Transatlantic Transformations of Romanticism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism

This book presents innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
British Romanticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Periodical Studies ◽  
Digital Resources ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twenty First Century

While the twenty-first century has brought a wealth of new digital resources for researching late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century serials, the subfield of Romantic periodical studies has remained largely inchoate. This collection sets out to begin tackling this problem, offering a basic groundwork for a branch of periodical studies that is distinctive to the concerns, contexts and media of Britain’s Romantic age. Featuring eleven chapters by leading experts on the subject, it showcases the range of methodological, conceptual and literary-historical insights to be drawn from just one of the era’s landmark literary periodicals, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Drawing in particular on the trove of newly digitised content, specific essays model how careful analyses of the incisive and often inflammatory commentary, criticism and original literature from Blackwood’s first two decades (1817–37) might inform and expand many of the most vibrant contemporary discussions surrounding British Romanticism.

The Twilight of Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Weston, and the End of Nineteenth-Century Literary Nature

Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 347-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph F. Bogardus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Thomas Eakins ◽  
Georgia O'keeffe

That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.

A Composite Portrait of a True American Philosophy on Magnanimity

2019 ◽  
pp. 235-265
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Corsa ◽  
Eric Schliesser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Standard Methods ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Characteristic Features

This chapter offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group’s philosophizing in order to illuminate features that may still resonate in today’s philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of individual authors. These American philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. They suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life.

In Plain Sight

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Familiar Figure ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Length Analysis

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this book offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. In doing so, In Plain Sight makes visible a whole field of poetry that has been long forgotten. In order to recover this field instead of its individual women poets, each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention and its participation in the construction of literary history. Taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which its authors were always in the process of vanishing. By inhabiting those spaces, we can see both the conventions that were taken up with such gusto that they made the woman poet a familiar figure to nineteenth-century readers and the specter of obscurity and unreadability that are embedded within them. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

Transcendentalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
National Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Literary Movement

New England transcendentalism is the first significant literary movement in American history, notable principally for the influential works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. The movement emerged in the 1830s as a religious challenge to New England Unitarianism. Building on the writings of the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing, Emerson and others such as Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker developed a theology based on interior, intuitive experience rather than the historical truth of the Bible. By 1836 transcendentalist books from several important religious thinkers began to appear, including Emerson’s Nature, which employed idealist philosophy and Romantic symbolism to examine human interaction with the natural world. Emerson’s Harvard addresses, “The American Scholar” (1837) and the controversial “Divinity School Address” (1838), gave transcendental ideas a wider prominence, and also generated strong resistance that added an element of experiment and danger to the movement’s reputation. In 1840 the transcendentalists founded a journal for their work, and Fuller became the Dial’s first editor, a position that gave her an important role in the movement and a crucial outlet for her own work in literary criticism and women’s rights. Though it had begun as a religious movement, by the middle 1840s transcendentalism could be better described as a literary movement with growing political engagements on several fronts. Emerson proclaimed it as an era of reform and aligned the transcendentalists with those who resisted the social and political status quo. In her feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller called for the removal of both legal and social barriers to women’s full potential. In 1845 Henry David Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond; his memoir of his experience, Walden (1854), became a founding text of modern environmental thinking. Antislavery also became a key concern for many of the transcendentalists, who condemned the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and actively resisted the execution of the law after its passage. The transcendentalists, a nineteenth-century cultural avant-garde, continue to exert cultural influence through the durability of their writings, works that shaped many aspects of American national development.

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

History of Recording Demotic Epigraphy

2020 ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
Jan Moje
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

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