Southey the Epic-Headed

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert F. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Narrative Art ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Epic Poems ◽  
The Stranger

Abstract Dubious though the honour may be, if anybody dominated the anglophone epic poetry scene across the Romantic period it was Robert Southey. For forty years he was at work on one or another extended verse narrative, with topics that represented, on four continents, cultures from medieval Christendom, Islam, Hindustan, and the indigenous New World. Between the two quite different versions of Joan of Arc that he published in 1796 and 1837 appeared Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Madoc (1805), The Curse of Kehama (1810), Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), and A Tale of Paraguay (1825). Southey’s chosen themes of contest and conquest threw into high relief the profile of each culture he seized on, as in a different register did his characteristically bookish and condescending notes. Enlightened skepticism about alien systems of belief, joined to antinomian indifference to the internal logic of social patterns, disposed Southey’s epics to forms of causal overdrive that impoverish their narrative interest, even as they fulfill a whole set of now widely discredited clichés about Romantic alienation, transcendence, unstoppable will and insatiable desire. To Southey’s known importance for his Laker contemporaries, and his impact on Byron and Shelley in the next generation, may be added an extensive legacy to Victorian verse and prose narrative art: an influence that is the stranger given the extremity of his example. Action after action in Southey’s epic poems illustrates the incompatibility with heroic virtue of any course of action – i. e., any plot – that does not result in personal, national, or (at the imaginative bedrock these slighter levels imply) cosmic catastrophe.

The first item in the first issue of The Liberal: Byron's The Vision of Judgement

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Period ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Leigh Hunt

The Liberal is one of the most important journals of the Romantic period, the brainchild of Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Byron. It was inevitable that Byron's poem, an attack on Robert Southey, the poet laureate, would be in the first issue. 7,000 copies were printed and 4,000 sold, enough to make the new journal a huge success.

1780–1820 Southey’s New Star Chamber: Literature, Revolution, and Romantic-Era Libel

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-282
Author(s):  
Thomas Keymer
Keyword(s):  
Free Radical ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Political Tension ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Star Chamber ◽  
William Cobbett

Phases of high political tension during the Romantic period, notably under Pitt after the French Revolution and under Liverpool following the Napoleonic Wars, indicate the ongoing importance, and sometimes the severity, of press control between 1780 and 1820. But control was becoming more difficult in practice, and the consequences for poetry and other literary genres are sometimes overstated at a time when the overwhelming priority for the authorities was cheap (or worse, free) radical print. This chapter surveys key cases of prosecution and/or pillorying across the period (Daniel Isaac Eaton, Walter Cox, William Hone, William Cobbett), and argues that the writers now central to the Romantic canon were relatively unaffected. The striking exception is Robert Southey, whose incendiary Wat Tyler, which embarrassingly emerged at the height of Southey’s Tory pomp two decades later, is newly contextualized and interpreted.

scholarly journals Living the Threshold. The Kairos of World Person and New Perspective for Hospitality

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Gabriel Antunes Ferreira de Almeida
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Good Samaritan ◽  
The World ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Stranger

Abstract Starting from the analysis of a phenomenological reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan and arriving at the idea of the World Person in Chiara Lubich, this article will discuss two topics: union in difference and the model of the neighbor in the Gospel. For Christians this is the confirmation that the meeting with the stranger is possible. Christ founded a community that co-exists with the stranger. It is within this path that the intuition the figure of the World Person in Chiara Lubich arises. In the tension between interpretation and Truth, Lubich puts the question: was there anyone that went through the trial of doubt about the Truth, but has been able to create a new world? She says that was Jesus Forsaken, who opens up the possibility of differentiation without exclusion.

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cheshire
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
Interpretative Analysis

William Gilbert, poet, theosophist and astrologer, published The Hurricane: A Theosophical and Western Eclogue in Bristol in 1796, while he was on intimate terms with key members of Bristol literary culture: Coleridge published an extract from The Hurricane in his radical periodical The Watchman; Robert Southey wrote of the poem’s ‘passages of exquisite Beauty’; and William Wordsworth praised and quoted a long passage from Gilbert’s poem in The Excursion. The Hurricane is a copiously annotated 450 line blank verse visionary poem set on the island of Antigua where, in 1763, Gilbert was born into a slave-owning Methodist family. The poem can be grouped with other apocalyptic poems of the 1790s—Blake’s 'Continental Prophecies', Coleridge's 'Religious Musings', Southey's Joan of Arc—all of which gave a spiritual interpretation to the dramatic political upheavals of their time. William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism presents the untold story of Gilbert’s progress from the radical occultist circles of 1790s London to his engagement with the first generation Romantics in Bristol. At the heart of the book is the first modern edition of The Hurricane, fully annotated to reveal the esoteric metaphysics at its core, followed by close interpretative analysis of this strange elusive poem.

scholarly journals A NETWORKS-SCIENCE INVESTIGATION INTO THE EPIC POEMS OF OSSIAN

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (04n05) ◽  
pp. 1650008 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH YOSE ◽  
RALPH KENNA ◽  
PÁDRAIG MacCARRON ◽  
THIERRY PLATINI ◽  
JUSTIN TONRA
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Scottish Gaelic ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
James Macpherson ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Epic Poems

In 1760 James Macpherson published the first volume of a series of epic poems which he claimed to have translated into English from ancient Scottish-Gaelic sources. The poems, which purported to have been composed by a third-century bard named Ossian, quickly achieved wide international acclaim. They invited comparisons with major works of the epic tradition, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and effected a profound influence on the emergent Romantic period in literature and the arts. However, the work also provoked one of the most famous literary controversies of all time, coloring the reception of the poetry to this day. The authenticity of the poems was questioned by some scholars, while others protested that they misappropriated material from Irish mythological sources. Recent years have seen a growing critical interest in Ossian, initiated by revisionist and counter-revisionist scholarship and by the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the first collected edition of the poems in 1765. Here, we investigate Ossian from a networks-science point of view. We compare the connectivity structures underlying the societies described in the Ossianic narratives with those of ancient Greek and Irish sources. Despite attempts, from the outset, to position Ossian alongside the Homeric epics and to distance it from Irish sources, our results indicate significant network-structural differences between Macpherson’s text and those of Homer. They also show a strong similarity between Ossianic networks and those of the narratives known as Acallam na Senórach (Colloquy of the Ancients) from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.

scholarly journals Ya. B. Knyazhnin’s Tale in Verses Flor and Lisa in the Context of Early Russian Ballads

2019 ◽  
pp. 104-122
Author(s):  
L. A. Kurysheva
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The One ◽  
Dead Man ◽  
The 19Th Century

One of the popular plots of the Russian literary ballad of the last third of the 18th – the first decade of the 19th century was the story of treacherous love. Ya. B. Knyazhnin’s Flor and Lisa. A Tale in Verses (1778) is one of the first Russian ballads. In addition, this is the first Russian ballad with the appearance of the dead man – the plot situation is so productive in the subsequent, romantic period. It is characteristic that at the early stage of the formation of a new literary genre, the nomination “ballad” does not appear for all authors. Poets get along either without a genre designation, or use more familiar nominations, genres in origin related to a lyro-epic ballad: song, romance, “fairy tale in verses”. We observe, on the one hand, the variability of genre nominations for the lyric-epic narration of a personal dramatic event, and on the other hand, the instability of ideas about the formal and substantive components of the genre of “ballad”. The most typologically close to Flor and Lisa is the N. M. Karamzin’s ballad Alina (<1790– 1791>). Both ballads are devoted to the theme of infidelity and both develop a ballad version of the fairy-tale plot “The husband at the wife’s wedding”, which ends with the transition to the world of the dead and the reunion of lovers. In addition, the similarity lies in a detailed narrative manner and the psychologization of the ballad conflict through direct author commentary. In Flor and Lisa, all events – love, betrayal and the reunion of lovers in death – are presented as extraordinary. The tragic ending is due to the mysterious connection of the fate of the two characters, reinforced by the mythology of the “plant code”. The verification technique (quatrains, four-footed iambic, cross-rhyme, alternating female and male clauses) emphasizes the tightness of the love story. In Karamzin’s Alina, the course of action is due to a combination of universal laws of human existence and the fateful connection of characters. The ballad event is the final union of lovers, despite their stay in different worlds, earthly and heavenly. The mythopoetic basis of the plot is composed of images of changing elements and nature. The verification technique (non-strophic four-foot iambic with free rhyme) supports the idea of fluidity, whimsicality of the elements of life.

“The Renovating Fury”: Southey, Republicanism and Sensationalism

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Haywood
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Moral Reflection ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
State Terror ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
British State ◽  
Self Defence

Abstract This article takes a fresh look at Southey’s radical poetry of the 1790s in order to assess Southey’s mobilization of the tropes of political violence and atrocity. In the repressive antijacobin climate of the mid to late 1790s, radicalism was frequently associated with the sensational imagery of unbridled popular violence and regicide, but such propaganda misrepresented the ways in which radical authors like Southey used their texts precisely to explore and negotiate the problem of “justified” violence. The two texts I focus on are Wat Tyler and Joan of Arc, both of which imagine the bloody overthrow and destruction of a violent British state. But I show that beneath such a sensational vision (which may seem to explain why Wat Tyler was not published) is a more complex and coded engagement with the contemporaneous debate about politics, violence and democracy, including issues such as plebeian chivalry, heroic martyrdom, divine punishment, and state terror. I also argue that the furore surrounding the radical pirating of Wat Tyler in the postwar period overlooked the fact that the text offers the reader various political fantasies and discourses of violence ranging from regicide to patriarchal self-defence, sacrificial defiance and statesmanlike moral reflection. I hope to show, therefore, that a more nuanced historicist approach to Southey’s early poetry in fact yields a more polysemic hermeneutics than has been appreciated by critics from the Romantic period to the present.

scholarly journals The body within the body: Ian McEwan’s creation of a new world in Nutshell

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang G. Müller
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
New World ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Unborn Child ◽  
Narrative Art

AbstractThis article looks at Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell, as a great innovative contribution to narrative art. As far as its basic plot is concerned, it looks like crime fiction with Shakespearean resonances, but the choice of an unborn child as narrator and the consistent perspective from within the body of a heavily pregnant woman result in the disclosure and exploration of an entirely new world. Aspects investigated are the novel’s narrative situation, its relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a reference text, the use of quotations and allusions and the representation of bodily processes and the relation between the I-narrator and the author. The ethical substance of the work is shown to be generated by its specific narrative form.

State power as reality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Noakes
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Quality Of Information ◽  
The Core ◽  
World Power ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
Core Mission

This concluding chapter explores the implications of the varied patterns and pathways taken by TANs engaging with China. A key lesson is that foreign activists rarely succeed in persuading China to follow a course of action it does not favour for its own reasons. China’s leaders are not insensitive to external pressures for change, but base their policy actions on the domestic legitimacy implications of a given issue. This means that much rides on the quality of information the state receives—the results of a miscalculations could have grave consequences for the survival of the CCP. However, it also means that activists targeting China need to maintain a healthy perspective on what they can reasonably achieve. Given the power of China to alter the core mission and message of TANs, those wishing to deepen engagement with China need to make a clear-eyed assessment of the risks, and consider how far they are willing to go to accommodate the preference of a new world power.

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