The Life of William Cobbett: Caricature, Hauntology, and the Impossibility of Radical Life Writing in the Romantic Period

2017 ◽  
pp. 176-194
Author(s):  
Ian Haywood
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
William Cobbett

1780–1820 Southey’s New Star Chamber: Literature, Revolution, and Romantic-Era Libel

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-282
Author(s):  
Thomas Keymer
Keyword(s):  
Free Radical ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Political Tension ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
William Cobbett

Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.

scholarly journals ‘A journal of my feelings, mind & Body’: Narratives of Ageing in the Life Writing of Mary Berry (1763–1852)

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-302
Author(s):  
Amy Culley
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Critical Reflections

This article contributes to studies of gender and old age in the Romantic period through an exploration of the life writing of the biographer and historian, Mary Berry (1763–1852). In her manuscript journal, Berry provides a self-conscious and intimate commentary on the experience of ageing, mixing chronological, personal, cultural, and physical definitions. Yet this account of her feelings, mind, and body is radically reshaped for a Victorian readership in the posthumously published work of 1865. Beyond the journal, Berry's correspondence provides insight into intragenerational sociability through the exchanges of a network of older letter-writers. The theme of ageing also manifests in her biographical works, in which she refuses to treat old age as an epilogue to a life and complements the critical reflections presented in the journal. Read in dialogue, these texts therefore provide valuable perspectives on old age, gender, and sociability and establish age as an important category within studies of life writing.

Afterword

2018 ◽  
pp. 298-306
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Women's Networks ◽  
Literary Networks

While the individual essays in this collection each examine a particular aspect of women’s literary networks during the Romantic period, when taken as a whole, larger patterns begin to emerge and invite further exploration. Broadly speaking, these patterns might be organized according to five tentative claims: (1) networks led to a densely interconnected Romantic world; (2) manuscript letters and life writing were vital parts of literary networks and deserve re-examination as literature; (3) men were an important part of women’s literary networks, but not necessarily in all the ways we have come to expect; (4) women used networks to become active in political, social, and religious causes and debates from which they were otherwise excluded; and (5) women’s networks were intergenerational and trouble easy distinctions between literary periods....

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Barbeau
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Times ◽  
Historical Developments

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion provides the first scholarly survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life during the British Romantic period (1780s–1832). The collection of seventeen scholarly essays introduces the diverse religious influences on the literature of the times. Part one, “Historical Developments,” surveys diverse religious communities, texts, and figures that shaped British Romantic culture, investigating the influence of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and atheism on the literature of the times. Part two, “Literary Forms,” considers British Romanticism and religion through attention to major genres such as poetry, the novel, drama, sermons and lectures, and life writing. Part three, “Disciplinary Connections,” explores links between religion, literature, and other areas of intellectual life during the period, including philosophy, science, politics, music, and painting.

Murder'd Men: ‘Isabella’ and Goethe's Werther

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Tom Baynes
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Principal Source

The numerous resemblances between ‘Isabella’ (1818) and the first English translation of Werther (1779) can be most plausibly attributed to direct influence. Goethe's novel was extremely popular throughout the Romantic period, and was admired by several of Keats's associates. He himself referred to it in 1819, and it may also have influenced two poems that he wrote around the same time as ‘Isabella’. That piece includes a number of details that have no precedent in its principal source (the Fifth Novel of the Fourth Day of The Decameron), but which can be traced, instead, to Werther. For Keats, the proleptic references to death in the latter stages of Goethe's novel may have held an especial appeal, as they could easily have resonated with his own personal experience. On a more speculative note, it is worth asking whether Werther was in his thoughts once again in 1820–21, as his own death drew ever closer.

Byron and Romantic Concepts of Inspiration

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-189
Author(s):  
Rolf Lessenich
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Irony ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Ideal World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Ideal

Though treated marginally in histories of philosophy and criticism, Byron was deeply involved in Romantic-Period controversies. In that post-Enlightenment, science-orientated age, the Platonic-Romantic concept of inspiration as divine afflatus linking the prophet-priest-poet with the ideal world beyond was no longer tenable without an admixture of doubt that turned religion into myth. As a seriously-minded Romantic sceptic in the Pyrrhonian tradition and commuter between the genres of sensibility and satire, Byron often refers to the prophet-poet concept, acting it out in pre-Decadent poses of inspiration, yet undercutting it with his typical Romantic Irony. In contrast to Goethe, who insisted on an inspired poet's sanity, he saw inspiration both as a social distinction and as a pathological norm deviation. The more imaginative and poetical the creation, the more insane is the poet's mind; the more realistic and prosaic, the more compos it is, though an active poet is never quite sane in the sense of Coleridge's ‘depression’, meaning his non-visitation by his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.

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