Ann Radcliffe and Romantic-era fiction

Author(s):  
Sue Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge

This book examines the relationship between Romantic-period writing and the activity that Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ in 1802. It argues that mountaineering developed as a pursuit in Britain during the Romantic era, earlier than is generally recognized, and shows how writers including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Walter Scott were central to the activity’s evolution. It explores how the desire for physical ascent shaped Romantic-period literary culture, and investigates how the figure of the mountaineer became crucial to creative identities and literary outputs. Illustrated with twenty-five images from the period, the book shows how mountaineering in Britain had its origins in scientific research, antiquarian travel, and the search for the picturesque and the sublime. It considers how writers engaged with mountaineering’s power dynamics and investigates issues including the politics of the summit view (what Wordsworth terms ‘visual sovereignty’), the relationships between different types of ‘mountaineers’, and the role of women in the developing cultures of ascent. Placing the work of canonical writers alongside a wide range of other types of mountaineering literature, this book reassesses key Romantic-period terms and ideas, such as vision, insight, elevation, revelation, transcendence and the sublime. It opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between Romantic-period writers and the world that they experienced through their feet and hands, as well as their eyes, as they moved through the challenging landscapes of the British mountains.


Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge

This ‘Introduction’ establishes the importance of the activity Samuel Taylor Coleridge christened ‘mountaineering’ for the literature of the Romantic period. It discusses the etymologies of the words ‘mountaineering’ and ‘mountaineer’, showing how they indicated the creation of a new activity and identity. The chapter outlines the mountaineering pursuits and writings of a number of the period’s authors, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, John Keats, and Ellen Weeton, exploring the emerging link between ascent and literary authority. The introduction situates the overall study in terms of current research in the fields of mountaineering and Romantic-era literature.


Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-80
Author(s):  
Ruth Knezevich

The genre of annotated verse represents an under-explored form of transporting romanticism. In annotated, locodescriptive poems like those in Anna Seward's Llangollen Vale, readers are invited to read not only the spatiality of the landscapes depicted in the verse but also the landscape of the page itself. Seward's poems, with their focus on understanding geographical, political, and historical spaces both real and imaginary, provide geocritical insight into poetic productions of the early Romantic era. Likewise, geocriticism offers a fresh and useful – even necessary – analytic approach to such poems. I adopt Anna Seward as a case study in annotated verse and argue that attending to the materiality and paratextuality of her work allows us to access the complexities of her poetry and prose as well as her position within the wider framework of transporting Romanticism.


2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-100
Author(s):  
Rachel Esner

Seit der Epoche der Romantik bringen viele der Diskurse, die künstlerische Kreativität betreffen, den Künstler und seinen Arbeitsraum zusammen: Die Werkstatt wird als ein Spiegel des Künstlers und seines Werks angesehen, als ein Heiligtum, ein sozialer Raum oder eine Ausstellungsfläche. Ein populärer bildlicher Topos der Zeit war die Darstellung des leeren Ateliers. Der vorliegende Beitrag versteht das Bild des leeren Ateliers im 19. Jahrhundert als ein Selbstporträt des Künstlers. Er untersucht, wie die Darstellung des Raums und seiner Objekte dem Gemälde die Präsenz des Künstlers einschreiben und sein bzw. ihr künstlerisches  Selbstverständnis innerhalb der sich verändernden künstlerischen und sozialen Strukturen der Epoche wiedergeben.<br><br>From the Romantic era onward, many of the discourses surrounding artistic creativity have merged the artist and his working space: the place of work is viewed as the mirror of the man and his oeuvre, a sanctuary, a social or an exhibition space. A popular topos in this context was the view of the empty studio. This paper explores the 19th-century empty studio image as a self-portrait of the artist. It examines how the depictions of the space and its objects work to inscribe the artist’s presence, and to express his or her  artistic self-conception and identity within the changing artistic-social structures of the period.


In his philosophical writings, Coleridge increasingly developed his thinking about imagination, a symbolizing precursor to contemplation, to a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of ‘Reason’. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the ‘dark fluxion’ pursued but ultimately ‘unfixable by thought’, and his extensive range of interests make essential an approach that is philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary. This is the first collection of essays to be written mainly by philosophers and intellectual historians on a wide range of Coleridge’s philosophical writings. With a foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock, and original essays on Coleridge and Contemplation by prominent philosophers such as Sir Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, and Andy Hamilton, this volume provides a stimulating collection of insights and explorations into what Britain’s foremost philosopher-poet had to say about the contemplation that he considered to be the highest of the human mental powers. The essays by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other essays, from intellectual historians and theologians, clarify the historical background, and ‘religious musings’, of Coleridge’s thought regarding contemplation.


Author(s):  
Sean Moreland

This essay examines Poe’s conception and use of the Gothic via his engagements with the work of earlier writers from Horace Walpole through Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Poe’s uses of the Gothic, and his relationship with the work of these writers, was informed by his philosophical materialism and framed by his dialogue with the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Tracing these associations reveals Poe’s transformation of the idea of “Gothic structure” from an architectural model, the ancestral pile of the eighteenth-century Gothic, to one of energetic transformation, the electric pile featured in many of Poe’s tales.


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