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Illuminates Britain's literary field during the 1820s as a decade of improvisation, speculation and rapid cultural change.
Spheres of Action examines the significant intersections between language and performance during the Romantic period.
"The Romantic Performative" develops a new context and methodology for reading Romantic literature by exploring philosophies of language from the period 1785-1835. It reveals that the concept of the performative, debated by twentieth-century theorists from J. L. Austin to Judith Butler, has a much greater relevance for Romantic literature than has been realized, since Romantic philosophy of language was dominated by the idea that something "happens" when words are spoken. By presenting Romantic philosophy as a theory of the performative, and Romantic literature in terms of that theory, this book uncovers the historical roots of twentieth-century ideas about speech acts and performativity. Ro...
Angela Esterhammer explores how the professional practice of improvisation contributes to Romantic ideas and explores poetic improvisation in nineteenth-century fiction.
Published anonymously in 1824, this gothic mystery novel was written by Scottish author James Hogg. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner was published as if it were the presentation of a century-old document. The unnamed editor offers the reader a long introduction before presenting the document written by the sinner himself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the most influential, as well as one of the most enigmatic, of all Romantic figures. The possessor of a precocious talent, he dazzled contemporaries with his poetry, journalism, philosophy and oratory without ever quite living up to his early promise, or overcoming problems of dependence and drug addiction. The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge does full justice to the many facets of Coleridge's life and work. Specially commissioned essays focus on his major poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, his notebooks, and his major work of non-fiction the Biographia Literaria. Attention is given to his role as talker, journalist, critic, and philosopher, his politics, his religion, and his reputation in his own times and afterwards. A chronology and guides to further reading complete the volume, making this an indispensable guide to Coleridge and his work.
Byron’s and Shelley’s experimentation with the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic heroism unites their work. The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley traces the evolution of the poet-hero in the work of both poets, revealing that the struggle to find words adequate to the poet’s imaginative vision and historical circumstance is their central poetic achievement. Madeleine Callaghan explores the different types of poetic heroism that evolve in Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry and drama. Both poets experiment with, challenge and embrace a variety of poetic forms and genres, and this book discusses such generic exploration in the light of their developing versions of the poet-hero. The heroism of the poet, as an idea, an ideal and an illusion, undergoes many different incarnations and definitions as both poets shape distinctive and changing conceptions of the hero throughout their careers.
The first history of keyboard improvisation in European music from the time of Beethoven through the later nineteenth century, Dana Gooley's Free Play: Fantasies of Improvisation in Nineteenth-Century Music describes the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century's leading improvisers, and traces the evolution of the performance practice into a glorified ideal.
Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a co...