3. Voices

‘Voices’ evaluates the role of voices in short stories. In English fiction, from the Romantic period to the Edwardians, the voice of the storyteller often dominated. As the story form moved away from its sensational or journalistic style, the use of a performative frame became a popular device. Monologues and dialogues are soundscapes as well as content. Once discouraged by many style manuals, dialogue has become essential shorthand in creating effects of characterization, realism, and regional inflection. The performance element originally used in 19th-century tales as a frame to create atmosphere and setting, while much less used, remains available today.

The Suppression of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: An Unpublished Letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers

This article faithfully reproduces a letter from Lord Holland to Samuel Rogers, including deletions, hyphenated words, underlines, and paragraphs, to evidence how Samuel Rogers interceded in the suppression of a fifth edition of Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Rogers’s knowledge of the publishing market, its publishing houses and successful authors, made him one of the most formidable and important of Byron’s acquaintances and contemporaries in the 1810s. This article demonstrates the important role of Rogers as an individual whose political negotiations and literary advice impacted the literary landscape of the Romantic period. The decision to suppress the fifth edition of English Bards also shows how Byron navigated literary and political opinion, as well as the role of sociability in the production and genetics of literary text. Professional authorship in the Romantic period was performed within this context of social networks.

Metamorphoses of Portrait Genre in Russian Art at the Turn of the 18th–19th Centuries

The article is dedicated to the research of changes in the development of portrait painting in Russian art at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. A more common approach in the academic literature is a study of typological variants for the portrait image within the stable system, formed under the influence of classicism, or the review of a new concept in portrait painting, embodied by the artists of Romantic period. In that regard the transitional stage, related to the fundamental revision of portrait’s nature as a specific genre, lacks the close attention of researchers. The crisis of Enlightenment’s ideals at the end of the 18th century causes a rethinking of the relationship between a person and the outside world. This tendency directly influences the art of portraiture, which is now distinguished by more expressed dynamism of image. This is particularly important to the national tradition of portrait painting in the 18th century, which before showed the static approach for the representation of model and the moderation of portrait characteristic. Meanwhile, the fluidity becomes not only a method of artistic expression in a single work, but also a guiding principle for the modification of portrait painting at the system level. In other words, there is a new understanding of the fundamental categories inherent in the portrait genre: the popularity of more compact forms of portrait art, the ratio of ceremonial and chamber trends, new relationships between the master and the model, the active interaction of the individual and the surrounding nature. The interest in English culture also plays an important role in these processes. Despite the transitional nature of the era and external influences, Russian portrait painting at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries remains one of the main national features of genre — the prevalence of semi-ceremonial variants of image.

Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric

This chapter charts developments in anatomy in the wake of the French Revolution, and shows how Romantic lyrics model a reading practice informed by anatomical medicine. Surgical tropes from the advances in morbid anatomy, for example, inform William Wordsworth’s most important poems. Referring to medical advances in battlefield dissection and autopsy that occurred during the French Revolution, Wordsworth turns from social analysis to self-critique as he performs his retrospective analyses of the “growth of the poet’s mind” and the “spots of time.” Responding to Wordsworth’s model of interpretation, the critic Francis Jeffrey and the poet John Keats developed a practice of dissective reading, an influential protocol that crossed between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. Dissective reading anticipates symptomatic close reading through a segmentation of surface and underlying structures, and invokes dismemberment as a tool for converting critical reading into authorial auto-exegesis. Examples drawn from Wordsworth and Keats reveal how Romantic lyrics offer up the poet’s own body as the subject of surgical (and critical) analysis, treating critical readings as diagnoses of the poets themselves.

Introduction

The introduction reimagines the historical narrative of rivalry between increasingly specialized cultures of medicine and the arts in the Romantic period as instead a period of mutual exchange. This familiar history is belied by the historical movement of the terms “autopsy” and “verve,” which traveled in opposite directions between medical and literary fields during the height of the British Romantic period. The crossing of “autopsy” and “verve” between fields introduces the book’s principal concerns: how shared concepts and critical practices were exchanged between letters and medicine, how new structures of thought crossed between biological and textual concerns, and how tropes of organicity, disease, and treatment in Romantic texts reveal the diagnostic practices that bridged literary and medical cultures. Through a study of the great developments in the history of medicine in this period, and the “metapothecaries” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who considered literature and medicine through a shared ontology, the chapter argues that Romantic literature develops the notion of protocols of diagnosis—the idea that the same protocols of critical interpretation can be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Outlining four protocols of diagnosis that the rest of the book will elaborate, the chapter concludes by linking these four formulations to modern methodologies of critical reading, exploring the resonance of this history to contemporary reflections on the history of what has come to be called “symptomatic reading.”

UKRAINE, QUO VADIS? AFTERTASTE HOLIDAY

The fourth and final article prepared in the Centre for Ukrainian Studies of the Institute of Europe of the RAS for the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence cycle, devoted to the way in which the features of transformation of Ukrainian society and the State addressed in previous articles were reflected in the celebrations, discourses and narratives. The opportunity to analyse the country’s path has not been fully exploited. The anniversary events were held, leaving a sense of understatement. This to a certain extent characterizes the situation – internal and external – in which the Ukrainian Republic found itself at the beginning of the fourth decade of its sovereign independent existence. His romantic period is over, and the realistic one has not been started yet. A sense of general uncertainty and political indecision has been left from the events and judgments of the anniversary year. The conclusion proposed by the author of the article is that the time for waiting, declarations and palliatives for Ukraine has passed. It is time for sober judgment and decisive action. Countries face a decisive reboot of the political system and a critical review of the goals, means and pace of modernization and development.

Learning and teaching by literature. "Casus" of Polish romanticism created in country

This article is devoted to the issue of one of the methods of informal education in the Romantic period, namely literature. Polish modern national consciousness was formed during the partitions, and the place of its formation was the émigré literature. The ideas flowing from it penetrate into the literature created in the country, the latter being more involved in the creation and dissemination of national patterns in society. The issue of imitating in domestic literature the patterns developed by bards is also raised.

A Midsummer Night’s Gene: The familial Neurological Illness of Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1805–1847) is widely regarded as one of the musical geniuses of the Romantic period. A prodigy akin to Mozart, Mendelssohn composed piano works, symphonies, and concertos at an early age but died young, at 38. His death has been attributed to neurological disease, but the mystery of his diagnosis is amplified by the fact that his sisters died under similar circumstances, including the renowned composer, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Mendelssohn died after years of suffering from headaches, earaches, and mood disturbances. In the final year of his life, his acute decline was marked by stepwise, progressive neurologic deficits: gait disturbance, loss of sensation in the hands, partial paralysis, and, finally, loss of consciousness. The similar pattern of disease within his family suggests an underlying genetic link, though this may be multifactorial in nature. We present a thorough, posthumous differential diagnosis for Mendelssohn's illness, given his medical history, the familial pattern, and hints from within his music. Possible diagnoses include ruptured cerebral aneurysm with resultant subarachnoid hemorrhage, familial cerebral cavernous malformation, and cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL). Continued research into Mendelssohn's life may yield more information about his illness, death, and possibly true diagnosis.

Book History without Old Books1

During the pandemic, the closure of university libraries and Special Collections meant that there were few opportunities for students to interact with the print and manuscript material of the Romantic period. These conditions created an entirely new set of interactions between instructors and students, students and their classmates, and students and their objects of study. To address these new conditions, we created a series of assignments that sought to recreate a sense of the opportunities and pleasures of the sensory experience in an archive; to foster an understanding of both the material history of Romantic literary culture and of material culture more broadly; and finally to connect students emotionally with the objects of their study. This essay reports on the outcomes of these assignments and what they can teach us about attempts to integrate play, discovery, and interactivity with material objects into the study of Romantic writing.