English Literature Research Areas
Romantic and Gothic Art
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The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, circa. 1818 (first published in 1796), courtesy of The British Library.
British Romantic
From the English Department:
The Romantic period in British Literature (roughly 1780-1832) stands at the nexus of the Enlightenment's promotion of commerce, reason, and liberty and the Victorian experience of industrialization and empire. Romanticism, as embodied in both artistic production and cultural reception, elevated aesthetic practice to an almost divine activity, a realm wherein the individual might forge his or her very self as an ethical, political, and creative being.
In recent decades, the field of Romantic studies has consistently produced some of the most influential and wide-ranging theoretical models for literary analysis and remains a vibrant and ever-progressing area of study. Our own work in the department has produced explorations of theatricality, museums, collections, nationalism, and the unique contribution of women writers from the period.
Gothic literature arose at the end of the eighteenth century during a time of social, political, and economic unrest, leading to the genre to be described as a reactionary genre devoted to returning repressed societal fears to our attention so we might expel them. Though Gothic fiction is most easily recognized for its formulaic plot devices and stock characters, one of its most important and often overlooked characteristics is its reliance on anachronisms to highlight the clash between “modernity” and “antiquity.” (Gray, 2019)
Collections and Companions
Click on the "i" info icon after each book title to view a brief description about the following books from the University of Iowa Libraries' catalog:
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The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime
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This is the only collection of its kind to focus on one of the most important aspects of the cultural history of the Romantic period, its sources, and its afterlives. Multidisciplinary in approach, the volume examines the variety of areas of enquiry and genres of cultural productivity in which the sublime played a substantial role during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With impressive international scope, this Companion considers the Romantic sublime in both European and American contexts and features essays by leading scholars from a range of national backgrounds and subject specialisms, including state-of-the-art perspectives in digital and environmental humanities. An accessible, wide-ranging, and thorough introduction, aimed at researchers, students, and general readers alike, and including extensive suggestions for further reading, The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime is the go-to book on the subject.
ISBN: 9781009032810Publication Date: 2023-11-08 -
The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion
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The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion provides the first scholarly survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life during the British Romantic period (1780s-1832). Part I, 'Historical Developments,' examines diverse religious communities, texts, and figures that shaped British Romantic culture, investigating the influence of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and atheism on the literature of the times. Part II, 'Literary Forms,' considers British Romanticism and religion through attention to major genres such as poetry, the novel, drama, sermons and lectures, and life writing. Part III, 'Disciplinary Connections,' explores links between religion, literature, and other areas of intellectual life during the period, including philosophy, science, politics, music, and painting.
ISBN: 9781108482844Publication Date: 2021-10-21 -
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, 3 Volume Set
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The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities
ISBN: 9781405188104Publication Date: 2012-01-30 -
A Handbook of Romanticism Studies
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The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism. Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years
ISBN: 9781444334968Publication Date: 2012-04-16 -
The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period
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The Romantic period saw the first generations of professional women writers flourish in Great Britain. Literary history is only now giving them the attention they deserve, for the quality of their writings and for their popularity in their own time. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores the challenges and achievements of this fascinating set of women writers, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley alongside many lesser-known female authors writing and publishing during this period. Chapters consider major literary genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, travel writing, histories, essays, and political writing, as well as topics such as globalization, colonialism, feminism, economics, families, sexualities, aging, and war. The volume shows how gender intersected with other aspects of identity and with cultural concerns that then shaped the work of authors, critics, and readers.
ISBN: 9781107016682Publication Date: 2015-03-12 -
The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism
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The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of recent research. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values
ISBN: 9780191019708Publication Date: 2018
Click on the "i" info icon after each book title to view a brief description about the following books from the University of Iowa Libraries' catalog:
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The Gothic Novel in Ireland, C. 1760-1829
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The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Countering traditional scholarly views of the 'rise' of 'the gothic novel' on the one hand, and, on the other, Irish Romantic literature, this study persuasively re-integrates a body of now overlooked works into the history of the literary gothic as it emerged across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1829. Its twinned quantitative and qualitative analysis of neglected Irish texts produces a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period, persuasively positioning Irish works and authors at the centre of a new critical paradigm with which to understand both Irish Romantic and gothic literary production. An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
ISBN: 9781526122308Publication Date: 2018-05-11 -
The Cambridge History of the Gothic
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This first volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in Western civilisation, from the Goths' sacking of Rome in 410 AD through to its manifestations in British and European culture of the long eighteenth century. Written by international cast of leading scholars, the chapters explore the interdisciplinary nature of the Gothic in the fields of history, literature, architecture and fine art. As much a cultural history of Gothic as an account of the ways in which the Gothic has participated within a number of formative historical events across time, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to eighteenth-century politics and theatre, the volume provides a thorough and engaging overview of early Gothic culture in Britain and beyond.
ISBN: 1108654541Publication Date: 2020-07-16 -
The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 2, Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
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This second volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in British, American and Continental European culture, from the Romantic period through to the Victorian fin de siècle. Here, leading scholars in the fields of literature, theatre, architecture and the history of science and popular entertainment explore the Gothic in its numerous interdisciplinary forms and guises, as well as across a range of different international contexts. As much a cultural history of the Gothic in this period as an account of the ways in which the Gothic mode has participated in the formative historical events of modernity, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From Romanticism, to Penny Bloods, Dickens and even the railway system, the volume provides a compelling and comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Gothic culture.
ISBN: 9781108460187Publication Date: 2025-07-24 -
Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out
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Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the 'otherness' of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory. After the dissemination of Darwin's theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the 'animal within'. Here, the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. However, non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters, too, and even before Darwin, humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals, which, as Donna Haraway puts it, have a way of 'looking back' at us. In this book, the focus is not on the 'animal within' but rather on the animal 'with-out': otherand entirely incomprehensible.
ISBN: 3030345408Publication Date: 1st ed. 2020 -
Romantic Gothic
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Though once conceived of as mutually exclusive categories, Romanticism and the Gothic share a long and complex history of reaction and interaction, avowal and disavowal, influence and exchange. Extending recent critical interrogations of the Gothic / Romantic divide, this collection of essays provides a thorough overview of the manifestly Gothic impulses in Romantic-era literary culture, from the graveyard verse of the 1740s, through the heady politics of the later eighteenth century, and into the writings of the second-generation Romantic poets. Divided into three sections - Gothic Modes and Forms'; 'National and International Borders'; and 'Reading the Romantic Gothic' ? the volume comprises 18 original essays and a detailed introductory essay by an international cast of new and established scholars in the field. As much an introduction to Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as it is a contribution to scholarly debates concerning the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic, Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion is an indispensable resource for both students and scholars of British, American and European literary culture in the period 1740?1830.
ISBN: 9780748696741Publication Date: 2015-12-01 -
Gothic Britain
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Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided upon nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement - as well as exploring, uniquely, the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the Island of Great Britain.
ISBN: 9781786832337Publication Date: 2018-08-15
Contextual Resources
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C19, The Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new windowProvides integrated bibliographic coverage of over over 1.3 million books and official publications, and 10 million articles published in over 2,000 journals, magazines and newspapers.
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Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new windowMulti-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the long nineteenth century, with archives releasing incrementally beginning in spring 2012. The content is sourced from the world’s preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. Collections I - XII.
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19th Century British Newspapers, (aka British Newspapers) This link opens in a new window
This database features British newspapers from the 19th century selected by the British Library's editorial board. Many of the newspapers are available in complete runs, and all are searchable full-text. Access includes British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900, British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800-1900, British Library Newspapers, Part III: 1741-1950, British Library Newspapers, Part IV: 1732-1950 and British Library Newspapers, Part V: 1746-1950
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19th Century U.K. Periodicals Series This link opens in a new windowThe 19th century was a time of revolutionary change and expansion. Britain was one of the world's first industrial, urban superpowers and developed a press to feed the demands of its increasingly literate population. 19th Century UK Periodicals Online, 1800-1900 is a major new series that covers the events, lives, values and themes that shaped the 19th century world.
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British Newspapers 1600-1950 This link opens in a new windowThe most comprehensive digital historic newspaper archive. Includes 17-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers, 19th Century British Library Newspapers, 3 million pages of historic newspapers, newsbooks & ephemera, and National & Regional papers from British Isles.
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Women and Social Movements, International— 1840 to Present This link opens in a new windowOnline archive of published and manuscript primary sources focusing on women’s international activism since the mid-nineteenth century. The archive includes proceedings of women’s international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, as well as correspondence, diary entries, and memoirs. Also contains numerous online publications of contemporary Non-Governmental Organizations.
Searching InfoHawk+ and Locating Materials in the Library
Locating Physical Materials in the Main Library:
- Call numbers beginning with P (philology and linguistics), PN (general literature), and PR (English literature) are going to be located on the west side of the 4th floor.
Some sample search terms to use in InfoHawk+
- gothic literature
- gothic novel
- littérature gothique
- romanticism
Databases
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Crime, Punishment and Popular Culture This link opens in a new windowCrime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 is an archive comprising more than 2 million pages. It contains manuscripts, books, broadsheets, and periodicals. Some of the printed matter is very scarce, such as Mary Fortune's 1871 The Detective's Album, a pioneering police procedural by a woman author, of which only two hard copies survive. Other material has been held in archives, often widely dispersed, and not always readily accessible to the researcher. Now such matter is digitized and carefully curated to present unparalleled opportunities for study, available all over the world
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JSTOR (Journal Storage) This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each titles. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below
Note that this database comprises mostly back issues: for most titles the JSTOR database does NOT include full text of the most recent 3 to 5 years. -
Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new windowA fully searchable library of over 350,000 works of English and American literature, overseen by an academic advisory board.
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MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO Version) This link opens in a new window
The MLA International Bibliography is a subject index for books, articles and websites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), an organization dedicated to the study and teaching of language and literature. The electronic version of the Bibliography dates back to 1925 and contains over 2 million citations from more than 4,400 periodicals (including peer-reviewed e-journals) and 1,000 book publishers.
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Nineteenth-Century Fiction This link opens in a new windowA collection of 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s. Major novelists of the period such as Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontes feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature. Part of Literature Online (LION).
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Project Muse This link opens in a new windowWith full text for well over 300 journal titles from university publishers, Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, and many others. Coverage begins in 1995.
Journals
Click on the "i" info icon after the title to view a brief description about the following literary journals:
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Essays in Romaticism A peer-reviewed journal edited by Alexander Schlutz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice & the Graduate Center, CUNY), Essays in Romanticism is the official journal of the International Conference on Romanticism. Essays in Romanticism continues the tradition of its predecessor Prism(s) in encouraging contributions within an interdisciplinary and comparative framework. More broadly, the journal welcomes submissions on any aspect of Romanticism, and especially work using emergent or innovative perspectives and approaches.
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European Romantic Review The European Romantic Review publishes innovative scholarship on the literature and culture of Europe, Great Britain and the Americas during the period 1760-1840. Topics range from the scientific and psychological interests of German and English authors through the political and social reverberations of the French Revolution to the philosophical and ecological implications of Anglo-American nature writing.
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Gothic Studies Gothic Studies is the journal of the International Gothic Association, and covers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day, providing an international platform for dialogue and cultural criticism in the sphere of Gothic from within every period and media form.
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Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies This journal is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, electronic publication dedicated to the study of gothic and horror literature, film, theatre, new media, and television.
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Romanticism Romanticism is the journal of Romantic culture and criticism. The only major international scholarly publication of its kind edited and published in Britain, Romanticism offers a much-needed forum for the flourishing diversity of Romantic studies today. Focusing on the period 1750-1850, it publishes critical, historical, textual and bibliographical essays and notes prepared to the highest scholarly standards, reflecting the full range of current methodological and theoretical debate.
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Romantic Textualities Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an open-access journal committed to foregrounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality and textual studies.
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Studies in Romanticism Studies in Romanticism is the flagship journal in its field, a quarterly with international circulation, publishing articles representing the full range of disciplines within the Romantic period.
Web Resources
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Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth Century History (BRANCH)This site provides users with a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, copy-edited, easy-to-use overview of the period 1775-1925. Unlike dry chronologies that simply list dates with minimal information about the many noteworthy events of a given year, BRANCH offers a compilation of a myriad of short and long articles on not only high politics and military history but also “low” or quotidian histories.
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The British Association for Romantic StudiesThe British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) is the UK’s leading national organisation for promoting the study of Romanticism and the history and culture of the period from which it emerged.
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Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle (NYPL)The Collection was the creation of the financier Carl H. Pforzheimer (1879-1957), who took a special interest in the lives and works of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his contemporaries, including his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and such friends and fellow writers as Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Teresa Guiccioli, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Horace Smith, and Edward John Trelawny.
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Gothic Archive (Raynor Memorial Library)In its present state, The Gothic Archive (Marquette University) is a growing digital collection of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Gothic chapbooks and related materials held in a variety of private and research libraries in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The chapbooks have been digitized or transcribed and linked to summaries and supplemental materials.
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Gothic Motifs (The British Library)Professor John Bowen considers some of the best-known Gothic novels of the late 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the features they have in common, including marginal places, transitional time periods and the use of fear and manipulation.
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A Guide to the GothicA Gothic anthology of selections from more than 200 years of Gothic works in the public domain, this OER textbook covers major trends, tropes and periods in the development of Gothic literature from 1764 to the present.
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NeuRoN: Romanticism on the NetCreated in conjunction with the 2017 relaunch of Romanticism on the Net (RoN), NeuRoN functions as a new nerve center for digital research on British Romanticism, offering a stable, extensive, and up-to-date catalog of web-based resources in the field. NeuRoN lists, describes, and links to online archives, databases, indexes, and editions that are at once sufficiently reliable for scholarly use and directly relevant to British literature and culture of the “Romantic Century” (1750-1850).
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Online Exhibitions: Wordsworth Trust and MuseumOnline exhibitions curated using collection materials held by the Wordsworth Trust and Museum
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Project Gutenberg: Gothic Fiction CollectionProject Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks with a collection of gothic fiction books.
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Romantic CirclesRomantic Circles is a refereed scholarly website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. Funded by the University of Colorado, Boulder in partnership with Texas A&M University, The site is home to several different publications and resource hubs.
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Romanticism (Internet History Sourcebooks)From Fordham University, The Internet Modern Sourcebook is part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project.
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Romanticism on the NetRomanticism on the Net (RoN) is an international, open access journal devoted to British Romantic literature. RoN remains committed to the principles of open access; accepted articles will join two decades of leading scholarship archived on the Érudit platform, from which they will be freely accessible worldwide in perpetuity. All submissions are rigorously peer-reviewed. The journal accepts contributions of between 6,000 and 12,000 words; as a digital publication, it offers authors the freedom to include unlimited illustrations and to embed other kinds of media.
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The Romantics (The British Library)Dr Stephanie Forward explains the key ideas and influences of Romanticism, and considers their place in the work of writers including Wordsworth, Blake, P B Shelley and Keats as part of the British Library's Discover Literature series.
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Shelley-Godwin ArchiveDigitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
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The Web ConcordancesDigital concordances of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keat's Odes of 1819, and William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
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The William Blake ArchiveIncludes an exhibition about Blake's life and works, digitized images of his illuminated books, illustrations, manuscripts, and drawings, and a digitized copy of "The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake".