Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry Work, Play, and Politics

This is the first modern critical study of Thomas Hood, the popular and influential nineteenth-century poet, editor, cartoonist and voice of social protest. Acclaimed by Dickens, the Brownings and the Rossettis, Hood's quirky, diverse output bridges the years between 1820 and 1845 and offers fascinating insights for Romanticists and Victorianists alike. Lodge's timely book explores the relationship between Hood's playfulness, his liberal politics, and contemporary cultural debate about labor and recreation, literary materiality and urban consumption.Each chapter examines something distinctive of interdisciplinary interest, including the early nineteenth-century print culture into which Hood was born; the traditional, urban and political ramifications of the grotesque art and literature aesthetic; the cultural politics of Hood's trademark puns; theatre, leisure and the "labour question".Lively and accessible, this book will appeal to scholars of nineteenth-century English Literature, Visual Arts and Cultural Studies.

Sara Lodge is Senior Lecturer in English, specializing in Nineteenth-Century Literature, at the University of St Andrews.

Introduction1. Material Backgrounds: Print, Dissent, and the Social Society2. Hood and the Minor: at the London Magazine and After3. Performing the City: the Audience as Subject4. A Common Centaur: Hood and the Grotesque5. Pun and Pleasure: Hood's Tied Trope6. Sine qua non-sense: Work, Play, and CriticismIndex