Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMatthew Sangster, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xii+372 pp. US$109.99 (cloth); US$79.99 (paper).Eric EisnerEric EisnerGeorge Mason University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 54, Number 4Fall 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726792 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Just as the myth of Byron was not created by the poet alone during his lifetime, so after his death a whole industry kept the myth-making machinery running. Byronic aura was reproduced, challenged and reinvented throughout the nineteenth century, in new editions, portraits of the poet, accounts of his life and conversation, fictionalizations of his life story, continuations of his poems, adaptations, imitations, memorials and tributes. British and American tourists took Byron with them to the Continent, where his verse mediated their experience of natural landscapes and classical ruins. Byron and the heroes of his romances – so often blended together by the public – provided the template for both literary characters and real-life imitators who styled themselves after their idol. The many flavors, straight or parodic, of the “Byronic hero” suggest the range of nineteenth-century takes on the electric, contradictory, confounding Lord Byron himself: ruggedly handsome individualist, effeminate Regency fop, savage misanthrope, devilish charmer, demonic scoffer, hopeless romantic, dreamboat outlaw, perverse criminal, exilic wanderer, mad genius, noble revolutionary, egotistical poseur.
Landon's Local Attachments: Urban Mobility, Literary Memory, and the Professional Woman Writer Eric Eisner (bio) "Oh, London!" letitia landon effuses in an 1834 letter to novelist Anna Maria Hall, "Mr. Leigh Hunt says prettily of some Italian name, that he cannot write it without pleasure. I say the same of London!"1 Celebrity poet, enterprising editor and critic, and in the 1830s successful novelist as well, "L.E.L." operated at the forefront of London's literary world. From the start, her urban identifications have been understood as central to her sensibility: looking back, her friend William Howitt commented in his Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847) that "city life was part and parcel of her being."2 Despite renewed interest in Landon, however, recent scholarship often registers her "local attachments" (to borrow Charles Lamb's phrase) only in passing, if at all, emphasizing instead the self-exoticizing verse that brought her to notice in the 1820s—poetry conjuring the faraway, not the streets outside her door.3 [End Page 27] Yet across Landon's writing of the 1830s—in fiction, essays, letters and poems—she articulates an intimate connection between the writer's imagination and the city's energies, often vaunting a privileged and knowing perspective on the streetscape she inhabits. She launches her 1834 New Monthly Magazine essay "Calendar of the London Seasons" (signed "L.E.L.") from the perspective of "a cockney, heart and soul" who, with typical Cockney chauvinism, declares she "never in my life looked over with any interest any map but the map of London" a striking comment from someone known for her verses about foreign places. "I never wish to go farther than a hackney-coach can take me; I desire nothing better than pavement beneath my feet," she explains.4 Her 1831 silver-fork novel Romance and Reality attends to the rhythms and feel of contemporary metropolitan life, while her 1837 novel Ethel Churchill is set in the eighteenth-century city. Such poems as "The Factory" (1835) and her "Scenes in London" series (1836) take up urban life, but, as Margaret Linley points out, even gift-book poetry accompanying illustrations of rural sights, such as "Linmouth" (1833), become excuses for writing about the city.5 After her death, moreover, Landon endures in Victorian cultural memory—in London guidebooks as well as for successive London writers—not only as the sentimental "poetess" with whom we are familiar, but also as a quintessential voice of the city. This essay examines the complex exchanges with literary tradition through which Landon constructs a mode of literary authority tied to urban location as she aggressively makes the case, in both poetry and prose, for a specifically lyric mode of urban consciousness, not as a counterpoint to, but rather bound up with, the city's motion, crowds, and noise. Anne Janowitz identifies a form of mobile lyric identity connected to urban structures of experience and available, across the nineteenth century, to "persons whose identities, like the city itself, were being forged rather than inherited": peculiarly urban voices … who intuit a freedom which links them to a whole patchwork of urban culture where they might grasp the freedom of sublime experience.6 Though she goes unmentioned in Janowitz's account, I argue Landon articulates a version of this democratic identity, at once passionately attached [End Page 28] to metropolitan experience and radically unmoored. Figures of urban mobility crowd into Landon's writing in the '30s—from solitary urban wanderers to the "most migratory multitude" of people and vehicles transiting in and out of London.7 Landon uses these figures, and in particular the figure of the woman walker—mobile but also exposed, independent but also literally outside—in order to think through the contradictory and gendered conditions of authorship as well as her relation to the city as social and political community. The woman walker is of course a charged figure in literature of the nineteenth-century city, frequently associated with sexual fallenness, the prostitute, and the urban underclass. In Landon's writing, however, this figure concentrates the insecurity and also the sense of possibility and provisional autonomy—the activity and freedom...
In the American poet Mark Doty's books of the 1990s, allusions to Keats are so frequent and so pronounced as to make Keats appear a kind of presider to the poetry. Doty's lyrics may often be elegiac in tone, but his use of Keats is neither elegiac nor nostalgic. I see Doty's style in these early books as enacting a reading of the critical possibility of Keats's style, one that corroborates the insights of recent materialist scholarship on Keats. I understand Doty's queer poetics as strategically employing a kind of Cockney poetics. Where for many contemporary poets Keats functions as the icon of lyric tradition or authenticity of experience, Doty, working within the lyric tradition, connects Keats to drag, kitsch, and simulation. I propose D. W. Winnicott's notion of object use as a model for this irreverently allusive use of Keats.
Deidre Lynch positions her wonderfully engaging cultural history Loving Literature as a response to the charges we frequently hear, both within the academy and from without, that literary studies h...
Almost two centuries have passed since John Keats's death, and yet he is very much with us today. This chapter examines the role of ideas of 'friendship' in the construction of Keats's ongoing 'afterlife' beginning with the poet's circle of friends, and explores how reading, writing and friendship color each other in the formation of a general Romantic culture of commemoration. It is argued that Keats's poetry and poetics, as well as his friends' and admirers' posthumous care for his image, negotiate a set of tensions central to his afterlife all along: tensions between publicity and intimacy, mediation and immediacy, and between the body and the book. The chapter asks what 'friendship' as a category of analysis adds to discussions of literary celebrity and 'afterlife'.
In the standard story criticism tells, nineteenth-century women writers aspiring to fame faced a persistent double bind. The literary marketplace rewarded women writers whose public image reflected...
278 BOOK REVIEWS these living museums and reenactments enshrine, however haphazardly. Though Goode readily admits that a place like Colonial Williamsburg has had varied and contradictory aims (the film shown at Williamsburg, The Story ofA Patriot [1957], owes a good deal to Waverly), it and similar institu tions do manage to attempt a non-narrative reproduction of daily life, and do produce “a feeling of a historically specific and unique past-ness that is irreducible to an experience of stance or narrative movement” (178). And while Civil War reenactors can be either passed over or mocked, there are “Hardcore” reenactors who so concentrate on the “feeling” of history that they do not even bother refighting the obvious famous battles like Man assas, Spotsylvania Courthouse, or Antietam, but instead act out the daily distress of the Confederate soldier, complete with near-starvation, 15-mile barefoot marches, and lice. This devotion, which is certainly grounded in masculine performance, is finally, Goode argues, “a form of Romantic Historicism” (182) that deserves recognition as a descendant of Burke, Scott, and Carlyle. With its large and entertaining variety of sources, its fine historicized readings, and its convincing argument, Sentimental Mascu linity and the Rise ofHistory achieves its aims. The coda is also a strong con clusion to the book as a whole, as it shows quite eloquently why the book’s explorations matter. James Najarian Boston College Paul Westover. Necroromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750—1860. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. viii+217. $95. Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem” (1812) specu lates about a distant future in which North American tourists seek out traces of vanished glory in a Britain imagined as part museum, part ceme tery: “With curious search their pilgrim steps shall rove / By many a ruined tower and proud alcove ... I With throbbing bosoms shall the wanderers tread / The hallowed mansions of the silent dead” (lines 151-52, 177-78). Paul Westover’s lively, lucid study investigates the popularity of such necro-tourism among Barbauld’s own contemporaries. Starting in the eighteenth century, Westover argues, a new concept of national cultural heritage emerged, sustaining increasingly popular forms ofdomestic literary tourism. While tourists were eager to visit any kind of site associated with writers’ lives or works, Westover’s contention is that the graves of authors in particular acquired a special attraction as paradigmatic spots for the kind S/R, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 279 of contact with the past tourists pursued. While literary in focus, West over’s solidly researched book goes beyond the cult of the author to also entertain wider questions about the relationships among tourism, travel writing, and cultural memory. Necroromanticism explores terrain somewhat similar to that mapped by such excellent recent studies as Nicola Watson’s The Literary Tourist (2006), Samantha Matthews’s Poetical Remains (2004), and Ann Rigney’s The After lives of Walter Scott (2012). Westover is carefully engaged with this body of scholarship (though Anne Janowitz’s quite relevant England’s Ruins some how goes overlooked). The originality ofthis book’s contribution lies both in its compelling close readings and in the broader argument that “traveling to meet the dead” is not a merely peripheral expression of Romantic desires—not simply a way readers act on the desires given impetus by Romantic texts—but rather a primary, organizing element of Romanticera literary activity. One might expect a study ofcultural tourism to be built around particu larjourneys or destinations, but Westover structures the book around texts: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809); Felicia Hemans’s poems on authors’ graves; travel books by Americans tourists in England; and Victo rian illustration books of Walter Scott’s novels and “Scott country.” This approach responds to Westover’s interest in the circuits among reading, writing, and travel. Guidebooks of the period imbue landscapes with liter ary and historical associations, while literary texts act as guidebooks, direct ing readers to specific landscapes and teaching tourists how to read what they see, or how to see what they read. At tourist sites, Westover observes, literary pilgrims “had difficulty at times deciding whether they were read ing, seeing, feeling or remembering,” when “in...
Previous articleNext article No AccessThe International Conference on Romanticism 2012: Selected PapersDisaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary American PoetryEric EisnerEric Eisner Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 44, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044240 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Tom Mole, ed. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ISBN: 9780521884778. Price: US$98.00. Un article de la revue Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (Romantic Cultures of Print) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.
In letters written just after the publication of her remarkable “novel-poem” Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Browning tracked what these days we would call the poem’s buzz. The letters reflect her excitement and apparent mystification about the poem’s reception. In a letter to her sister Arabella dated 10–18 December 1856, she wrote that the poem is “taken up with favour with certain persons, to the amount of a mania;” in a letter to Anna Jameson dated 2 February 1857, she reported on the “extravagant” fan mail she received, and jokingly marveled at the spectacle of “quite decent women taking the part of the book in a sort of effervescence which I hear of with astonishment.”1 Some of these women indeed wrote directly to Barrett Browning to thank her for “‘help’—for new views of ‘love, truth, and purity,’” as she informed Julia Martin in a letter dated 10 March 1857.2 Influential readers were vocal in their enthusiasm: John Ruskin wrote to Robert Browning assuring him “all the best people shout with me, rapturously” in praise of the poem.3 While reviews in the major periodicals were mixed, the passionate response the poem aroused in many individual readers is striking—as is Barrett Browning’s surprised, delighted and sometimes bemused fascination with the “extravagances” of her readers.4KeywordsIdealist ModeConventionally RealistSpiritual IdealismAffective PowerRealist PlotThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage on 10 March 1812 notoriously sparked a sensation. Even before the poem was officially offered to the public, advance copies stirred excitement about the dashing young noble freshly returned from his exotic travels.1 As Byron's friend Thomas Moore recalled (or re-imagined) the scene from a vantage point almost two decades later, Byron's effect on British audiences had been immediately "electric": "young Byron stood forth alone, unanswered by either praise or promise—the representative of an ancient house, whose name, long lost in the gloomy solitudes of Newstead, seemed to have just awakened from the sleep of half a century in his person."2 Despite the campy, B-movie Gothicism, Moore is astute in observing that this figure exotically out of time had arrived perfectly on time to take advantage of the modern "taste for strong excitement" in a public captivated and fatigued by Napoleon. After the first edition of 500 copies of Childe Harold sold out in a mere three days, fan letters began pouring in from readers who had fallen hard for the writer whose own sensibility they imagined they recognized in the fashionably melancholic Harold. Byron found himself the darling of Whig high society, "the only topic almost of conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other," as the Duchess of Devonshire informed her son overseas.3KeywordsFemale CharacterPublic SentimentReading PublicPerformative UtteranceFemale WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Obituaries for Keats staked their claim for attention on that paradoxical but pervasive trope of Romantic celebrity, the narrative of neglected genius. Take, for example, this version from the London Magazine notice signed “L.,” written by “Barry Cornwall” (Bryan Waller Procter), subsequently picked up by the Imperial Magazine (December 1821), Time’s Telescope for 1822, and American journals, and quoted liberally elsewhere: Mr. Keats was, in the truest sense of the word, A POET. […] He had a fine ear, a tender heart, and at times great force and originality of expression; and notwithstanding all this, he has been suffered to rise and pass away almost without a notice: the laurel has been awarded (for the present) to other brows: the bolder aspirants have been allowed to take their station on the slippery steps of the temple of fame, while he has been nearly hidden among the crowd during his life, and has at last died, solitary and in sorrow, in a foreign land.
