Romanticism, Lyricism, and History
Romanticism, Lyricism, and History

Author: Sarah MacKenzie Zimmerman

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780791441091

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Arguing against a persistent view of Romantic lyricism as an inherently introspective mode, this book examines how Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and John Clare recognized end employed the mode's immense capacity for engaging reading audiences in reflections both personal and social. Zimmerman focuses new attention on the Romantic lyric's audiences - not the silent, passive auditor of canonical paradigms, but historical readers and critics who can tell us more than we have asked about the mode's rhetorical possibilities. She situates poems within the specific circumstances of their production and consumption, including the aftermath in England of the French Revolution, rural poverty, the processes of parliamentary enclosure, the biographical contours of poet's careers, and the myriad exchanges among poets, patrons, publishers, critics, and readers in the literary marketplace.

John Clare's Romanticism
John Clare's Romanticism

Author: Adam White

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-19

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 3319538594

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This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare’s poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare’s knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare’s poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period – in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare’s original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including ‘fancy’, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, ‘poesy’, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare’s lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.

John Clare in Context
John Clare in Context

Author: Geoffrey Summerfield

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-05-12

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780521445474

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Critics including Seamus Heaney provide a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare's bicentenary.

John Clare
John Clare

Author: Simon Kövesi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-08-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1349591831

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This book investigates what it is that makes John Clare’s poetic vision so unique, and asks how we use Clare for contemporary ends. It explores much of the criticism that has appeared in response to his life and work, and asks hard questions about the modes and motivations of critics and editors. Clare is increasingly regarded as having been an environmentalist long before the word appeared; this book investigates whether this ‘green’ rush to place him as a radical proto-ecologist does any disservice to his complex positions in relation to social class, work, agriculture, poverty and women. This book attempts to unlock Clare’s own theorisations and practices of what we might now call an ‘ecological consciousness’, and works out how his ‘ecocentric’ mode might relate to that of other Romantic poets. Finally, this book asks how we might treat Clare as our contemporary while still being attentive to the peculiarities of his unique historical circumstances.

Romanticism and Time
Romanticism and Time

Author: Sophie Laniel-Musitelli

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2021-03-10

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1800640749

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‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts. Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett. Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.

New Essays on John Clare
New Essays on John Clare

Author: Simon Kövesi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-29

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1316351955

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John Clare (1793–1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ‒ a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

Romantic Cartographies
Romantic Cartographies

Author: Sally Bushell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1108603173

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Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies – just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself – Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry
The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry

Author: Jonathan Wordsworth

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2005-05-26

Total Pages: 1048

ISBN-13: 0141905654

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The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance
John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance

Author: Johanne Clare

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780773506060

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As a working-class poet, born in 1793 to an impovisherished family in rural England, John Clare has often been considered of interest for the unusual nature of his life and career rather than for his poetry. In this book, Johanne Clare argues that he should be taken seriously both as a poet and as a representative figure in a period of social and agrarian upheaval. She discusses Clare's political attitudes and his views on the social issues which most affected him - poverty, economic inequality, class prejudice, and the enclosure movement - and shows how his social identity and experience were intricately related to his major writings.

Madness and the Romantic Poet
Madness and the Romantic Poet

Author: James Whitehead

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0198733704

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Madness and the Romantic Poet examines the longstanding and enduringly popular idea that poetry is connected to madness and mental illness. The idea goes back to classical antiquity, but it was given new life at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book offers a new and much more complete history of its development than has previously been attempted, alongside important associated ideas about individual genius, creativity, the emotions, rationality, and the mind in extreme states or disorder - ideas that have been pervasive in modern popular culture. More specifically, the book tells the story of the initial growth and wider dissemination of the idea of the 'Romantic mad poet' in the nineteenth century, how (and why) this idea became so popular, and how it interacted with the very different fortunes in reception and reputation of Romantic poets, their poetry, and attacks on or defences of Romanticism as a cultural trend generally - again leaving a popular legacy that endured into the twentieth century. Material covered includes nineteenth-century journalism, early literary criticism, biography, medical and psychiatric literature, and poetry. A wide range of scientific (and pseudoscientific) thinkers are discussed alongside major Romantic authors, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Hazlitt, Lamb, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, Byron, and John Clare. Using this array of sources and figures, the book asks: was the Romantic mad genius just a sentimental stereotype or a romantic myth? Or does its long popularity tell us something serious about Romanticism and the role it has played, or has been given, in modern culture?