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Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European Romantic literature prior to this point. Robinson thus emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, he educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years, and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired Robinson’s first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800–05, Robinson became the leading British scholar of Kant’s critical philosophy, which informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and other German literature. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and early career as a writer; this also laid the foundation for Robinson’s lifelong critical admiration of Hazlitt’s works. Robinson’s distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This excellence also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul to England in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds, anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.

Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. Essays examine how these writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. They offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes—assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities—that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.

This book explores William Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of transport revolutions, popular tourism, and the Great 1914-18 War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of travel. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage—a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period when the popularisation of motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of Romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. By revealing how Romantic ideas of nature, travel, liberty and self-reliance were re-interpreted and utilized in discourses on landscape, transport, accessibility, preservation, war and cultural heritage, this book portrays multiple Wordsworthian legacies in modern ways of perceiving and valuing the nature and culture of the Lake District.