Placing and Displacing Romanticism

This title was first published in 2001: Romanticism has often been concerned with the literal sense of "place". British Romanticism has variously been placed in the West Country, the Lake District, North Wales, the Wye Valley and Scotland. It also shows a concern with the "place" in an antithetical sense, imagining a city as an artificial and corrupting phenomenon. The dialogue of place and displacement as a feature of Romatic period writing is often regarded as a response to the great historical movements of urbanization and industrialization that marked late 18th- and 19th-century British life. "Displacement" was also a significant usage in Romanticism. It could be interpreted as alienation or the displacement of historical, social and political tensions at the time. The essays in this volume interpret the critical issues of "place" and "displacement", "placing" and "displacing" in their figurative and their literal senses. They show a desire to return to the compexity of the texts and the contexts in which they were written, and argue that Romantic texts are self-conscious and self-reflective.