1st Edition
Legacies of Romanticism Literature, Culture, Aesthetics
This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture.
The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.
Introduction Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell Part 1: Early and Mid-Victorian 1. Hazlitt as a Gateway to Nineteenth Century Ekphrasis: The Quarrel with Reynolds Revisited Richard Read 2. Ruskin’s Keats: A Joy for Ever (and its Price in the Market), "The Mystery of Life and its Arts", and the Resonance of the Severn Circle Carmen Casaliggi 3. Anatomizing the "Case": Shelley’s The Cenci, Browning’s The Ring and the Book, and the Origins of the Dramatic Monologue Porscha Fermanis 4. Burney’s Wanderers and Brontë’s Silent Revolts: Revolution, Vagrancy and Gender Muireann O’Cinneide Part 2: Late Victorian and Edwardian 5. Shelley’s Alchemy, Pater’s Transformations Catherine Maxwell 6. The New Pygmalions: Idealism and Disillusionment in Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris and Lee’s Miss Brown Patricia Pulham 7. Late Victorian Responses to Romanticism: Wordsworth, Wilde’s Poems and other inheritances Ruth Robbins 8. Pole to Pole: Romantic Apocalypse at the Victorian Fin de Siècle Matthew Bradley Part 3: Modernism and Postmodernism 9. Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity Madeleine Callaghan 10. The Neo-Romantic Wyndham Lewis Paul March-Russell 11. Neo-Romantic Visionaries: Picturing Britain in the Second World War Stella Hockenhull 12. The Last of the Romantics? The Accidental Investigator in Postmodern Detective Fiction Stefania Ciocia Part 4: Postcolonialism and Theoretical Studies 13. "Dark Interpretations": Romanticism’s Ambiguous Legacy in India Daniel Sanjiv Roberts 14. Diaspora and its Romanticism(s) - The Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Ellen Dengel-Janic 15. Romanticism and Unhappiness: Melancholy as a Romantic Legacy Simon Swift 16. Present Prophesy: The Transformation of Romantic Rhetoric in and by New Media Joseph Tabbi
Biography
Carmen Casaliggi is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK.
Paul March-Russell is Honorary Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
