The 1820s has commonly been overlooked in literary and cultural studies, seen as a barren interregnum between the achievements of Romanticism and the Victorian era proper, or, at best, as a time of transition bridging two major periods of cultural production. This volume contends that the innovations, fears and experiments of the 1820s are both of considerable interest in themselves and vital for comprehending how Victorian and Romantic culture wrote and visioned one another into being. Remediating the 1820s explores the decade's own sense of itself as a period of expansion in terms of the projection of British power and knowledge, but also its tremendous uncertainty about where this left traditional identities and moral values. In doing so, the collection articulates how specific novelties, transformations and anxieties of the time remediated and remade culture and society in manners that continue powerfully to resonate.
About the Author: Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, India and the United States. His books include Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford University Press, 1992), Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003), Conversable Words: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1832 (Oxford, 2011) and Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He co-edited The Spirit of Controversy, a selection of William Hazlitt's essays, with James Grande for Oxford World's Classics in 2021. He is currently completing a book on cultural networks in the Industrial Revolution for the University of Chicago Press, due to be published in Fall 2023. The research for the book was supported by a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. He has also co-edited another collection of essays with Matthew Sangster: Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 (Cambridge, 2022).
Matthew Sangster is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. His first book, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He has published widely on authorship, institutions, readers and urban life in the Romantic period. He co-edited a special issue of Romanticism on the Net on Robert Southey (with Tim Fulford; 2017) and edited the Romantic Circles volume David Bowie and the Legacies of Romanticism (2022). Currently, he is collaborating on two major AHRC-funded projects exploring the history of reading using neglected library records: Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic and Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers' Registers. His next monograph will be An Introduction to Fantasy.
