This collection of essays provides upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers with a fresh view of the nineteenth century through 18 readings of individual texts from 1800-1900, chosen to show the range and diversity of the Romantic-Victorian period, combining the still-canonical with the newly recovered. After decades of critical focus on historical context, this collection seeks to re-centre close analysis on the literary text – broadly conceived – attending to form and texture, while also drawing in dialogues with other texts, responses and contexts. The aim is not to displace historical awareness, but to show how it might be combined with attention to literary shape, which is itself subject to historical, political and aesthetic forces. The 18 readings explore poetry, fiction, essays, drama and periodicals, ensuring full coverage of the formal and thematic diversity of print culture across the century. Our claim is that close reading emerges in the nineteenth century as a central concern of literary, critical and cultural practice. The collection seeks to disrupt the conventional critical division of Romantic from Victorian, showing how formal experimentation works throughout the nineteenth century as literary shape is recreated in each decade of cultural and technological development, alongside a continuous dialogue with literary commonalities and inheritances.

Simon Kövesi is Professor of English and Scottish Literature and Head of the School of Critical Studies, at the University of Glasgow, UK. He focuses on Romantic-period culture, and working-class writing from 1800 through to now. His books include Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets (2003), James Kelman (2007), New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community (2015), John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (2017), and Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies (2020). He is currently co-editing Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) for Oxford World’s Classics.

Jane Stabler is Professor of Romantic Literature in the School of English, University of St Andrews, UK. She works on Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and English travel writing. Her books include Byron, Poetics and History (2002), Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies (2007), The Artistry of Exile: Romantic & Victorian Writers in Italy (2013) and an edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for Oxford World’s Classics series (2003). She is the lead editor for the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Lord Byron’s Poetry. The first two volumes of Don Juan were published in 2024.