Urbanization and English Romantic Poetry Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series

Through an incisive analysis of the emerging debates surrounding urbanization in the Romantic period, together with close readings of poets including William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stephen Tedeschi explores the notion that the Romantic poets criticized the historical form that the process of urbanization had taken, rather than urbanization itself. The works of the Romantic poets are popularly considered in a rural context and often understood as hostile to urbanization - one of the most profound social transformations of the era. By focusing on the urban aspects of such writing, Tedeschi re-orientates the relationship between urbanization and English Romantic poetry to deliver a study that discovers how the Romantic poets examined not only the influence of urbanization on poetry but also how poetry might help to reshape the form that urbanization could take.

Introduction: urbanization and English Romantic poetry; 1. Urban ideology in eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry; 2. Coleridge and the civilization of cultivation; 3. Wordsworth and the affects of urbanization; 4. Shelley and the political representation of urbanization; 5. Robinson, Barbauld, and the limits of luxury; Conclusion: English Romantic poetry and urbanization.

Stephen Tedeschi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama. His articles have appeared in European Romantic Review, Keats-Shelley Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and Keats-Shelley Review.