Chris Baldick
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122494
- eISBN:
- 9780191671432
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122494.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other ...
More
This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of ‘monstrosity’ generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The book shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.Less
This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of ‘monstrosity’ generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues and protean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The book shows that while the myth did come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.
Harry Brighouse
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780199257874
- eISBN:
- 9780191598845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199257876.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Responds to a series of objections to the argument for autonomy‐facilitating education, including objections from parental rights (put by Charles Fried), from religious freedom, from cultural rights, ...
More
Responds to a series of objections to the argument for autonomy‐facilitating education, including objections from parental rights (put by Charles Fried), from religious freedom, from cultural rights, and from neutrality. It discusses further objections, which take the need for autonomy seriously, from William Galston and Shelley Burtt. It contains a detailed discussion of the Yoder versus Wisconsin case, in which Old Order Amish parents successfully claimed the right to withdraw their children from any form of schooling at the age of 14.Less
Responds to a series of objections to the argument for autonomy‐facilitating education, including objections from parental rights (put by Charles Fried), from religious freedom, from cultural rights, and from neutrality. It discusses further objections, which take the need for autonomy seriously, from William Galston and Shelley Burtt. It contains a detailed discussion of the Yoder versus Wisconsin case, in which Old Order Amish parents successfully claimed the right to withdraw their children from any form of schooling at the age of 14.
Charles Issawi
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195118131
- eISBN:
- 9780199854554
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195118131.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a ...
More
Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a study of past encounters and conflicts between the world's major cultures can shed light on their nature and importance. Ranging in scope from the great ancient civilizations to Shelley's passion for the Middle East, from the economics of the Ottoman empire to the pre-eminence of English as an international language, this collection reflects the many interests of its author, with an emphasis on the Middle East, whose cultural conflict with the West is of concern to us today.Less
Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a study of past encounters and conflicts between the world's major cultures can shed light on their nature and importance. Ranging in scope from the great ancient civilizations to Shelley's passion for the Middle East, from the economics of the Ottoman empire to the pre-eminence of English as an international language, this collection reflects the many interests of its author, with an emphasis on the Middle East, whose cultural conflict with the West is of concern to us today.
Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195073843
- eISBN:
- 9780199855179
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195073843.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The chapter attempts to uncover Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship with his mother, Elizabeth Shelley, in his infancy and youth. However, the limited material available requires the use of ...
More
The chapter attempts to uncover Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship with his mother, Elizabeth Shelley, in his infancy and youth. However, the limited material available requires the use of interpretive skills. The accounting begins with Lady Shelley’s life prior to marriage with Sir Timothy Shelley and residence at Field Place. From letters and third party accounts, Elizabeth Shelley’s maternal behavior and qualities during Percy’s birth and adolescence are theorized and discussed. The possible influence of these behaviors over Shelley’s childhood, his burgeoning talent, and his eventual outlook in life are also tackled. The extent of Lady Shelley’s maternal influence on Shelley’s adult life is also analyzed. Linkages between Shelley’s prevalent use of feminine and “goddess” ideas in his literary pieces and his mother’s undeniable influence on his psyche are explored. The remaining section analyzes the mother–son alliance in their complex relationship, in contrast to the typical maternal conflicts described in previous segments.Less
The chapter attempts to uncover Percy Bysshe Shelley’s relationship with his mother, Elizabeth Shelley, in his infancy and youth. However, the limited material available requires the use of interpretive skills. The accounting begins with Lady Shelley’s life prior to marriage with Sir Timothy Shelley and residence at Field Place. From letters and third party accounts, Elizabeth Shelley’s maternal behavior and qualities during Percy’s birth and adolescence are theorized and discussed. The possible influence of these behaviors over Shelley’s childhood, his burgeoning talent, and his eventual outlook in life are also tackled. The extent of Lady Shelley’s maternal influence on Shelley’s adult life is also analyzed. Linkages between Shelley’s prevalent use of feminine and “goddess” ideas in his literary pieces and his mother’s undeniable influence on his psyche are explored. The remaining section analyzes the mother–son alliance in their complex relationship, in contrast to the typical maternal conflicts described in previous segments.
Bernard Schweizer
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199751389
- eISBN:
- 9780199894864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751389.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in ...
More
Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in return, and this chapter documents the reception of his controversial works. The influences on Swinburne, notably of Blake and Shelley, are also discussed, as well as how Swinburne put his own stamp on the theme of God-hatred by offering alternative pagan deities of fertility and love. Swinburne is not only unusual because he so openly declares his hatred of God but also because his eroticized work violated Victorian standards of decency in more ways than one. This chapter contains compelling close readings of Swinburne’s work, revealing just how radical his denunciations of both Yahweh and Christ were and documenting how this attitude was intertwined with his republicanism and working-class sympathies.Less
Algernon Swinburne is possibly the first unapologetic misotheist who did not choose self-censorship and concealment but rather boldly announced his hatred of God. This earned him much hostility in return, and this chapter documents the reception of his controversial works. The influences on Swinburne, notably of Blake and Shelley, are also discussed, as well as how Swinburne put his own stamp on the theme of God-hatred by offering alternative pagan deities of fertility and love. Swinburne is not only unusual because he so openly declares his hatred of God but also because his eroticized work violated Victorian standards of decency in more ways than one. This chapter contains compelling close readings of Swinburne’s work, revealing just how radical his denunciations of both Yahweh and Christ were and documenting how this attitude was intertwined with his republicanism and working-class sympathies.
KAREN O’BRIEN
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780197262795
- eISBN:
- 9780191753954
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197262795.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to ...
More
This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to empire was a central form of imagination. It argues that the major poets of this era not only articulated a powerfully anti-imperial vision of the world, but also contended that artistic culture could not flourish under the political conditions of modern imperialism. This is partly a historical claim, and one which assumes that poetry in this period played an important role in the public contestation of Britain's changing place in the world; but it is also a literary claim about the continuing salience of the classical and early modern traditions which governed poetic forms of imagination right up to the Romantic age. The purpose is not simply to record a series of improvised poetic responses to the growth of the British Empire. Rather, it is to show how a poetry grounded since the Renaissance in universal habits of thought and expansive modes of territorial vision was transposed onto an evolving historical reality, and how this process of imaginative transposition took on a heightened sense of political urgency as the implications of Britain's imperial activities broke upon public consciousness.Less
This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to empire was a central form of imagination. It argues that the major poets of this era not only articulated a powerfully anti-imperial vision of the world, but also contended that artistic culture could not flourish under the political conditions of modern imperialism. This is partly a historical claim, and one which assumes that poetry in this period played an important role in the public contestation of Britain's changing place in the world; but it is also a literary claim about the continuing salience of the classical and early modern traditions which governed poetic forms of imagination right up to the Romantic age. The purpose is not simply to record a series of improvised poetic responses to the growth of the British Empire. Rather, it is to show how a poetry grounded since the Renaissance in universal habits of thought and expansive modes of territorial vision was transposed onto an evolving historical reality, and how this process of imaginative transposition took on a heightened sense of political urgency as the implications of Britain's imperial activities broke upon public consciousness.
Herbert F. Tucker
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232987
- eISBN:
- 9780191716447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that ...
More
British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that pressure Scottish, Welsh, Dissenting, and female perspectives gained a fresh purchase. A new generation of Romantic poets broke with their elders' revolutionary/reactionary formation by breaking down the master narrative of trauma and healing that went with it. Instead, epic became a stylistic option, a manipulable and marketable repertory of forms. The Regency became an epic era of special effects, including Moore's epic-scented entertainment, Hunt's hedonist indulgence on Dantesque premisses, the epic resonance that Keats miraculously achieved without benefit of plot, and Shelley's utopian art of permanent revolution spinning outside history. To crown all, Byron's radical transvaluation of the genre both summed the tradition to date and, by the thoroughness of an inimitable celebrity irony, threatened to put an end to epic as his countrymen had known it.Less
British postwar epic disclosed fissures of faction within a national unity that had been artificially constrained by two decades' steady pressure from the enemy without. With the lifting of that pressure Scottish, Welsh, Dissenting, and female perspectives gained a fresh purchase. A new generation of Romantic poets broke with their elders' revolutionary/reactionary formation by breaking down the master narrative of trauma and healing that went with it. Instead, epic became a stylistic option, a manipulable and marketable repertory of forms. The Regency became an epic era of special effects, including Moore's epic-scented entertainment, Hunt's hedonist indulgence on Dantesque premisses, the epic resonance that Keats miraculously achieved without benefit of plot, and Shelley's utopian art of permanent revolution spinning outside history. To crown all, Byron's radical transvaluation of the genre both summed the tradition to date and, by the thoroughness of an inimitable celebrity irony, threatened to put an end to epic as his countrymen had known it.
Julian North
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199571987
- eISBN:
- 9780191722363
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571987.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This chapter focuses on Mary Shelley's career as a biographer and her role in shaping the afterlives of Percy Shelley from the 1820s. It reads her fragmented attempts at a posthumous memoir (an ...
More
This chapter focuses on Mary Shelley's career as a biographer and her role in shaping the afterlives of Percy Shelley from the 1820s. It reads her fragmented attempts at a posthumous memoir (an early, unpublished sketch, followed by three influential editions of his work) in the context of the wider picture of biography at the period – looking at the influence of William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Thomas Moore on her work. It reads her ‘Lives’ of Shelley in relation to her major biographical publication in the 1830s: her essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. It looks at how her early, domesticated Shelley is gradually replaced by a man whose failures of domestic responsibility are tied to his refusal to connect with his readers. The final section reviews the later nineteenth‐century biographical literature on Shelley, by T. J. Hogg, Lady Shelley, and Edward Dowden.Less
This chapter focuses on Mary Shelley's career as a biographer and her role in shaping the afterlives of Percy Shelley from the 1820s. It reads her fragmented attempts at a posthumous memoir (an early, unpublished sketch, followed by three influential editions of his work) in the context of the wider picture of biography at the period – looking at the influence of William Godwin, Mary Hays, and Thomas Moore on her work. It reads her ‘Lives’ of Shelley in relation to her major biographical publication in the 1830s: her essays for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. It looks at how her early, domesticated Shelley is gradually replaced by a man whose failures of domestic responsibility are tied to his refusal to connect with his readers. The final section reviews the later nineteenth‐century biographical literature on Shelley, by T. J. Hogg, Lady Shelley, and Edward Dowden.
Timothy Webb
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199588541
- eISBN:
- 9780191741845
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588541.003.0011
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron all encountered Italy both as a vivid reality and as ‘classic ground’. Although their sojourns in Rome (especially that of Byron) were relatively brief, that ...
More
Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron all encountered Italy both as a vivid reality and as ‘classic ground’. Although their sojourns in Rome (especially that of Byron) were relatively brief, that ‘delightful’ city played a significant part in the lives of all three and features prominently in the work of Percy Shelley and Byron. Like the Shelleys (whose son had died in the city), Byron was affected by a sense of Rome as essentially a city of the dead; he regarded contemporary Romans (like the Greeks who feature in his earlier poetry) as degenerate inheritors of traditions they could never emulate. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage finds some consolation in the durabilities of classical literature but is haunted by the recognition that history is monotonously predictable. The Shelleys allowed themselves an interpretation which was less melancholy: the enduring energies of nature could point towards liberation and an escape from the ghostly constraints of history.Less
Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Byron all encountered Italy both as a vivid reality and as ‘classic ground’. Although their sojourns in Rome (especially that of Byron) were relatively brief, that ‘delightful’ city played a significant part in the lives of all three and features prominently in the work of Percy Shelley and Byron. Like the Shelleys (whose son had died in the city), Byron was affected by a sense of Rome as essentially a city of the dead; he regarded contemporary Romans (like the Greeks who feature in his earlier poetry) as degenerate inheritors of traditions they could never emulate. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage finds some consolation in the durabilities of classical literature but is haunted by the recognition that history is monotonously predictable. The Shelleys allowed themselves an interpretation which was less melancholy: the enduring energies of nature could point towards liberation and an escape from the ghostly constraints of history.
Mary Shelley
David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262533287
- eISBN:
- 9780262340267
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262533287.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has endured in the popular imagination for two hundred years. Begun as a ghost story by an intellectually and socially precocious eighteen-year-old author during a cold ...
More
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has endured in the popular imagination for two hundred years. Begun as a ghost story by an intellectually and socially precocious eighteen-year-old author during a cold and rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, the dramatic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his stitched-together creature can be read as the ultimate parable of scientific hubris. Victor, “the modern Prometheus,” tried to do what he perhaps should have left to Nature: create life. Although the novel is most often discussed in literary-historical terms—as a seminal example of romanticism or as a groundbreaking early work of science fiction—Mary Shelley was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments and incorporated them into her story. In our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering, this edition of Frankenstein will resonate forcefully for readers with a background or interest in science and engineering, and anyone intrigued by the fundamental questions of creativity and responsibility. This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript—meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on the text—with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story. The result is a unique and accessible edition of one of the most thought-provoking and influential novels ever written. Essays by Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Heather E. Douglas, Josephine Johnston, Kate MacCord, Jane Maienschein, Anne K. Mellor, Alfred NordmannLess
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has endured in the popular imagination for two hundred years. Begun as a ghost story by an intellectually and socially precocious eighteen-year-old author during a cold and rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, the dramatic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his stitched-together creature can be read as the ultimate parable of scientific hubris. Victor, “the modern Prometheus,” tried to do what he perhaps should have left to Nature: create life. Although the novel is most often discussed in literary-historical terms—as a seminal example of romanticism or as a groundbreaking early work of science fiction—Mary Shelley was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments and incorporated them into her story. In our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering, this edition of Frankenstein will resonate forcefully for readers with a background or interest in science and engineering, and anyone intrigued by the fundamental questions of creativity and responsibility. This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript—meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on the text—with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story. The result is a unique and accessible edition of one of the most thought-provoking and influential novels ever written. Essays by Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Heather E. Douglas, Josephine Johnston, Kate MacCord, Jane Maienschein, Anne K. Mellor, Alfred Nordmann
Mike W. Martin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199845217
- eISBN:
- 9780199933068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199845217.003.0012
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, General
Does happiness promote virtue, and unhappiness cause vice? Mary Shelley dramatizes the issue in Frankenstein, and her insights into the moral psychology of happiness deserve attention. Her articulate ...
More
Does happiness promote virtue, and unhappiness cause vice? Mary Shelley dramatizes the issue in Frankenstein, and her insights into the moral psychology of happiness deserve attention. Her articulate monster argues, based on his personal experience (and reminiscent of Rousseau), that happiness promotes virtue and unhappiness produces vice. Victor Frankenstein largely shares this “happiness principle.” Although this agreement between the two protagonists is central to the novel’s plot, Shelley conveys the more nuanced view. Happiness does tend to promote virtue, and unhappiness often promotes vice, but the unqualified belief in the happiness principle can function as a source of moral evasion.Less
Does happiness promote virtue, and unhappiness cause vice? Mary Shelley dramatizes the issue in Frankenstein, and her insights into the moral psychology of happiness deserve attention. Her articulate monster argues, based on his personal experience (and reminiscent of Rousseau), that happiness promotes virtue and unhappiness produces vice. Victor Frankenstein largely shares this “happiness principle.” Although this agreement between the two protagonists is central to the novel’s plot, Shelley conveys the more nuanced view. Happiness does tend to promote virtue, and unhappiness often promotes vice, but the unqualified belief in the happiness principle can function as a source of moral evasion.
Jonathan Sachs
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195376128
- eISBN:
- 9780199871643
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195376128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted ...
More
Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle‐18th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has arisen in the context of the articulation of a modernity distinguished either by its full‐scale rejection of classical precedents or by its embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the Roman past for Romantic writers, and transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book asserts the centrality of Rome in a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti‐democratic, or “right royal.” By exposing how Roman references help structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacts fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book initiates a major overhaul in how we understand the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.Less
Romantic Antiquity examines how Romantic‐period writers deploy Roman republican precedents to constitute their vision of literary and political modernity. While scholars have long noted the fascination with Roman literature and history expressed by many preeminent British cultural figures of the early and middle‐18th century, they have only sparingly commented on the increasingly vexed role Rome played during the subsequent Romantic period. This critical oversight has arisen in the context of the articulation of a modernity distinguished either by its full‐scale rejection of classical precedents or by its embrace of Greece at the expense of Rome. In contrast, Romantic Antiquity argues that Rome is relevant to the Romantic period not as the continuation of an earlier neoclassicism, but rather as a concept that is simultaneously transformed and transformative: transformed in the sense that new models of historical understanding produced a changed conceptualization of the Roman past for Romantic writers, and transformative because Rome became the locus for new understandings of historicity itself and therefore a way to comprehend changes associated with modernity. The book asserts the centrality of Rome in a variety of literary events, including the British response to the French revolution, the Jacobin novel, Byron's late rejection of Romantic poetics, Shelley's Hellenism, and the London theatre, where the staging of Rome is directly responsible for Hazlitt's understanding of poetry as anti‐democratic, or “right royal.” By exposing how Roman references help structure Romantic poetics and theories of the imagination, and how this aesthetic work, in turn, impacts fundamental aspects of political modernity like mass democracy and the spread of empire, the book initiates a major overhaul in how we understand the presence of antiquity in a modernity with which we continue to struggle.
Mary Shelley
David H. Guston, Ed Finn, Jason Scott Robert, Joey Eschrich, and Mary Drago (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262533287
- eISBN:
- 9780262340267
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262533287.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The editors provide a brief chronology of important dates in the history of science in the context of Mary Shelley’s life and important aspects of the novel.
The editors provide a brief chronology of important dates in the history of science in the context of Mary Shelley’s life and important aspects of the novel.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent ...
More
This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.Less
This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his ...
More
This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his response to Romantic culture by setting that response in dialogue with his evaluation of Dante. It is argued that Yeats's exaltation of Dante for being able to attain ‘Unity of Being’ cannot disguise his recognition of affinity with, and indebtedness to Romantic poets such as Shelley. The chapter's second half explores in detail the nature of Yeats's self-declared status as a ‘last Romantic’ in relation to a number of later poems, including ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ and ‘The Gyres’. Complex intertextual relations are discussed between Yeats and his Romantic precursors (including Keats in his Odes). The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Yeats returns to the Romantics, less for a system of belief than for examples of how to dramatize conflict.Less
This chapter on Yeats explores the work of his mid-to-late career. It begins by examining ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, a pivotal poem written in a crucial period for Yeats, and one in which he sharpens his response to Romantic culture by setting that response in dialogue with his evaluation of Dante. It is argued that Yeats's exaltation of Dante for being able to attain ‘Unity of Being’ cannot disguise his recognition of affinity with, and indebtedness to Romantic poets such as Shelley. The chapter's second half explores in detail the nature of Yeats's self-declared status as a ‘last Romantic’ in relation to a number of later poems, including ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ and ‘The Gyres’. Complex intertextual relations are discussed between Yeats and his Romantic precursors (including Keats in his Odes). The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Yeats returns to the Romantics, less for a system of belief than for examples of how to dramatize conflict.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
The chapter reads ‘Esthétique du Mal’ as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. It argues that Stevens's poem, written at a time of ...
More
The chapter reads ‘Esthétique du Mal’ as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. It argues that Stevens's poem, written at a time of historical crisis (in 1944), addresses the relationship between art and suffering. It draws links between Stevens's poem and an array of Romantic works, including Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, which find that what Stevens calls ‘the dark italics’ of evil compel the poetic imagination. Even Wordsworth's optimism does not forego awareness of forces that cry out against, even as they are subsumed within an imaginatively celebratory synthesis. Stevens, if read as someone whose poetry serves as a form of literary criticism, allows one to see that Romantic poets such as Shelley are often at their finest when voicing entangling or contradictory surmises about the relationship between the Utopian imagination and the pressures of reality. He allows us, therefore, to defend the Romantics against the charge that their vision is tainted by facile disregard of evil and suffering.Less
The chapter reads ‘Esthétique du Mal’ as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. It argues that Stevens's poem, written at a time of historical crisis (in 1944), addresses the relationship between art and suffering. It draws links between Stevens's poem and an array of Romantic works, including Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, which find that what Stevens calls ‘the dark italics’ of evil compel the poetic imagination. Even Wordsworth's optimism does not forego awareness of forces that cry out against, even as they are subsumed within an imaginatively celebratory synthesis. Stevens, if read as someone whose poetry serves as a form of literary criticism, allows one to see that Romantic poets such as Shelley are often at their finest when voicing entangling or contradictory surmises about the relationship between the Utopian imagination and the pressures of reality. He allows us, therefore, to defend the Romantics against the charge that their vision is tainted by facile disregard of evil and suffering.
Diego Saglia
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199584628
- eISBN:
- 9780191739095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584628.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
This chapter discusses various female authors' views of the nation (England, Britain, Italy, or an abstract entity) as a political and cultural structure in the mirror of Dante and his verse. It ...
More
This chapter discusses various female authors' views of the nation (England, Britain, Italy, or an abstract entity) as a political and cultural structure in the mirror of Dante and his verse. It starts by considering Anna Seward's epistolary exchanges with Henry Francis Cary in the 1790s, where she censured his passion for the Italian poet because of her concerns about a progressive loss of Englishness in the national poetical tradition. It then examines Felicia Hemans's poem ‘The Maremma’ (1820), in which she reinvents the tale of Pia de' Tolomei through her own poetical idiom as well as Shakespearean, and therefore quintessentially national, characterization and formal patterns. It concludes with Mary Shelley's constructions of Dante as a major emblem of oppositional and ‘proto-liberal’ ideas of the nation in her essay ‘Giovanni Villani’ (1823) and in Valperga (1823), her novel about the medieval Italian republics. The chapter draws attention to the presence of Romantic women's works on Dante to emphasize the need for further research into this presence. Concentrating specifically on their ‘national’ approaches to the poet, it points out some ways to reinstate female contributions to the Romantic re-evaluation of the Italian bard and their relevance to discourses of cultural and political identity and agency.Less
This chapter discusses various female authors' views of the nation (England, Britain, Italy, or an abstract entity) as a political and cultural structure in the mirror of Dante and his verse. It starts by considering Anna Seward's epistolary exchanges with Henry Francis Cary in the 1790s, where she censured his passion for the Italian poet because of her concerns about a progressive loss of Englishness in the national poetical tradition. It then examines Felicia Hemans's poem ‘The Maremma’ (1820), in which she reinvents the tale of Pia de' Tolomei through her own poetical idiom as well as Shakespearean, and therefore quintessentially national, characterization and formal patterns. It concludes with Mary Shelley's constructions of Dante as a major emblem of oppositional and ‘proto-liberal’ ideas of the nation in her essay ‘Giovanni Villani’ (1823) and in Valperga (1823), her novel about the medieval Italian republics. The chapter draws attention to the presence of Romantic women's works on Dante to emphasize the need for further research into this presence. Concentrating specifically on their ‘national’ approaches to the poet, it points out some ways to reinstate female contributions to the Romantic re-evaluation of the Italian bard and their relevance to discourses of cultural and political identity and agency.
Jonathan Sachs
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195376128
- eISBN:
- 9780199871643
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195376128.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Shelley's later writing, despite its obvious fascination with Greece, represents Romanticism's most complicated engagement with Rome. Though considerable attention has been given to Shelley's ...
More
Shelley's later writing, despite its obvious fascination with Greece, represents Romanticism's most complicated engagement with Rome. Though considerable attention has been given to Shelley's Hellenism, scholars have little to say about Shelley's use of Rome. This chapter argues that such critical oversight has left us with an incomplete understanding of the meaning and importance of Shelley's Hellenism, one which cannot be remedied without a sharper sense of Shelley's appreciation of antiquity more broadly and of the relationship between Greece and Rome in particular. To watch the changing fortunes of Athens and Rome in such later works as The Philosophical View of Reform, the “Ode to Liberty,” The Defence of Poetry, and Hellas reveals the critical role that Rome plays in Shelley's historicism and his strategies for understanding the past, which, in turn, exposes the relationship of these techniques to the deeply political functions of Shelley's classicism and his historiography.Less
Shelley's later writing, despite its obvious fascination with Greece, represents Romanticism's most complicated engagement with Rome. Though considerable attention has been given to Shelley's Hellenism, scholars have little to say about Shelley's use of Rome. This chapter argues that such critical oversight has left us with an incomplete understanding of the meaning and importance of Shelley's Hellenism, one which cannot be remedied without a sharper sense of Shelley's appreciation of antiquity more broadly and of the relationship between Greece and Rome in particular. To watch the changing fortunes of Athens and Rome in such later works as The Philosophical View of Reform, the “Ode to Liberty,” The Defence of Poetry, and Hellas reveals the critical role that Rome plays in Shelley's historicism and his strategies for understanding the past, which, in turn, exposes the relationship of these techniques to the deeply political functions of Shelley's classicism and his historiography.
Julian North
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199571987
- eISBN:
- 9780191722363
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571987.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, ...
More
This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and others, in the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. It argues that, from Johnson and Boswell onwards, the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers ‘domesticated’ Byron, Shelley and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness. Biography was an influential transmitter of a myth of ‘the Romantic poet’, as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. Victorian biographers of the Romantic poets have been criticized for taming their subjects – making them respectable ‐ and biography was regarded with suspicion by the Romantic poets themselves. Yet Lives of the poets were also celebrated by critics, publishers and readers at the period, for their capacity to bring these poets home to the reader, in a sense that the poetry itself could not.Less
This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and others, in the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. It argues that, from Johnson and Boswell onwards, the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers ‘domesticated’ Byron, Shelley and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness. Biography was an influential transmitter of a myth of ‘the Romantic poet’, as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. Victorian biographers of the Romantic poets have been criticized for taming their subjects – making them respectable ‐ and biography was regarded with suspicion by the Romantic poets themselves. Yet Lives of the poets were also celebrated by critics, publishers and readers at the period, for their capacity to bring these poets home to the reader, in a sense that the poetry itself could not.
Morton D. Paley
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262175
- eISBN:
- 9780191698828
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262175.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
