The fifth volume of The New Pelican Guide to English Literature covers the period from William Blake to Lord Byron. It begins with an account of the social and intellectual context of English literature during the Romantic period, followed by a survey of the literature itself. The rest of the book is made up of a series of essays dealing in detail with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Crabbe, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Burns, Jane Austen, Scott, and the Essayists. Finally the volume contains an appendix of biographies and bibliographies.

CONTENTS:

PART 1
The Social Setting
Material and Industrial Changes – Opening New Worlds – The Milieu of the Writer – Gentlemen and Writers – Epilogue

PART 2
The Character of Literature from Blake to Byron
Blake and the New Period – The Non-Rational in Literature – The Insights of Childhood – Conventional Society and the Individual – The Foreign and the Savage – The Poor and Unlettered – History and Imaginative Reconstruction – The Expression of Emotion – Jane Austen and Moral Judgement – New Tools of Language

PART 3
William Blake
George Crabbe’s Verse Tales
Burns and English Literature
Varieties of English Gothic
Walter Scott
The English Language: Tradition and Innovation
Jane Austen: "Mansfield Park"
Jane Austen: "Emma"
The Spirit of the Age in Prose
The European Background to Romanticism
John Clare, William Cobbett and the Changing Landscape
Wordsworth’s Poetry
Coleridge: Poet and Philosopher
Shelley’s Poetry
John Keats
Lord Byron
The Letters and Journals of the Romantics
Landscape Painting from Blake to Byron