The chapter traces a period of growing self-confidence in Irish letters that might seem surprising in the context of the post-Waterloo recession but takes some of its charge from the strength and eventual success of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Between 1815 and 1830, Irish writers felt able to look more closely at the island on their own terms, a move that meant for many a new interest in coastal locations and the shaping force of the sea. The chapter proposes new watery co-ordinates for mapping Irish romanticism via the cases of Gerald Griffin, Charles Robert Maturin and Jeremiah Joseph Callanan.

Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto is based on the historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott and thus invites us to examine the real-life sources for Scott’s published work. In addition, as the Scott work was published in 1819, it follows on the heels of the more famous novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818. Shelley’s gothic novel reveals a similar fascination with the sociopolitical environment of the early Enlightenment, as well as the spectres of madness, murder and the private lives of individuals caught up in vengeful forces beyond their control. Beyond the literary sources for the libretto, the opera also bears witness to the use of medical knowledge in defining the appearance and sound of a mentally ill young woman who has succumbed to hysteria. According to medical treatises of the time, hysteria was a disease that bore physical and emotional symptoms, the severity of which could be diagnosed with the relatively new invention of the stethoscope (1816). As Donizetti’s work premiered during a time of heightened listening, whereby audiences sought to hear within the notes of the music the inner world of the composer or the performer, the sound of pain or latent disease was now understood to reflect a lexicon of medically understood sounds that reveal themselves to the careful listener.

This chapter examines the literary registration of the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. It focuses on fictional representations of the contemporary soy frontier in Argentina and the former coal-mining districts of North East England. Specifically, the chapter considers Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014), described by the author as Argentina’s first glyphosate novel, alongside Benjamin Myer’s Pig Iron (2012), which registers the socioecological fallout from the collapse of the coal frontier in County Durham. Placing both novels in the context of earlier depictions of the agricultural and industrial frontiers of Argentina and North East England, I show how, despite the very different geopolitical situations to which they respond, Schweblin’s and Myer’s narratives share certain thematic, stylistic, and formal likenesses in their mediation of the volatile and violent dynamics of commodity frontiers.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and episodes where a character anxiously navigates the gloomy and elaborate gothic castle. Drawing on Andrew Elfenbein’s description of the complicated mental operations involved even in “easy reading,” the chapter argues that these passages subtly convey the many cognitive activities that reading Gothic fiction coordinates. These episodes therefore invite the reader to become impressed by her competency to do such things as inhibit distractions, integrate events into a larger model of the plot, and track the character’s emotional shifts. This sense of competence could have been particularly important for nineteenth-century women readers, whose sense of capability acquired from Gothic reading could feed into their sense of competence to face the unknown and potentially perilous world outside their immediate acquaintance.

This chapter explores the economy of the later Roman Empire, with special emphasis on resource management, economic structures and regional variations. It highlights how land, labour and capital functioned within a largely agrarian system, with agriculture serving as the primary economic driver and tax base. The chapter examines diverse sources, including archaeological surveys, historical texts, coinage and environmental data. It analyses the effects of political instability, regional differentiation and resource distribution on economic trends. Case studies from North Gaul, Iberia, Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean reveal that economic activity was influenced by both local conditions and imperial policies. The study also incorporates ecological data, such as pollen analysis and lead pollution levels, to assess economic fluctuations. A central argument is that the later Roman economy was not a uniform system but a collection of interconnected regional economies. While political fragmentation led to economic contractions in some areas, others adapted through local specialisation and changing trade networks. This study thus challenges the view of economic collapse, instead emphasising resilience and adaptation, and calling for an interdisciplinary approach to better understand the complexities of late Roman economic life and its long-term transformations.

Part 2: Through a reading of the works of Horace Walpole, this book shows the ludic as a mode of play unconditioned by any preconceived judgment or intended outcome. As bourgeois taste is increasingly tasked with dispelling the material conditions of risk, uncertainty, violence, and death that underwrite Britain’s growing colonial wealth, it becomes increasingly hostile to funniness – any kind of oddity, proclivity, or quirk that disrupts an engineered sense of safety, stability, and predictability in the lived world. Borrowing from Brian Massumi’s theorization of “ludic play” between dogs, I invoke eighteenth-century philosophy’s interest in “animal spirits” to show how Walpole coordinates his own ludic scenes. Ludic play, I offer, is a technique for strategically disorganizing the rituals and conceits of civility and good taste, retooling them from techniques of disavowing violence to a means of grappling with violence in its most diffuse and ever-present forms.

Chapter 2 turns to the presence of the stethoscope in medical consultations from the perspective of the newly objectified patient, now acutely aware of, yet unable to hear or to interpret, the sounds of their own body. Horror, dread, and insight into the unknown are staples of the Victorian sensation and gothic genres, which, I argue, provided an anxious site for the medical and the imaginative to inform and disrupt one another in fictional explorations of the powers of the stethoscope. Drawing on works by Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as short stories and poetry from popular periodicals, this chapter demonstrates that, as medical institutions accepted new technologies and became increasingly specialised throughout the century, the stethoscope became for many patients an object of anxious contemplation, serving as a palpable interface between doctor and patient, between hope and fear, and between the visible and invisible.

The ‘idea of absolute music’ proposed by Carl Dahlhaus has encouraged a view of German Romantic music aesthetics as preoccupied with instrumental music, and more interested in lofty metaphysics than emotion. Yet writers such as Novalis and Hoffmann saw the ‘Absolute’ precisely in emotional terms, and argued that its presentation was the task of a new, socially accessible genre of national opera. This would draw its subjects from the popular mythological and ‘romantic’ realm of fairy tale and fantasy, while ‘pure’ music – instrumental and church genres – was imagined in the sensational contemporary terms of the gothic. When instrumental genres were eventually revaluated above opera, it was because they were held to embody another popular trait valued by Hoffmann – humour. Strongly promoted by German critics in the 1830s, humour and the ‘humoristic’ posited the exploitation of emotional contrast as the highest aim of instrumental music after Beethoven.

This chapter recounts the manner in which Goldsmith’s pamphlet The Mystery Revealed (1762), uncovering the hoax of the famous Cock Lane Ghost in London, is a sign – as are the many significant references to ghosts in his works – of his rejection of supernatural occurrences and his defence of rational Enlightenment values.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

For the British, ‘Europe’ in general and continental Romanticism in particular approached an enigma. This chapter examines how British intellectuals and artists perceived and engaged with continental aspects of the literature, music, and visual arts in this period. It focuses on lesser-known examples, which includes the specificity of German Gothicism and De Quincey’s fictitious biographical essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, but also Thomas L. Peacock’s critiquing of this English preoccupation with German thought. This chapter asks whether, in aesthetic terms, British engagements with ‘Europe’ cannot but ‘romanticize’ the continent, thus maintaining a paradoxical attitude of ‘remote proximity’, which might also apply to subsequent eras.

This chapter examines cross-fertilization in the ‘transitional’ period (roughly 1818–37) between the Gothic novel, the French roman noir, and the German Schauer traditions, including the well-known influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the French conte fantastique and Hoffmann’s relation to George Sand and to Sir Walter Scott. It does so by tracing the European peregrinations of the Gothic trope of forbidden space across diverse national and literary borders, from Perrrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ to Tieck, Hoffmann, Radcliffe, Stevenson, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The chapter then focuses on George Sand’s novel Mauprat and its dialogue with Hoffmann and Scott.

This chapter considers how nineteenth-century poetry in Australia adapted European conceptualisations of the sublime and the gothic to articulate a literal inability to settle on the land. It argues that settler poetry has a difficulty with being grounded: its representations have a tendency to hover, sublimely, above the surface of the earth; or, if forced under, they refuse to simply die: but live on, as gothic, revenant, voices. It draws on popular and canonical examples like A. B. (Banjo) Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda,” Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider,” and Mary Gilmore’s “Old Botany Bay,” as well as examples that have been sourced from historical archives.

Following its explosive debut in October 1817, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine reached the heights of its notoriety in the following four years, and while it moderated its ferocity as the 1820s progressed, it continued to exert a powerful influence on British political, literary, and popular culture. Its early assaults on poets such as Percy Shelley and Lord Byron typically combined truculence with insight, and in the early 1830s it took the same approach to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Most notably, Blackwood’s writers like John Wilson, William Maginn, and Samuel Warren produced innovative terror fiction that rejected the ominous suggestions and careful evocations of ‘atmosphere’ in the late eighteenth-century Gothic in favour of the precision and the more direct realism of chapbooks, broadsheets, ‘true crime’ narratives, and newspaper accounts of executions, murders, and suicides. These fictions inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and the three Brontë sisters, all of whom emulated and transformed the Blackwood’s tale of terror.