Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle
Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle

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Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9004489215

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Both John Keats and Thomas Carlyle were born in 1795, but one rarely thinks of them together. When one does, curious speculations result. It is difficult to think of Carlyle as a young Romantic or of Keats as a Victorian Sage, but had Carlyle died prematurely and had Keats lived to a ripe old age, we might now be considering a Romantic Carlyle and a Victorian Keats. Such a juxtaposition leads one to consider the use and abuse, the fusions and confusions, of period terms in literary history and in criticism. Does Carlyle represent Romanticism as typically as Keats? Does Keats's work give us any cause to believe that he might have developed into a Victorian poet? Do the terms Romanticism and Victorian have any useful literary historical and literary critical value? What are the marks of the transition from one to the other? Or is the existence of such a transition an illusion? In this volume, some essays consider aspects of Keats or of Carlyle independently, or together, or focus on contemporaries of one or other or of both and explore the effect of their literary and ideological relationships, and the often indefinable sense that we all have of different styles, manners and periods, as well as the awareness that we might all be equally deceived about such distinctive boundaries and definitions.

Configuring Romanticism
Configuring Romanticism

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9004487670

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Configuring Romanticism focuses on the ways in which “Romanticism” continues to change shape in light of new discoveries, new readings, new approaches. To this end, some essays here gathered offer novel interpretations of Romantic “classics” such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Southey, or discuss the Celtic roots of Romanticism. Others address the relationship of Romantic literature, particularly the work of Scott, Shelley, and De Quincey, to issues of colonialism and imperialism. Yet others trace the “afterlife” of Romanticism and the Romantics, specifically Byron, Shelley, and Keats, in the writings of Leigh Hunt, Elizabeth Gaskell, James Thomson, Algernon Swinburne, William Michael Rosetti, James Clarence Mangan, Francis Parkman, Gilbert and Sullivan, and T.S. Eliot, as well as in Dutch nineteenth-century criticism. The volume closes with discussions of the Romantic aspects of World War II propaganda, twentieth-century translations of the Aeneid in view of Romantic principles, the Romantic face of recent Québecois fiction, and present-day film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma.

Challenge of Keats
Challenge of Keats

Author: Allan C. Christensen

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9789042004993

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Two centuries after his birth in October 1795, John Keats occupies a secure place in the canon of great literature of the western world. But for much of the nineteenth century and even during periods of the twentieth century, his right to such a position was not so firmly established. On the bicentenary of Keats's birth, various Italian scholars, along with specialists from English-speaking countries, decided to take advantage of the occasion not only to render homage to a poet whose greatness now seems unchallenged but also to accept his continuing challenge to his readers. The contributors to this volume re-examine some of the harshest criticisms of Keats, from Byron onwards, and some of the unconditional exaltations of the poet in order to discover possible sites between the two for new critical impulses and fertile re-evaluations of his achievement. Under five headings - Romantic Truth, Textual Readings, History and Myth, Keats and Other Poets and Painting and Music - the essays in this book appraise the historical-cultural contexts that nurtured Keats's creativity; discuss the influences and interrelationships among Keats and other poets; and consider Keats's artistry as revealed in the analyses of particular texts.

The Victorian Eighteenth Century
The Victorian Eighteenth Century

Author: B. W. Young

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-10-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0191531316

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The Victorians were preoccupied by the eighteenth century. It was central to many nineteenth-century debates, particularly those concerning the place of history and religion in national life. This book explores the diverse responses of key Victorian writers and thinkers, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Leslie Stephen, Vernon Lee, and M.R. James to a period which commanded their interest throughout the Victorian era, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the opening decades of the twentieth century. They were, on the one hand, appalled by the apparent frivolity of the eighteenth century, which was denounced by Carlyle as a dispiriting successor to the culture of Puritan England, and, on the other they were concerned to continue its secularising influence on English culture, as is seen in the pioneering work of Leslie Stephen, who was passionately keen to transform the legacy of eighteenth-century scepticism into Victorian agnosticism. The Victorian interest in the eighteenth century was never a purely insular matter, and the history of eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Italy played a dominant role in the nineteenth-century historical understanding. A debate between generations was enacted, in which Romanticism melded into Victorianism. The Victorians were haunted by the eighteenth century, both metaphorically and literally, and the book closes with consideration of the culturally resonant eighteenth-century ghosts encountered in the fiction of Vernon Lee and M.R. James.

Victorian Biography Reconsidered
Victorian Biography Reconsidered

Author: Juliette Atkinson

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-08-26

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0191591432

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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.

Handbook of British Romanticism
Handbook of British Romanticism

Author: Ralf Haekel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 770

ISBN-13: 3110393409

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The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain
The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain

Author: William Christie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1315476282

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From its first issue, published on the 10th October 1802, Francis Jeffrey's "Edinburgh Review" established a strong reputation and exerted a powerful influence. This is a literary study of the "Edinburgh Review" for over fifty years. It contextualizes the periodical within the culture wars of the Romantic era.

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era
Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

Author: Andrew Radford

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1351902474

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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.

Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence
Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence

Author: Paul E. Kerry

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-06-20

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1683930665

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That Thomas Carlyle was influential in his own lifetime and continues to be so over 130 years after his death is a proposition with which few will disagree. His role as his generation’s foremost interpreter of German thought, his distinctive rhetorical style, his approach to history via the “innumerable biographies” of great men, and his almost unparalleled record of correspondence with contemporaries both great and small, makes him a necessary figure of study in multiple fields. Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence positions Carlyle as an ideal representative figure through which to study that complex interplay between past and present most commonly referred to as influence. Approached from a theoretically ecumenical perspective by the volume's introduction and eighteen essays, influence is itself refigured through a number of complementary metaphorical frames: influence as organic inheritance; influence as aesthetic infection; influence as palimpsest; influence as mythology; influence as network; and more. Individual essays connect Carlyle with the persons and publications of Mathilde Blind, Orestes Brownson, John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, James Joyce, William Keenan, Windham Lewis, Jules Michelet, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Spencer Stanhope, John Sterling, and others. Considered as a whole, Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence assembles a web of conceptual and intertextual connections that both challenges received understandings of influence itself and establishes a standard by which to measure future assertions of Carlyle's enduring intellectual legacy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century
The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century

Author: Francis O'Gorman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1351880608

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Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, the essays in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century propose a re-examination of these relationships. Together, they expose some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted within the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Individual essays examine the influence of the work of Pope and the eighteenth-century novelists such as Johnson, Chatterton, and Rousseau on a range of Victorian writers and cultural productions, including Dickens, Eliot, Oliphant, Ruskin, historical fiction, late Victorian art criticism, The English Men of Letters series, and the Oxford English Dictionary. The contributors challenge long-held views about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, represents a unique approach to this area of literary history and offers new perspectives on the nature and methodology of 'periodization'. While it is obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, it will also appeal to readers more broadly concerned with questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.