Romanticism and the Letter

Madeleine Callaghan is a Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research specialty is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Her monograph, Shelley's Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2017. She has published various articles and chapters on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and has been assistant editor for The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Michael O'Neill and Anthony Howe and, with O'Neill, is co-authoring the Blackwell Handbook of Romantic Poetry, to be published in 2017. Anthony Howe's main research focus is Romantic period poetry, but he has wider interests in literary theory, literary controversies, and the connections between poetry and philosophy. His recent monograph, Byron and the Forms of Thought, offers a provocative re-reading of Byron's philosophical thought through an analysis of the poet's varied use of literary form. He has published a number of essays on the Romantics and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He is currently working on a project about letter writing and Romantic poetics.

1.Introduction.- 2.Mary O'Connell, Romantic Letter Writing and the Publisher.- 3. Stephen Behrendt, The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon.- 4.Oliver Clarkson, The Disappointment of Wordsworth's Letters.- 5.Susan J. Wolfson, Two Wordsworths: Mountain-climbing, Letter-writing.- 6. Gregory Leadbetter, 'Hare and Hound': Ends and Means in Coleridge's Letters.- 7.Lynda Pratt, The 'entire man of letters'?: Robert Southey, Correspondence, and Romantic Incompleteness.- 8. Timothy Webb, Charles Lamb and the Rattle of Existence.- 9. Joe Bray, The Tensions of Jane Austen's Epistolary Style.- 10. Daniel Westwood, 'Transported to your presence': Leigh Hunt's Letters to the Shelleys.- 11. Jane Stabler, 'Foam is their foundation': The Poetics of Byron's letters.- 12.Madeleine Callaghan, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters.- 13. Michael O'Neill, 'The Varied Pauses of His Style': Shelley's Letters from Italy.- 14.Andrew Bennett, John Keats's Epistolary Intimacy.- 15. Anthony Howe, 'don't imagine it an a propos des bottes': Keats, the Letter, and the Poem.- 16. Angela Wright, 'The house of misery': Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

"If the letters of Romantic period authors have for the most part been viewed as a supplement to the creative work, valuable for substance to the exclusion of literary qualities, Romanticism and the Letter does much to challenge this misconception while opening the way to further critical work on the epistolary culture and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century." (Mary A. Waters, Biography, Vol. 45 (1), 2022)
"This volume is a timely contribution to larger trends in literary and media studies. ... Romanticism and the Letter shows how important letter writing and epistolarity were to key Romantic authors, and opens a field for further explorations of Romantic epistolary culture." (Rachael Scarborough King, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34 (3), 2022)