The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts

Abstract

The only volume to comprehensively bring together developments from different disciplines that address the complex interplay between British Romantic literature and the visual arts It covers a wide range of intermedial cultural productions, from popular to elite, and from the public to the domestic sphere, including literary texts, paintings and prints, literary galleries, exhibition catalogues, illustrated magazines, household objects and design All the essays in this volume are newly commissioned and include cutting edge research from an interdisciplinary group of writers, literary scholars, art historians, and exhibition curators It brings together work of emerging as well as established scholars in the field, from Europe, North America and Australia, reflecting the global significance of this growing field From the birth of the museum to the explosion of mass-produced illustrated books, the Romantic period (c. 1770-1840) was a moment of rapid change and fruitful experimentation in the fields of art and literature alike. New advances in print production encouraged a wider range of readers to engage with literary forms that opened a path into the once aristocratic field of the visual arts. This Companion captures the way recent engagements with visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period. It brings together 27 research-led chapters that offer a detailed account of the productive, if sometimes tense, interactions between emergent forms of intermedial expression that were redefining culture in the Romantic period -- as they continue to do today.