Romantic Victorians

Romantic Victorians
Author: R. Cronin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2001-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 140390717X

Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors of works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs.

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Author: Tom Mole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2020-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691202923

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

The Victorian and the Romantic

The Victorian and the Romantic
Author: Nell Stevens
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385543514

In this tale of two writers, Nell Stevens interweaves her own life as a twenty-something graduate student with that of the English author, Elizabeth Gaskell. Although they are separated by more than 150 years, Nell finds herself drawn to the Victorian novelist by their shared experiences of unrequited love—Gaskell for an American critic she met in Rome, Nell for a soulful American screenwriter living in Paris. As Nell’s romance founders and her passion for academia fails to materialize, she finds herself wondering if the indomitable Mrs. Gaskell might rescue her pursuit of love, family, and a writing career. Lively, witty, and impossible to put down, The Victorian and the Romantic is a moving chronicle of two women, each charting a way of life beyond the rules of her time.

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism
Author: Tom Mole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691175365

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era
Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351902474

In tracing those deliberate and accidental Romantic echoes that reverberate through the Victorian age into the beginning of the twentieth century, this collection acknowledges that the Victorians decided for themselves how to define what is 'Romantic'. The essays explore the extent to which Victorianism can be distinguished from its Romantic precursors, or whether it is possible to conceive of Romanticism without the influence of these Victorian definitions. Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era reassesses Romantic literature's immediate cultural and literary legacy in the late nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian writings of Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, the Brownings, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and the Rossettis were instrumental in shaping Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon. Many of these Victorian writers found in the biographical, literary, and historical models of Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth touchstones for reappraising their own creative potential and artistic identity. Whether the Victorians affirmed or revolted against the Romanticism of their early years, their attitudes towards Romantic values enriched and intensified the personal, creative, and social dilemmas described in their art. Taken together, the essays in this collection reflect on current critical dialogues about literary periodisation and contribute to our understanding of how these contemporary debates stem from Romanticism's inception in the Victorian age.

Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy

Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy
Author: Dr Britta Martens
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1409478874

Taking an original approach to Robert Browning's poetics, Britta Martens focuses on a corpus of relatively neglected poems in Browning's own voice in which he reflects on his poetry, his self-conceptualization and his place in the poetic tradition. She analyzes his work in relation to Romanticism, Victorian reactions to the Romantic legacy, and wider nineteenth-century changes in poetic taste, to argue that in these poems, as in his more frequently studied dramatic monologues, Browning deploys varied dramatic methods of self-representation, often critically and ironically exposing the biases and limitations of the seemingly authoritative speaker 'Browning'. The poems thus become devices for Browning's detached evaluation of his own and of others' poetics, an evaluation never fully explicit but presented with elusive economy for the astute reader to interpret. The confrontation between the personal authorial voice and the dramatic voice in these poems provides revealing insights into the poet's highly self-conscious, conflicted and sustained engagement with the Romantic tradition and the diversely challenging reader expectations that he faces in a post-Romantic age. As the Victorian most rigorous in his rejection of Romantic self-expression, Browning is a key transitional figure between the sharply antagonistic periods of Romanticism and Modernism. He is also, as Martens persuasively demonstrates, a poet of complex contradictions and an illuminating case study for addressing the perennial issues of voice, authorial authority and self-reference.

Romantics and Victorians

Romantics and Victorians
Author: Nicola J. Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781849666237

The second volume in the Reading and Studying Literature series, co-published with the Open University, introduces students to European romanticism and Victorian culture. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus for study and discussion and introducing readers to an important theoretical concept in literary studies. European romanticism is approached through a consideration of the evolution of the idea of the romantic author and the romantic inner life, using readings from Wordsworth on Grasmere, Shelley lyric poetry and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The book goes on to explore Victorian culture through a reading of ideas of 'home' and 'abroad', in the work of Emily Bronte, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. The featured theoretical concept of this volume is 'the author'.

Understanding the Victorians

Understanding the Victorians
Author: Susie Steinbach
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 041577408X

"Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of the era, combining broad surveys with close analysis, and introduces students to the critical debates taking place among historians today. Focusing not just on England but on the whole of Great Britain and Ireland it emphasises class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This book encompasses the whole of the Victorian period giving equal prominence to social and cultural topics alongside the politics and economics. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming right up to the start of World War I in 1914, Susie L. Steinbach uses thematic chapters to discuss and evaluate, the economy, gender, religion, the history of science and ideas, material culture and sexuality. Steinbach also provides much-needed chapters on consumption, which links consumption with production, on law, which explains the legal culture and trials of criminal and scandalous cases and on space which draws to together the most current research in Victorian studies"--Provided by publisher.

Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing

Tennyson and Mid-Victorian Publishing
Author: Jim Cheshire
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137338156

This book examines how Tennyson’s career was mediated, organised and directed by the publishing industry. Founded on neglected archival material, it examines the scale and distribution of Tennyson’s book sales in Britain and America, the commercial logic of publishing poetry, and how illustrated gift books and visual culture both promoted and interrogated the Poet Laureate and his life. Major publishers had become disillusioned with poetry by the time that Edward Moxon founded his business in 1830 but by the mid-1860s, his firm presided over a resurgence in poetry based on Tennyson’s work. Moxon not only orchestrated Tennyson’s rise to fame but was a major influence on how the Victorian public experienced the poetry of the Romantic period. This study reevaluates his crucial role, and examines how he repackaged poetry for the Victorian public.

Victorian Britain (Routledge Revivals)

Victorian Britain (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Sally Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1014
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136716173

First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.