This article examines the intersections of queerness, masculinity and heteronormativity in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and its queer adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). While Rocky Horror is celebrated as a cult classic, its role as an adaptation of Frankenstein has received little attention within Romantic studies. I argue that attention to Rocky Horror as a Shelley adaptation illuminates the author's concern with compulsory heterosexuality and the family, transsexuality, sexual violence against women, and the construction of nineteenth-century masculinities. The depiction of Rocky Horror's Frank-N-Furter, whose creation of Rocky queers Frankenstein's creation of The Monster, critiques and parodies contemporary American gender roles and patriarchal family structures. Ultimately, the article argues that recognizing Rocky Horror as a queer adaptation of Frankenstein not only uncovers queer subtexts within Shelley's novel but also expands our understanding of adaptation studies.
From Wordsworth's poems, Southey's translations, and Coleridge's lectures to Hazlitt's essays, Keats's letters, and Shelley's plays, Romantic art criticism reveals an interest in Italian Renaissance artists, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. As their artworks arrived on the British art market for Old Masters after Napoleon's spoliation of Italy, the Romantics encountered them not only in public and private collections but also in prints and books. Indeed, this arrival coincided with the publication of the first English biographies of Italian Renaissance artists. Yet did the Romantics interact with the authors of these biographies? This essay argues that Romantic art criticism and these biographies both emerged from and contributed to a period from 1800 to 1830 that marked a crucial moment in the history of the reception of Italian Renaissance art in Britain - a moment that redefined the style of the Old Masters as an expression of artistic individuality.
This essay considers Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' in light of the vast planetary changes that have taken place since Shelley composed the poem in 1816. Mont Blanc and its glaciers were, for Shelley, a symbol of the enduring and indomitable force of nature. Today, these glaciers are on the verge of extinction. I read this alteration through the lens of Rob Nixon's slow violence and find that, in our own time, the hierarchy of power and vulnerability that Shelley establishes in the poem breaks down. This failure of the glacier's power does not represent a failure of Shelley's poetry, however. Rather, it represents a transference of sublime aspect from the mountain to the looming spectre of climate change. I argue that this continuing relevance exemplifies Shelley's characterization of poetry as a fountain forever flowing with new meaning for new circumstances.
'Madame d'Houtetot' was one of Mary Shelley's three contributions to The Liberal, the great collaborative project of the literary left which was shipwrecked by her husband's death. Her character sketch of the salonni & egrave;re who became Rousseau's muse for La Nouvelle H & eacute;lo & iuml;se has gone as 'unnoticed' as its subject, but it is rich with psychobiographical and historiographical riddles. Although the essay has a feminist agenda, depicting a woman of talent treated like a piece of property, MWS seems to shy away from her mother's critique of the ancien r & eacute;gime and from drawing any explicit political conclusions. 'Madame D'Houtetot', interpenetrated by 'A Defence of Poetry' and Leigh Hunt's editorial line, seems to be a genteel contribution to a literary miscellany celebrating cultured intercourse with artistic genius. However, the gate-key to the essay is Lady Morgan's chapter on female society in France, which had included a sympathetic portrait of the same woman to the disgust of the Quarterly Review. By rehabilitating the idol of Rousseau already defended by a b & ecirc;te noire of the right, MWS conducts covert periodical warfare under the cover of historical study.
At the age of eighteen, Shelley, recently expelled from Oxford and returned in ignominy to his ancestral home, Field Place, entered into an epistolary relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, the teacher of his uncle's children. The letters have received little scrutiny, and yet when examined up close, they provide remarkable insight into the nature of Shelley's mind. In this essay, I explore the many reasons why Shelley entered into an affair of pen and paper with a woman whose age and social class would have rendered impossible any relationship of any kind in the actual world. I trace the increasing intensity of the letters from the merely didactic to those of raw, soul-baring intensity. Also, I focus on Miss Hitchener's responses, which show an imaginative understanding of her young correspondent. Over the course of the 46 letters written from June 1811 to July 1812, Miss Hitchener became for Shelley first student, then mother confessor and finally imagined revolutionary counterpart in a shared vision of remaking the world. Finally, I explore the end of the relationship, which has been recounted by all of Shelley's biographers, but with a failure to understand how Miss Hitchener's life was altered by Shelley.
Lord Byron's celebrity in his own time and after was supported and partly created by the many published portraits showing his young and handsome features: first, those made in England by Thomas Phillips, Richard Westall, James Holmes and George Henry Harlow, and then those produced in Italy by Bertel Thorvaldsen, Marianne Hunt, Lorenzo Bartolini, William West and Count Alfred D'Orsay. This paper considers the circumstances of the creation and publication of these portraits through engravings in prints, frontispieces and magazines; it discusses the miniature portraits by Girolamo Prepiani which have remained unreproduced until relatively recently and explores Byron's own thoughts about portraiture and visual art in general.
In the nineteenth century, beyond the works of art that directly celebrated Lord Byron, for at least two generations the most important artists felt themselves obliged to compare their own works to his poetry, reproducing their topical moments. These works - in particular engravings, are most often used to enhance the various editions of his books, and paintings - today constitute an endless body of material. They played a fundamental role in making Byron's work known but above all, they constitute the most tangible proof of an interaction, fruitful and eloquent, between the figurative arts and Byron's poetry, as well as demonstrating how that poetry effectively lent itself to a sort of ekphrasis in the transition from written text to other artistic forms.
While critics agree that Frederick Douglass underwent a radical transformation during his first transnational journey through Ireland, Scotland, and England (1845-7) and that Classical Rome and Lord Byron's Promethean Romantic ideals shaped his mid-nineteenth century novella, The Heroic Slave (1853), and autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass's 1886-7 Italian Grand Tour is largely overlooked. To redress this oversight, I bring the author's Rome diaries, letters, and lectures together to illustrate the intersection between travel and his quest for absolute equality. With Classical Rome and Lord Byron as starting points, I emphasize how Douglass sculpts Black Heroic models and Intellectuals into an American freedom-fighting mould to counter racist caricatures. Ultimately, his experience as a Black traveller rambling freely in the Eternal City provides 'the ethnological evidence to combat American prejudice against the darker colored races'. While hearkening back to Byron's Romantic vision and to Classical Rome, Douglass's Italian travel writing, as I argue, also reframes theories of race and travel.
In 2024 the Keats-Shelley House in Rome hosted an exhibition dedicated to Lord Byron and his relationship to Italy. 'Byron's Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance' charted Byron's seven years on the peninsula (1816-1823), the relationships he made there, and its influence on his poetry and politics. Centred on Mary Shelley's definition of an 'Anglo-Italian literary tradition', and her suggestion that Byron's Beppo was the starting point of this genre, the exhibition sought to examine the reciprocal relationship Byron had with Italian literary traditions as well as his lasting legacy among Italian writers.
A key role in Lord Byron's decision to commit himself to the cause of Greece in 1823 was played by his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. The story begins with Shelley's visit to Byron in Ravenna in August 1821, when the Greek Revolution was only four months old. It is well known that Shelley persuaded his friend to move home to Pisa; less well known is the evidence that Shelley's persuasive powers were directed towards the revolution in Greece, to which he and his wife Mary were already enthusiastically committed. The unexpected tragedy of Shelley's death by drowning on 8 July 1822 seems to have focused Byron's mind still further on Greece, so that Shelley in death would prove even more influential in shaping the poet's fateful decision, the next year, to dedicate himself to the cause that would lead to his own death at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824.
'Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.' What are these lines from Ariel's song doing in this context and how does the repurposing affect the way we come to them in The Tempest? The story of Shelley's death has assumed such status it seems to shimmer like a meaningful dream in the collective memory of those of us who hold the history of literature to be important, rather as events on the enchanted island of The Tempest shimmer. Can we simply ascribe the decision to select lines from Shakespeare for Shelley's epitaph to the overwhelming presence of Shakespeare as the central canonical figure in English literature by the Romantic period? Why The Tempest and more specifically why Ariel's song? We can conjecture that one intention in the inclusion of the circumstantially apt quotation was to throw over Shelley's untimely death that atmosphere or mood which Dowden thought found its ideal expression in that play, 'The pathetic yet august serenity of Shakspere's final period.' The epitaph modifies for good the lines in question. The lines have accrued a part of Shelley's biography which will not be ignored.
George Keats with Georgiana sailed to America in 1818 to seek his fortune. They settled in Henderson, Kentucky as paying guests of John James Audubon. Audubon had left France aged 18 years and established a trading store in Henderson, while pursuing his main interest the painting of birds of America. Audubon had been persuaded to invest in a steamboat on the Ohio River and encouraged his tenant to do likewise. The business proved to be a disaster and both men lost heavily. In 1820 following Tom Keats's death George travelled to England to claim his share of inheritance. Later George was castigated by Charles Brown. George refuted this explaining that John had already drawn down large sums of his inheritance to pay for his medical education. George paid off Tom's debts and later settled all of John's debts having become a successful businessman in Louisville. Audubon continued his paintings, producing the masterpiece Birds of America. This paper reviews the events leading to the steamship disaster and George's subsequent relationship with his brother John. We argue that George was treated unfairly by John Keats's friends and that John Audubon was far from being a fool in anything but perhaps financial matters.
In 'The Triumph of Life', Percy Shelley uses biologically charged language to discuss political and aesthetic heredity. Metaphors of degeneracy, forgetting, and physical infirmity are in turn taken up by the critical reception of the poem after Paul de Man, whereby the fragment is treated by critic-physicians who diagnose the chronic condition of difficulty, expressed through pathological language. Yet in his last work, Shelley engages with romantic life sciences to explore physical, intellectual, political, and aesthetic heredity and what it means to pass on, proto-genetically, aspects of culture and the body by staging an encounter with Life outside the purview of human time and history. He thus engages contemporaneous thinking on reproduction, inheritance, and the life sciences on a subject and a formal level to produce a meditation on heredity through intentional, and not accidental, form. I will think about the poetic fragment as an impasse (Marjorie Levinson) and as a genre of the present (Lauren Berlant), to close read Shelley's engagement with concepts of heredity. These are linked by his poetics and his scientific inquiry through his explosive use of simile, bringing experimental images into provocative relation, and through resisting generic readings through the instigation of poetic inquiry.
In 1896 William Osler wrote in his pamphlet, John Keats, The Apothecary Poet, 'All lovers of poetry cherish Keats' memory for the splendour of the verse with which he has enriched our literature'. Later T. Wilson Parry stated, 'To me Keats is and ever will be the doctors' poet'. The abiding question underlying this paper is why Keats appeals to so many members of the medical profession and why so few now read the other medical poets. The paper sets out to address this question. It concludes that the reason why Keats is particularly admired by the medical profession is not just because of his early tragic death nor his training in medicine but because his poetry embodies negative capability and an ability to bear the knowledge that pain and pleasure, love and hate, loveliness and ugliness are intertwined. The entwining of Keats's whole life experience (including his medical knowledge) in his emotionally truthful poetry makes his work directly accessible and recognizable to those engaged in a profession which binds them close to the painful, insistent and contradictory realities of human life.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a famous demolition of John Keats's poetry in August 1818. The same issue also announced its hostility to John Ferriar's Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions (1813). Ferriar's essay treated visionary experience as a form of hallucination, 'a waking dream' whose causes were not essentially different from other physical diseases. This lecture explores the intersecting trajectories of Keats and Ferriar - who died in 1815 just as the poet started his medical training at Guy's - to suggest both responded to the emergent science of mind in the period not as a demystification but rather a re-enchantment of imaginative life.
A manuscript copy in Charles Clairmont's hand of an unpublished letter of Byron to Catherine, Lady Mackintosh dated 17 May 1814 has recently been uncovered at Keats-Shelley House, Rome. The letter is part of an exchange that also involved William Godwin, for whom Byron expresses his esteem, and it provides evidence of a hitherto unrecorded attempt of the latter to ease Godwin's financial situation by interceding with John Murray on his behalf, nearly two years before he resolved to cede part of the copyrights of The Siege of Corinth and Parisina to the philosopher. The new episode is reconstructed in the article, which includes a transcription of the copy of Byron's letter and all extant related correspondence held at Keats-Shelley House and the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland.
Julian and Maddalo is a poem about how the mind structures reality. Shelley's focus lies in exploring what constitutes the conditions of knowledge. The first part of the essay discusses Shelley's philosophy of mind as set forth in 'A Treatise on Morality'. With the 'Treatise' as backdrop, I read the poem as Shelley's vehicle for exploring consciousness. Each figure in the poem, not merely the Maniac, embodies a different aspect of consciousness. Each is a madman; each bends reality to prop up his view of life. The second part of the essay examines the poem in light of Shelley's theory of mind in A Defence of Poetry. Here Shelley explores the mind's capacity to envision alternative worlds. The tragedy of the Maniac is that he cannot do what Shelley calls for in the Defence: He cannot imagine any other life than the tortured one he is living in his mind. Maddalo's daughter asserts a new pathway to knowledge, one that acknowledges the boundlessness of the mind and offers a new hermeneutics of the self. My argument owes a debt to Sartre's theory of the 'unreal object', Freud's notions of the preconscious and 'the uncanny', and Galen Strawson's ideas on narrativity.
