British Romanticism and the Catholic Question

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues. The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics elicited a prolonged political and cultural conflict about the nation's religious and historical identity. It engaged the period's most prominent writers, including S.T. Coleridge, Elizabeth Inchbald, Walter Scott, P.B. Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Beginning with the 1778 Catholic Relief Act, the book follows debates over the Catholic Question across parliamentary speeches, periodical writing, and political cartoons and through the genres of the national tale, epic poetry, the historical novel, and romantic drama. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question argues that while the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act removed the confessional state's legislative apparatus, the regulation of religious difference passed into culture and reshaped the nineteenth century's approach to religious minorities and toleration in the British nation and empire.