scholarly journals The Moor's Last Sight : Spanish-Moorish exoticism and the gender of history in British Romantic poetry

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Diego Saglia
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Letitia Landon ◽  
New States ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Poetic Texts

Legends and tales of Islamic Granada were among the most frequently re-elaborated exotic subjects in British Romantic literature. A popular theme in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish Orientalism attracted both famous writers such as Lord Byron, Joanna Baillie, Washington Irving, Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, and less familiar ones such as Lord Porchester, George Moir and Lady Dacre. This essay concentrates on one component of the myth of Granada which enjoyed great diffusion in Romantic-period literature, the tale of the Moor's Last Sigh and the tears shed by the last Muslim monarch on leaving his capital forever after the Christian conquest in 1492. The aim is to illustrate how, in migrating from its original context, this tale comes to signify and emblematize issues of gender and notions of history as progress specific to British culture. The poetic texts examined here employ the Spanish-Orientalist myth to elaborate ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as reflections on power and its extinction, the fall of empires and the emergence of new states. Thus King Boabdil's tears were exotically popular also because they were removed from their original meaning and import, and refashioned into vehicles for ideological concerns proper to British Romantic-period culture

Romantic Italy and Restoration Politics: Romantic Poetry, Lady Morgan’s Italy and Mary Shelley’s Valperga

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
Patricia Cove
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Romantic Era

Chapter 1 analyses Romantic-era responses to the Congress of Vienna and 1820-1 Italian uprisings, with attention to Lady Morgan’s travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga (1823). Although the tropes of decay and rebirth that pervade British Romantic poetry about Italy by William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley tend to elide contemporary Italy in favour of a distant, idealised past and imminent but imagined future, Morgan and Shelley historicise Italy to demonstrate that outside influence and occupation shaped the peninsula, while Italy mediated the major European powers’ views of themselves and each other. Morgan and Shelley place Italy, a cluster of minor states, within a broad, European context of cultural appropriation, imperialist territorial expansion and failed diplomacy, to interrogate the discourse of Italian decay and offer, instead, Italy as a potential site of concrete resistance to the post-Napoleonic status quo.

scholarly journals Motherhood in Wordsworth: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Poetics

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (127) ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Saad Najim Abid Al-Khafaji
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Connection To Nature ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Maternal Function ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Unconscious Desire ◽  
Felt Presence ◽  
The Ideal

By definition, the Romantic ego is a male; the creator of language which helps him to establish “rites of passage toward poetic creativity and toward masculine empowerment.”1 The outlet for a male quest of self – possession in Romantic poetry is women. For the Romantic poets , the “true woman was emotional, dependent and gentle –a born flower”2 and “the Ideal mother was expected to be strong , self- reliant , protective and efficient caretaker in relation to children and home.”4 With emphasis on the individual in Romantic literature and ideology, mothers are depicted as good when they are natural or unnaturally bad. In the Romantic period then, women’s maternal function equals the “foundation of her social identity and of her sexual desire.”5 Consequently, “convinced that within the individual and autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible”, the Romantic poets “struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy.”6 In a number of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) poems, this creative agent who possesses the powers of creation and imagination becomes a female character who is also often a mother. Nonetheless, when critics examine mothers in Wordsworth’s poetry, they also explore the child/poet’s relationship. Events in Wordsworth’s life surely influenced his attention to mothers. From a psycho-analytic perspective this interest might be an unconscious desire to resurrect the spirit of his dead mother Ann Wordsworth who died when the poet was almost eight. Thus in his poetry, the mother is the counterpart of the genuine faculty of the imagination of the poet and has a strong and felt presence within the poet’s poetic system. In The Prelude, Wordsworth acknowledges his mother’s deep influence on him. He associates her death with the break within his own poetic development; a sign that the poet relies upon in his creative power .It is through her that the young poet came first in contact with the genial current of the natural world. Nevertheless, without his mother, the male child’s connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger:

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.”

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.

scholarly journals Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Douglass
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Madame De Stael ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Hannah Cowley

Abstract Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.

Augustan Romantics

2019 ◽  
pp. 227-246
Author(s):  
Matthew Scott
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Pastoral Tradition

This chapter examines the influence and persistence of the Augustan tradition upon Romanticism. The role of Horace as an occasionally rather vexed model for both movements is used as a lens to view their complex interrelations. It begins with an account of the role of Horatian satire in framing the Romantic critique of imperialism, before moving on to discuss the Romantic pastoral tradition and its debt to Augustanism. The essay ends with an account of the satirical tradition in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the writers in the Shelley circle and finding, in the later work of Lord Byron, the quintessential Romantic Augustan.

scholarly journals COUNTERDISCURSIVE ARTISTIC STRATEGIES OF UKRAINIAN ROMANTICISM

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (11(79)) ◽  
pp. 159-162
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Kyrylchuk
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Value System ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
National Life ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
The Military

In Ukrainian romantic literature of the 1830s and 1840s, the authors turned their attention to folk art and historical themes. This aesthetic orientation of writing allowed the creation of texts that revealed aspects of the national life of Ukrainians. Romantic poets sought to artistically comprehend the Ukrainian past, to bring it out of oblivion, which was to help restore the historical memory of society and form a model of national self-identity. The ethnocultural identity, articulated in the texts of the Romantics, challenged the Russian imperial narrative, which sought to marginalize the Ukrainian value system by assimilating it with metropolitan axiology. Romantic literature of the first half of the nineteenth century created a powerful counterdiscursive strategy, which later transformed from the sphere of culture into the socio-political plane. The anti-colonial tendency introduces military symbols into romantic literature, as the appeal to the Cossack heritage actualizes in the Ukrainian cultural code markers of knightly victory and armed defence of the homeland. Romantic poets of the 1830s and 1840s transferred folklore and baroque chronicle imagery to written literature, in which the figures of the Cossacks were often heroized and glorified. Cossack military images allow Ukrainian authors to praise the pre-colonial period and poetize their military might, which, although in literary projection, opposes the oppressor. In the conditions of the Russian imperial discourse, the Ukrainian romantics resorted to the latent challenge to the metropolis, in the image of the enemy depicting the Poles, traditional opponents of the Cossacks. Such a strategy allows us to oppose the imperial narrative not directly, but through intermediaries, which are the Poles. At the same time, along with the military theme, the poetry of the Romantics includes the rhetoric of cruelty, which formats the Ukrainian world, dividing it into “Friends” and “Foes”. In general, the atmosphere of violence that often accompanies the image of the Other in romantic poetry allows us to represent the colonial trauma of the Ukrainian community, as acts of violence are interpreted as “just revenge” on enemies. At the same time, the glorification of one’s cruelty is an attempt to imitate the power of imperial discourse, which always labels such actions as a forced measure to subdue savages or preserve the achievements of civilization. The Ukrainian counterdiscursive strategy in the literature of Romanticism appears as an attempt to oppose and at the same time imitate metropolitan models.

scholarly journals ‘A FONDNESS FOR BEING SAD’: SOME PORTUGUESE SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S POETICS OF MELANCHOLY IN SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE (1850)

Diacrítica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Paula Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Great Similarity ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Depressed Woman ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Luis De Camoes ◽  
Letitia Landon ◽  
Sonnets From The Portuguese

In seeing melancholy as the antithesis of poetic creativity, the Victorians often broke with the traditional Renaissance and Romantic attitudes of equating melancholy moods with artistic or poetic genius. This article proposes to explore how, initially viewed as an emotional and ‘depressed’ woman poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to resist and escape the sickening disempowerment or abandonment which had affected poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, and engage in a new poetics of melancholy in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). It demonstrates how the poet plays this poetics out in most of her later sonnets, where she indeed attempts to prove that good poetry can be written without melancholy, even if she herself does not always succeed in this deliberate rejection of ‘dejection’. The article thus intends to suggest, through a brief comparative analysis, that her apparently contradictory poetics of melancholy very probably derived from a specifically Portuguese poetic tradition, namely the ‘fondness for being sad’ of Luís de Camões, as well as the sorrowful love of Mariana Alcoforado’s epistles (1669) and of Soror Maria do Céu’s mannerist poems, an influence that is supported in the great similarity of motives and language that can be found in the respective texts.

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