Abbreviations 1. Formal intelligence: formalism, romanticism, and formalist criticism 2. Sketching verbal form: Blake's Political Sketches 3. The formings of simile: Coleridge's 'comparing power' 4. Revision as form: Wordsworth's drowned man 5. Heroic form: couplets, 'self', and Byron's Corsair 6. Teasing form: the crisis of Keats's last lyrics 7. Social form: Shelley and the determination of reading Notes Index.

ABSTRACT Funny Feelings and the Natural World, a panel convened for the joint NASSR/BARS conference at Edge Hill in August 2022, offered new ways of reflecting on the relation between human emotions and the environment. In contrast to the more sublime aesthetic categories and solemn moods that continue to dominate approaches to Romanticism and environmental criticism more broadly, we considered various forms of funny business in Romantic feelings towards the non-human world. This article develops some of the concerns of that panel, by engaging with current ideas in Romantic emotions, affect, and environmental literature. Our readings of John Clare and William Wordsworth suggest that both poets relay experiences of the non-human as funny in various senses and are inspired by the idea that poetic form is itself affective and a model of ecological thinking or feeling. Our enquiry attends to the Romantic period as a time not only when a new appreciation of the environment was emerging, but also different understandings of, and attitudes towards, the ludicrous took hold. ‘Funny’ here operates as it was understood at the time: as a compound of amusement and bemusement, and as a means of considering what the laughable and nature might share.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10509585.2023.2205089?needAccess=true&role=button

Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism

Funny Feelings in Nature

This study focuses on spatial deixis in early modern English lyric; the reasons for those delimitations are explained, but the implications f or other types of deixis, other eras, and other genres are also emphasized The chapter explores methodological problems, notably the challenges of defining lyric, and evaluates related developments in linguistics

Introduction: Delimitations, Definitions, Disciplines

Bafflement" in my title is a technical term, which I pose or sense of direction that finds itself thwarted. Relig borrow from a famous passage in Coleridge's 1818 "Lectures ious allegory isn't just a false lead that Bunyan's realist on European Literature," I suppose the most celebrated comgreatness manages to survive; it is the necessary condition for ment made upon the language's most celebrated allegory: that greatness to appear. His baffling kind of genius could only ever discover itself in the circumstances of allegory, the The dullest and most defective parts of Spenser are those in imaginative duties of which it rouses itself magnificently to which we are compelled to think of his agents as allegories— disappoint: Coleridge is describing a sort of imaginative and how far the Sin and Death of Milton are exceptions to his drama of failure. None of this is very surprising, I suppose, censure is a delicate problem which I shall attempt to solve in and it does genuinely seem to say something true about The another lecture—butin that admirable Allegory, the first Part Pilgrim's Progress: Bunyan himself admits in his verse "Apol of Pilgrim's Progress, which delights every one, the interest is ogy" that the work emerged by an inspired sort of inadver so great that spite of all the writer's attempts to force the alletence, "Before I was aware" (Pilgrim's Progress, 1). Still, I had goric purpose on the Reader's mind by his strange names— imagined the Bunyan scholars angrily united against so Old Stupidity of the Tower of Honesty, &c., &c.—his piety was flighty an approach to their man; but the narrowness of mind baffled by his Genius, and the Bunyan of Parnassus had the was entirely mine. N.H. Keeble calls Coleridge's view "a corn better of Bunyan of the conventicle—and with the same illumon conviction of Bunyan criticism" (Keeble, 255); and it is sion as we read any tale known to be fictitious, as a Novel—we evidently something like Coleridgean lines that Vincent go on with his characters as real persons, who had been Newey is following, for example, when he says that while "Ig nicknamed by their neighbours. (Lectures on Literature, i.103; norance is damned on theological and moral grounds he is deletions not reproduced) redeemed through art" (Newey, 44)—which sounds a dizzy Romanticism, but actually describes the important but quite In the Literary Remains, Henry Nelson Coleridge reduces this normal sort of human virtue, celebrated or exemplified by rich argument to a simple warning: Bunyan is there said to many works of literature, which enables you to see things exemplify merely the risk that the allegorist runs when he more generously than your governing theory properly allows, makes his characters "too strongly individualised"—the work then "ceases to be allegory," something which is "often felt in I think the idea of virtuous bafflement gets at some the Pilgrim's Progress, where the characters are real persons thing true about some of the most characteristic things in with nick names" (Remains, i.91). H.N.C. makes S.T.C. say Coleridge too, which is no doubt why he was so stirred by the something about keeping a steady line between abstraction spectacle in Bunyan; and the notion of bafflement might also and individuality, which anyone might say who presumed the lead to some interesting matters in Wordsworth—who was, virtues of the via media: Coleridge's thinking, which often after all, Coleridge's greatest student, and subject of his advocates, as though instinctively, the "balance or reconciliagreatest criticism. First, though, what sort of effect in Bunyan tion of opposite or discordant qualities" (Biographia, ii. 16), does Coleridge have in mind? Here, the best lead is his refer can readily be cast in this slightly bland way; but Coleridge's ence to nicknames, which crop up as a subject at one point in remarks about Bunyan are actually more striking than that. The Pilgrim's Progress. Christian and Hopeful have just run What's admirable about The Pilgrim's Progress occurs by a kind into By-Ends, whose account of his ancestors suggests his of mistake, in spite of the allegory its author intends—which identity to Christian: might also look like formulaic praise, of course: the expan sive free life of the imagination defeats the narrowness of an Then Christian stept a little a toside to his fellow Hopeful, say allegory moved by doctrinaire religious prescription (there s ing, It runs in my mind that this is one By-ends, of Fair-speech; at least the suspicion of a curl of the tongue in conventicle and if it be he, we have as very a Knave in our company, as for dissenter : cf. OED, conventicle, §8). But I think that dwelleth in all these parts. Then said Hopeful, Ask him; me would also sell Coleridge s fine remark short. For it is crucial thinks he should not be ashamed of his name. So Christian came to the effect which Coleridge admires that the ambitions of Up with him again; and said, Sir, you talk as if you knew some allegory really are there to be embarrassed or, in his own thing more than all the world doth, and, if I take not my mark fine word, baffled. amiss, I deem I have half a guess of you: is not your name Mr.

Coleridge, Bunyan, and the Arts of Bafflement

Dubrow’s Afterword identifies several achievements of the collection, notably the range of critical methods and texts it encompasses and its inclusion of both critics of earlier generations and cutting-edge work. The essay traces the ways contributors approach three keys and often overlapping subjects: authors, readers, and forms. In so doing, these studies often participate in the rejection of what is often termed “critique” in the sense of antagonistic attacks on other approaches. This collection, the Afterword suggests, gestures toward goals for the future, such as ways we can continue to approach other scholars judiciously, build bridges with creative writers, and address contemporary pedagogical challenges.

Let’s Hear It For Janus: Looking Behind and Ahead

The introductory chapter situates the study’s analysis of Blake’s prophetic mode within the various contexts, ancient and modern, biblical and political, that shaped and reshaped Blake’s conception of prophetic power throughout his career. As the introduction shows, prophecy was never, for Blake, simply a rhetorical mode or stance; it had real consequences in the world. Thus, when the energy of the French Revolution dissipated and it became clear that the world had passed up the chance for universal liberty, Blake suffered not just a political loss but a vocational one. Still believing it to be his duty as a prophet to share his visionary message, Blake was forced to adapt his understanding of the prophetic mode again and again in response to the changing culture of the period in which he lived. In his repeated efforts to recast himself as a prophet of his age, Blake had a number of models of prophetic action available to him, each of which involved a specific relationship with temporality that appealed to him at various points in his life. The introduction also sets out the methodology of the study, which draws on Ricoeur’s theory of hermeneutics in its approach to Blake’s writing.

Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism

Citations

Funny Feelings in Nature

Introduction: Delimitations, Definitions, Disciplines

Coleridge, Bunyan, and the Arts of Bafflement

Let’s Hear It For Janus: Looking Behind and Ahead

Introduction: Prophetic Failure

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