Author: Karsten Runge
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638194809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), Ruhr-University of Bochum (Faculty for Philology), language: English, abstract: The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of accelerating cultural, social, economic, and political change. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832 are the political cornerstones of an age that saw the promotion of human rights and civil liberties against established systems of absolutist governments and limited possibilities of political participation. Democratic ideas that form the constitutional basis of modern Western societies were developed and circulated in a highly-charged political and cultural climate, represented, defended and contested in a bourgeois public sphere that had only come into being as a space of rational contestation in England in the century between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution.1 In philosophy, perhaps the most far-reaching development in the eighteenth century was the exploration of the individual psyche. John Locke’s empiricist epistemology was based on the idea that the mind of the infant is like a tabula rasa and that there are no innate ideas or moral principles. Instead, Locke argued, the individual’s knowledge springs from his or her own sensory perceptions. This epistemology carried with it a serious social problem: in effect perceivers were deprived of shared views and, isolated in their own perceptions, were cut off from the environment that had produced their knowledge. “Equally isolated from objects and from others, Lockian perceivers can be certain of only their individual mental processes. [...] Certainty, knowledge, and truth become, at best, relational.”2 The problem of the individual’s position in and relation to a society that was already perceptibly fragmenting as a result of economic developments and increased social mobility was debated by philosophers throughout the eighteenth century. David Berkeley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith all in their own ways tried to find a solution to the empirical dilemma they had inherited from Locke and sought to relocate the individual in a social context.3 [...] 1 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962). 2 Regina Hewitt, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma (New York et al.: Peter Lang, 1990), 5f. 3 Ibid., 7-32.
Author: William G. Rowland
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803239180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Literature and the Marketplace addresses one of the great ironies of nineteenth-century British and American literature: the fact that authors of that era, in voicing their alienation from middle-class readers, paradoxically gave expression to feelings of alienation felt by those same readers. As William G. Rowland Jr. points out, romantic writers "thought of the market as conspiring against 'imagination' (Blake) or 'telling the truth' (Melville)" and consequently felt frustrated with literary institutions. Yet their "frustrations, " writes Rowland, "helped to energize romantic work and explain its subsequent and continuing appeal." The book opens with a survey of reading publics in Great Britain and the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. Rowland then presents individual writers-including Wordsworth, Shelley, Hawthorne, Poe, and Emerson-and their relations to their readers. Finally, Rowland shows how the idea of genius was developed by writers as different as Coleridge, Blake, Whitman, and Dickinson and how that idea evolved as an antidote to the commercial literary marketplace of the nineteenth century. A wide-ranging and provocative book, Literature and the Marketplace describes the relations between important British and American authors and the audiences and publishing industries of their era-relations that were troubled, uncertain, and remarkably productive of literature. William G. Rowland Jr. is the Director of Studies at Hereford Residential College, University of Virginia. This is his first book.
Author: Sarah MacKenzie Zimmerman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791441091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Arguing against a persistent view of Romantic lyricism as an inherently introspective mode, this book examines how Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and John Clare recognized end employed the mode's immense capacity for engaging reading audiences in reflections both personal and social. Zimmerman focuses new attention on the Romantic lyric's audiences - not the silent, passive auditor of canonical paradigms, but historical readers and critics who can tell us more than we have asked about the mode's rhetorical possibilities. She situates poems within the specific circumstances of their production and consumption, including the aftermath in England of the French Revolution, rural poverty, the processes of parliamentary enclosure, the biographical contours of poet's careers, and the myriad exchanges among poets, patrons, publishers, critics, and readers in the literary marketplace.
Author: Fiona Stafford
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118773004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis. Provides a clear, lively introduction to Romantic Poetry, backed by academic research and marked by its accessibility to students with little prior experience of poetry Introduces many of the major topics of the age, from politics to publishing, from slavery to sociability, from Milton to the mind of man Encourages direct responses to poems by opening up different aspects of the literature and fresh approaches to reading Discusses the poets' own reading and experience of being read, as well as analysis of the sounds of key poems and the look of the poem on the page Deepens understanding of poems through awareness of their literary, historical, political and personal contexts Includes the major poets of the period, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Burns and Clare —as well as a host of less familiar writers, including women
Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139426052
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This 1999 book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues such as the commercialization of poetry, the gendering of the canon, and the construction of poetic identity. Bennett goes on to discuss the strangely compelling effects which this reception theory produces in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, who have come to embody, for posterity, the figure of the Romantic poet.
Author: Kelvin Everest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
Everest (modern literature, U. of Liverpool) presents the lives and careers of the major English Romantic poets--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron--in relation to the larger historical forces and circumstances of the period, and to the literary culture within and against which they worked and published. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Tom Mole
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.
Author: Andrew Franta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462997
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 15
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Book Description
Dramatic changes in the reading public and literary market in early nineteenth-century England not only altered the relationship between poet and reader, these changes prompted marked changes in conceptions of the poetic text, literary reception, and authorship. With the decline of patronage, the rise of the novel and the periodical press, and the emergence of the mass reading public, poets could no longer assume the existence of an audience for poetry. Andrew Franta examines how the reconfigurations of the literary market and the publishing context transformed the ways poets conceived of their audience and the forms of poetry itself. Through readings of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hemans, and Tennyson, and with close attention to key literary, political, and legal debates, Franta proposes a unique reading of Romanticism and its contribution to modern conceptions of politics and publicity.
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801491177
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
Discusses the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, George Darley, and others.
Author: Harriet Kramer Linkin
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081315703X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks. The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, and Fanny Kemble and argue for a significant rethinking of Romanticism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Grounding their consideration of the poets in cultural, social, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns, the authors contest the received wisdom about Romantic poetry, its authors, its themes, and its audiences. Some of the essays examine the ways in which many of the poets sought to establish stable positions and identities for themselves, while others address the changing nature over time of the reputations of these women poets.
