The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts

From the birth of the museum to the explosion of mass-produced illustrated books, the Romantic period (c. 1770-1840) was a moment of rapid change and fruitful experimentation in the fields of art and literature alike. New advances in print production encouraged a wider range of readers to engage with literary forms that opened a path into the once aristocratic field of the visual arts. This Companion captures the way recent engagements with visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period. It brings together 27 research-led chapters that offer a detailed account of the productive, if sometimes tense, interactions between emergent forms of intermedial expression that were redefining culture in the Romantic period -- as they continue to do today.

Maureen McCue is former Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century British Literature at Bangor University (UK). She is the author of British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840 (Ashgate, 2014), which was short-listed for the British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize (2015). She has published essays on Romantic periodicals, the development of the National Gallery in London, Anglo-Italian relations and illustrations. Her current project, funded in part by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, examines how the rich ecology of women’s visual lives determined the period’s wider print culture.

Sophie Thomas is Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the author of Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (Routledge, 2008), and of numerous articles and chapters that address the crosscurrents between literature, material culture and visual culture in the Romantic period. She is currently completing a book on objects, collections, and museums at the turn of the nineteenth century--The Romantic Museum, 1770 - 1830: Matter, Memory, and the Poetics of Things--and beginning a new, funded program of research on Romanticism, museums and the poetics of sculpture.