The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety.

DAVID STEWART Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Humanities at the University of Northumbria, UK. He has published a number of articles on Romanticism and print culture in journals such as Romanticism, Prose Studies, Keats-Shelley Journal & Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.