Product Description
by Paul Hamilton (Editor)
TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.
Author Biography
Paul Hamilton, Professor of English, Queen Mary, University of London
Paul Hamilton read English and Philosophy at Glasgow University. He took a D.Phil. at Oxford University, where he was a Junior Research Fellow, and then College Lecturer at Balliol College. Following posts at the University of Nottingham, Exeter College, Oxford, and the University of Southampton, he became Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London in 1996. Hamilton is the author of Metaromanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Coleridge and German Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics (OUP,2013).
