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.

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 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

Romanticism: Characteristics, Themes and Poets

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 66-74
Author(s):  
Mr Amit
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Ludwig Tieck ◽  
Creative Mind ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Lyrical Ballads

This paper examines about Romanticism or Romantic era, themes and some famous writers, poets and poems of romantic era. Romanticism is one of the repetitive topics that are connected to either creative mind, vision, motivation, instinct, or independence. The subject frequently condemns the past, worries upon reasonableness, disconnection of the essayist and pays tribute to nature. Gone before by Enlightenment, Romanticism brought crisp verse as well as extraordinary books in English Literature. Begun from England and spread all through Europe including the United States, the Romantic development incorporates well known journalists, for example, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Lord Byron, Shelley, Chatterton, and Hawthorne. ‘Romantic’ has been adjusted from the French word romaunt that implies a story of Chivalry. After two German scholars Schlegel siblings utilized this word for verse, it changed into a development like an epidemic and spread all through Europe. Romanticism in English writing started during the 1790s with the distribution of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's "Preface" to the subsequent version (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he portrayed verse as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", turned into the statement of the English Romantic development in verse. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was set apart by advancements in both substance and artistic style and by a distraction with the mysterious, the intuitive and the heavenly. An abundance of abilities, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. what's more, Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, have a place with this first phase. The second phase of Romanticism, involving the period from around 1805 to the 1830s, was set apart by a reviving of social patriotism and another regard for national roots, as bore witness to by the accumulation and impersonation of local old stories, people songs and verse, society move and music, and even recently disregarded medieval and Renaissance works. The resuscitated recorded  appreciation was converted into creative composition by Sir Walter Scott, who is frequently considered to have imagined the verifiable novel. At about this equivalent time English Romantic verse had arrived at its peak in progress of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

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?

Amorous Aesthetics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth T. Reno
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Affect Studies ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Politics Of Love

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being. Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics,through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, this book shows intellectual love to be a pillar of Romanticism.

scholarly journals The Napoleon mystique and British poets

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (26) ◽  
pp. 359-377
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Mc Danel de García
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Precise Definition ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
At Home

This reflection on the influence of Napoleon and the consequences of the wars on the major British poets of the Romantic era is meant to illustrate how the reactions of both nobility and commoners are recorded in literature and media. The dual perception of Napoleon as both hero and tyrant and the atrocious suffering of those at home and bloody battles are manifest in the works of the major poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and especially George Gordon, Lord Byron. Even today, Napoleon transcends precise definition and he has inspired some of the greatest poets in British literature

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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