Thesefeverish and burning nights he passed among his books. He ran through the store rooms, he ran through the galleries of his library with ecstasy and delight. Then he stopped, his hair in disorder, his eyesfixed and sparkling. His hands, warm and damp, trembled on touching the wood of the shelves.... He scarcely ate, he no longer slept, but he dreamed whole days and nights of hisfixed idea: books. He dreamed of all that a royal library should have of the divine, the sublime, and the beautiful, and he dreamed of makingfor himself as big a library as that of the King. Howfreely he breathed, how proud and strong hefelt, when he cast his eye into the immense galleries where the view was lost in books! Gustave Flaubert, Bibliomanie

Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain

Introduction: the Cockney moment 1. Leigh Hunt, John Keats and the suburbs 2. William Hazlitt and the Periodical Press 3. Liber Amoris and lodging houses 4. Pierce Egan and life in London 5. Charles Lamb and the alchemy of the streets 6. John Martin, John Soane and Cockney art 7. B. R. Haydon and debtors' prisons 8. Charles Dickens and Cockney adventures.

Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810-1840: Cockney Adventures

Like a manifestant, this text revives the riven, if not rival, discourses of art history and performance studies. Split apart by conventions of seeing and knowing developed in and practiced by the academy, art history and performance studies explicate different textual forms. For example, painting, sculpture, and architecture belong within the purview of art history, whereas plays, parades, and social rituals belong to the field of performance studies. Despite such differences in their historical constitution, both the discipline of art history and the transor inter-discipline of performance studies share an interest in vision, visuality, and scopic regimes (not to mention particular investments in perspective). From Martin Meisel’s landmark 1983 study, Realizations, to Elin Diamond’s recent citation in Performance and Cultural Politics, connections among and between such frames of reference and referent framing draw

Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet's Olympia

Romantic critics have traditionally viewed Keats as a
master of the lyrical "still object" and his Hyperion
as a narrative failure. In this article, I aim to present a different
Keats, one whose work, moreover, sheds light on the relationship
between our making sense of the world (as a time-space construct) and
the development of narrative modes in the long poem. In exploring the
time-space poetics of Keats's Hyperion, this essay takes
as its point of departure the narrative questions posed by the shift
from the classical model of Enlightenment epic to the Romantic long
poem, and so connects Keats's narrative experimentation to a new
(Romantic) paradigm. Throughout, the central question is why and to
what effect space became the focus of this paradigmatic shift in the
composition of the long poem. Various possibilities of space poetics
are examined, always (unlike Joseph Frank's "spatial
form") as an interaction of the axes of world and composition,
as well as in relation to temporality. Time-space organization functions
in this context as an image of the world and as a device for activating
the reader. Historically, the changing hierarchy between world and
composition and their interplay with time should also enable us to trace
(dis)continuities between the Romantic model and its (post)modernist
variants.

Keats's Hyperion : Time, Space, and the Long Poem

The challenges of contemporary-history-writing were brought into relief in Britain in the nineteenth century Philosophical and pragmatic factors made the recent past a subject of discomfort for historians, but popular with novelists Changing concepts of time and social value made it more difficult to draw boundaries on the remit of historiography, and to decide which individuals were worthy of inclusion As a period still present in diverse living memories, the recent past was associated with multiplicity and particularity, in an era that valued grand and singular narratives, and looked to history to provide them
This was exacerbated in the later Victorian period by the establishment of history as a university discipline Historians sought professional credibility, and thus avoided including the as-yet inconclusive recent past in their national histories Those historians who did incorporate it often struggled to maintain a consistent tone, seeking overview while aware of their lack of hindsight They resorted to the trope of ‘nation’ to impose apparent social unity
By contrast, the recent past was popular with novelists This more personal genre enabled mid-century women writers to write provincial and localised narratives By using polyphonic and ironic narrators, they commented on history without claiming definitive judgement, and gave voice to ‘unhistoric’ individuals They included women, however, more successfully than they did the working class
At the end of the century, socialist writers seeking social transformation set utopian fictions in the future, enabling them to look back with an imaginary hindsight, and write contemporary history with impunity They were, however, still faced with the problem of agency The quasi-religious significance that had earlier been attributed to ‘History’ was now transferred to the collective These genres, therefore, all offered different opportunities for contemporary-history-writing, but could not solve its intrinsic challenges

William Walling

Papers

Images of Romanticism : verbal and visual affinities

Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities by Karl Kroeber, William Walling