Project MUSE®: Romanticism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Romanticism.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 12 (2006) - vol. 14 (2008)Latest Articles: RomanticismTWOProject MUSE®Romanticism1750-01921354-991XLatest articles in Romanticism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Daniel Mendoza’s Contests of Identity: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Nation in Georgian Prize-fighting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258368
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Boxing provides a particularly illuminating indicator of the complex relationships between rank, leisure, and competing masculinities as they are defined in terms of national identity.1 From the early eighteenth century onwards, pugilism justified itself by reference to the national character: the sport’s ‘championism’ took the form of a ‘brave moral independence’ framed in terms of a classical heroism which served the purposes of a nascent Britishness.2 This conjunction of nation and masculinity was a strong feature of the sport’s popularity in the 1740s and remained so in its second period of popularity from 1780 to 1825. By the second decade of the nineteenth century it was, like many other rural, urban
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallDaniel Mendoza’s Contests of Identity: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Nation in Georgian Prize-fighting2009-01-23text/htmlen-USDaniel Mendoza’s Contests of Identity: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Nation in Georgian Prize-fighting2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®750382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258369
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Julie A. Carlson’s new monograph takes a collective approach. In place of the conventional denigration of biography in literary criticism and emphasis on an individual author’s originality, its methodology embraces the mutual construction of lives and stories; its subject is the intricate interrelationships between the works of family members. Experience and textualisation were inextricably entwined for Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley, for whom the production of print was simultaneously their bread and butter and fervent testament to evolving beliefs. Carlson attempts to acknowledge that fluidity by employing the terms life/writings and im/personalities to indicate those permeable
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallEngland’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (review)2009-01-23text/htmlen-USEngland’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (review)2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®113412026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23The Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258370
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Recent discoveries concerning the genesis of Waverley (1814) have made it possible to position Scott’s first novel more satisfactorily in the history of fiction in the Romantic period generally, particularly in relation to the Irish ‘national’ tales of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson.2 Scant attention however has been paid to the possible influence of the relatively obscure ‘national’ novel John de Lancaster (1809), by the veteran author Richard Cumberland, better known as a playwright. Set in North Wales in the later eighteenth century, it depicts a country community presided over by a network of country gentleman, dominant amongst whom is the elder hero, Robert de Lancaster, an antiquary given to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallThe Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance2009-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®776202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23Elizabeth Kent’s Collaborators
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258371
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In 1823 Taylor and Hessey published an innocuous handbook for the suburban gardener. The author of Flora Domestica, they announced in a puff piece in the London Magazine, ‘has devoted much time, and talent, to the subject on which his heart is set’.1 ‘We have no doubt’, their reviewer noted, ‘that our readers will rise from the perusal of it quite satisfied’ (London Magazine, 147). In the Preface to Flora Domestica, its unnamed author was equally understated about the purpose of her volume, and her own botanical skills: ‘Many a plant have I destroyed, like a fond and mistaken mother, by an inexperienced tenderness; until, in pity to these vegetable nurslings and their nurses, I resolved to obtain and to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallElizabeth Kent’s Collaborators2009-01-23text/htmlen-USElizabeth Kent’s Collaborators2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®591582026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23The Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258372
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This is a closely-argued and brilliant book which offers a great wealth of insights, arguments and theoretical models relevant to Romantic and psychoanalytical writing. It belongs to that well-established line of criticism which reads psychoanalytic and literary texts on terms of equality and reciprocity. A crucial influence here is Shoshana Felman, from whose 1977 article ‘To Open the Question’, Reisner quotes the claim that ‘in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis each form represents for the other the “unthought . . . the possibility of its own self-subversion”’ (67). Reisner’s aim is to use ‘the relationship between desire and romance’ to ‘focus the encounter between literature and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallThe Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis (review)2009-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Death-Ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis (review)2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®133612026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23The Works of Charlotte Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258373
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In July 2003, scholars from all corners of the globe assembled at the University of Southhampton for the conference on ‘Women’s Writing in Britain: 1660–1830’, which marked the opening of the Chawton House Library and Study Centre, as well as the beginning of an exciting new phase in the study of women writers of the long eighteenth century and Romantic periods. Of particular interest was Stuart Curran’s energetic plenary address in which he urged those assembled to participate in an ongoing mission to make available scholarly editions of the works of the writers who formed the subject of the conference – especially those of the Romantic period. In so doing, Curran reiterated a plea made six years earlier by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallThe Works of Charlotte Smith (review)2009-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Works of Charlotte Smith (review)2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®389832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and Anticipating the Future
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258374
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‘I deprecate the moral & intellectual habits of those men both in England & France, who have modestly assumed to themselves the exclusive title of Philosophers and Friends of Freedom’, c.10 March 1798.1
Coleridge often invited his reader, silently, to wonder what might come next in a literary text. Act 2 of Osorio (1797) sees the title character demand of Ferdinand: ‘Well – and what next?’. Ferdinand, stammering, replies: ‘Next, next – my lord!’2 The stumbling anxiety makes for an awkward dramatic exchange. But the question of ‘what next?’, for Coleridge himself, particularly in 1797 and 1798, was intriguing enough. On one side, of course, there was the matter, all-too-relevant throughout his life
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallColeridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and Anticipating the Future2009-01-23text/htmlen-USColeridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, and Anticipating the Future2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®673202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23The Poetics of Orphanhood: Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, and ‘Tintern Abbey’
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258375
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E. P. Thompson’s suspicion, in a 1988 review that ‘there was something secretive about Wordsworth in the 1790s’, can seem to have become a guiding thread for many of Wordsworth’s most influential critics in the twenty years or so since. A broader sense of the ‘difficulties of establishing and reading “absent” contexts for Romantic poems’ has coincided with a commonly felt need to read Wordsworth’s work according to operative ratios between suppression and disclosure.1 To take possibly the most celebrated example, Marjorie Levinson’s 1986 account of the air-brushing out of local poverty and industry in ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ may have been decisively countered,2 but her mode of reading still
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallThe Poetics of Orphanhood: Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, and ‘Tintern Abbey’2009-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Poetics of Orphanhood: Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’, ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’, and ‘Tintern Abbey’2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®793402026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23The Feminization of Fame 1750–1830 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258376
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While the figure of Fame is always feminine, Claire Brock claims, ‘the famed are always men’ (1). In The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830, Brock seeks to draw our attention to a number of celebrated women in the period, as well as to men who helped to make contemporary fame accessible to both sexes. In chapters on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Robinson, Frances Burney, Germaine de Staël and William Hazlitt, the book suggests that new kinds of public recognition were available to women from the mid eighteenth century onwards, that they actively and enthusiastically embraced the task of self-promotion, and that they enjoyed being in the spotlight.
Rousseau is identified (in Chapter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallThe Feminization of Fame 1750–1830 (review)2009-01-23text/htmlen-USThe Feminization of Fame 1750–1830 (review)2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®108932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23Wordsworth’s Imaginative Duty
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/258377
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In his well-known essay of 1879, Matthew Arnold suggested that Wordsworth’s poetry was ‘great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple elementary affections and duties’.1 Arnold’s observation is a penetrating recognition of the things in life which Wordsworth held to be most important – but for all that, Wordsworth’s affirmation of duty has frequently been seen as at variance with his faith in nature and the natural world. Misread in this light, the ‘Ode to Duty’ has often appeared to be an uncomfortable oddity amongst the poems of Wordsworth’s ‘great decade’, both a sign of Wordsworth’s looming moralism and resignation as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/337/image/coversmallWordsworth’s Imaginative Duty2009-01-23text/htmlen-USWordsworth’s Imaginative Duty2009-01-232009TWOProject MUSE®713902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002009-01-23