Reshaping the Romantic Canon from the Margins: The Medial Construction of ‘Byron’ in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Byron and Marginality ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474439411.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 40-56

Author(s):

Ralf Haekel

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Public Perception ◽

Narrative Voice ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Special Position ◽

Byronic Hero ◽

Rhetorical Constructions

Byron has always been considered to belong to the canon of Romantic literature, but the place he occupies in the canon has been a special and recently a marginalised one. Byron’s phenomenal success and his special position within literary history is mainly the result of what is called the medial construction of “Byron”. The melancholic Byronic hero of the earlier works together with the narrative voice lead to rhetorical constructions of “Byron” that easily cross authorial and medial boundaries and turn into the Byronic vampire in Polidori’s novella, in the theatre and in the opera. In this reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron is shown as the construct of medial and public perception.

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Henry Crabb Robinson

10.3828/liverpool/9781789621785.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Philipp Hunnekuhl

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

German Literature ◽

Early Career ◽

Literary Critic ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Unpublished Manuscript ◽

Romantic Period ◽

Moral Relevance ◽

Jean Paul ◽

Aesthetic Autonomy

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European Romantic literature prior to this point. Robinson thus emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, he educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years, and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin’s philosophy subsequently inspired Robinson’s first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800–05, Robinson became the leading British scholar of Kant’s critical philosophy, which informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and other German literature. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt’s understanding of Kant and early career as a writer; this also laid the foundation for Robinson’s lifelong critical admiration of Hazlitt’s works. Robinson’s distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern ‘moral excellence’ in Christian Leberecht Heyne’s Amathonte. This excellence also prompted Robinson’s transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul to England in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. Robinson’s ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature’s moral relevance, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds, anticipated the current ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies.

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The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300004166 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 10 ◽

pp. 409-422 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lawrence Buell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New England ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Literary History ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

American Civil Religion ◽

Past Half Century ◽

American Literary History ◽

American Intellectual History

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

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Introduction: A Literary History of Migration, 1750–1850

Migration and Modernities ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440349.003.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

JoEllen DeLucia ◽

Juliet Shields

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Literary History ◽

Western World ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Primary Means ◽

History Of ◽

Literature Of Migration ◽

History Of Migration ◽

The Wanderer

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are central to recent influential theories and histories of migration because they saw the rise of urbanization, industrialization, and imperial expansion in the western world. Yet, despite the centrality of the wanderer and exile as a figure in Romantic literature, there is relatively little work on the literature of migration prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Literary history might seem like an odd lens through which to study migration, but this introduction contends that one of the primary means of understanding the migrant experience is through stories, whether those of historical individuals or those recounted in literary works. By focusing on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, this collection explores alternatives to the stories of migration as a form of either irrevocable loss or transcendent gain that crystallized later in the nineteenth century.

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Edgar G. Ulmer — Roger Corman — Stuart Gordon. Filmowe adaptacje opowiadania Edgara Allana Poego Czarny kot

Literatura i Kultura Popularna ◽

10.19195/0867-7441.25.24 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 ◽

pp. 429-444

Author(s):

Nina Ćwiklak

Keyword(s):

Short Story ◽

Cultural Context ◽

Historical Context ◽

World War ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

Film Directors ◽

The First World War ◽

Byronic Hero ◽

First World ◽

Made In

The article entitled Edgar G. Ulmer — Roger Corman — Stuart Gordon. Movie adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” is a comparative analysis of three adaptations of a gothic short story. The attempt at finding inspirations from romantic poetics in the works of film directors, created in different decades and answering the question of how is it possible to transfer assumptions of romantic literature into movie language, was made in this text. In the movie from 1934, Edgar G. Ulmer connects gothic poetics with modernism aesthetics. He also adds historical context, referring to events in the First World War. On the other hand, taking classic literature became an opportunity for Roger Corman to play with convention. He expresses it in the adaption from 1962, in which terror gives space to humour. Stuart Gordon in turn, creates a post-modern variation based on a theme of The Black Cat, making Poe himself the main character of the movie from 2005. The important criterion of interpretation includes the motives of the Byronic hero, cat, madness and crime. Analysis of different ways to re-interpret the gothic short story leads to conclusions about filmmakers’ attitude to literary prototype. Also, the cultural context of individual adaptations was pointed out.

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Romantic Labouring-Class Pastoral as Eco-Queer Camp

Romanticism on the Net ◽

10.7202/011134ar ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Bridget Keegan

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Great Britain ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

Literary History ◽

Romantic Literature ◽

John Clare ◽

Pastoral Poetry ◽

Critical Practices ◽

Critical Attention ◽

History Of

Abstract The few eighteenth-century and Romantic labouring-class poems that have been recuperated within recent efforts at canon revision appear to have attracted critical attention primarily because they represent the authentic hardships of the working poor, thereby suggesting a nascent effort toward solidarity. However, while these direct expressions of a more familiarly class-based politics are important, they are also relatively rare within the broader tradition of labouring-class poetry, a tradition made up of countless poems written by over 1300 poets who published in Great Britain and Ireland between 1700 and 1900. This essay proposes that a queer reading might productively undermine the usual critical practices for evaluating and valorizing labouring-class writing. It begins by questioning the current logic for determining whether to include a labouring-class poet within mainstream literary history, a logic which proceeds from the assumption that, as John Guillory describes, “the noncanonical author’s experience as a marginalized social identity necessarily reasserts the transparency of the text to the experience it represents” (Cultural Capital 10). A queer reading complicates such representational reductionism. Furthermore, it may also contribute to a broader queer history of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, which although it has certainly been sensitive to the class issues, has heretofore focused predominantly on tensions between bourgeois and aristocratic subjects. The essay focuses in particular on conventional pastoral poetry as a paradoxically felicitous site from which to launch a queer reading of labouring-class poetry. Through Moe Meyer’s concept of queer camp, the essay explores what happens when labouring-class pastoral is read as queer camp expression. Through a close reading of poems by John Clare, Janet Little and Samuel Thomson, the essay also considers to what extent these poems question representations of what is “natural” for a particular rank of society and, more broadly, opens up the discussion of what is “natural” in other categories of identity, including sexuality.

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What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī

Comparative Literature ◽

10.1215/00104124-7546181 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 71 (3) ◽

pp. 226-251

Author(s):

Preetha Mani

Keyword(s):

Short Stories ◽

Middle Class ◽

Literary History ◽

Social Reality ◽

The Other ◽

Literary Production ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Narrative Voice ◽

Historical Approach ◽

The 1950S

AbstractThis essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows how the movement inaugurated a modernist realism characterized by attention to genre, rhetoric, and style on one hand, and commitment to social reality on the other. Combining rhetorical strategies—such as shifting narrative voice, allegorical descriptions of landscape, and implicit reference to authorship and the condition of postcolonial literary production—with structural and thematic tensions between form and content, this mode developed an interchangeability between author, reader, and character, which did not previously exist in Hindi literature and which reconfigured the category of the middle class in the universally recognizable terms of alienation. Using the case of the nayī kahānī, the essay offers a new literary historical approach that moves beyond sweeping accounts of a single postcolonial mode to attend to regional realisms and modernisms.

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