The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe

This book investigates how Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and their circle understood the idea of Europe. What geographical, cultural, and ideological concepts did they associate with the term? What does this tell us about politics and identity in early nineteenth-century Britain? In addressing these questions, Paul Stock challenges prevailing nationalist interpretations of Romanticism, but without falling prey to imprecise alternative notions of cosmopolitanism or "world citizenship." Instead, his book accounts for both the transnational and the local in Romantic writing, reassessing the period in terms of more complex, multi-layered identity politics.

Autorentext
PAUL STOCK is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in History at LSE. He was previously Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Culture and Literature at Birkbeck, and Teaching Fellow in European Studies at University College London, UK.

Inhalt
PART I: THE CHILDE HAROLD PILGRIMAGE: BYRON'S EUROPEAN TOUR, 1809-1818 'Spain, Portugal and Greece': Byron on the Borders of Europe, 1809-1811 'Repairing Shattered Thrones': Post-Waterloo Europe and the Shelley-Byron Circle, June 1815-December 1816 'The Elysium of Europe': Byron, Italy and Europe, June 1817-July 1818 PART II: EUROPE AND THE UNIVERSAL REVOLUTION: PERCY SHELLEY'S EUROPE, 1817-22 'Revolution in a European Nation': The Shelley Circle, January 1817-March 1818 'From a Particular to a Universal': The Shelley Circle, 1820-22 PART III: THE SYSTEM OF EUROPE: BYRON AND EUROPEAN POLITICS, 1822-24 'A Congress for Outworn Europe': Byron's International Relations, October 1822-July 1823 The Cause of Greece, the Cause of Europe: The Byron Circle, July 1823-April 1824