The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

Scottish and Irish Romanticism is the first single-author book to address the main non-English Romanticisms of the British Isles. Murray Pittock begins by questioning the terms of his chosen title as he searches for a definition of Romanticism and for the meaning of "national literature." He proposes certain determining "triggers" for the recognition of the presence of a national literature, and also deals with two major problems which are holding back the development of a new and broader understanding of British Isles Romanticisms: the survival of outdated assumptions in ostensibly more modern paradigms, and a lack of understanding of the full range of dialogues and relationships across the literatures of these islands. The theorists whose works chiefly inform the book are Bakhtin, Fanon and Habermas, although they do not define its arguments, and an alertness to the ways in which other literary theories inform each other is present throughout the book.
Pittock examines in turn the historiography, prejudices, and assumptions of Romantic criticism to date, and how our unexamined prejudices still stand in the way of our understanding of individual traditions and the dialogues between them. He then considers Allan Ramsay's role in song-collecting, hybridizing high cultural genres with broadside forms, creating in synthetic Scots a "language really used by men," and promoting a domestic public sphere. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the Scottish and Irish public spheres in the later eighteenth century, together with the struggle for control over national pasts, and the development of the cults of Romance, the Picturesque and Sentiment: Macpherson, Thomson, Owenson and Moore are among thewriters discussed. Chapter 5 explores the work of Robert Fergusson and his contemporaries in both Scotland and Ireland, examining questions of literary hybridity across not only national but also linguistic borders, while Chapter 6 provides a brief literary history of Burns' descent into critical neglect combined with a revaluation of his poetry in the light of the general argument of the book. Chapter 7 analyzes the complexities of the linguistic and cultural politics of the national tale in Ireland through the work of Maria Edgeworth, while the following chapter considers of Scott in relation to the national tale, Enlightenment historiography, and the European nationalities question. Chapter 9 looks at the importance of the Gothic in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, particularly in the work of James Hogg and Charles Maturin, while Chapter 10, "Fratriotism," explores a new concept in the manner in which Scottish and Irish literary, political and military figures of the period related to Empire.

Exploring the relationship between visual art and literature in the Romantic period, this book makes a claim for a sister-arts 'moment' when the relationship between painting, sculpture, pottery and poetry held special potential for visual artists, engravers and artisans. Elaborating these cultural tensions and associations through a number of case studies, Thora Brylowe sheds light on often untold narratives of English labouring craftsmen and artists as they translated the literary into the visual. Brylowe investigates examples from across the visual spectrum including artefacts, such as Wedgwood's Portland Vase, antiquarianism through the work of William Blake, the career of engraver John Landseer, and the growing influence of libraries and galleries in the period, particularly Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Brylowe artfully traces the shifting cultural connections between the imaginative word and the image in a period that saw new print technologies deluge Britain with its first mass media.

A renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and elan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media. Gay's scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all? Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no "single basket" to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in "families," whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these innovations to Wordsworth's sense that he was writing for posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realized objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own skeptical doubts.
Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these skeptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine hisconfidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

Already in the century before photography's emergence as a mass medium, a diverse popular visual culture had risen to challenge the British literary establishment. The bourgeois fashion for new visual media -- from prints and illustrated books to theatrical spectacles and panoramas -- rejected high Romantic concepts of original genius and the sublime in favor of mass-produced images and the thrill of realistic effects. In response, the literary elite declared the new visual media an offense to Romantic idealism. "Simulations of nature," Coleridge declared, are "loathsome" and "disgusting." The Shock of the Real offers a tour of Romantic visual culture, from the West End stage to the tourist-filled Scottish Highlands, from the panoramas of Leicester Square to the photography studios of Second Empire Paris. But in presenting the relation between word and image in the late Georgian age as a form of culture war, the author also proposes an alternative account of Romantic aesthetic ideology -- as a reaction not against the rationalism of the Enlightenment but against the visual media age being born.

John Ruskin first came to widespread attention for his support for the work of J. M. W. Turner and his defence of naturalism in art. Later he was the executor of Turner's will. The present volume collects Ruskin's essay on Turner's paintings of English Harbours and Ruskins commentary on numerous other works of Turner.

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, "A Rossetti Family Chronology" breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the "Chronolgy" deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the" Author Chronologies" series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.

This text is an interdisciplinary study of Romanticism which focuses on the reception of the Biblical canon in poetry, art and theory. The Bible is acknowledged as the heart of European culture, but as its status as the sacred text of Judaism and Christianity becomes questionable, it remains at the turning point between sacred and secular art in the modern world. The insights of Romanticism are crucial for our understanding of postmodernism as a fundamentally religious movement which acknowledges both the death and rebirth of religious language.

Waiting for the millennium was a major feature of British society at the endof the 18th century. But how exactly did this preoccupation shape—and how was it shaped by—the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call Romantic? These essays investigate a series of millenarians both famous and forgotten, from Coleridge to Cowper, Blake to Byron; and explore the artistic and political subcultures of radical London; the religious sects surrounding Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and the poetics of feminism and Orientalism. Romanticism and Millenarianism presents an expanded and rehistoricized canon of writers and artists who shaped key debates about revolution, empire, gender, and sexuality.

Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of the City of Light during Napoleon III’s Second Empire into the beloved city of today. Together, Napoleon III and his right-hand man, Georges Haussmann, completely rebuilt Paris in less than two decades—a breathtaking achievement made possible not only by the emperor’s vision and Haussmann’s determination, but by the regime’s unrelenting authoritarianism, augmented by the booming economy that Napoleon fostered. Yet a number of Parisians refused to comply with the restrictions that censorship and entrenched institutional taste imposed. Mary McAuliffe follows the lives of artists such as Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet, as well as writers such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, while from exile, Victor Hugo continued to fire literary broadsides at the emperor he detested. McAuliffe brings to life a pivotal era encompassing not only the physical restructuring of Paris but also the innovative forms of banking and money-lending that financed industrialization as well as the city’s transformation. This in turn created new wealth and flaunted excess, even while producing extreme poverty. Even more deeply, change was occurring in the way people looked at and understood the world around them, given the new ease of transportation and communication, the popularization of photography, and the emergence of what would soon be known as Impressionism in art and Naturalism and Realism in literature—artistic yearnings that would flower in the Belle Epoque. Napoleon III, whose reign abruptly ended after he led France into a devastating war against Germany, has been forgotten. But the Paris that he created has endured, brought to vivid life through McAuliffe’s rich illustrations and evocative narrative.

Shortlisted, Marilyn Gaull Book Award Techno-Magism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theater of early nineteenth-century England and Europe but also communicative technologies invented after the British Romantic period, such as photography, film, video, and digital screens. This proleptic abutting points to one way we can understand the implicit exceptionality wagered by reading Romanticism through media studies and media theory. Techno-Magism argues that both media studies and the concept of mediation in general can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction, an unavoidable consequence of thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media. The book thinks that relationship through the catachrestic practice of a techno-magism, a technics of inscription always outside the causalities of a dialectical economy. The book further pursues two interrelated ideas: the structural incommensurability of the cut and the unapologetic presentism of the constellation. Marked by its late capitalist moment of composition, the book explores the continuity between the social character of Romantic and post-Romantic media, in terms of commodity culture, revolution, and the ecological devastation of the anthropocene.

Blake's only wood engravings, made near the end of his life for a school edition of Virgil, are among his most lyrical and enduringly influential creations. This is their first publication as a stand-alone book, with the original text of Ambrose Philips' version of the first Eclogue of Virgil.

This special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is devoted to William Blake. It explores the British and European reception of Blake's work from the late nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on the counterculture. Opening with two articles by the late Michael Horovitz, an important figure in the 'Blake Renaissance' of the 1960s, the issue goes on to investigate the ideological struggle over Blake in the early part of the twentieth century, with particular reference to W. B. Yeats. This is followed by articles on the artistic avant-garde and underground of the 1960s and on Blake's significance for science fiction authors of the 1970s. The issue closes with an article on the contemporary Belgian art collective maelstrOEm reEvolution. -- .