Codex Poetics and the Politics of Romantic Reading

This study explores how the bound book gains a particular political edge in the Romantic period – in works by Austen, Hazlitt, Keats, Landon, Wheatley, and others. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Revisiting the Romantic period as one of revolution, abolitionism, and mass print, Emily Wing Rohrbach explores the bound book's political force across literary genres. Innovative readings illuminate interplays of meaning between poetics and material format, showing how Romantics thought carefully, and sometimes anxiously, about the material forms in which their words would circulate. They understood the book's capacity to expose the cultural status quo as a product of choice and chance. Rohrbach puts conventionally 'Romantic' authors, such as Keats and Landon, in conversation with early Black Atlantic authors from the perspective of book history for the first time. She thus reveals an association between a politics of social equality and the book as a reading technology that is visible, however unevenly, across these authors' works. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.