The panel of judges would like to extend their sincerest thanks to everyone who submitted a nomination for the BARS First Book Prize 2026. In 2026, the Prize was open to monographs published between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2025, and we received 26 nominations (all eligible) by the closing date. Nominated books were written by scholars based in the UK, USA, and (in one case) Israel, and were published by Anthem, Boydell, and Palgrave Macmillan, and by the University Presses of Bucknell, Cambridge, Cornell, Edinburgh, Ohio, Oxford, Stanford, UCL, and Wales. We read work on an extraordinarily wide range of topics in the literature and culture of the period from c.1780–1830, including work that stretched these period boundaries in illuminating ways, as well as work that examined Romanticism in newly elaborated regional, national, and global contexts.
Everything we read was informative and innovative in various ways, and all entrants are to be heartily congratulated on their first books. Reading was hard but enjoyable work and our deliberations were rigorous and cordial in every case. We shortlisted eight of the 26 nominations (the shortlist was announced on the BARS Blog), announcing one winner and making two honourable mentions at the BARS ‘Romantic Retrospections’ international conference in Birmingham, UK, at the end of July 2026. Short descriptions of the winning and honourably mentioned books follow here. Congratulations again to all nominees, to authors of shortlisted books, and, especially, to those honourably mentioned and the winner!
–– Ross Wilson (Chair; University of Cambridge); Susan Civale (University of Oxford); Daisy Hay (University of Exeter); Andrew McInnes (Edge Hill University); Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman (University College Cork); Emily Paterson-Morgan (The Byron Society); Amy Wilcockson (Queen Mary University of London).
Honourable Mention
Joey Kim (University of Toledo) for Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation takes up the critic Sara Ahmed’s injunction that ‘[i]t is time for us to consider the significance of “the orient” in orientation, or even “the oriental”’. It does so by articulating orientation understood as the subject’s self-positioning in culture, history, and the world, on the one hand, with ‘the Orient’ as the fantasised ‘East’ of a white supremacist imaginary, on the other. Kim’s book is thus a significant, bracing contribution to contemporary literary and cultural theory and, as such, demonstrates the abiding significance of work in our period to questions that preoccupy critics working beyond its historical parameters. Through close readings of a wide range of writers – Sir William Jones, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and, in particular, Lord Byron, William Blake, and Phillis Wheatley – the book develops a challenging new account of the emergence and development of the lyric ‘I’. The book concludes stirringly with a call to imagine ‘radical orientations that foster an “unbridled romanticism” for us all’.
Honourable Mention
Colleen Taylor (Boston College) for Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690–1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 explores ‘different kinds of matter as cultural remainders of lost experiences’ or what it also calls ‘local materiality’. It is a major contribution to postcolonial studies as well as to the study of literature through material culture. The materials it examines are those of the daily lives of people living in Ireland from the end of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth – and hence under British colonial rule. Drawing on recent New Materialist theory, it takes material objects not to be inert but rather as bearers of agency and drivers of narratives. And the objects it examines – which it does with an admirable combination of archival rigour, historical sensitivity, and literary intuition – are various indeed: coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, and pigs all play central roles in this gripping, widely informative book. Irish Materialisms is a major contribution not only to the cultural history of Ireland but also to the developing field of materialist literary studies.
Winner
Yin Yuan (St Mary’s College of California) for Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East (Bucknell University Press, 2023)
Alimentary Orientalism is a methodologically daring and innovative book, beginning from the desire to challenge the boundary between the exoticizing and racist past, on the one hand, and ‘our’ enlightened critical present, on the other. The book’s central argument is that British Orientalists writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were more aware of the fantasmatic structure of their own practices – practices both of discourse and, importantly for a book that focuses on comestible goods, of consumption – than they are often credited for. Alimentary Orientalism works with both a literary and a material archive – with what Yuan wonderfully calls ‘exotic ingestants’, namely, sugar, tea, and opium. Each of these ingestible goods was central to the British relationship with the East and with China in particular. Yuan’s archive of literary works is wide, stretching the period boundaries of work in Romantic studies at both ends with excellent discussions of Oliver Goldsmith, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens – with similarly insightful, often revelatory readings of Beckford, Moore, Scott, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb in between. The book also builds on cutting-edge work in postcolonial studies that emphasises the instability of an emergent British identity, developing in the process a new way of interconnecting material culture, literary form, and global history. Alimentary Orientalism is engagingly written throughout and promises to have a significant impact on our field.