Keats’s 1816 competition sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ is easily dismissed as juvenilia, but when read with an eye to his interest in Greek mythology, the poem rewards further attention. In particular, the myth of Tithonus, who gained eternal life without eternal youth and was transformed into either a grasshopper or cricket, situates Keats’s immortal ‘poetry of earth’ in an ambivalent context that, in turn, makes sense of otherwise curiously neutral language. This ambivalent framing also encourages a new reading of the poem as a product of 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, building a case for the sonnet as an example of what Nikki Hessell has called Keats’s ‘botany of absence’ in the 1817 Poems volume more broadly.
{"title":"‘The poetry of earth is never dead’: Meteorology and Myth in Keats’s Grasshopper Sonnet","authors":"Noah Comet","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0642","url":null,"abstract":"Keats’s 1816 competition sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ is easily dismissed as juvenilia, but when read with an eye to his interest in Greek mythology, the poem rewards further attention. In particular, the myth of Tithonus, who gained eternal life without eternal youth and was transformed into either a grasshopper or cricket, situates Keats’s immortal ‘poetry of earth’ in an ambivalent context that, in turn, makes sense of otherwise curiously neutral language. This ambivalent framing also encourages a new reading of the poem as a product of 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, building a case for the sonnet as an example of what Nikki Hessell has called Keats’s ‘botany of absence’ in the 1817 Poems volume more broadly.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141717097","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 paper considers the letters and the character of Frances ‘Fanny’ Brawne together as a model for criticism at the present time, as well as a meaningful indication of how criticism was practiced by laypeople in the Romantic period. Focusing on Keats’s great love affair rather than on Keats himself, or on Keats to the exclusion of his interlocuters, I describe the erotic conflict between Brawne and the poet as a form of agonistic engagement between writer and critic–the one tragic in impulse, the other more comic. Toward the end of the essay, I ask how conflict of this kind may be understood, in Stanley Cavell’s terms, not as the ugly underside of love but as one of its most significant expressions, a way of keeping up (in Cavell’s words) ‘the conversation love demands’. Throughout, the essay queries the relation between criticism and love, and how that relation might contest contemporary thinking around affect and pleasure.
{"title":"Fanny Brawne and Criticism","authors":"Anahid J. Nersessian","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0639","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0639","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers the letters and the character of Frances ‘Fanny’ Brawne together as a model for criticism at the present time, as well as a meaningful indication of how criticism was practiced by laypeople in the Romantic period. Focusing on Keats’s great love affair rather than on Keats himself, or on Keats to the exclusion of his interlocuters, I describe the erotic conflict between Brawne and the poet as a form of agonistic engagement between writer and critic–the one tragic in impulse, the other more comic. Toward the end of the essay, I ask how conflict of this kind may be understood, in Stanley Cavell’s terms, not as the ugly underside of love but as one of its most significant expressions, a way of keeping up (in Cavell’s words) ‘the conversation love demands’. Throughout, the essay queries the relation between criticism and love, and how that relation might contest contemporary thinking around affect and pleasure.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141713350","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 article situates John Keats’s 1817 sonnet ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ within the context of 1816–1819’s climate catastrophe and subsistence crisis. Countering received readings of Keats’s sonnet as about artistic vocation; I argue that it is more about the opportunity cost of expending public funds on ancient art during a climate-exacerbated economic crisis. This reading emerges by placing the poem in dialogue with a political cartoon by George Cruikshank, ‘ The Elgin Marbles! or John Bull buying stones at the time his numerous family want bread!!’ that critiques the British Government’s purchase of the Parthenon sculptures in these terms. I contend that both sonnet and cartoon stage the purchase of the sculptures not in terms of their artistic merits, but instead in terms of the opportunity cost of public relief and the potential ‘waste’ status of art in the face of a depressed labour market and skyrocketing grain prices.
{"title":"On Seeing the Price of Keats’s Bread: or John Bull Buying the Elgin Marbles in a Time of Climate Crisis, 1816","authors":"Lauren Cooper","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0643","url":null,"abstract":"This article situates John Keats’s 1817 sonnet ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’ within the context of 1816–1819’s climate catastrophe and subsistence crisis. Countering received readings of Keats’s sonnet as about artistic vocation; I argue that it is more about the opportunity cost of expending public funds on ancient art during a climate-exacerbated economic crisis. This reading emerges by placing the poem in dialogue with a political cartoon by George Cruikshank, ‘ The Elgin Marbles! or John Bull buying stones at the time his numerous family want bread!!’ that critiques the British Government’s purchase of the Parthenon sculptures in these terms. I contend that both sonnet and cartoon stage the purchase of the sculptures not in terms of their artistic merits, but instead in terms of the opportunity cost of public relief and the potential ‘waste’ status of art in the face of a depressed labour market and skyrocketing grain prices.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141699404","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 article considers the publication of Hellas, the last major poem of Shelley's that appeared in his lifetime. First, it focusses on the press-copy, the poem's most important textual witness (and arguably the basis of any modern edition), recovering from it a hitherto unnoticed but apparently authoritative reading. Second, it discusses Charles Ollier's unexpurgated edition, identifying passages that were removed from, or altered in, the first edition published in 1822. Third, it traces the gradual emergence of the suppressed passages in editions of the poem published between 1829 and 2002. Finally, with reference to ‘A Defence of Poetry’ and the first (authorised) posthumous edition of the poem, by Mary Shelley, published in 1839, it considers how the textual history of Hellas may illustrate Shelley's view that the meaning of a poem may not be realised in an author's lifetime. In her ‘Note on Hellas’ Mary Shelley appears to have identified the poem's awareness of itself as yet to be fully understood with a subtlety matched in the criticism of the late Michael O’Neill, one of Shelley's finest readers whose loss we continue to mourn.
{"title":"The Publication of Hellas","authors":"Michael Rossington","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0630","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the publication of Hellas, the last major poem of Shelley's that appeared in his lifetime. First, it focusses on the press-copy, the poem's most important textual witness (and arguably the basis of any modern edition), recovering from it a hitherto unnoticed but apparently authoritative reading. Second, it discusses Charles Ollier's unexpurgated edition, identifying passages that were removed from, or altered in, the first edition published in 1822. Third, it traces the gradual emergence of the suppressed passages in editions of the poem published between 1829 and 2002. Finally, with reference to ‘A Defence of Poetry’ and the first (authorised) posthumous edition of the poem, by Mary Shelley, published in 1839, it considers how the textual history of Hellas may illustrate Shelley's view that the meaning of a poem may not be realised in an author's lifetime. In her ‘Note on Hellas’ Mary Shelley appears to have identified the poem's awareness of itself as yet to be fully understood with a subtlety matched in the criticism of the late Michael O’Neill, one of Shelley's finest readers whose loss we continue to mourn.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140352726","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":"Madeleine Callaghan, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry","authors":"Jennifer G. Jesse","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0632","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140355801","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}
Scholarship on Shelley’s economic thought has long acknowledged his embrace of the labour theory of value. This essay offers a more probing account of the poet’s investigations into the origins of economic value. Focusing on Queen Mab (1813), it situates Shelley’s value theory in relation to competing theories and examines his engagement with his cited sources, including works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin. It argues that Shelley moves beyond this work to encompass unacknowledged sources, including John Locke’s theory of property rights and Adam Smith’s discussion of value in the Wealth of Nations, enabling him to formulate his own version of the pure labour theory of value. The essay thus provides a richer examination of the philosophical foundations of Shelley’s early economic thought, connecting these ideas to aspects of his ethics and epistemology.
{"title":"Queen Mab and the Origins of Economic Value","authors":"Paul Stephens","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0629","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship on Shelley’s economic thought has long acknowledged his embrace of the labour theory of value. This essay offers a more probing account of the poet’s investigations into the origins of economic value. Focusing on Queen Mab (1813), it situates Shelley’s value theory in relation to competing theories and examines his engagement with his cited sources, including works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin. It argues that Shelley moves beyond this work to encompass unacknowledged sources, including John Locke’s theory of property rights and Adam Smith’s discussion of value in the Wealth of Nations, enabling him to formulate his own version of the pure labour theory of value. The essay thus provides a richer examination of the philosophical foundations of Shelley’s early economic thought, connecting these ideas to aspects of his ethics and epistemology.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140352993","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 investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.
{"title":"P. B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of ‘The Sensitive-Plant’","authors":"Elisa Cozzi","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0627","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140356716","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}
In his final years, Shelley's primary sources of information on India were the first-hand accounts of his friends, starting with Thomas Medwin. Following his return from India, Medwin revived his friendship with Shelley and they engaged in a creative exchange of ideas, criticism, and encouragement which began in their correspondence of 1819–1820, and developed during Medwin's stay with the Shelleys in Pisa from October 1820 to February 1821. Medwin reads from his Indian Journal and entertains Shelley with tales of India during his visit. Shelley assists him with the revision and publication of his Indian poems and, in the latter half, they work concurrently on two projects – Shelley's Epipsychidion and Medwin's article on the temple caves of Ellora for the Bibliothèque Universelle, based on extracts from his journal. There are significant correspondences between the works of both writers during this period and their intertextual relationship will also be examined.
{"title":"Thomas Medwin's Indian Journal and Shelley's ‘visioned wanderings’","authors":"Natalie Tal Harries","doi":"10.3366/rom.2024.0626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2024.0626","url":null,"abstract":"In his final years, Shelley's primary sources of information on India were the first-hand accounts of his friends, starting with Thomas Medwin. Following his return from India, Medwin revived his friendship with Shelley and they engaged in a creative exchange of ideas, criticism, and encouragement which began in their correspondence of 1819–1820, and developed during Medwin's stay with the Shelleys in Pisa from October 1820 to February 1821. Medwin reads from his Indian Journal and entertains Shelley with tales of India during his visit. Shelley assists him with the revision and publication of his Indian poems and, in the latter half, they work concurrently on two projects – Shelley's Epipsychidion and Medwin's article on the temple caves of Ellora for the Bibliothèque Universelle, based on extracts from his journal. There are significant correspondences between the works of both writers during this period and their intertextual relationship will also be examined.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140353512","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：