Building on recent studies of the Romantic public sphere, Alex Benchimol provides a new reading of the period's intellectual politics based on a historically informed examination of its spaces of cultural production and modes of intellectual practice. Benchimol traces the development of social criticism produced for the liberal bourgeois and radical plebeian publics in key periodicals, while highlighting their cultural origins in the Scottish Enlightenment and the English radical movements of the long eighteenth century.

Contents: Introduction: new sites of cultural conflict in the Romantic period; Cultural theory and the Habermasian public sphere; Cultural leadership in 'North Britain' and the making of the Scottish Enlightenment public sphere; Formations of popular English cultural politics and the making of the radical plebeian public sphere; Scottish philosophic Whiggism and Romantic cultural critique; post-Enlightenment intellectual politics in the Edinburgh Review; Radical Englishness in the Romantic period: intellectual leadership and popular cultural resistance in the plebeian public sphere; Afterword: national cultural history, cultural studies, and the Romantic public sphere; Selected bibliography; Index.

Alex Benchimol is lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK