Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Altered States ◽  
Slow Time ◽  
Suspended Animation ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Era

Suspended animation emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century as part of the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to convince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a condition we would now likely describe as a coma). The term was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Exploring these Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation can help us understand the reception and formal structures of creative literature, grasp the often counterintuitive links that Romantic-era authors established between “altered states” and “Romantic sobriety,” and articulate why poetry and other slow media remain important in our contemporary new-media landscape.

Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The Public ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

Wordsworth, Keats and Cognitive Spaces of Empathy in Endymion

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Renee Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
John Keats ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Anatomical Basis ◽  
Romantic Era

Eighteenth-century medicine provided an anatomical basis for the belief that our skin is not a barrier against but a channel to the feelings of others. Mutual adoption of the term ‘sympathy’ in medicine and moral philosophy exceeds metaphor to speak to the way Enlightenment and Romantic-era culture understood the body’s openness to external influence. While Romantic writers conceived of reading as an embodied social interaction between writer and reader, contrasting sentiments surfaced between those who celebrated the possibility for radical interconnectedness and those who feared the vulnerability of a penetrable self. William Wordsworth and John Keats experimented with poetic form to find how best to manage a reader’s engagement with the text and thereby shape their sympathetic faculties. Examining acts of reading in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Keats’s Endymion, I apply Giovanna Colombetti’s work on enacted spaces of empathy to show how Keats’s theory of feeling challenges Wordsworth’s and goes beyond Enlightenment models available to them to envision a more revolutionary model of social cognition. For Keats, poetry enacts a co-emergence of aesthetic experience where cognition and composition seem to occur between acts of writing and reading at the site of text.

Conscripting Imagination: The National “Duty” of William Blake’s Art

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Saklofske
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Visual Displays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Exhibition Culture ◽  
Reproductive Processes

Abstract This paper explores William Blake’s creative and commercial positioning relative to late-eighteenth-century galleries, exhibition culture and artistic spectacle. Demonstrating a desire to reintroduce originality into reproductive processes while also embracing the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric often associated with the spectacular visual displays of exhibition societies and new media diversions, Blake confronts modern spectacle with corrective spectacles of his own, bringing clarity, detail and focus to bear on otherwise unmanageable sights. By combining the vocabulary of modern visual spectacles with a dutiful commitment to the maintenance of national strength and progress in the advertisements for and descriptions of his 1809 exhibition, Blake optimistically reconfigures his public as a homogeneously capable body of intellectual and consumer ability. Viewing his own artistic assertion as dramatic performance on national and political scales, he appeals to spectatorial intellect in an era of increasingly sensationalist visual displays, individually attempting to reconfigure the taste of his beloved “public” through a seductive hybridization of spectacular novelty and gallery traditions. However, his “failed” exhibition allows us to see the overall incompatibility between his intended functions for art on national and political fronts (the conceptual), the rhetoric of spectacle (the visual), the individualism at the heart of Blake’s revolutionary nationalism and the persistent economical/commercial foundations of this project. Blake’s vision of a direct link between the strength of artistic expression, the potential of the urban audience and the strength of a nation is complicated by the economic demands faced by the artist and the inherently commercial nature of spectacle.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Michelle Levy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Book History ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Manuscript Production ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Media Interaction ◽  
Political Conditions

The Introduction draws upon recent work in the fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, to advance the fundamental thesis of early modern scholars – that manuscript production and circulation continued long after the advent of print. It also supports the consensus of media historians – that newer media (such as print) did not overtake and subsume older media forms (such as manuscript). Repudiating a ‘decline and rise’ or ‘succession’ model of technological change, this book instead posits a model characterized by media interaction and exchange. Taking Romantic-era literary manuscript culture and its inevitable entanglement with print as its central subject, the subsequent six chapters examine the literary manuscripts and writing practices of several central Romantic authors, and the shifting set of cultural and political conditions they faced. In doing so, this study presents a new account of literary Romanticism, one that recalibrates accounts of individual authors’ works, careers and practices; reconstructs networks of authors, editors, publishers and readers; and reconfigures concepts of privacy, sociability and publicity. It also addresses how the expanding print culture of the late eighteenth century impacted both the practices and the values ascribed to manuscript culture.

Romantic Prayer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

Mountaineering and British Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Visual Sovereignty ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Relationship

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.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Simon Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Dorothy Wordsworth

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.

Stillborn Plots

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-447
Author(s):  
Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Recurrent Theme

Clayton Carlyle Tarr, “Stillborn Plots: Revolution, Imagination, and the Failure of Romanticism” (pp. 415–447) The metaphor “fell stillborn from the press” was used frequently by Romantic-era critics to disparage unsuccessful literary productions. Stillbirth statistics began to be collected in earnest in the late eighteenth century alongside an explosion of midwifery texts and obstetric advances. Since Romantic authors often referred to their texts as offspring, it is useful to understand stillbirth plots in these texts as evidence of the authors’ anxiety over imaginative or revolutionary failure. Stillbirth plots are a recurrent theme in Romantic literature, appearing in both novels and poetry, and they are tied together by the mental struggle of the creator, either female or male. In Romantic novels, stillbirth plots signal the defeat of radical theories, whereas in poetry they express the failure of the imagination. Ultimately, these metaphors of failed parturition demonstrate Romantic writers’ fascination with contemporary obstetrics, which made extraordinary advances in the late eighteenth century only to remain static throughout the nineteenth century.

Creative Translation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rossington
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Sir William Jones

This chapter addresses the theory and practice of translation in works by Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, Felicia Hemans, Sir William Jones, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite Shelley’s view of its impossibility, translation is shown in the work of Jones, Byron, and Shelley to be one of the most vital and sophisticated literary activities of the Romantic era, at once a means to enlightenment about poetic traditions outside Britain and an arena for bold technical experimentation. For Shelley, translation constitutes a creative habitus through which he escapes his native language and then translates back into English from an assumed ‘foreign’ persona. Keats’s poetry, on the other hand, demonstrates how originality is prompted through engagement with the translations of others. The chapter also situates theories about translation in Britain within the context of wider debates on the Continent.

Romantic Autopsy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arden Hegele
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Medical Specialties ◽  
Medicine And Literature ◽  
Romantic Era

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

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