Chapter XIII Literature 1780-1830: the Romantic Period Maxine Branagh
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Chapter XIII Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell, Barbara Leonardi, Paul Whickman, Matthew Ward and Omar F. Miranda This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell; section 2 by Barbara Leonardi; section 3 by Matthew Ward and Paul Whickman; section 4 is by Omar F. Miranda. 1. General and Prose Works focusing on political and philosophical writings of the Romantic period published in 2015 include both author-specific studies and broader studies of Romantic-era philosophy and its permeation in literary works. These works will be dealt with in the first part of this section. It will then move on to discuss recent work in the field of women’s writing, focusing on three longer works, and articles on Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Mary Tighe, and articles focusing on specific male writers. Finally, this section will deal with works in the field of material and print culture, which account for many of the general and prose works published in 2015. Kevin Gilmartin’s book-length study of William Hazlitt, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (OUP), joins Stephen Burley’s 2014 work, Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics, 1766-1816 (PalMac) in the field, proving that, as Gilmartin argues in his introduction, ‘William Hazlitt has enjoyed a striking revival of interest among literary critics in recent decades’ (p. 1). Gilmartin’s book seeks to offer a better understanding of Hazlitt’s politics in order to ‘deepen our appreciation of the social and collective terms of his literary achievement, and of the wider relations between early nineteenth-century literary and aesthetic criticism and the British radical tradition’ (p. 35). The book is wide-ranging in its analysis of Hazlitt’s political writings. Gilmartin’s combination of careful close reading of Hazlitt’s ‘distinctive political voice’ (p. 25), focusing on style and form, while also situating him in relation to the wider press culture in the period, offers a fascinating and important insight into Hazlitt’s contribution as a political writer within Romantic print culture. Ulf Schulenberg’s Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the idea of a poeticized culture (PalMac) asks ‘[w]hat role has Romanticism played for the development of pragmatism, and especially for the renaissance of pragmatism?’ (p. 4). Schulenberg seeks to answer this question through a study of the poet, Richard Rorty. However, the book’s focus on the significance of pragmatism in the Romantic period in general is probably most valuable for readers of this section. The analysis of Rorty’s writing in the first half of this work paves the way for a discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and Romanticism in the second half. The chapters in this second half focus on ‘how Romantic writers prepared for the establishment of a poeticized culture’ (p. 11) through a discussion of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman in chapters four and five, and William James and John Dewey in chapters six and seven. This wide-ranging work offers a new perspective on the cross-over between pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent’s Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects (PalMac) is a collection of essays which seeks to position Rousseau in a Swiss context and offer new readings of his key philosophies in light of the recognition of the influence of Swiss philosophy, science and the Swiss landscape on Rousseau’s writings and the Romantic authors inspired by him. The work ‘engages with numerous approaches in contemporary scholarship to undertake a re-evaluation of the significance of Rousseau and Switzerland for Romantic studies’ (p. 16). The first essays in the collection focus on re-reading some of Rousseau’s major theories and their representation in Romantic-period works. These include his views on education in Enit K. Steiner’s chapter ‘Romantic Education, Concealment, and Orchestrated Desire in Rousseau’s Emile and Frances Brooke’s Julia Mandeville’ (pp. 21-37), and ‘the formation of the Romantic conception of suicide’ (p. 38) in Michelle Faubert’s ‘Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and Rousseau’s Julie’ (pp. 38-53). The next two essays offer different views of Rousseau’s interest in ‘organic and inorganic or mechanical life’ (p. 13), with Rachel Corkle’s essay ‘Seeing Jean-Jacques’ Nature: Rousseau’s Call for a Botanist Reader’ (pp. 54-67) arguing that Rousseau’s Lettres sur la botanique and Dialogues offer ‘a vision of the good botanist and of the good reader’ (p. 63) while Wendy C. Nielsen’s Rousseau’s Pygmalion and Automata in the Romantic Period’ (pp. 68-84) focuses on Rousseau’s fascination with ‘the artificial nature of society’ (p. 69). The essays in the second half of the book focus more on the influence of the Swiss landscape on Rousseau and Romanticism more generally, with topics including literary tourism (Nicola J. Watson’s ‘Rousseau on the Tourist Trail’ (pp. 84- 100)) and alpine tourism more broadly (Simon Bainbridge’s ‘A ‘Melancholy Occurrence’ in the Alps: Switzerland, Mont Blanc, and an Early Critique of Mountaineering’ (pp. 150-67). Other essays in the collection also focus on the influence of Switzerland and the Swiss landscape on a variety of Romantic-period writers, both in Britain and in Europe, including ‘James Boswell and Rousseau in Môtiers: Re-inscribing Childhood and Its (Auto)biographical Prospects’ (pp. 101-16) by Gordon Turnbull, Pamela Buck’s ‘Prints, panoramas, and Picturesque Travel in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of Tour on the Continent’ (pp. 117-31), and ‘Visionary Republics: Virtual Representations of Switzerland and Wordsworth’s Lake District’ (pp. 132-49) by Patrick Vincent. These essays offer a diverse range of new perspectives on Rousseau’s work and its impact on Romantic-period writing and thought, as well as the impact of the landscape of Switzerland both on his work and the work of a variety of Romantic-period writers. Three articles published in European Romantic Review also focus on Romantic-period philosophy. Jonathan Kramnick’s ‘An Aesthetics and Ecology of Presence’ (ERR 26[2015] 315-27) argues for ‘an anti-representational model of perceptual experience’ (p. 315) during the Romantic period by tracing connections between a variety of different writing forms by poets John Dyer and James Thomson, the letters and fiction of Laurence Sterne, Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), and in the works of Hogarth and Lord Kames. In ‘Hegel and the Prehistory of the Postracial’ (ERR 26 [2015] 289-99), Rei Terada examines Hegel’s theory of race in light of what the author terms the ‘post-racial’, which he defines, in two ways, as ‘the rhetorical erasure of an actually existing racialized violence’ and in a ‘logical sense, in that ‘non-raciality’ must carry assumptions about what ‘race’ is, and assume the responsibility for deciding what it looks like, in order to testify to its absence’ (p. 290; emphasis in the original). Finally, in ‘“Wandering beneath the Unthinkable”: Organization and Probability in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century’ (ERR 26 [2015] 301-14), Arkady Plotnitsky argues that Romanticism, and the nineteenth century, ‘were characterized by their persistent attempts to find an effective concept of organization’ (p. 301; emphasis in the original). Plotnitsky approaches this through an examination of ontological thinking in the works of Hölderlin and argues that ‘the Romantics… introduced a new type of ontology’ (p. 304). Three studies of women writers, pertinent to ‘General and Prose’, were published in 2015. Two of these are also covered in section 2 of this chapter. The first is Melissa Sodeman’s Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History (StanfordUP). Sodeman aims to ‘put the history of the novel and women’s literary history in conversation with book history to better read the situation of later eighteenth-century women novelists’ (p. 3). Though focusing specifically on novelists Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson, Sodeman’s work takes a literary historical approach and is therefore also of use to the reader interested in the history of women’s writing, specifically the conditions under which women were writing and how they reflected upon these within their literary outputs. Each of the four chapters is devoted to one of the women writers named above and ‘aim[s] to show how these novels meaningfully respond to changes in the cultural status of literature, authorship, and sentimentality at the end of the eighteenth century, changes that stranded sentimental genres and left their mostly female practitioners on the margins of literary history (pp. 8-9). Of particular interest is Sodeman’s argument that these women novelists were responding to developments in literary history in sentimental novels themselves, ‘memorializing, quite self-consciously, the conditions of their writing’ (p. 13). Chapter One, which focuses on Sophia Lee, argues that her novel The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783-5) draws on the work of sentimental historiography by William Robertson and David Hume, who Sodeman terms ‘sentimental historians’ (p. 21), and lost antiquarian texts, specifically Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments. In so doing, Sodeman argues that Lee reveals how the ‘shared methods’ of these two approaches ‘come to characterize the uses of the past in late eighteenth-century print culture’ (p. 22). Chapter Two deals with Ann Radcliffe’s self-conscious reflections on reading practices of the late eighteenth century in her novels, especially The Romance of the Forest (1791). Sodeman argues that these reflections reveal Radcliffe’s anxiety about the ephemeral nature of her own literary output (p. 56), reflecting ‘the situation of women novelists at this time’ (p.