Creating Romanticism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 1-27

3. Mary Wollstonecraft and Nature

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 28-62

4. William Godwin and the Imagination

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 63-96

5. Romantic Creation

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 97-131

6. Humphry Davy and the Sublime

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 132-174

7. Conclusion

   • Sharon Ruston

   Pages 175-177

8. Back Matter

   Pages 178-218

   PDF

This book argues that the term 'Romanticism' should be more culturally-inclusive, recognizing the importance of scientific and medical ideas that helped shape some of the key concepts of the period, such as natural rights, the creative imagination and the sublime.

• English literature
• Imagination
• Romanticism
• British and Irish Literature

"...a fascinating and thoroughly convincing call to re-examine not just "Romanticism and Science" but "Romanticism" itself. If Ruston is correct about the deliberate use of scientific and medical ideas in some of the period's foundational literary texts - and I have every confidence that she is - then Creating Romanticism should find an audience well beyond those of us interested in the science of the day and become required reading for all students of the period." James Robert Allard, Keats-Shelley Journal

"...offers a lively, de-centred view of British Romanticism, considered from the multiple vantage points provided by the complex structure of its intellectual and social networks". Noah Heringman, The Keats-Shelly Review

'Ruston's book offers a valuable addition to the long history of research into science in the Romantic era: its strength resides particularly in its grasp of the political sub-texts of the interpretation of scientific ideas in the period, as wellas in the accounts of little-discussed texts, and in the importance it rightly accords to Davy.' Edward Larrissy, The BARS Review

• University of Salford, UK

  Sharon Ruston

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University, UK. She has published Shelley and Vitality (2005), Romanticism: An Introduction (2007), and has edited The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism (1999), Literature and Science (2008) and co-edited Teaching Romanticism (2010).

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