19th-century Literature and Romanticism

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, the book focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. The introduction analyses the persistence of the Romantic. Chapter 1 dwells on images of ‘air’, using these to understand the efforts of a number of 20th-century poets to ‘sustain’ Romanticism or forms of it. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Yeats and Eliot, respectively, the latter apparently shunning the Romantic, the former seeming to embrace it, but both responding with acute subtlety and individuality to the Romantic bequest. Chapter 4 argues that Wallace Stevens's ‘Esthétique du Mal’ should be read as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. Chapter 5 discusses the work of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complex response of both poets to the Romantic, Auden complicated in his post-Romantic attitudes, Spender daring in his attempts to renew a Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic age. Chapter 6 investigates the response of a range of contemporary poets from or associated with Northern Ireland, including Heaney, Kavanagh, Mahon, and Carson, to Romantic poetry. Chapter 7 sustains the Irish connection, discussing Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics, especially in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’. And Chapter 8 focuses on Geoffrey Hill's tense and tensed relations with Romantic poetry, and on Roy Fisher's sense of being a ‘gutted Romantic’, in order to illustrate two diverse ways of being post-Romantic in contemporary culture.

The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but in their various ways the major Romantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley—question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. No matter how confidently the sequence of apocalypse and millennium seems to be affirmed in some of the major works of the period, the issue is always in doubt: the fear that millennium may not ensue emerges as a significant, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period. Related to it is the tension in Romantic poetry between conflicting models of history itself: history as teleology, developing towards end time and millennium, and history as purposeless cycle. This subject matter is traced through a selection of works by the major poets, partly through an exposition of their underlying intellectual traditions, and partly through a close examination of the poems themselves.

‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). This book considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this ‘Parliamentary people’, and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources — classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, and treatises on crowd theory — this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. The book focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending demands and allegiances in their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary engagement that could both resist and respond to the terms of contemporary political discussion. Providing a close reading of the relations between printed words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible civic conduct.

The book describes and analyses the condition of autobiographical writing in Britain during the Romantic period. As well as chapter-length studies of major autobiographical works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, it provides a wide-ranging account of the rapidly expanding field of published self-writing during the period. The book also demonstrates that the category of ‘autobiography’ emerged in the literary public sphere during these years, and that instances of autobiographical writing need to be read in relation to the conditions under which they were circulated and read. Part I deals with the emergence of a sense of genre: the idea of autobiography, as it made its way into the literary environment. Part II examines how the anxieties and restrictions attendant upon the idea of self-writing are reflected in published texts, which present themselves as autobiographies. Part III focuses on readings of autobiographical works, exploring some examples of their representations of the situation of self-writing, and considering what sort of readings are involved when we interpret a given text as an autobiography. Overall, the book emphasizes the uncertain and contested transactions between Romantic autobiographical writing and the literary public sphere.

This book provides the first examination of Ben Jonson's place in the texts and culture of the Romantic Age. Part I of the book explores theatrical, critical, and editorial responses to, and refashionings of, Jonson, including his place in the post-Garrick theatre, critical estimations of his life and work, and the politically-charged making and reception of William Gifford's 1816 edition of Jonson's Works. Part II explores allusive and imitative responses to Jonson's poetry and plays in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and explores how Jonson serves variously as a model by which to measure the poet laureate, Robert Southey, and Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley Coleridge. The introduction and conclusion locate this ‘Romantic Jonson’ against his 18th-century and Victorian re-creations. This book shows us a varied, mobile, and contested Jonson and offers a fresh perspective on the Romantic Age.

This book examines the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre. It uncovers a Blake deeply engaged with the cultural discourses of his time, in profound dialogue with Swedenborg, Locke, and Young. In the course of this conversation, Blake anatomizes a remarkable variety of cultural practices (including religion, science, and art) designed to achieve transcendence. He focuses in particular on the fate of the body in cultures of transcendence, developing perhaps the first theory of sexual sublimation. Blake's radical visual and verbal strategies in this poem are part of an attempt to defer the movement of transcendence, long enough for the reader to see the warring elements of the fallen world as the dismembered body of humanity.

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

This book argues that poetry played a major role in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and that the wars had a significant impact on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. It examines a wide range of writers, both canonical (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron) and non-canonical (Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans), and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines. It shows that poetry was a crucial form through which what were seen as the first modern or ‘total’ wars were imagined in Britain and that it was central to the cultural and political debates over the conflict with France. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars compelled poets to re-examine their roles, it was poetry itself which produced a major transformation of the imagining of war that would be influential throughout the 19th century.