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Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a “science” of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wave-like stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll’s children’s books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.

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.

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they lived at a historical turning point, a transitional moment whose outcome, though still uncertain, would transform the French way of life—beginning with the French way of love. The literary works of the Bourbon Restoration ceaselessly return to the themes of love, marriage, and sexuality, partly as vital cultural questions in their own right, but also as a means of critiquing the unsatisfactory politics of the present and imagining the shape of the political future. In the literature of the Restoration, love and politics become entwined in a mutually metaphorical embrace. The Amorous Restoration, the first book in English devoted to literary and cultural life under the last Bourbon kings, considers this relationship in all its richness and many contradictions. Long neglected as a drab historical backwater, the Restoration emerges here as a vibrant era, one rife with sharp cultural and political disagreements, and possessed of an especially refined sense of allusion, discretion, and even humour. Drawing on literature, journalism, political writing, life writing, and gossip, The Amorous Restoration vividly recreates the erotic sensibilities of a pivotal moment in the transition from an amorous old regime to erotic—and political—modernity.

Romanticism is often synonymous with models of identity and action that privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy, models that, in the last two decades, have been the focus of critiques of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. While such critiques have proven useful, they often draw attention to the conceptual or material tensions of romantic subjectivity while accepting a conspicuous, autonomous subject as a given, thus failing to appreciate the possibility that Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona. This book goes against the grain of these dominant critical stances by examining anonymity as a model of being that is provocative for writers of the era because it resists the Enlightenment emphasis on transparency and self-disclosure. The author explores how romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, frequently rejects the demands of self-assertion and fails to prove its authenticity and coherence.

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.

This book explores the ways in which exile concentrates the aesthetics of two generations of 19th-century British writers who felt forced to leave England and chose to live in Italy. Focusing on the Pisan circle (Byron, the Shelleys, Leigh Hunt, and the Williamses), the next generation of exiles, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and the mobile intermediaries who connected both groups (Anna Jameson, Walter Savage Landor, and Lady Blessington), the book traces the complex legacy of Byron and the Shelleys for the English in Italy in the 19th century. Self-consciously ostracized, singly or in groups, these writers favoured discursive modes of literary creation and used the disjunctions of exile to probe, challenge, and seek answers to compelling questions about literature, art, religion, law, history, and politics. Exile has always been a dialogical condition, fostering reflection on the difference between here and there, then and now, presence and absence. This book re-examines the literary traditions that influence the layered forms of exiled writing. Looking at the interaction of classical and Middle-Age writing with the mixed genres produced by English writers who rejected insular domestic mores and immersed themselves in European culture, the book offers a fresh approach to one of the most important motifs of 19th-century literature. Keeping the material and the mythic aspects of exile in dialogue throughout, the study contributes to current debates in Romantic studies about travel writing, cosmopolitanism and theories of affect.

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.

Exploring the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), this book examines how and why Baudelaire’s poetry has inspired so many composers to set it to music in different ways. The author proposes a new model for analysing song, through an ‘assemblage’ approach, which examines the complex relationships formed between common features of poetry and music, including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound properties/repetition, and semantics. The model also factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, revealing which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting and where composers diverge in their approach. The specific case studies that make up the second half of the book focus on Baudelaire song sets produced by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, the assemblage model is tested to uncover new findings about what happens to Baudelaire’s poetry when it is set to music. Analysing Baudelaire’s poetry within song settings uncovers richer features of the texts that we might otherwise not see or hear. Examining each song setting in close detail confirms that there are no overt resonances between the types of poems selected for musical interpretation, just as there is no single, perfect ‘ideal’ setting of Baudelaire.

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.

This book examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works the author shows how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature. While he considers the influence of Milton and the ‘Ossian’ poems, as well as of philosophers including Locke, Diderot, Berkeley and Thomas Reid, much of the book is taken up with new readings of writers of the period. These include canonical authors such as Blake, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Keats and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as less-well-known writers such as Charlotte Brooke and Ann Batten Cristall. There is also a chapter on the popular genre of improving tales for children by writers such as Barbara Hofland and Mary Sherwood. The author finds that, despite the nostalgia for a bardic age of inward vision, the chief emphasis in the period is on the compensations of enhanced sensitivity to music and words. This compensation becomes associated with the loss and gain involved in the modernity of a post-bardic age. Representations of blindness and the blind are found to elucidate a tension at the heart of the Romantic period, between the desire for immediacy of vision on the one hand and, on the other, the historical self-consciousness that always attends it.

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.

If we could ask a Romantic reader of new poetry in 1820 to identify the most celebrated poet of the day after Byron, the chances are that he or she would reply with the name of ‘Barry Cornwall’. Solicitor, dandy and pugilist, Cornwall — pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874) — published his first poems in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under the tutelage of Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, Cornwall had produced three volumes of verse. Marcian Colonna sold 700 copies in a single morning, a figure exceeding Keats's lifetime sales. Hazlitt's suppressed anthology, Select British Poets (1824), allocated Cornwall nine pages — the same number as Keats, and more than Southey, Lamb or Shelley; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pronounced Cornwall a poet of ‘originality and genius’; and in 1821, Gold's London Magazine announced that in terms of ‘tenderness and delicacy’ even Percy Shelley was ‘surpassed very far indeed by Barry Cornwall.’ It is difficult to square Cornwall's early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect. This book concentrates on Cornwall's success between 1817 and 1823. The book explores Cornwall's rivalry — and at various junctures, political camaraderie — with fellow Hunt protégé Keats, whose career exists in a mirrored relationship with his own trajectory into celebrity. The book argues that Cornwall helped to structure Keats's experience as a poet but also explores how Cornwall's racy and politically subversive poetry managed to establish a broad readership where Keats's similarly indecorous publications met with readerly indifference.

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.

This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. The first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres that featured within a range of mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of the book brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often drew upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations. It examines emigration texts featured in the Victorian feminist and women’s presses, Chartist anti-emigration literature, utopian emigration narratives, and a corpus of transnational westerns. Alongside its analysis of more ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of important works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. It also maps its analysis of settler emigration onto broader debates about Victorian literature and culture, Victorian empire, the global circulation of texts, periodical form, and the role of digitization within Victorian studies.

This book contends that changing definitions of state power in the late Romantic period propelled authors to revisit the work of literature as well as the profession of authorship. Traditionally, critics have seen the Romantics as imaginative geniuses and have viewed the supposedly less imaginative character of the Romantics' late work as evidence of declining abilities. The author of this book argues, in contrast, that late Romanticism offers an alternative aesthetic model which adjusts authorship to work within an expanding and bureaucratizing state. She examines how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and De Quincey portray specific state and imperial agencies to debate what constituted government power, through what means government penetrated individual lives, and how non-governmental figures could assume government authority. Defining their work as part of an expanding state, these writers also reworked Romantic structures such as the imagination, organic form, and the literary sublime to operate through state agencies and to convey membership in a nation.

Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, this book examines British writers’ engagement with mid-nineteenth-century Paris. This historically grounded account of the ways in which Paris touched the careers and work of both major and minor Victorian writers considers both their actual experiences of an urban environment—distinctively different from anything Britain offered—and the extent to which this became absorbed and expressed within the Victorian imaginary. The first part of this book explores these writers’ reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Paris for mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists, culminating in a chapter devoted to demonstrating the ways in which the young Thackeray’s exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. The final part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures, and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly growing British readership.

Byron’s connection with Italy is one of the most familiar facts about British Romanticism. A considerable portion of his legend is linked to his many pronouncements about the country (where he lived between 1816 and 1823), its history, culture and people, as well as about his own experiences in Italy and among Italians. Offering new insights into Byron’s relation to Italy, this volume is concerned with the real, historical ‘Anglo-Italian’ Byron, and his ‘almost Italianness’ as a poet. Its essays bring together different critical perspectives to take the pulse of current debates and open up new lines of enquiry into this crucial theme in Byron Studies and Romantic-era Studies more widely. In doing so, they explore how Byron’s being in Italy affected his sense of his own individual identity and of the labile nature of the self. It affected his politics – both in theory and in practice – and, of course, his whole development as a writer of lyrics, dramas, narratives, satires and letters. Moreover, the essays show how Italy affected, changed and informed Byron’s thinking about matters far beyond Italy itself. As the book shows, the poet’s relation to the country and its culture was complicated by a pervasive dialectic between familiarity and distance, and thus neither stable nor consistent. For this reason, among many others, the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ remains an endless source of intellectual, literary, historical and existential fascination.