Academic literature on the topic 'Romanticism 19th century'

This dissertation examines representations of authorship and subjecthood in the Romantic period as products of market position and publishing mode. In doing so, it views the traditional concept of Romantic individualism commonly associated with the solitary poet as a strategy developed to help the author navigate a complex writer’s market. Rather than focusing upon individualism as the defining authorial model for this period, however, my project presents it as one example of a diverse range of representational strategies employed by different authors operating from different positions within the market. To this end, this study compares the authorial model of the independent poet with authors engaged in a variety of other modes of publishing, including hack essayists, serialized poets, periodical editors, and celebrity authors. By examining authors operating across different publishing modes, I demonstrate that each one’s concept of public identity is shaped principally by his or her particular market position, as defined by working relationships with peers, involvement in the particulars of publishing, exchanges with the critical press, and engagement with readers. These authors include William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charles Lamb, and Francis Jeffrey. By juxtaposing their different models of authorship, this study seeks to bridge the longstanding discourse regarding the social isolation of the Romantic poet with more contemporary streams of scholarship into the material realities of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Drawing upon the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School and Eric Gans’ theory of Generative Anthropology, I examine how different strategies of representation were developed to preserve personal meaning and sustain public attention. By comparing responses to the rise of the writer’s market and the ubiquity of print culture, this dissertation argues that Romantic period authors demonstrate a distinctly modern understanding of public identity as a product of mediation in mass media culture.

Following recent critical work on writers' representations of sociability in Romantic literature, this thesis examines in detail the textual strategies (such as allusion, acts of address, and the use of 'coterie' symbols or references) which writers used to seek to establish a friendly or sympathetic relationship with a particular reader or readers, or to create and define a sense of community identity between readers. The thesis focuses on specific relationships between pairs and groups of writers (who form one another's first readers), and examines 'sociable' genres like letters, manuscript albums, occasional poetry, and periodical essays in a diverse series of author case-studies (Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, John Keats and Leigh Hunt). Such genres, the thesis argues, show how manuscript and print culture could frequently overlap and intersect, meaning that writers confronted the demands of two co-existing audiences - one private and familiar, the other public and unknown - in the same work. Rather than arguing that writers used manuscript culture practices and produced 'coterie' works purely to avoid confronting their anxieties about publishing in the commercial sphere of print culture, the thesis suggests that in producing such 'coterie' works writers engaged with and reflected contemporary philosophical and political concerns about the relationship between the individual and wider communities. In these works, writers engaged with the legacy of eighteenth-century philosophical ideas about the role (and limitations) of the sympathetic imagination in maintaining social communities, and with interpretative theories about the best kind of reader. Furthermore, the thesis argues that reading literary texts in the specific, material context in which they are 'published' to particular readers, either in print, manuscript, or letters, is vital to understanding writer/reader relationships in the Romantic period. This approach reveals how within each publication space, individual texts could be placed (either by their writers, by editors, or by other readers) in meaningful relationships with other texts, absorbing or appropriating them into new interpretative contexts.

Walt Whitman has long been celebrated as a Romantic writer who celebrates the self, reveres Nature, claims unity in all things, and sings praises to humanity. However, some of what Whitman has to say has been overlooked. Whitman often questioned the goodness of humanity. He recognized evil in various shapes. He pondered death and the imperturbability of Nature to human death. He exhibited nightmarish imagery in some of his works and gory violence in others. While Whitman has long been called a celebratory poet, he is nevertheless also in part a writer of the Dark Romantic.

My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.

This thesis reassesses the evidence surrounding Edward Irving’s controversial teaching about the doctrine of the incarnation. Irving was a controversial figure in his own day and his legacy has been contested ever since he was dismissed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for teaching that Christ had a ‘fallen’ human nature. This thesis re-examines the emergence and significance of Irving’s teaching. It evaluates the scholarly consensus that his distinctive Christology was a stable feature of his thought and argues the case that his thinking in this area did change significantly. Methodologically, this thesis draws on some aspects of Quentin Skinner’s work in the importance of context (Chapter Two) to understand Irving as he really was, rather than in terms of his later significance. In the light of this, Irving’s biography is examined in Chapter Three, before moving into a discussion of the influential part played by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Irving’s intellectual development (Chapter Four). The second half of the thesis then moves on to consider the development of Irving’s Christology and the questions surrounding its provenance and development (Chapters Five and Six). Finally, in Chapter Seven, possible sources of explanation for Irving’s distinctive ideas about the Incarnation are exhibited and assessed. The argument of this thesis is that Edward Irving developed an account of the Incarnation that was essentially novel, in response to the Romantic ideas that he had derived from Coleridge. In accordance with Coleridge’s assessment, it is argued that this derivation was rendered more complex by Irving’s incomplete apprehension of Coleridge’s underlying philosophy. Nonetheless, it is argued that Edward Irving’s teaching presented a Romantic version of Christ, and that this distinctive conception owes more to the times in which Irving lived than to the theological tradition to which he claimed adherence.

In the course of the romantic movement, the vision of the poetic ministry has been expressed by several poets through the figure of Jesus at the Mount of Olives. While Lamartine appropriates the suffering of Christ in order to proclaim himself to be a poet-prophet, Vigny refuses the silence of God. He, thus, accomplishes his poetic mission against God. Whereas Hugo does not take into consideration the meaning of Jesus' agony in order to make the Gethsemane a place of glory, Nerval rejects the notion of a Christlike mission. Hence, by putting into words the death of God, he foretells what Hugo Friedrich will later call an "empty transcendence", which is the very sign of modern poetics. Romanticism carried within itself the signs of the end of transcendence of poetics. Therefore, we will analyse the transition of romanticism to modernity in these four poems1 through the representation of Jesus Christ at Gethsemane.<br>1"Gethsemani ou la mort de Julia" d'Alphonse de Lamartine, "Le Mont des Oliviers" d'Alfred de Vigny, un extrait (strophes VI, VII et VIII du Chapitre intitule Jesus-Christ) de La Fin de Satan de Victor Hugo et "Le Jardin des Oliviers" de Gerard de Nerval.

Il presente studio si propone di ricostruire, in una dimensione monografica, la figura di Francesco Scaramuzza, personalità artistica prolifica che ha determinato nella prima metà dell’Ottocento il nuovo corso della pittura parmense. Interprete e portatore di un Romanticismo atipico, fu debitore, a suo modo, tanto della lezione dei Nazareni quanto, più tardi, della svolta lombarda verso i temi contemporanei, senza mai trascurare l’amata impronta correggesca. L’artista attraversa tre distinti momenti di committenza, dal governo restaurato di Maria Luigia d’Asburgo, dopo la parentesi napoleonica, all’infelice intervallo borbonico, presto sfociato nell’annessione al regno Sardo di Vittorio Emanuele II. Sotto la sovrana austriaca giunge all’apice della carriera, subendo, però, una battuta d’arresto con i Borbone a causa delle sue note simpatie libertarie. Trova una conferma nel nuovo governo unitario, il quale gli affida il compito di illustrare la Divina Commedia, la sua opera più nota e più riuscita, che segnerà, dopo diciassette anni di strenuo lavoro, il punto di arrivo della sua carriera d’artista.<br>This study aims to reconstruct, in a monographic dimension, the profile of Francesco Scaramuzza, a prolific artist who determined the new course of painting in Parma in the first half of the 19th century. Interpreter and bearer of an atypical Romanticism, in his artistic development he was inspired by the lessons of the Nazarenes as much as by the Lombard interest in contemporary subjects, without neglecting the beloved imprint of Correggio’s style. Throughout his career he went through three different patronages, from the restored regime of Marie Louise of Hapsburg, after the Napoleonic period, to the unhappy Bourbon interlude, ended quickly with the annexation to the reign of Vittorio Emanuele II. Under the Austrian sovereign he reached the peak of his career, suffering, however, a setback under the Bourbon government because of his well-known libertarian sympathies. His value was recognized eventually by the establishment of the united Italy, who entrusted him to illustrate the Divine Comedy, his most famous and successful work, which will mark, after seventeen years of strenuous work, the conclusion of his career as an artist.