Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Mary A. Favret is associate professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters. What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the home front...

In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger-the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor-carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are "different" has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. In Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, David Simpson locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in...

With the "arrival" of the so-called era of the Anthropocene, certain contemporary theoretical approaches have led us to think that we are only now properly beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, as well as confronting our fears and anxieties around ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. Reflections on apocalypse and disaster, however, were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, but in Last...

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of...

"In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety, or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language. And they were barely out of their teens when their...

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels-Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock-that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates...

From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, playing...

"A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets-with urgent lessons for today. A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who...

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: "A stunning work of biography" about three little-known New England women who made intellectual history (The New York Times). Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways the American Brontës. The story of these remarkable sisters—and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day—has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biography brings the era of creative...