This essay argues that Byron is not only on the look-out for a suitable hero for his narrative poem, but also for an impersonation of the avenger at the end of the story. With Don Juan transferred into the modern age, the ontological category of hell has become as outdated as the threat of a stony guest appearing at a banquet and dragging the over-reacher down into hell. While the idea of eating and feasting pervades the entire poem, the avenger is camouflaged behind different masks and disguises: apparently a convivial Spanish gentleman and banqueter, the narrator dexterously transforms himself into a roguish Yorick, or Mephistopheles exposing their victims to their painful pranks; in the ‘England’ Cantos, he eventually shows Don Juan on the brink of falling into the misogynist inferno of a gynocratic marriage, with Juan curiously petrified and the (female) avenger dressed up as a Gothic friar.
{"title":"In Pursuit of the Stony Guest: Byron’s Don Juan and the Modern Concept of Revenge","authors":"N. Lennartz","doi":"10.3366/rom.2022.0537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2022.0537","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that Byron is not only on the look-out for a suitable hero for his narrative poem, but also for an impersonation of the avenger at the end of the story. With Don Juan transferred into the modern age, the ontological category of hell has become as outdated as the threat of a stony guest appearing at a banquet and dragging the over-reacher down into hell. While the idea of eating and feasting pervades the entire poem, the avenger is camouflaged behind different masks and disguises: apparently a convivial Spanish gentleman and banqueter, the narrator dexterously transforms himself into a roguish Yorick, or Mephistopheles exposing their victims to their painful pranks; in the ‘England’ Cantos, he eventually shows Don Juan on the brink of falling into the misogynist inferno of a gynocratic marriage, with Juan curiously petrified and the (female) avenger dressed up as a Gothic friar.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48947941","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":"Susan J. Wolfson Romantic Shades and Shadows","authors":"S. Perry","doi":"10.3366/rom.2022.0544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2022.0544","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45566318","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}
Much has been said about De Quincey's fascination with the speed and mobility of contemporary life. This essay argues that we need also to recognize an acute sense of slowness that develops alongside De Quincey's fascination with speed. Activities like walking and reading and the figure of the crocodile offer examples of slowness that complicate De Quincey's fixation with speed. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the fraught relationship between speed and slowness that colours De Quincey's experiences of media and mobility clarifies the emotional landscape of the ‘Confessions’, marked as it is by drawn-out affective experiences, including boredom, longing, and nostalgia.
{"title":"De Quincey's Slowness","authors":"Jonathan Sachs","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0519","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been said about De Quincey's fascination with the speed and mobility of contemporary life. This essay argues that we need also to recognize an acute sense of slowness that develops alongside De Quincey's fascination with speed. Activities like walking and reading and the figure of the crocodile offer examples of slowness that complicate De Quincey's fixation with speed. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the fraught relationship between speed and slowness that colours De Quincey's experiences of media and mobility clarifies the emotional landscape of the ‘Confessions’, marked as it is by drawn-out affective experiences, including boredom, longing, and nostalgia.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43275739","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":"Anne C. McCarthy Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry","authors":"Chris Townsend","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0529","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42034020","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 1821, like a messenger out of the dark (or a literary leg-puller), the English Opium-Eater arrived as if offering some saving play of mind in an obdurately literalising age. He conflated the two most reputedly chthonic regions: Hell, and the East. The language was ravishing, precise, unpredictable, and viscerally xenophobic (‘… in China or Indostan … I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things …’). De Quincey was not to be taken too seriously. But the author of ‘Confessions’ has inspired some poised indignation. For example, for Albert Goldman, De Quincey was more of a literary taker than a giver, and not least as Wordsworth and Coleridge's most prolific plagiarist. Arguably though, such a criticism looks unhelpfully hard-nosed when one considers the self-consciousness of De Quincey's secondariness, the deeply disturbed state of his mind, and the counter-inflationary quality of his sense of humour.
{"title":"Delinquency (if I may coin that word) and the Conditions of an English Leg-Puller","authors":"Andrew Keanie","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0521","url":null,"abstract":"In 1821, like a messenger out of the dark (or a literary leg-puller), the English Opium-Eater arrived as if offering some saving play of mind in an obdurately literalising age. He conflated the two most reputedly chthonic regions: Hell, and the East. The language was ravishing, precise, unpredictable, and viscerally xenophobic (‘… in China or Indostan … I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things …’). De Quincey was not to be taken too seriously. But the author of ‘Confessions’ has inspired some poised indignation. For example, for Albert Goldman, De Quincey was more of a literary taker than a giver, and not least as Wordsworth and Coleridge's most prolific plagiarist. Arguably though, such a criticism looks unhelpfully hard-nosed when one considers the self-consciousness of De Quincey's secondariness, the deeply disturbed state of his mind, and the counter-inflationary quality of his sense of humour.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46027863","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":"David Duff The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism","authors":"Richard Gravil","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0526","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46710540","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}
De Quincey's assertion in the 1821 ‘Confessions’ that the effects of opium were ‘always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system’, establishes him in contemporary medical discourse as a follower of Brunonianism. Yet, against this indubitably pharmacological and bodily strain, the ‘Confessions’ also insists upon an intellectual aspect to the opium-eater's dreaming, his ability to dream imaginatively. This essay seeks to relate these discursive tensions in De Quincey, rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the human nervous system held in equilibrium, to his self-presentation as an addict and a philosopher in his autobiographical writings, and to his critical thinking. As I argue, the physiological theory of Brunonianism in the ‘Confessions’ is complemented by an equal emphasis on moral and intellectual development embedded in the ideas of Hartleian psychology which provide a balancing view of body and (embodied) mind in De Quincey's thinking.
{"title":"‘The Opium-Eater Boasteth Himself to be a Philosopher’: Bodily Subjection and Intellectual Self-fashioning in De Quincey's 1821 ‘Confessions’","authors":"D. S. Roberts","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0518","url":null,"abstract":"De Quincey's assertion in the 1821 ‘Confessions’ that the effects of opium were ‘always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system’, establishes him in contemporary medical discourse as a follower of Brunonianism. Yet, against this indubitably pharmacological and bodily strain, the ‘Confessions’ also insists upon an intellectual aspect to the opium-eater's dreaming, his ability to dream imaginatively. This essay seeks to relate these discursive tensions in De Quincey, rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the human nervous system held in equilibrium, to his self-presentation as an addict and a philosopher in his autobiographical writings, and to his critical thinking. As I argue, the physiological theory of Brunonianism in the ‘Confessions’ is complemented by an equal emphasis on moral and intellectual development embedded in the ideas of Hartleian psychology which provide a balancing view of body and (embodied) mind in De Quincey's thinking.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42208834","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":"Jessica Fay Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community","authors":"B. C. Yen","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0527","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42655215","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 examines De Quincey's representation of opium ‘addiction’ in the cross-cultural context of Britain and China in the light of recent revisionist medical discussions of addiction and dependence, and revisionist historical writing about opium use in nineteenth-century China. De Quincey's representation of the opium user is compared to that of China's first ‘city novel’, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou believed to have been written in 1848 (trans 2009). In this complex fiction, opium smoking is presented as a largely pleasurable and common pastime which has the potential for danger if abused by the unwary. It is not connected with dreams and nightmares, or figured as a stimulus of, or analogy for, the creative imagination. It offers a fascinating view of the leisure world of nineteenth-century China, where recreational opium smoking is common and not problematic when undertaken moderately.
{"title":"Opium and Addiction in a Cross-Cultural Context: De Quincey's ‘Confessions’ (1821) and the Chinese Novel, Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou (Fengyue meng) (c. 1848)","authors":"Peter J. Kitson","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0524","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines De Quincey's representation of opium ‘addiction’ in the cross-cultural context of Britain and China in the light of recent revisionist medical discussions of addiction and dependence, and revisionist historical writing about opium use in nineteenth-century China. De Quincey's representation of the opium user is compared to that of China's first ‘city novel’, Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou believed to have been written in 1848 (trans 2009). In this complex fiction, opium smoking is presented as a largely pleasurable and common pastime which has the potential for danger if abused by the unwary. It is not connected with dreams and nightmares, or figured as a stimulus of, or analogy for, the creative imagination. It offers a fascinating view of the leisure world of nineteenth-century China, where recreational opium smoking is common and not problematic when undertaken moderately.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48941901","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}
De Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821) and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830) both take an unusual form in which seemingly digressive wanderings coalesce around an obsessively repeated motif: in both cases, an idealized young woman whose evasive near-presence is continually suggested through minimally varied repetitions of formal elements the artist associates with her. Although others have noted similarities between the two works – chiefly that both foreground a young artist-protagonist's opium visions – the works' structural parallels have been little discussed. This essay argues that an analysis of the commonalities between these strikingly similar formal innovations supplements previous arguments in significant ways, illuminating the oeuvres of both Berlioz and De Quincey as well as aspects of Romantic formal experimentation in general.
{"title":"‘To mask, by slight differences in the manner, a virtual identity in the substance’: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and De Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’","authors":"Dennis Loranger, B. Milligan","doi":"10.3366/rom.2021.0522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2021.0522","url":null,"abstract":"De Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821) and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique (1830) both take an unusual form in which seemingly digressive wanderings coalesce around an obsessively repeated motif: in both cases, an idealized young woman whose evasive near-presence is continually suggested through minimally varied repetitions of formal elements the artist associates with her. Although others have noted similarities between the two works – chiefly that both foreground a young artist-protagonist's opium visions – the works' structural parallels have been little discussed. This essay argues that an analysis of the commonalities between these strikingly similar formal innovations supplements previous arguments in significant ways, illuminating the oeuvres of both Berlioz and De Quincey as well as aspects of Romantic formal experimentation in general.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43231805","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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