Early in his career the astronomer William Herschel argued that the appearance of ‘so many changes among the stars’ – stars materialising out of nowhere and stars gradually vanishing, stars fluctuating in brightness and stars changing position – ‘should cause a strong suspicion that most probably every star in the heaven is more or less in motion’. Given his knowledge of modern astronomy, Keats's plea to be as ‘stedfast’ as the bright star might be considered deliberately retrograde: the aesthetic privileging of an ideal by a sky-gazing lover indifferent to empirical science. This essay argues, on the contrary, that the ‘Bright star’ sonnet seizes upon a figurative paradox produced in a period of epistemological transition. The indeterminacy of the bright star image introduces an affective dimension to the sonnet more in keeping with its Petrarchan roots and captures an essential quality of even steadfast lovers: changeability.
{"title":"Celestial Variability and Keats's ‘Bright star’","authors":"Meegan Hasted","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0611","url":null,"abstract":"Early in his career the astronomer William Herschel argued that the appearance of ‘so many changes among the stars’ – stars materialising out of nowhere and stars gradually vanishing, stars fluctuating in brightness and stars changing position – ‘should cause a strong suspicion that most probably every star in the heaven is more or less in motion’. Given his knowledge of modern astronomy, Keats's plea to be as ‘stedfast’ as the bright star might be considered deliberately retrograde: the aesthetic privileging of an ideal by a sky-gazing lover indifferent to empirical science. This essay argues, on the contrary, that the ‘Bright star’ sonnet seizes upon a figurative paradox produced in a period of epistemological transition. The indeterminacy of the bright star image introduces an affective dimension to the sonnet more in keeping with its Petrarchan roots and captures an essential quality of even steadfast lovers: changeability.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Charles Lloyd remains on the fringe of Romanticism, remembered for his relationships with Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, De Quincey and Hays, and known chiefly for his novel Edmund Oliver (1798). This essay investigates the complex history and meanings of Lloyd’s other, entirely neglected novel, Isabel, A Tale. Using unpublished correspondence the essay establishes that, although published in 1820, Isabel was printed in 1810, and written in 1798–99. Two manuscripts of the novel have been located. These are for the first time analysed to shed light on Lloyd’s intentions. Intriguingly, the manuscripts give the novel the sub-title ‘Godwin versus Godwin’, as well as positioning it as a response to Mary Wollstonecraft. These clues, with an unpublished preface, support a reading of Isabel as an attempt to use Wollstonecraft’s work, and her life as written by William Godwin, to develop a modus vivendi allowing radical social critique to co-exist with a defence of chastity and marriage.
{"title":"‘Godwin versus Godwin’: Negotiating the War of Ideas in Charles Lloyd’s <i>Isabel, A Tale</i>","authors":"M. O. Grenby","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0610","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Lloyd remains on the fringe of Romanticism, remembered for his relationships with Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, De Quincey and Hays, and known chiefly for his novel Edmund Oliver (1798). This essay investigates the complex history and meanings of Lloyd’s other, entirely neglected novel, Isabel, A Tale. Using unpublished correspondence the essay establishes that, although published in 1820, Isabel was printed in 1810, and written in 1798–99. Two manuscripts of the novel have been located. These are for the first time analysed to shed light on Lloyd’s intentions. Intriguingly, the manuscripts give the novel the sub-title ‘Godwin versus Godwin’, as well as positioning it as a response to Mary Wollstonecraft. These clues, with an unpublished preface, support a reading of Isabel as an attempt to use Wollstonecraft’s work, and her life as written by William Godwin, to develop a modus vivendi allowing radical social critique to co-exist with a defence of chastity and marriage.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"B<scp>eth</scp> L<scp>au</scp>, <i>Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind</i>","authors":"Marina Cano","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0620","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"2012 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136159813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reflects on Percy Bysshe Shelley's peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. It first traces Shelley's reception history by discussing his introduction during the late Qing era, the Republican popularisation of Shelley, and Communist China's curious endorsement of him. From this almost undisrupted trajectory of increasingly enthusiastic advocacy, sharply contrasting with Shelley's controversial English critical heritage, the essay argues that Chinese readers of Shelley radically appropriated him. It then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in this process by proposing two major means of appropriation: reduction and transmission. Reduction was achieved by censoring unacceptable elements in Shelley's poetry, philosophy, and biography. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively transmitted through an authoritarian critical discourse. Linguistic transmission played a crucial role as well, and Chinese translation often toned down certain quintessential Shelleyan stylistic features. The essay concludes that the uneasy relationship between Shelley's poetics and politics might have encouraged Chinese appropriation which, ironically, was made by an authoritarian state ideology and institution – the very powers that Shelley had so fiercely opposed.
{"title":"Shelley's Scattered Words in China","authors":"Ou Li","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0614","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reflects on Percy Bysshe Shelley's peculiar afterlife in twentieth-century China. It first traces Shelley's reception history by discussing his introduction during the late Qing era, the Republican popularisation of Shelley, and Communist China's curious endorsement of him. From this almost undisrupted trajectory of increasingly enthusiastic advocacy, sharply contrasting with Shelley's controversial English critical heritage, the essay argues that Chinese readers of Shelley radically appropriated him. It then attempts to tease out the complex forces at play in this process by proposing two major means of appropriation: reduction and transmission. Reduction was achieved by censoring unacceptable elements in Shelley's poetry, philosophy, and biography. Meanwhile, Shelley was almost exclusively transmitted through an authoritarian critical discourse. Linguistic transmission played a crucial role as well, and Chinese translation often toned down certain quintessential Shelleyan stylistic features. The essay concludes that the uneasy relationship between Shelley's poetics and politics might have encouraged Chinese appropriation which, ironically, was made by an authoritarian state ideology and institution – the very powers that Shelley had so fiercely opposed.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reads the 1934 prose Autobiography of the twentieth-century British novelist John Cowper Powys as a parody of Wordsworth’s Prelude. It argues that Powys revises Wordsworth’s trajectory of emotional growth, loss and recovery in ways that sometimes endorse and more often satirise the poet’s youthful love of nature and his adult transcendental imaginings. In doing so, Powys anticipates the revisionary readings of recent critics who have interpreted Wordsworth’s ‘language of the sense’ in materialist terms. Powys represents Wordsworth as a poet of physical – and sexual – sensation, registering The Prelude’s openness to physiology-focused interpretation. Powys self-mockingly rewrites the story of the growth of Wordsworth’s mind, debunking The Prelude’s climactic encounters with transcendence. Ultimately however, for Powys as for Wordsworth, nature leads him beyond nature. Powys’s Autobiography thus helps to suggest the limits of approaches focused on what Powys calls ‘the physical quality of Wordsworth’s flesh and blood’.
{"title":"Parodying <i>The Prelude</i>: The <i>Autobiography</i> of John Cowper Powys","authors":"Kim Wheatley","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0613","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reads the 1934 prose Autobiography of the twentieth-century British novelist John Cowper Powys as a parody of Wordsworth’s Prelude. It argues that Powys revises Wordsworth’s trajectory of emotional growth, loss and recovery in ways that sometimes endorse and more often satirise the poet’s youthful love of nature and his adult transcendental imaginings. In doing so, Powys anticipates the revisionary readings of recent critics who have interpreted Wordsworth’s ‘language of the sense’ in materialist terms. Powys represents Wordsworth as a poet of physical – and sexual – sensation, registering The Prelude’s openness to physiology-focused interpretation. Powys self-mockingly rewrites the story of the growth of Wordsworth’s mind, debunking The Prelude’s climactic encounters with transcendence. Ultimately however, for Powys as for Wordsworth, nature leads him beyond nature. Powys’s Autobiography thus helps to suggest the limits of approaches focused on what Powys calls ‘the physical quality of Wordsworth’s flesh and blood’.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.
{"title":"Displaced Rituals, Replaced Contexts: Reimagining Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Charles Dibdin's <i>The Younger Brother</i> (1793)","authors":"David Chandler","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0608","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136094981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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