Nineteenth Century Literature in Transition: The 1810s

The 1810s – a decade marked by the challenges of war, monarchy, poverty, religion, and nationalism – are immortalised in Percy Bysshe Shelley's impassioned but despairing sonnet, 'England in 1819', as a graveyard of undead ideologies from which he longs that a 'Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day'. Criticism too often looks past the 1810s and towards the illusory border between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' to hunt down these bright phantoms and follow their progress into a century of cultural, affective, philosophical, and political transformation. Yet the 1810s were more than a threshold decade from which we were thrown into the beginnings of the modern world. As the essays in this volume reveal, the 1810s brought into focus new questions about subjects as broad as the imagination, literary form, morality, aesthetics, race, politics, the environment, the body, gender, and sexuality.