Remaking Romanticism

Remaking Romanticism
Author: Casie LeGette
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319469290

This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political ends—and for their largely working-class readership—long after those works’ original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwin’s Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process.

Poetic Remaking

Poetic Remaking
Author: George Bornstein
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 1990-10-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0271071516

This volume offers a coherent view of post-romantic poetic development through selective examples both of individual poems and of poetic influence. Bornstein focuses most centrally on Browning in the Victorian period and Yeats and Pound in the Modern, but also looks more briefly at works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Arnold, Tennyson, and Eliot. The introductory manifesto, "Four Gaps in Postromantic Influence Study," posits four new orientations for such work: taking the volume (rather than the individual poem) as a unit; stressing more centrally the Victorian mediation between Romantic and Modern; allowing for national differences among English, Irish, and American traditions; and basing influence studies as much on manuscript materials as on finished products. Each of the following chapters follows one or more of those orientations. The initial four chapters, "Remaking Poetry," focus on readings of specific poetic texts. The first treats Browning's first major volume as a unit; the second reads his dramatic monologue "Pictor Ignotus" against Romantic acts of mind; the third maps distinctively Victorian variations in the major form known as Greater Romantic Lyric; and the fourth explores Yeats's mature revision of that form. The second group of four chapters, "Remaking Poets," stresses the dynamics of literary influence by which poets turn their forerunners into figures helpful to their own development. The first three examine Yeats's encounter with Dante, Spenser, Browning, and Tennyson, respectively; the fourth treats Pound's remaking of the poet he called his poetic "father," Browning, in a way that suggests the limits of anxiety models of poetic influence. For this volume Professor Bornstein has revised and expanded a select group of his recent essays and added a new one, on the Greater Victorian Lyric.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose
Author: British Academy Global Professor Robert Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 993
Release: 2024-09-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198834543

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Memory and Modern British Politics

Memory and Modern British Politics
Author: Matthew Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350190470

This edited collection explores absence, presence and remembrance in British political culture and memory studies. Comprehensive in its scope, it covers the entire modern period, bringing together the 19th and 20th centuries as well as Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World. As the first comparative and in-depth study to explore the central and contested place of memory and the invention of tradition in modern British politics, chapters include memorialisation, statue-mania, anniversaries and on the wider impact and invoking of 'dead generations'. In doing so, this book provides a new, exciting and accessible way of engaging with the history of British political culture.

British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths

British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths
Author: James Epstein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000342115

This book explores the hopes, desires, and imagined futures that characterized British radicalism in the 1790s, and the resurfacing of this sense of possibility in the following decades. The articulation of “Jacobin” sentiments reflected the emotional investments of men and women inspired by the French Revolution and committed to political transformation. The authors emphasize the performative aspects of political culture, and the spaces in which mobilization and expression occurred – including the club room, tavern, coffeehouse, street, outdoor meeting, theater, chapel, courtroom, prison, and convict ship. America, imagined as a site of republican citizenship, and New South Wales, experienced as a space of political exile, widened the scope of radical dreaming. Part 1 focuses on the political culture forged under the shifting influence of the French Revolution. Part 2 explores the afterlives of British Jacobinism in the year 1817, in early Chartist memorialization of the Scottish “martyrs” of 1794, and in the writings of E. P. Thompson. The relationship between popular radicals and the Romantics is a theme pursued in several chapters; a dialogue is sustained across the disciplinary boundaries of British history and literary studies. The volume captures the revolutionary decade’s effervescent yearning, and its unruly persistence in later years.

Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism

Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism
Author: Joseph M. Ortiz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135190079X

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

On the Horizon of World Literature

On the Horizon of World Literature
Author: Emily Sun
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2021-04-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823294803

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.

Characters Before Copyright

Characters Before Copyright
Author: Matthew H. Birkhold
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198831978

Based on extensive archival work, Characters before Copyright shows that fan fiction proliferated in the eighteenth century and explains why this phenomenon emerged when it did.

Romantic Biography

Romantic Biography
Author: Arthur Bradley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351902504

Romantic biography lives. Despite the so-called 'death of the author', popular interest in the lives of the major Romantic writers has reached a new peak. Romantic Biography brings together Romantic biographers and critics to consider some of the key questions surrounding this publishing phenomenon. What precisely is Romantic biography? What is the relationship between it and Romantic writings more generally? And to what extent is Romantic biography itself the product of Romantic ideas about the self, time and creativity? Romantic Biography examines a range of canonical and non-canonical biographical subjects from a variety of practical and theoretical standpoints. Michael O'Neill opens the collection with an analysis of the relationship between Romantic biography and Romantic poetry. Jonathan Bate, Mark Storey and Kenneth R. Johnston reassess Clare, Southey and Wordsworth from their position as authors of recent/forthcoming biographies of the poets. Joe Bray and Alan Rawes explore the Romantic assumptions at work within contemporary biographies of Austen and Byron. Gerard Carruthers, Julian North, Jennifer Wallace and Arthur Bradley put biographies of Burns, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley into the context of contemporary historicist and theoretical ideas about national and gender identity, the body and difference. Ralph Pite brings the collection to a close with a further examination of the vexed question of Romantic biography's relation to Romanticism itself. Romantic Biography is a major new survey of Romantic life-writing and an important contribution to biographical studies more generally.

Chartist drama

Chartist drama
Author: Gregory Vargo
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2020-06-10
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1526142082

The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins’s John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo’s introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.