Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader

"This anthology is perfectly pitched to help students understand the ideas and debates that underpin literary Romanticism. The introduction is excellent and the headnotes and footnotes make the texts themselves far more accessible. This is a hugely useful text for any Romantic Period module."
—Sharon Ruston, University of Salford

"John Mee and David Fallon's Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader is destined to become the first choice for those seeking to analyze the most important context for the emergence of English Romanticism. This work—given the care of its preparation, the concision of its informative introductions, and the greater depth of its entries—will delight students and teachers frustrated by past anthologies and should supplant past anthologies in classrooms at every level of instruction."
—Mark Lussier, Arizona State University

"Romanticism and Revolution offers a representative anthology of immediate British reactions to the epoch-making events taking place in late eighteenth-century France. Reflections on the Revolution meant debate over the Rights of Man - and Woman - as well as on the nature of Government, patriotism, social and political justice. This careful selection of passages from the most important texts allows modern readers to see the intense contemporary debate unfold, to consider the arguments and to trace the dialogues between different writers. Key players in the great Revolutionary Debate come alive for a modern readership through these memorable passages of highly distinctive prose and are set in context by the other extracts as well as through judicious editorial introductions and notes. Anyone keen to develop a real understanding of the political climate of the early 1790s will find this volume indispensable."
—Fiona Stafford, Somerville College, University of Oxford

"An indispensable volume – in every way a worthy successor to Marilyn Butler's Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy. In Romanticism and Revolution, Mee and Fallon provide intelligent, representative, wide-ranging selections from Price, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Godwin for a new generation of students and scholars. Due not least to the generosity of their selections, Mee and Fallon revitalize our understanding of – to name but a few contexts – Price's politics of Rational Dissent, Burke's affective rhetoric of the sentiments, both Wollstonecraft's attack on Burkean theatricality and her arguments for female education, Paine's levelling of political language, and Godwin's ideals of political utility and disinterestedness. As Mee and Fallon note, the Revolution controversy was a political battle fought with literary weapons: Romanticism and Revolution illuminates this vital affiliation throughout, emphasizing as it does the indissoluble links between the rhetoric of political argument and the politics of literary forms and strategies. Romanticism and Revolution forcefully reminds us of the centrality of the Revolution controversy both for the writers of the 1790s, writing as they were under the pressure of events at home and abroad, and for critics of Romanticism ever since, trying to make sense of the incontestable though often unwieldy connections between Romanticism and Revolution. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the heady mix of politics and literature that continues to constitute Romanticism."
—Charles W Mahoney, University of Connecticut