English Romantic Writers and the West Country

Long confounded with a monolithic British entity or misrepresented as 'Lakers' and 'Cockneys', the diverse regional forms of 'English Romanticism' are ripe for reassessment. Ranging west of a line between the Wye at Tintern and Jane Austen's Chawton, this book offers a first reconfiguration of Romantic culture in terms of English regional identity.

Foreword List of Illustrations Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Preface; R.Holmes Introduction; N.Roe PART I: LANDSCAPES AND LEGENDS ''More wondrous far than Egypt''s boasted pyramids'': The South West''s Megaliths in the Romantic Period; J.Parker ''Al under the wyllowe tree'': Chatterton and the Ecology of the West Country; N.Groom PART II: THE BRISTOL SCHOOL: COTTLE, COLERIDGE, AND THEIR CIRCLES Joseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticism; R.Cronin William Gilbert and his Bristol Circle 1788-98; P.Cheshire S.T. Coleridge, Joseph Cottle, and Some Bristol Baptists, 1794-96; T.Whelan Coleridge''s Bristol and West Country Radicalism; P.J.Kitson Radical Bible: Coleridge''s 1790s West Country Politics; A.J.Harding PART III: IMAGINING THE WEST COUNTRY Wordsworth''s 1793 Journey to the West Country and Wales; C.K.Walker Coleridge in Devon; G.Davidson Southey''s West Country; L.Pratt Romantic Hydrography: Tide and Transit in ''Tintern Abbey''; D.W.Davies The Road Not Taken: Robert Bloomfield''s Wye Valley and the Poetic Imagination; T.Fulford PART IV: IN PURSUIT OF SPRING ''The Outset of Life'': Shelley, Hazlitt, the West Country, and the Revolutionary Imagination; M.O''Neill ''Over the Dartmoor Black'': John Keats and the West Country; N.Roe Going Westward: William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas; S.Yoshikawa Afterword; T.Mayberry Index