This collaborative book derives from the 2006 Bristol University Conference on periodicals culture in the Romantic era. The essays indicate that the periodical text presented a novel and challenging medium in the Romantic period and enabled a particularly.
The inherent 'metropolitanism' of writing for a Romantic-era periodical is here explored through the Elia articles that Charles Lamb wrote for the London Magazine.
Wordsworth’s process of revision, his organization of poetic volumes and his supplementary writings are often seen as distinct from his poetic composition. Bates asserts that an analysis of these supplementary writings and paratexts are necessary to a full understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry.
Through close readings of diverse examples by Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Irving and Poe, this book argues that the familiar essay in the Romantic period embodies a quintessentially metropolitan mode of affect. The generic traits of the essay—astuteness of observation, an ambulatory or paratactic movement of thought, and an urbane tone of wry or ironic humour—all predispose it to the expression of a detached, non-pathological state of mind. This is a mind conditioned by the quickened pace, assorted humanity, and plenitude of spectacle which characterise urban and urbanised life. In making a valuable, genre-based contribution to scholarship on the importance to Romantic studies of the city and metropolitan culture, the traditional concept of Romantic affect is reassessed. The book proposes a more complex and varied model than the simple binary one of a “feeling” reaction to Enlightenment “reason.” Partly enacted within its own formal parameters and partly through its disruptive and genre-transcending progeny, the essayistic figure, the familiar essay articulates a blithe and, at times, shocking and provocative discourse of “un-affect,” or a strategically and often satirical callousness. Therefore, the overall concept of affect in this period needs to be understood not as a unified entity opposed to Enlightenment reason, but a dialogue between concurrent, opposing modes, played out against a dichotomized geo-cultural landscape of the country and the city. Essayistic un-affect emerges, in the end, as an apolitical phenomenon, a primary vehicle for the essayist’s inherent scepticism, sometimes enabling outright ridicule and, at other times, a tentative questioning or probing of both orthodox thought and emerging ideas: from the rarefied liberalist sensibility of the Lake poets, to the hubristic vanity of the colonial adventurer, and from the allure of hedonistic, Old World decadence to the proscriptive strictures of moralistic art.
Discussing contemporary perspectives and new developments in the field of English language studies has gained ascendancy in view of the fact that such concerns about learning and teaching English make important contributions to society. Such discussions are of critical importance in today’s globalised societies and more needs to be done towards collaboratively presenting the growing wealth of quality research in linguistics and literature. Linguists and scholars continue to champion the need to interrogate the discourse of literary and language texts using a number of critical frameworks that help sensitise readers to the ideological nature of literary discourse and the ways in which certain dominant ideas of nation, race, ethnicity and gender are ratified or challenged. Readers need to be constantly challenged to think, interpret and evaluate differing views and perspectives. The collection of chapters in this book explores contemporary issues and perspectives in linguistics and literature among educators and researchers whose primary focus is to examine the manner in which English is used for various educational purposes from traditional curriculum demands to answering broader questions about human knowledge, global citizenship and social engagement.
The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism offers a comprehensive guide to the literature and thought of the Romantic period, and an overview of the latest research on this topic. Written by a team of international experts, the Handbook analyses all aspects of the Romantic movement, pinpointing its different historical phases and analysing the intellectual and political currents which shaped them. It gives particular attention to devolutionary trends, exploring the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish strands in 'British' Romanticism and assessing the impact of the constitutional changes that brought into being the 'United Kingdom' at a time of revolutionary turbulence and international conflict. It also gives extensive coverage to the publishing and reception history of Romantic writing, highlighting the role of readers, reviewers, publishers, and institutions in shaping Romantic literary culture and transmitting its ideas and values. Divided into ten sections, each containing four or five chapters, the Handbook covers key themes and concepts in Romantic studies as well as less chartered topics such as freedom of speech, literature and drugs, Romantic oratory, and literary uses of dialect. All the major male and female Romantic authors are included along with numerous lesser-known writers, the emphasis throughout being on the diversity of Romantic writing and the complexities and internal divisions of the culture that sustained it. The volume strikes a balance between familiarity and novelty to provide an accessible guide to current thinking and a conceptual reorganization of this fast-moving field.
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.
This collection renders an invigorating take into engaging ideas that traverse various literary issues. Each chapter opens our minds to the thrilling possibilities of approaching literary texts and paves the way for appreciating literature more widely. Although appearing divergent in nature, these chapters do encourage literary exploration and appreciation. Literature celebrates diversities and differences, and this book World Mosaics of Literary Analysis: Accepting Differences and Embracing Diversities admittedly urges its readers to accept differences and to embrace diversities. Undeniably there is strength in diversity.
This book is a monumental work on the late Romantic Irish poet, George Darley, with a scholarly edition of his complete poetry and a new biography. The text of each poem is meticulously edited from manuscript and printed sources. For the first time, Darley is established as a translator of the First Book of Virgil’s Æneid. A newly discovered manuscript of Darley’s 70 Lenimina Laborum poems enriches the edition, while the celebrated Nepenthe is authoritatively presented with Darley’s manuscript running headnotes. The book introduces over 40 new manuscript letters by Darley, and discusses contemporary reviews of his work and a century of critical commentary. Darley’s influence on Tennyson is evaluated and his vast periodical contributions are examined. In addition, the insightful interpretation of Nepenthe by Edward Hutchinson Synge is presented. This book will be of great interest to scholars of the Romantic period, readers of contemporary periodical journalism, and students of Irish literary history.
Charting the failure of the Romantic critique of political economy, Richard Adelman explores the changing significances and the developing concepts of idleness and aesthetic consciousness during the nineteenth century. Through careful analysis of some of the period's most influential thinkers, including John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Adelman weaves together evolving ideas across a range of intellectual discourses - political economy, meditative poetry, the ideology of the 'gospel of work', cultural theory, the Gothic and psychoanalysis. In doing so, he reconstructs debates over passivity and repose and demonstrates their centrality to the cultural politics of the age. Arguing that hardened conceptions of aesthetic consciousness come into being at moments of civic unrest concerning political representation and that the fin-de-siècle witnesses the demonization of the once revolutionary category of aesthetic consciousness, the book demonstrates that late eighteenth-century positivity around human spirituality is comprehensively dismantled by the beginning of the twentieth century.