Edward Larrissy
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748632817
- eISBN:
- 9780748651696
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748632817.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Kenneth R. Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199657803
- eISBN:
- 9780191771576
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657803.003.0019
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The effects of Pitt’s government’s domestic policy of alarmism, directed at proponents of parliamentary reform, on the development of English Romantic literature, may be viewed as inconsequential ...
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The effects of Pitt’s government’s domestic policy of alarmism, directed at proponents of parliamentary reform, on the development of English Romantic literature, may be viewed as inconsequential collateral damage, or as highly significant distortions of otherwise promising literary works and careers. The effects of Alarmism are as far-reaching and difficult to document as those of McCarthyism in 1950s America. William Pitt himself participated directly in these culture wars through his creation and protection of The Anti-Jacobin of 1797–8. Alan Liu found Unusual Suspects to be an important ‘census of the disappeared’ when reviewing an earlier version of it in Romanticism, History, Historicism (2009). The impact of Alarm on literary works and careers is undeniable, but hard to quantify conclusively. Some works and careers are being recuperated, two centuries later, but Pitt’s defeat of the parliamentary reform movement in the 1790s also spelled defeat for many promising literary careers.Less
The effects of Pitt’s government’s domestic policy of alarmism, directed at proponents of parliamentary reform, on the development of English Romantic literature, may be viewed as inconsequential collateral damage, or as highly significant distortions of otherwise promising literary works and careers. The effects of Alarmism are as far-reaching and difficult to document as those of McCarthyism in 1950s America. William Pitt himself participated directly in these culture wars through his creation and protection of The Anti-Jacobin of 1797–8. Alan Liu found Unusual Suspects to be an important ‘census of the disappeared’ when reviewing an earlier version of it in Romanticism, History, Historicism (2009). The impact of Alarm on literary works and careers is undeniable, but hard to quantify conclusively. Some works and careers are being recuperated, two centuries later, but Pitt’s defeat of the parliamentary reform movement in the 1790s also spelled defeat for many promising literary careers.
Jonathan Ellis (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748681327
- eISBN:
- 9781474422239
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748681327.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last ...
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This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.Less
This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.
Irving Howe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300203660
- eISBN:
- 9780300210583
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300203660.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1971 essay “The City in Literature,” in which he talks about how the city is portrayed as a major locale in literature. Howe first looks at pastoral poetry as a ...
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This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1971 essay “The City in Literature,” in which he talks about how the city is portrayed as a major locale in literature. Howe first looks at pastoral poetry as a genre before turning to Western tradition that views the city as both an inimical and a threatening place. He traces our modern disgust with the city to the eighteenth-century novels and looks at Romantic literature's assault upon the city. He also examines what literature may tell about the city and vice versa, together with the so-called the myth of the modern city. Howe concludes by describing two significant visions of urban life in modern literature: the first is benign, while the second proceeds in a cultural line from Charles Baudelaire through T. S. Eliot and then through Eliot's many followers.Less
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1971 essay “The City in Literature,” in which he talks about how the city is portrayed as a major locale in literature. Howe first looks at pastoral poetry as a genre before turning to Western tradition that views the city as both an inimical and a threatening place. He traces our modern disgust with the city to the eighteenth-century novels and looks at Romantic literature's assault upon the city. He also examines what literature may tell about the city and vice versa, together with the so-called the myth of the modern city. Howe concludes by describing two significant visions of urban life in modern literature: the first is benign, while the second proceeds in a cultural line from Charles Baudelaire through T. S. Eliot and then through Eliot's many followers.
Joseph Luzzi
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300123555
- eISBN:
- 9780300151787
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300123555.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter begins by presenting a chilling scene in Romantic literature, where Goethe lies abed with his Roman mistress, enraptured by her body and overcome by pleasure, yet composed enough to ...
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This chapter begins by presenting a chilling scene in Romantic literature, where Goethe lies abed with his Roman mistress, enraptured by her body and overcome by pleasure, yet composed enough to discern the outline of metrical patterns along the contours of her back. In an equally signatory Italian coming-of-age moment some hundred years later, Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, from E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, stand together above the Arno, after witnessing a murder over a few liras. Something about the horror they observed has brought them closer and, in a sense, sealed their love. Into their dull world of English manners, an alien and unsettling “Italic” emotional economy has entered, and, George realizes, it will rend asunder the traditional, respectable bonds that their English identity was to have provided them.Less
This chapter begins by presenting a chilling scene in Romantic literature, where Goethe lies abed with his Roman mistress, enraptured by her body and overcome by pleasure, yet composed enough to discern the outline of metrical patterns along the contours of her back. In an equally signatory Italian coming-of-age moment some hundred years later, Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, from E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, stand together above the Arno, after witnessing a murder over a few liras. Something about the horror they observed has brought them closer and, in a sense, sealed their love. Into their dull world of English manners, an alien and unsettling “Italic” emotional economy has entered, and, George realizes, it will rend asunder the traditional, respectable bonds that their English identity was to have provided them.
James A. W. Heffernan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780300195583
- eISBN:
- 9780300206845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300195583.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines seduction by hostesses in Romantic literature. In his autobiography, Confessions, Rosseau became a long-term guest in Madame de Waren's house in the town of Annecy. She remained ...
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This chapter examines seduction by hostesses in Romantic literature. In his autobiography, Confessions, Rosseau became a long-term guest in Madame de Waren's house in the town of Annecy. She remained his surrogate mother and hostess, and shared his bed as well. In Stendhal's Red and Black, the hostess Madame de Rênal treats Julien Sorel, a household servant, as her surrogate son, lover, and guest. The chapter also examines Coleridge's Christabel, a Gothic ballad in which the hostess is both eroticized and repressed.Less
This chapter examines seduction by hostesses in Romantic literature. In his autobiography, Confessions, Rosseau became a long-term guest in Madame de Waren's house in the town of Annecy. She remained his surrogate mother and hostess, and shared his bed as well. In Stendhal's Red and Black, the hostess Madame de Rênal treats Julien Sorel, a household servant, as her surrogate son, lover, and guest. The chapter also examines Coleridge's Christabel, a Gothic ballad in which the hostess is both eroticized and repressed.
