Oriental Gothic: Imperial-Commercial Nightmares from the Eighteenth Century to the Romantic Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 345-363
Author(s):  
Diego Saglia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period

The History of Missed Opportunities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. Galperin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Levels

This study is about the emergence of the everyday as both a concept and a material event and about the practices of retrospection in which it came to awareness in the romantic period in “histories” of the missed, the unappreciated, the overlooked. Prior to this moment everyday life was both unchanging and paradoxically unpredictable. By the late eighteenth century, however, as life became more predictable and change on a technological and political scale more rapid, the present came into unprecedented focus, yielding a world answerable to neither precedent nor futurity. This alternative world soon appears in literature of the period: in the double takes by which the poet William Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what subjective or “poetic” experience typically overlooks; in Jane Austen, whose practice of revision returns her to a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, by previous documentation, as something different. It is observable in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which marriage and domesticity are consigned not only in the wake of his separation from Lady Byron but during their earlier epistolary courtship, where the conjugal present came to consciousness (and prestige) as foredoomed but an opportunity nonetheless. The everyday world that history focalizes in the romantic period and the conceptual void it exposes in so doing remains a recovery on multiple levels: the present is both “a retrospect of what might have been” (Austen) and a “sense,” as Wordsworth put it, “of something ever more about to be.”

Affect in the Margins

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-84
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer ◽  
Katrina O’Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Publishing Practice

The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.

Oeuvre-Making and Canon-Formation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gamer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Property Regimes

During the eighteenth century, the activities of oeuvre-making and canon-formation unquestionably—and increasingly—fed off one another. Much of the reason had to do with changing intellectual property regimes, which made the Statute of Anne law in Scotland by 1751 and in England by 1774. After these dates, publishers in each country could reprint the works of given authors both as stand-alone sets (oeuvres) and as parts of larger, national collections (canons). Between 1774 and 1824, enterprising booksellers did just that, with sales registering in the millions of copies. These publishers’ canons shaped how writers of the Romantic period thought about canonicity. In addition, their publications verify fundamental assumptions about the relative prestige of genres and the rivalries that exist between them, with poetry garnering the most cultural status, followed by drama, and then prose fiction.

Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegit liubovnye and the Development of Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Vroon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Lyric Sequence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lyric Sequences

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

The Origin of the Weaving Songs and the Theme of the Girl at the Fountain

PMLA ◽  
1922 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Bertram Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Old French ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Ancient Times

The poems called in this study Weaving Songs were in ancient times also known as History Songs, for the first name applied to them was Chansons d'istoire; then, a little later apparently, they were called Chansons de toile or Weaving Songs. By modern critics they have also been termed Romances but this name is not altogether satisfactory. If one glances through the critical edition of these poems published by Karl Bartsch under the title Romanzen und Pastourellen one finds that the Weaving Songs are mixed up with other poems under the loose title of Romanzen. The term Romance, in use since the days of Grimm and Fauriel but first made popular by the collection of old French poems published by Paulin Paris under the title of Le Romancero français, was borrowed from the Spanish towards the end of the eighteenth century and then it designated, as it does still today, poems of historical content like our English Ballads. If the term was suitable enough during the Romantic period when the Romancero appeared, it is a source of dangerous confusion nowadays when the same term is applied to poems so widely different in nature as the Weaving Songs and, to give only one instance, the lament of the young girl in the famous poem of Marcabru, A la fontana del vergier, which is generally termed a Romance.

Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period

PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 1060-1079 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank B. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
James Boswell ◽  
The Road ◽  
Thomas Love Peacock ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Complete Bibliography

A careful student of the Romantic poets will soon or late encounter the name of Thomas Taylor, whose chief claim to importance is that he was an extraordinarily diligent scholar and the first translator into English of all Plato's works. An inquirer will find brief and not always accurate accounts of this man in several encyclopedias; he will discover that certain nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote a number of sketches of Taylor in which fact is liberally sprinkled with fiction; and finally, he will come upon half a dozen more recent articles of a scholarly nature, including an almost complete bibliography of Taylor's books, three papers suggesting rather doubtful parallels between some passages of these and certain poems of Blake and Wordsworth, one which reprints from manuscript sources a few of Taylor's own poems, and another which endeavors unsuccessfully to demonstrate an acquaintance between Taylor and Shelley. Taylor's various translations and original works have also been cited occasionally in studies such as Professor Lowes's The Road to Xanadu. But with all this array of scholarship, imposing when it is called forth by a man so obscure as Thomas Taylor, there is still no comprehensive or accurate account of the man himself and his work. He is important, however, as the most energetic exponent of Platonism in England between the Cambridge Platonists and Benjamin Jowett, this at a time when Platonism once more became significant in literature after the eighteenth-century dismissal of Plato. Yet before we have a study of Taylor's Platonism in its relation to that of the Romantic poets, we should have a reasonably trustworthy biography of the man. For although it will not be found that Thomas Taylor was a person of hitherto unrecognized and startling importance for the student of literature, it is certain that he was known to such people as James Boswell, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft, probably William Blake, and quite possibly Shelley; that his books were read by Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Emerson in America; and that he was a conspicuous figure in the intellectual world of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the available accounts of him are incomplete and contradictory, he deserves the services of a biographer who will simply collect and set forth the facts.

The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach

PMLA ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 96 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Accepted Standard ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many ◽  
Realism Debate

The many facets of the realism debate reflect the complexity of the subject. Realism was an accepted standard of value only during the romantic period; it became more prominent later as it became more problematic. Major senses of “real” in the nineteenth century are (1) universal essence, (2) irregular minute particular, and (3) causal regularity. Realist plotting typically juxtaposes background tableau and foreground coup de theatre; realist style typically consists of multiple silhouettings. Realism is a semiosis by silhouetting. Hegel's analysis of reality in the Science of Logic explains the association of realism with silhouetting, shows the systematic and historical relationships among the various critical positions and the nineteenth-century senses of “real,” and finally locates them with respect to the trope of inversion. The realist or silhouetting style falls between the relational style of the eighteenth century and the dispersive style of the twentieth.

scholarly journals Elder Gothic And Atwood’s Modernization Into New Forms

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-183
Author(s):  
Saman Khalid Imtiaz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Important Shift

The article investigates how the gothic tradition of early eighteenth century has evolved into its present twentieth century form by building on its staple ingredients of awe, fear, heightened imagination, dark subterranean vaults, persecuted heroines and malevolent aristocrats. During the Romantic period the external paraphernalia of gothic devices began to be internalized, which marks the most important shift in the genre. The external markers became the internal states of the individual. The consciousness, imagination and freedom of the individual tended to be valued more than his conformation to the societal norms. The focus in the modern gothic is not on the supernatural but it operates in completely human, social and familiar world. The article reviews how Margaret Atwood, a leading Canadian author implicates gothic devices in three of her novels, Surfacing, The Edible Woman and The Lady Oracle. The most frightening gothic phenomenon which haunts Atwood’s heroines is their own psyche; their gothic and heightened imagination illustrates their desires and fears in excessive forms.

scholarly journals Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Marketplace Of Ideas ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Literary Networks

The eighteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion of social, political, religious, and literary networks in Great Britain. The increased availability of and access to print, combined with the ease with which individuals could correspond across distance, ensured that it was easier than ever before for writers to enter into the marketplace of ideas. However, we still lack a complex understanding of how literary networks functioned, what the term ‘network’ means in context, and how women writers in particular adopted and adapted to the creative possibilities of networks. The essays in this volume address these issues from a variety of perspectives, arguing that networks not only provided women with access to the literary marketplace, but fundamentally altered how they related to each other, to their literary production, and to the broader social sphere. By examining the texts and networks of authors as diverse as Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Hamilton, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Joanna Baillie, Mary Berry, Mary Russell Mitford, Mary Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, this volume demonstrates that attention to the scope and influence of women’s literary networks upends long standing assumptions about gender, literary influence, and authorial formation during the Romantic period. Furthermore, this volume suggests that we must rethink what counts as literature in the Romantic period, how we read it, and how we draw the boundaries of Romanticism.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Yohei Igarashi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
New Rhetoric ◽  
Large Scale Data ◽  
Good Writing ◽  
Normal Method ◽  
To Come ◽  
Scale Data

This chapter shows that the Romantic period was very much a preview – similar and yet different – of our own “connected condition.” Romantic poets witnessed the rise of transcription technologies (shorthand), large-scale data collection and processing through standardized forms, social networks and communications and transportation infrastructure, and instantaneous contact at a distance via telegraphy. The chapter goes on to discuss the concept of the “dream of communication,” ideals of good writing style (like clarity and brevity) treated by the New Rhetoric of the eighteenth century, the book’s own method (the “normal method”), poetic difficulty, and finally the chapters to come.

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