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Felicia Hemans Also by Julie Melnyk Felicia Hemans Also by Julie Melnyk WOMEN'S THEOLOGY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN: Transfiguring the Faith of their Fathers (editor) Felicia Hemans Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century Edited by Nanora Sweet Assistant Professor English and Women~\ and Gender Studies University of Missouri - St Louis USA and Julie Melnyk Associate Professor of English Central Methodist College Fayette Missouri USA Foreword by Marlon B. Ross Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk 2001 Foreword © Marlon B. Ross 2001 Chapter 4 © Julie Melnyk 2001 Chapter 10 © Nanora Sweet 2001 Chapters 1-3, 5-9 and 11-12 © Palgrave Publishers ltd 2001 * Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-80109-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, london Wl P OlP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PAlGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PAlGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press llC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-42094-0 ISBN 978-0-230-38956-4 (eBook) 00110.1057/9780230389564 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Felicia Hemans : reimagining poetry in the nineteenth century I edited by Nanora Sweet, Julie Melnyk; foreword by Marlon B. Ross. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-42094-0 (cloth) 1. Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne, 1793-1835-Criticism and interpretat'on. 2. Women and literature-Great Britain-History­ -19th century. I. Sweet, Nanora, 1942- II. Melnyk, Julie. PR4781 .F45 2000 821'.7-dc21 00-048348 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 To the Eigh teen th- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Association, which provided the location of this project's genesis and the inspiration for its completion Contents List of Illustrations ix Foreword: Now Our Hemans x Contributors xxvii Introduction: Why Hemans Now? 1 Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk I Readings: The Woman's Voices, the Poet's Choices 1 Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans's Elegiac Poetry and Contaminated Grief 19 Michael T. WiIIiamson 2 The Fragile Image: Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis 36 Grant F. Scott 3 The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans's The Forest Sanctuary 55 John M. Anderson 4 Hemans's Later Poetry: Religion and the Vatic Poet 74 Julie Melnyk II Reception: The (Re)Making of the Woman Poet 5 'Certainly not a Female Pen': Felicia Hemans's Early Public Reception 95 Stephen C. Behrendt 6 The Search for a Space: A Note on Felicia Hemans and the Royal Society of Literature 115 Barbara D. Taylor 7 Felicia Hemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism 124 Chad Edgar 8 'The Spells of Home': Hemans, 'Heimat' and the Cult of the Dead Poetess in Nineteenth-Century Germany 135 Frauke Lenckos vii vi ii COl1tmts III Contexts: Cultures of Romance, Histories of Culture 9 Hemans and the Romance of Byron ISS Susa/l J. WolfWIll 10 Gender and Modernity in Tl1e Abe/lcermge: Hemans, Rushdie, and 'the Moor's Last Sigh' 181 NlIIlOm Sweet 11 Death and the Matron: Felicia Hemans, Romantic Death, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State 196 Gary Kelly 12 Natural and National Monuments - Felicia Hemans's 'The Image in Lava': A Note 212 [sobel Armstrol1g Till/ex 231 List of Illustrations 2.1 Louis Ducis, 'La Sculpture ou Properzia de Rossi' (Exhibited Salon 1822). Courtesy of the Musee de I'Eveche, Limoges 44 2.2 Edward Burne-Jones, 'The Birth of Galatea' (1885). Courtesy of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 47 2.3 Angelica Kauffman, 'Self-Portrait in the Character of Painting Embraced by Poetry' (1782). Courtesy of the Iveagh Bequest, London 52 ix Foreword: Now Our Hemans Rest with your still and solemn fame; The hills keep record of your name, And never can a touch of shame Darken the buried brow. But we on changeful days are cast, When bright names from their place fall fast; And ye that with our glory past, We cannot mourn you now. Hemans (from' A Fragment') 1 Why Hemans now? Why a collection of essays on Felicia Hemans by one of the leading publishers of trade, scholarly, and text books? What is the Significance of promoting the study of a nineteenth-century provincial British 'poet­ ess' whom just over ten years ago even academic specialists had largely forgotten? Does this resuscitation of Hemans tell us something about how an artist's career is unmade and remade long after an author's bones have corroded in the ground? Does it tell us, belatedly placed at the butt of the twentieth century, something about the ongoing cultural status of 'the romantics' - that literary corpus (total work, essential substance, body, corpse) so hopefully taken as a metonym for the promise of universal, eternal, primordial power residing in poetry, literature, and the arts? Does our Hemans play to or against the romantic dream of a native human body wedded to the soul of nature in this era haunted by the guilt of environmental catastrophe? Given Hemans's former reputation as a poetess of 'domestic affections', does our attraction to her in this moment reveal something about that other, academically subordinated, but more popular meaning of 'romantic'; the pleasure of remorse that derives from yielding to an uncurbable careen of feeling? Does Hemans's corpus cover or expose our anxiety over sentiment, an anxiety palpable in the flesh of manly romanticism and still visceral among us as we plunge deeper into virtual electronic lives hyper-regulated by microcomputer rationality and scientific surveillance (niche marketing, political polling, focus grouping, genome coding, genetic cloning)? Or x Furewurd xi does our settling amidst her 'domestic affections' betoken our larger cul­ ture's current nostalgia for a sentimentalized domesticity uncluttered by sexual and gender nonconformity - a neoconservatism, a religious right­ eousness, a new traditionalism scurrying fast from the great divides of sex, race, and class as we seek yesterday's never-never-land of homogeneous nations, tight communities, chaste families, and crime-free strollable streets? Does the anatomy of Hemans's corpus tell us something about the fate of academic criticism in an age shaken by postmodern identity wars and rumors of identity wars when the universalizing hope of the word 'human', no longer adjective or noun, has devolved into the fraction­ alizing compound 'posthuman'? Does our Hemans reveal something about the institution of postmodern (posthuman?) education in an age of mass-media reproduction of popular 'taste'? After a decade of academic criticism on Hemans informed by feminist, materialist, and historicist theories, such questions have become more - not less - salient. * * * Deem not, 0 England! That by climes confined, Genius and taste diffuse a partial ray; Deem not the eternal energies of mind Swayed by that sun whose doom is but decay! Hemans (from Modem Greece [2: 208]) 'But the joy of discovery was short, and the triumph of taste transitory.' John Chetwode Eustace quoted by Hemans (epigraph to The Restoration oftlze Works of Art to Ital)' 12: ]48]) Taste seems like such an anachronistic word on the verge of the twenty­ first century when books and browsing themselves have been prophesied as obsolescent. Hemans emerged in that period when the culture of the book was probably at its apogee; when 'the eternal energies of mind' were seen as encased and preserved through printed books; when the expressive power of even the visual arts and music, thought to be liter­ ature's closest rivals, were disseminated most broadly and efficiently through the medium of print; when new magazines and journals con­ stituted the latest word in society, religion, science, politicS, and the arts; when books were finally cheap enough and accessible enough to help determine social-class formation and yet also to cause crossover and confusion among genteel, bourgeois, and popular predilections; xii Foreword when taste itself had been made both more real and more mystified by the exhaustive philosophizing of theorists like Burke, Hume, Smith, Hurd, Hazlitt, Kant, Hegel, and by the preachments and practices dis­ played in the reviews of the latest tasteful periodicals. Taste is therefore a word wholly in keeping with the aura of a writer like Hemans. She can be seen as central in helping to define the national taste of Britain and Anglophone America during the nineteenth century - and thus also the taste of those global colonies subjected to their imperialist ventures - when book publication came to dominate 'culture', in every sense of the word. We might also see her absetlce from twentieth-century cultural discourses (until the late 1980s) as ironically central to the peculiar controversies and laments infecting claims to and assaults on taste in modernity. Her reputation waned after the turn of the century as books were put in fierce competition with other media - notably film, radio, and sound recordings - in the making of mass cul­ tural consumption, with its embattled relation to already-imbricated nineteenth-century notions of genteel-bourgeois-popular taste.
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