DEVOTIONAL DISCOURSE AND FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FROM THE STEELE CIRCLE TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

The article brings into discussion the case of a few exceptional women who wrote, published, and became popular in the Age of Reason as poets, critics, and activists. They were considered as Nonconformist because they belonged to the Baptist or Unitarian Church and did not follow the mainstream Church of England views. On the other hand, the end of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Romantic aesthetics and of a number of nature poets. The questions this article attempts to answer refer both to the influence of the Biblical discourse on a group of women’s literary and non-literary productions and to the way in which the emerging Romantic aesthetics also impacted their work. How did devotional poetry go along Romantic principles and feminist views? Anne Steele’s and Mary Steele’s poetry, Mary Scott’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist agenda will be highlighted in the analysis.

Ballads and Romances or Ballads-Romances? On the romance in Mickiewicz’s poetic cycle

The article discusses the problem of the romance as a genre in Adam Mickiewicz’s poetic cycle Ballady i romanse (Ballads and Romances). So far scholars have paid attention mainly to Mickiewicz’s ballads and his innovative use of this genre, treating the romance as a ballad-like genre, without its own specifi city and rather marginal in the context of the developing romantic aesthetics. However, a closer analysis of the poems Kurhanek Maryli and Dudarz shows their distinctiveness within Mickiewicz’s poetic volume. The poet’s romance turns out to be a weak ballad of sorts, only stressing the potentiality of fantastic events. This genre can also be described as a contamination of the idyllic convention with elements of a horror ballad.

Was Addison a Poet?

This chapter provides an account of Addison’s poetic career—the first such account since the nineteenth century—and confronts the question of why, although Addison wrote several of the most influential and highly regarded poems of the entire eighteenth century, he is so rarely thought of as a poet. The first half of the chapter traces our received image of Addison as an inherently unpoetic figure back to Joseph Warton and the advent of ‘pre-Romantic’ aesthetics in the 1740s, before examining a number of Addison’s poems, particularly from marginalized areas of his verse canon including his neo-Latin pieces and others circulated only in manuscript, which challenge that image. The second half of the chapter explores Addison’s own reluctance to inhabit the role of poet, evident in particular in his serial uses in his verse of the classical trope of ‘recusatio’ (refusal to write a poem). Through detailed analyses of his major poems—especially A Letter from Italy and ‘Milton’s Stile Imitated’, a diptych reflecting the process of self-reassessment he went through while travelling in Italy, the land of poetry, in 1701—it argues that Addison’s serious misgivings about poetry were the making of him as a poet. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of The Campaign (1705), suggesting that Addison’s most famous poem in fact represents not the climax of his career as a poet but its epilogue; by the time he wrote it, Addison had ceased to consider it even a possibility that his future might lie in poetry, and so could versify with detached fluency.

Ecophilosophy and the Ambivalence of Nature: Kierkegaard and Knausgård on Lilies, Birds and Being

In The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849), Kierkegaard presents a succinct critique of Romantic aesthetics, in line with contemporary critiques of ecocriticism and ecophilosophy, e.g. by Timothy Morton. Whereas Romantic poets see nature as a mirror of their inner thoughts and pathos, thereby divinising themselves and their creativity, Kierkegaard emphasises the authority of the Creator and the exteriority of nature. He identifies the consequences of such Romantic self-infatuation on all levels of discourse: aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and ontology, and seeks to formulate an alternative. I argue that the discourses thus represent an alternative philosophy of nature, revealing an immediate joy for the gift of being-there. Being human thus means being dependent on and embedded in nature. This makes Kierkegaard a highly relevant interlocutor for contemporary ecophilosophy and ecocriticism, as revealed by Knausgård’s novel Morgenstjernen (2020).

The Spanish Translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures: An Early Anglo-Hispanic Canon

The Spanish translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) at the turn of the nineteenth century was one of the most remarkable literary events of the period in Spain. It appeared at a crucial time of shifting cultural paradigms and provoked an intense debate on some literary issues that were key in the transition to a new Romantic aesthetics, by introducing a view of the creative process based on pre-Romantic versions of the concepts of genius, the imagination and the sublime. But in its adaptation to the Spanish context Blair's work underwent a singular nationalization process. It also helped disseminate an Anglo-Hispanic canon that advanced the shift from French cultural dominance to an increasing Anglophilia that became noticeable in many Spanish authors and critics in subsequent decades. Thanks to the official adoption of the Lecciones as a rhetorical and literary handbook in schools and universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, the pre-Romantic canon established through Blair's work may have even contributed to the consolidation of literary eclecticism in Spain.

Expression

Expression is a term that has been applied to music in an extraordinarily wide range of senses; philosophers and musicologists alike remain sharply divided on what musical expression is and how it works. This essay gives a historical account of the ways in which music in and of itself—that is, music independent of words—has been regarded as expressive over the past three hundred years by surveying influences spanning Enlightenment theories of rhetoric and the imitation of emotions, Romantic aesthetics of subjectivity and self-expression, and more contemporary versions of contour, arousal, persona, and intransitive theories of expression. This review reveals the lack of a single satisfactory explanatory framework for musical expression, even while confirming musical expression’s enduring importance as “the soul of music.”

Counting the Bodies: Ferguson and Ferguson1

This article examines the political and interpretive possibilities of Romantic Idealism for understanding contemporary American race relations. Working with Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime, it puts Romantic aesthetics into a mutually constructive dialogue with afropessimist thought. That is, the underlying logic of Black Lives Matter proves to be one composed of Romantic “counting” as well as an afropessimist stance on Black alterity. Black Lives Matter, in this sense, features an aesthetics of omission and accumulation that reveals how Romantic Idealism intersects with a more expansive notion of materiality. Turning to Ferguson’s reading of William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” the article contends that any analysis of Romanticism’s political stakes should make use of the Idealism central to it, and that such a use does not attenuate the urgency or efficacy of Romanticist work.

Maskenspiel und Seelensprache

This two-volume monograph entitled “Maskenspiel und Seelensprache” (Masquerade and the Language of the Soul) addresses the tension between Robert Schumann’s aesthetics of music and Heinrich Heine’s post-Romantic aesthetics of poetry. In volume 1, Ingo Müller examines both the relationship between Schumann’s views on literary Romanticism in terms of musical aesthetics and the specific poetic aesthetic tendencies of Heine’s early poetry. Müller’s subsequent poetry and music analyses of Schumann’s musical compositions for all of Heine’s solo songs highlight the aforementioned tension in detail from both a literary and music studies perspective and allow examples of poetry and music converging and diverging to emerge clearly (volume 2). In this way, this study makes an interdisciplinary contribution to research into Heine’s early poetry and how Schumann set it to music. At the same time, it represents a compendium on Heine’s “Buch der Lieder” (Book of Songs) and Schumann’s music to it, which, in addition to its detailed examinations of the individual works of both men, provides an up-to-date overview of the far-reaching and broad international research literature on this subject.