Showing papers in "European Romantic Review in 2015"
TL;DR: The Minerva Press is being written back into Romantic-era literary history, both for its impact on the novel market and for the “Romantic” tropes (e.g. genius, transcendence) that its unprecedented output of novels inspired as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The Minerva Press is being written back into Romantic-era literary history, both for its impact on the novel market and for the “Romantic” tropes (e.g. genius, transcendence) that its unprecedented output of novels – many by new women authors – inspired. The novels themselves, which are usually dismissed as derivative, hover at the margins of literary history. This dismissal obscures the fact that Minerva novels were published prior to modern divisions between high and low literature. A discussion of four Minerva novels suggests that novelists drew on Romantic projections of poetic genius as well as anxieties about profligate print culture to develop their own model of collective authorship. Marginalized novelists connected with each other over space and time via the circulating-library novel. Popular tropes and fashionable terms also provided marginalized authors with the language to contribute to pressing conversations – most importantly, Romantic reassessments of authorship and literature. Novelists’ c...
46 citations
TL;DR: This paper traced the material and cultural history of the tree and its absence, and attempted to recapture the significance of Wordsworth's original protest and consider broader implications to critical assessments of romantic constructions of nature.
Abstract: The “broken arbour” in which Margaret sits despondent near the close of “The Ruined Cottage” is highly suggestive of the long and devastating deforestation of England that occurred from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. By the Romantic period, England had become one of the most deforested nations in Europe, largely in aid of a vast colonial enterprise. The vacant and huge space that spreads around the traveler at the poem's opening is not only related to this deforestation, but also to a sense of collective loss buried within cultural memory, and to the poetic and cultural traditions in which the tree plays a central historical role. By tracing the material and cultural history of the tree and its absence, this essay attempts to recapture the significance of Wordsworth's original protest and consider broader implications to critical assessments of Romantic constructions of nature.
18 citations
TL;DR: In the Lambeth books, Urizen is ejected out of order as a body in bits and pieces that is neither plant nor human as mentioned in this paper, and the disfiguration of its idealistic ambitions.
Abstract: In his later prophecies, Blake laid out his system as a geography mapped onto the human body. But in the Lambeth books, Urizen is ejected out of order as a body in bits and pieces that is neither plant nor human. This paper explores Urizen's body as a figure for Blake's own corpus and the disfiguration of its idealistic ambitions. Blake's later mapping of his system in a striated space with clear coordinates can be compared with Kant's equation of system with “architectonic,” which he compares with a body whose parts form a whole. But what if the body is not the anatomical body Kant imagines but is composed of systems irreducible to phenomenal cognition: circulatory, digestive, nervous? The contemporaneous work of John Hunter marks the first disclosure in Romanticism of a body without organs that is “flesh and nerve” and that Deleuze finds in Bacon and Artaud. Played out in Blake's theatre of cruelty Hunter's physiology lets us think of systems in a new, if traumatic, way: as enabled precisely by obstruct...
16 citations
TL;DR: A conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one was characterized by an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts.
Abstract: Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it has been argued that there is no materials for romance in England and must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this kind.
Abstract: “It has been asked, ‘Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this kind?’ And we answer – ‘Yes!’ Every foot of soil...
14 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors interpret suicide as an essential trope in Mary Shelley's critique of the fantasy of individualism in Frankenstein, and posits that suicide operates as a metaphor through which to interpret Romanticism's interest in radical politics.
Abstract: This essay interprets suicide as an essential trope in Mary Shelley's critique of the fantasy of individualism in Frankenstein, and posits that suicide operates as a metaphor through which to interpret Romanticism's interest in radical politics. Frankenstein engages the subject of suicide by way of three kinds of extra-textual discourses – Mary Shelley's attempt to come to terms with the role of suicide in her biography, as well as in the larger cultural debate on legal and medical aspects of suicide at the turn of the nineteenth century; the novel's engagement of Percy Shelley's account of the relationship between reading, sympathy, and love as it concerns the possibility of subject production; and a larger Enlightenment debate about how subjects are formed and maintain cohesion. Through the intersection of these three discourses, the novel uses suicide to stage Romanticism's interest in the political efficacy of the materials that the Shelleys saw as creating subjects – namely, texts.
13 citations
TL;DR: C Cobbett's History of the Protestant “Reformation” theorizes and historicizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared property and resources as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: William Cobbett's History of the Protestant “Reformation” theorizes and historicizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared property and resources. The monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts of commoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created a habitus of common rights access to property. At the same time, the monastic rule of celibacy served as a preventative check on those who would be born into the upper class, and thus transferred the burden for limiting population to those who consumed the most resources. The rule of celibacy further queers conservative Burkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal, homosocial groups instead of families. Cobbett's depiction of the monastic rule of hospitality toward the lower class and rule of celibacy for the monks and nuns challenges the naturalization of private property in Malthus's Essay on Population. As opposed to Smith's invisible hand of the market or Malthus's biopolitical, p...
11 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a secure chronology for the Jane Williams poems and re-assess, on the basis of that chronology, what those poems might be able to tell us about the course of Shelley's relationship with Jane in the last six months of his life.
Abstract: This essay returns to the extensive scholarly debate surrounding the lyrics and fragments which Percy Bysshe Shelley composed for Jane Williams, or with her in mind, during the last six months of his life. It takes its point of departure in what it defines as “the problem of the Jane Williams poems” – the difficulty, faced by biographers, editors, and critics alike, of mapping the relationship between the “Jane” of Shelley's poems and the historical Jane Williams. Drawing on the physical evidence available from Shelley's manuscripts, the essay seeks to establish a secure chronology for the Jane Williams poems and to re-assess, on the basis of that chronology, what those poems might be able to tell us about the course of Shelley's relationship with Jane in the last six months of his life. The essay offers new readings of a number of the Jane Williams poems, including “The Magnetic lady to her patient” and the fragment “We meet not as we parted,” as well as an extended discussion of Shelley's so-called “Unf...
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors identify these duplicated plots as the origin of this novel's much-discussed generic hybridity, suggesting that mediation offers a way to reassess the hybrid novelistic forms of the Romantic period and, secondly, a new approach to l...
Abstract: Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) is a heavily-annotated orientalist epistolary novel. Many of the novel's footnotes, which offer definitions of Hindi terms or refer to works of orientalist scholarship, interrupt the letters’ first sentences. Through this intersection of epistolary address with the footnotes’ direct address to the reader, Hamilton establishes the conceptual extremes of hypermediacy and immediacy that characterize this novel's representative strategies. Hamilton's notes and core text are linked through these structures of address as well as duplicated plots of education: as the eponymous Rajah learns about British culture in the main text, the British reader learns about Hindu culture in the notes. I identify these duplicated plots as the origin of this novel's much-discussed generic hybridity. Hamilton's novel suggests that mediation offers, first, a way to reassess the hybrid novelistic forms of the Romantic period and, secondly, a new approach to l...
10 citations
TL;DR: Barbauld's satiric verse has been omitted from studies of satire, including studies of specific satiric modes such as the mock heroic as mentioned in this paper, and this omission suggests the significance of women poets' contributions to satire, which has traditionally been identi...
Abstract: Anna Barbauld's satiric verse has been omitted from studies of satire, including studies of specific satiric modes such as the mock heroic. Drawing upon her knowledge of both scientific ideology and the satiric tradition, Barbauld uses the mock-heroic mode in “A Fragment of an Epic Poem,” “Washing-Day,” and “The Caterpillar” to interrogate the process of satiric differentiation, whereby the satirist distances himself or herself from the satiric object. As she does so, she constructs an ethic of satire that questions the configuration of the mode as a weapon. Barbauld employs the mock-heroic mode not to “wound,” but to emphasize the bonds that connect the “great” and the “small,” the mock-heroic satirist and the satiric object. Meanwhile, she identifies the appropriate object of satire not as those considered weak or inferior, but as those who misuse social and political power. Ultimately, Barbauld's work suggests the significance of women poets’ contributions to satire, which has traditionally been identi...
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the logic of sentimentalism and its aesthetic qualities, and compare Wordsworth's sonnet with abolitionist sonnets by Southey, and then bring this context into an analysis of wordsworth's use of rhyme in his address to Toussaint.
Abstract: The concepts of sympathy and sentiment have been vital to critical discussions of the ideals of humanness and social organization that were emerging in the eighteenth-century How sympathy and sentiment develop out of the family home and become part of national and international projects is a complex story This essay is concerned with Wordsworth's relationship to sentimental modes of writing, especially the British project of abolitionist writing; with his sonnet “To Toussaint L'Ouverture”; and with how Wordsworth uses poetic techniques as a response to the structure of sentimentalism Comparing Wordsworth's sonnet with abolitionist sonnets by Southey, I discuss the logic of sentimentalism and its aesthetic qualities Wordsworth's suspicion of sentimentalism is then put in the context of his analysis of the French Revolution and his critique of the newspaper, a mass culture institution I then bring this context into an analysis of Wordsworth's use of rhyme in his address to Toussaint, studying the multi
TL;DR: For example, there was no ontological gap between Mind and Nature for scientific naturalism any more than there had been for Romantic sensibilities as mentioned in this paper, for whom the natural world represented a self-sufficient unity.
Abstract: Examples from Charles Darwin, especially his tacking between different forms of temporality that enabled an integration of human experience and geological immensity, and John Tyndall, with his all-encompassing vision of a mechanical and energetic universe, show the sense in which Victorian scientific naturalism replicated in important respects the Romantic sensibilities of a Humboldt or a Goethe, for whom the natural world represented a self-sufficient unity. There was no ontological gap between Mind and Nature for scientific naturalism any more than there had been for Romantic sensibilities. Reason was what resulted from human nature, and human nature was reason. Nature red in tooth and claw, the terrible sublimity of scientific naturalism, was Romanticism's legitimate offspring.
TL;DR: In this paper, Davy argues that transcendent experiences are not disembodied, but moments of intense emotion, and provides an empiricist model of embodied transcendence that offers new ways to understand Romantic poetry.
Abstract: Transcendent experiences depicted in Romantic poetry are understood as instances in which the mind leaves the body to touch upon an immaterial realm that exists independently of the material world. This concept of transcendence, which relies on substance dualism or German idealism, posits an ahistorical version of a reality that is eternal. In contrast to this common view, Humphry Davy offers a materialist account of transcendence based on embodied cognition. Davy argues against a transcendental realm. He theorizes that transcendent experiences are not disembodied, but moments of intense emotion. He provides an empiricist model of embodied transcendence that offers new ways to understand Romantic poetry. This article elucidates Davy's theory in relation to British Romantic cognitive science and analyzes Wordsworth's “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” in light of these findings. It challenges traditional readings of the poem and raises questions about body's role in theories of imagination mor...
TL;DR: The authors examines models of direct perception in literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century, focusing on works of poetry, philosophy, and fiction that put their reader up close to a world at hand and explore a physical surround from the perspective of a moving body.
Abstract: This essay examines models of direct perception in the literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century. These models run counter to the dominant theory of perception during the period, which emphasizes the internal representation of distant objects. I focus on works of poetry, philosophy, and fiction that put their reader up close to a world at hand and explore a physical surround from the perspective of a moving body. My examples draw from the loco-descriptive poetry of Dyer and Thomson, the aesthetics of Kames and Hogarth, the anti-representational epistemology of Thomas Reid, and the letters and fiction of Laurence Sterne.
TL;DR: In this article, the fraught dynamics between literary romanticism and antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Denmark are explored, and the early development of the Danish museum dedicated to the exhibition of Nordic antiquities is reconsidered.
Abstract: This article explores the fraught dynamics between literary romanticism and antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Denmark. It explores the tensions between two national-romantic projects: the desire for collecting ancient objects and imaginatively transcending these same objects. Focusing on the early works of the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschlager – especially his famous poem “The Golden Horns” [Guldhornene] – the article casts new light on the appropriation of Nordic prehistory at a significant historical juncture. As part of this investigation, the early development of the Danish museum dedicated to the exhibition of Nordic antiquities is reconsidered. To gain a further perspective on the period, the article concludes with a discussion of the theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig, who straddled the line between romantic idealism and antiquarian research.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the alliance of geology, archeology, and art by examining the landscape paintings of Johan Thomas Lundbye Lundbye, who was engaged in the development of the genre of landscapes at the exact time geologists and archaeologists, such as Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, JJA Worsaae and Georg Forchhammer, rewrote the long history of the Danish land and its people.
Abstract: A landscape is under constant change and has a history that is intertwined with that of its inhabitants This important Romantic notion, developed on the Continent around 1800, influenced the conception of the Danish landscape It was absorbed by geology and archeology in the 1830s and 1840s, when these sciences developed new modes of research; and, through them, it influenced the genre of landscape painting This essay explores the alliance of geology, archeology, and art by examining the landscape paintings of Johan Thomas Lundbye Lundbye was engaged in the development of the genre of landscapes at the exact time geologists and archaeologists, such as Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, JJA Worsaae and Georg Forchhammer, rewrote the long history of the Danish land and its people
TL;DR: Romantic ontology as mentioned in this paper is defined by the impossibility of capturing the ultimate workings of the world by any given concept, which only allows us an access to certain effects of these ultimate workings.
Abstract: This article approaches the problem of organizing Romanticism and, with it, the nineteenth century by way of exploring a new type of ontological thinking, introduced by the Romantics, specifically Holderlin, and designated here as “Romantic ontology.” This ontology is defined by the impossibility of capturing the ultimate workings of the world by any given concept, which only allows us an access to certain effects of these ultimate workings. The radical limitations thus established do not inhibit but instead help to advance thought and knowledge and make them succeed where they failed previously, including in developing a better understanding of Romantic and nineteenth-century literature and culture. The nature of thought and knowledge changes, however: the unthinkable and the unknowable are now irreducible at any stage of our thinking and knowledge. As a result, we are irreducibly deprived of certainty, and the recourse to probability becomes an unavoidable aspect of our thinking and knowledge. According...
TL;DR: This article argued that the ideological biases of battlefield maps prompted William Wordsworth's radical critique of naval commemoration in “Benjamin the Waggoner.” Although the campaigns of the army created travel destinations for battlefield tourism, the naval battlefield occupies a strange space in Romantic commemoration.
Abstract: As the Napoleonic Wars ended, deceptively simple forms of commemorative militaria attuned Romantic writers to the overrepresentation of officers in victory culture. This article asserts that the ideological biases of battlefield maps prompted William Wordsworth's radical critique of naval commemoration in “Benjamin the Waggoner.” Although the campaigns of the army created travel destinations for battlefield tourism, the naval battlefield occupies a strange space in Romantic commemoration. Lacking a “place” for tourists to stand, naval commemoration induced geographic simulations from victory arboretums to dinner plates adorned with tactical maps. Inspired by the assumed objectivity of simulations such as these, Wordsworth's poem mocks the discharged sailor's reenactment of the Battle of the Nile for its revisionist geography. By overinvesting Nelson in the battle's history, Wordsworth's poem reveals the limits of patriotic nostalgia and its tendency to elide the memory of departed seamen and the families ...
TL;DR: The authors investigates proto-photographer William Henry Fox Talbot's decision (in 1840) to photograph handwritten Romantic poetry at the dawn of the photographic age and why, in doing so, he turned to the final lines and signature of Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814).
Abstract: This essay investigates proto-photographer William Henry Fox Talbot's decision (in 1840) to photograph handwritten Romantic poetry at the dawn of the photographic age and why, in doing so, he turns to the final lines and signature of Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814). I explore the poem's publication history and the theoretical implications of photographing Byron's flourish while situating the ode in relation to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Canto III, 1816) and other poems. Both Byronism and photography empty and subvert what are traditionally characterized as hallmarks of Romantic identity (e.g., boundless autonomy, authenticity, etc.). Negative-positive photography emerges and defines itself partly by its engagements with what was becoming even during the period an outdated conception of Romantic identity. By better understanding the relationship between Byron's art and Talbot's science, we may more clearly comprehend how the medium of Romantic poetry participated in the birth of this era's ...
TL;DR: The authors argued that the treatment of Anglo-Indian relations is best read in conjunction with works of tropical medicine, which, like The Missionary, seek to intervene directly rather than to theorize, recommend, or describe.
Abstract: Readers of Sydney Owenson's 1811 novel The Missionary: An Indian Tale have usually understood it generically: as a romance of imperial reconciliation or a tragedy of failed imperial sympathy. This essay argues that Owenson's treatment of Anglo-Indian relations is best read in conjunction with works of tropical medicine, which, like The Missionary, seek to intervene directly rather than to theorize, recommend, or describe. In emphasizing the pragmatics of The Missionary, this essay seeks to reorient readers’ attention toward Owenson's sentence-level poetics, more specifically her enchainment of metonymies, which produces for its readers a syntactical as well as lexical experience of equivalence without prioritization and speed without rest. In contrast to the strictures on disease and contagion in medical writing about India, Owenson's metonymies celebrate as well as enact the circulatory motions of the Anglo-Indian sphere her novel depicts.
TL;DR: In this paper, a selection of late poems by the important but understudied Irish-born poet Thomas Dermody (1775-1802) is examined, and three of his late poems (published in 1802 in the year of the poet's death) are argued to appropriate and personalize the aisling, a Gaelic literary genre.
Abstract: The following essay examines a selection of late poems by the important but understudied Irish-born poet Thomas Dermody (1775–1802). In the past ten years Dermody has received increasing scholarly attention after over a century of relative neglect. He has been studied in the context of “archipelagic Romanticism,” which aims to “reconfigure British Romanticism as a literary phenomenon encompassing all of the nations in the British archipelago.” This essay connects Dermody (who was born in Ireland but died in England) with his Irish cultural roots – an important connection insofar as many critics have dissociated Dermody from Gaelic literary tradition. I argue that three of his late poems (published in 1802 in the year of the poet's death) – which comprise what I call a “Spenserian Triad” – appropriate and personalize the aisling, a Gaelic literary genre extending from the middle ages to the folk and broadsheet ballads of the nineteenth century and beyond.
TL;DR: The authors examines the post-racial theory of race in light of the "post-racial" in both the actual erasure of racialized violence and the logical necessity of having to define race in the act of claiming its erasure.
Abstract: This article examines Hegel’s theory of race in light of the “post-racial.” I mean “post-racial” in two senses: in both the actual erasure of racialized violence and the logical necessity of having to define race in the act of claiming its erasure. In this double light, Hegel’s claim of the superiority of structural to moral thinking can be seen to underwrite a racialized sublation of race. Reading Hegel with and against Kant, Lacan, and Žižek, this article demonstrates that Hegel's very process of historical supersession then models the post-racialization of race.
TL;DR: The authors examines Coleridge's concern for the free and continuous motion of the mind in the act of reading, placing that concern in relation to its background at the intersection of Enlightenment medicine and empiricist aesthetics.
Abstract: This essay examines Coleridge's concern for the free and continuous motion of the mind in the act of reading, placing that concern in relation to its background at the intersection of Enlightenment medicine and empiricist aesthetics. While these overlapping sciences shared the same therapeutic-aesthetic ideal of an equilibrium between the external forces acting upon the body and the internal motions at work within it – or what Kames's Elements of Criticism called the “happy adjustment of the internal nature of man to his external circumstances” – medicine in particular was alert to the precarious ecology between persons and their external environments, which included their cultural, political, and social history as much as their spatial surroundings. Disease, which for the doctor manifested as a disturbance of corporeal motion, signaled the difficulty of accommodating men to their circumstances, the point at which historicity clashed with physiology and became perceptible in it. Analyzing Coleridge's inhe...
TL;DR: The authors focus on temporality, memory and agency in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, considering the texts in terms of their respective modes of resistance to contemporary theories of associative memory.
Abstract: This paper focuses on temporality, memory, and agency in Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Suspiria de Profundis, considering the texts in terms of their respective modes of resistance to contemporary theories of associative memory. Both writers merge archival and spatial models of memory in ways that speak – albeit to vastly divergent ends – to a later cognitive theory of memory, one that was explicitly framed as a corrective to the materialist reductionism commonly perceived as being inherent in associative thought: Henri Bergson's concept of durational memory. Through remarkably similar means, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Bergson sought out alternative models of memory to address the concerns surrounding associationism, striving to posit the mind as a holistically governed unity rather than a mere system of memories that are localized in specific regions of the brain. Ironically, in their respective models of memory, all three writers rehearse certain pro...
TL;DR: The play's overt discourse of dualism and exchange rests on a more viscous foundation of existential muck. as mentioned in this paper investigates Romantic tendencies in Schiller's inaugural drama, Die Rauber [The Robbers].
Abstract: The essay investigates Romantic tendencies in Schiller's inaugural drama, Die Rauber [The Robbers]. The play's overt discourse of dualism and exchange rests on a more viscous foundation of existential muck. Franz von Moor's “morastige Zirkel der menschlichen Bestimmung” [muckish cycle of human determination] is a cyclical solvent that engulfs the play's dualisms and dissolves opposition and exchange. Forms rise from the muck, taking on borders (dimensions, limits) and they descend back into the muck, becoming once more borderless. This may be the other side of an all-encompassing Freude [Joy], both originary and terminal, yet as “alle Menschen werden Bruder” [all people become brothers], we are reminded of what it means to be brothers in the Moor clan. As a belated product of the proto-Romanticism of the Sturm und Drang, Schiller's 1781 play is a specimen of retro-proto-Romanticism.
TL;DR: The authors traces the development of autoptical dissection as a medical practice during the French Revolution and its relation to modes of self-analysis in Romantic poetry, especially William Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude (1798-1799).
Abstract: This essay traces the development of autoptical dissection as a medical practice during the French Revolution and its relation to modes of self-analysis in Romantic poetry, especially William Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude (1798–1799). In keeping with William Godwin's association of autoptical analysis with radical politics, Wordsworth's autobiographical poem reveals his attraction to a practice of poetic interpretation informed by anatomical techniques of probing and dismemberment. What emerges in the Two-Part Prelude, though, is a hybrid version of dissective exegesis, in which post-Revolutionary radical analysis coexists with an earlier Enlightenment sense of dissection as a procedure that reveals underlying sympathy and wholeness. Performing this double function of dissection through invocations of the probing glance, the Two-Part Prelude looks beneath the surfaces of landscape and of the speaker's body to analyze and animate its account of the growth of the poet's mind. As it marks the historically tr...
TL;DR: Rossetti was a self-proclaimed interventionist who saw it as his “clear duty and prerogative to set absolutely wrong grammar ǫ, rhyming andǫ metre right.” as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Rossetti was a self-proclaimed interventionist who saw it as his “clear duty and prerogative to set absolutely wrong grammar … rhyming and … metre right.” In the matter of conjectural emendation, he noted that Swinburne and Harry Buxton Forman thought he had gone too far, his brother and William Bell Scott not far enough. By modern standards, Rossetti appears gauche in comparison with such contemporary editors as Forman, Dowden, and Woodberry. Yet in her review of his 1870 edition, Mathilde Blind recognized his extraordinary flair: “if in many instances his scruples are needless, there are many others where they have been called forth by a real corruption, which he has instinctively felt.” To Rossetti's delight, several of his conjectural emendations to the text of Prometheus Unbound proved correct on C. D. Locock's inspection of the manuscripts donated to the Bodleian in 1893. With regard to the organization of Rossetti's editions of Shelley, this essay addresses his “innovation” on “Mrs. Shelley's di...
TL;DR: The authors compare Swedenborg's account of how bodies ought to be organized with the radical revision of his thought developed by William Blake, and conclude with a discussion of the 33rd plate of Blake's Milton, which echoes in order radically to revise the machine at the heart of Swedenborgian world.
Abstract: This paper compares Emanuel Swedenborg's account of how bodies ought to be organized with the radical revision of his thought developed by William Blake. As I will suggest, the debate between these figures is not exhausted by the contest between reason and imagination; it is also about “hard” and “soft” systems, which organ-ize bodies, passions, and arguably the imagination itself in ways radically different from each other. These differences are nowhere more evident than in the sexual politics they imply and in the radically different roles they reserve for creation and “emergence.” My argument begins with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, the at-first-sight unlikely points of departure for Blake's own thought on organization, and it concludes with a discussion of the 33rd plate of Blake's Milton, which echoes in order radically to revise the machine at the heart of the Swedenborgian world.
TL;DR: In this paper, the Mortifikation der Kritik: Zum Nachleben von Walter Benjamins Wahlverwandtschaften Essay.
Abstract: Liska, Vivian. “Die Mortifikation der Kritik: Zum Nachleben von Walter Benjamins Wahlverwandtschaften-Essay.” Walter Benjamin und die Romantische Moderne. Ed. Heinz Brüggemann and Günter Oesterle. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 237–62. Print. Polheim, Karl Konrad. Die Arabeske: Ansichten und Ideen aus F. Schlegels Poetik. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1966. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1973. Print. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006. Print.
TL;DR: In this paper, the terms by which scholars have typically understood Lady Caroline Lamb's authorial career are questioned, and it is argued that Lamb's engagement with the politics of authorship and public identity demonstrate that her contributions to Romanticism extend beyond her well-known affair with Byron.
Abstract: This article troubles the terms by which scholars have typically understood Lady Caroline Lamb's authorial career. I pay particular attention to the publicity that Lady Caroline received throughout her lifetime, her unpublished correspondence, and her second novel Graham Hamilton (1822). Graham Hamilton and the extensive archival record surrounding it challenge longstanding assumptions about Lady Caroline as little more than Byron's jilted lover turned scandalous author. I relocate Lady Caroline's authorial career and Graham Hamilton in particular alongside now-canonical work by Frances Burney as well as Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, and in doing so I argue Lady Caroline's important place alongside them. Ultimately this article suggests that Lady Caroline's engagement with the politics of authorship and public identity demonstrate that her contributions to Romanticism extend beyond her well-known affair with Byron.