Politics, Emotions, and Romantic Periodicals

Abstract

Scholarly investigations of the politics of Romanticism and the role of emotion in Romanticism have been at the forefront of Romantic studies for some decades now, but these two fields of study have typically moved in different directions. Moreover, both fields have focused primarily on what we might loosely call ‘literary’ works (whether canonical or not). The current collection departs from this wide body of scholarship in that it addresses the multiple and varied links between politics and the emotions in the periodical press from the 1790s to the early 1830s. It approaches this complex topic through analyses of both the politics of emotion and the emotional registers of political discourse in the public sphere. Its value as a collection, as distinct from a monograph, lies in the variety of perspectives it brings to bear on the topic.