Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine

Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine
Author: David Higgins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2007-05-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1134309015

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses. Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s. It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.

Romantic Genius

Romantic Genius
Author: Andrew Elfenbein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1999
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780231107532

Elfenbein takes on the absorbing subject of homosexuality in British Romantic writing, showing the centrality of disreputable desires to the works of Romantic male authors--from William Beckford to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Blake--as well as to the writings of lesser-known but equally significant female authors of the period.

Subjectivity and the Political

Subjectivity and the Political
Author: Gavin Rae
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351966227

Despite, or quite possibly because of, the structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist critiques of subjectivity, master signifiers, and political foundations, contemporary philosophy has been marked by a resurgence in interest in questions of subjectivity and the political. Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are, at least implicitly, committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, this collection brings together an international selection of scholars to explore these notions and their connection. Rather than privilege one approach or conception of the subjectivity-political relationship, this volume emphasizes the nature and status of the and in the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the political’ schema. By thinking from the place between subjectivity and the political, it is able to explore this relationship from a multitude of perspectives, directions, and thinkers to show the heterogeneity, openness, and contested nature of it. While the contributions deal with different themes or thinkers, the themes/thinkers are linked historically and/or conceptually, thereby providing coherence to the volume. Thinkers addressed include Arendt, Butler, Levinas, Agamben, Derrida, Kristeva, Adorno, Gramsci, Mill, Hegel, and Heidegger, while the subjectivity-political relation is engaged with through the mediation of the law-political, ethics-politics, theological-political, inside-outside, subject-person, and individual-institution relationships, as well as through concepts such as genius, happiness, abjection, and ugliness. The original essays in this volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, cultural studies, history of ideas, psychology, and sociology.

Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816

Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816
Author: J. Darcy
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2013-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137271094

This book traces the development of literary biography in the eighteenth century; how writers' melancholy was probed to explore the inner life. Case studies of a number of significant authors reveal the 1790s as a time of biographical experimentation. Reaction against philosophical biography led to a nineteenth-century taste for romanticized lives.

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt
Author: Kevin Gilmartin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191019380

Over the course of a literary career that extended from the lingering Malthusian controversies of the late eighteenth century to the brink of the Reform Act of 1832, William Hazlitt produced a remarkable body of committed radical journalism. Against the view that partisan passion undermined his aesthetic judgment and compromised his celebrated disinterestedness, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist restores politics to the center of his achievement as a critic and essayist. In doing so Kevin Gilmartin explores his constructive relationship with the early nineteenth-century popular reform movement, while acknowledging his desire to reflect critically on radical politics and express his own doubts about social progress. Early chapters attend closely to his critical method and matters of style and form, focusing on the political development of his contradictory prose manner. Paradox and inconsistency are central to his attack on 'Legitimacy', a term he drew form the lexicon of post-Napoleonic political journalism. In treating legitimate government as a revived form of divine right monarchy, Hazlitt often produced harrowing visions of the perfect refinement of oppressive power and the complete elimination of any principle of liberty or resistance. At the same time he found ways to preserve his commitment to oppositional political expression and the redemptive necessity of what he termed 'a word uttered against'. Later chapters bring together the spiritual heritage of rational Dissent and emerging democratic developments in London to understand Hazlitt's distinctive mobilization of radical memory as a way of contending with present injustice and envisioning a political future.

Victorian Biography Reconsidered

Victorian Biography Reconsidered
Author: Juliette Atkinson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2010-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191591432

In 1939, Virginia Woolf called for a more inclusive form of biography, which would include 'the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious'. She did so in part as a reaction against Victorian biography, deemed to have been overly preoccupied with 'Great Men'. Yet a significant number of Victorians had already broken ranks to write the lives of humble, unsuccessful, or neglected men and women. Victorian Biography Reconsidered seeks to uncover and assess this trend. The book begins with an overview of Victorian biography followed by a reflection on how the bagginess of nineteenth-century hero-worship enabled new subjects to emerge. Biographies of 'hidden' lives are then scrutinized through chapters on the lives of humble naturalists, failed destinies, minor women writers, neglected Romantic poets rescued by Victorian biographers, and, finally, the Dictionary of National Biography. In its conclusion, the book briefly discusses how Virginia Woolf absorbed earlier biographical trends before redirecting the representation of 'hidden' lives. Victorian Biography Reconsidered argues that, often paradoxically, nineteenth-century biographers regarded the public sphere with intense wariness. At a time of instability for men of letters, biographers embraced the role of mediators in a manner that asserted their own cultural authority. Frequently, they showed little interest in vouchsafing immortality for their unknown or forgotten subjects, but strove instead to provoke amongst their readers a feeling of gratitude for the hidden labour that sustained the nation and an appreciation for the writers who had brought it to their attention.

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.

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Mason Nicholas Mason
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-09-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474448151

Maps a coherent subfield of Romantic periodical studies through studying the trailblazing Blackwood's Edinburgh MagazineAn introduction by two established scholars that articulates a case for the more sustained, systematic study of Romantic periodicals and justifies the volume's focus by retracing Blackwood's emergence as the era's most innovative, influential and controversial literary magazine.Features eleven essays modelling how the wide-ranging commentary, reviews and original fiction and verse published in Blackwood's during its first two decades (1817-37) might meaningfully inform many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism. Contributes to field-wide bicentenary celebrations and reappraisals both of Blackwood's and the authors and works - including Shelley's Frankenstein, Byron's Don Juan and Keats's Poems - whose reputations the magazine helped shape.This book pioneers a subfield of Romantic periodical studies, distinct from its neighbours in adjacent historical periods. Eleven chapters by leading scholars in the field model the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from careful engagements with one of the age's landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Engaging with the research potential unlocked by new digital resources for studying Romantic periodicals, they argue that the wide-ranging commentary, reviews and original fiction and verse published in Blackwood's during its first two decades (1817-37) should inform many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

Living as an Author in the Romantic Period

Living as an Author in the Romantic Period
Author: Matthew Sangster
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2021-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303037047X

This book explores how authors profited from their writings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the most tangible benefits were social, rather than financial or aesthetic. It examines authors’ interactions with publishers; the challenges of literary sociability; the vexed construction of enduring careers; the factors that prevented most aspiring writers (particularly the less privileged) from accruing significant rewards; the rhetorical professionalisation of periodicals; and the manners in which emerging paradigms and technologies catalysed a belated transformation in how literary writing was consumed and perceived.

Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature

Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature
Author: Jeremy Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2014-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135016747

Shortlisted for the University English Early Career Book Prize 2016 Shortlisted for the British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize 2015 When writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries explored the implications of organic and emotional sensitivity, the pain of the body gave rise to unsettling but irresistible questions. Urged on by some of their most deeply felt preoccupations – and in the case of figures like Coleridge and P. B. Shelley, by their own experiences of chronic pain – many writers found themselves drawn to the imaginative scrutiny of bodies in extremis. Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature reveals the significance of physical hurt for the poetry, philosophy, and medicine of the Romantic period. This study looks back to eighteenth-century medical controversies that made pain central to discussions about the nature of life, and forward to the birth of surgical anaesthesia in 1846. It examines why Jeremy Bentham wrote in defence of torture, and how pain sparked the imagination of thinkers from Adam Smith to the Marquis de Sade. Jeremy Davies brings to bear on Romantic studies the fascinating recent work in the medical humanities that offers a fresh understanding of bodily hurt, and shows how pain could prompt new ways of thinking about politics, ethics, and identity.