The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe

Book excerpt: This book investigates how Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and their circle understood the idea of Europe. What geographical, cultural, and ideological concepts did they associate with the term? What does this tell us about politics and identity in early nineteenth-century Britain? In addressing these questions, Paul Stock challenges prevailing nationalist interpretations of Romanticism, but without falling prey to imprecise alternative notions of cosmopolitanism or "world citizenship." Instead, his book accounts for both the transnational and the local in Romantic writing, reassessing the period in terms of more complex, multi-layered identity politics.