Early Nineteenth-century Writers Research Articles

Woman in a turban: Domenichino’s Sibyl, Staël’s Corinne, and the image of female genius

The heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) makes her first appearance in the novel ‘dressed like Domenichino’s Sibyl’, wearing an Indian shawl wound into a turban. The aim of this essay is to highlight the contribution that the tradition of Sibylline iconography made to the characterization of the heroine of Corinne by locating Staël in a long line of artists, writers, and patrons, particularly female ones, who adapted and appropriated this iconography for their own purposes over the previous two centuries. A crucial breakthrough was made in the early seventeenth century by Domenichino, who provided the prototype for later generations of artists by painting a freestanding picture of a generic (not, as often said, the Cumaean) Sibyl wearing a turban. Domenichino’s composition nevertheless remained exceptional in its insistence on the primacy of Sibylline inspiration, which helps to account for its role in Corinne as well as for its appeal to other early nineteenth-century writers. Staël’s direct predecessors included the artists Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, both of whom portrayed female sitters in more or less Sibylline guise, but the most important was Emma Hamilton, from whose famous Attitudes Staël almost certainly derived the motif of the turban fashioned out of an Indian shawl. Staël herself adopted the turban as her characteristic headdress, as did other literary and artistic women after her; its great advantage lay in the way it enabled them to lay claim to Sibylline authority whilst also disavowing any such intent.

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle

Reviewed by: Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle Shannon K. Withycombe (bio) Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America nora doyle University of North Carolina Press, 2018 286 pp. At some point in my courses in history of women and history of reproduction I like to show students images of pregnancy from eighteenth-century medical anatomy texts. I ask my students to gaze at images from William Hunter or William Smellie, to think about how these illustrations of [End Page 276] disembodied pelvises, chopped-off limbs, and abdomens splayed open affected how doctors and others approached reproducing women. If a young man learned about childbirth from a dismembered torso, detached from a woman’s mind and voice, how could this shape his actions in the midst of a birthing scene? How could these illustrations influence understandings of women’s bodies or their reproductive activities, and limit women’s roles in determining medical care or their ability to be heard? Nora Doyle answers these questions and many more with her study of the maternal body in early America. Uncovering descriptions, images, and ideals of the maternal body in print culture between 1750 and 1850, Doyle examines popular narratives about women birthing and nursing children, but more compellingly compares these narratives to women’s personal writings about their reproducing bodies. Juggling this multiplicity of sources, Doyle is able to present an original, timely, and captivating history. While the histories of reproduction and motherhood are rich genres, historians have rarely placed the body so squarely in the center of a study. Bodies often show up on the margins, but usually remain background or context for learned medicine, female activism, and governmental policy. Doyle considers both bodies in their unruly corporeality—leaking breasts, aching backs, tearing flesh—and their culturally mediated discursive and visual representations; perhaps most importantly, she delves into how these aspects of the maternal body are indelibly intertwined. Doyle shows not only that bodies matter but also that we cannot understand the institution of motherhood without a deep analysis of understandings of the bodies involved. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, two cultural transformations severely shaped the maternal body in American print culture. Following a similar movement in Europe, American medical men began to seek out the business of birthing women. These men instantly faced the social task of overturning the notion that entering a birthing room, sitting with a laboring woman, and examining how her labor was progressing (which usually included raising her skirts and looking directly at her vagina) was not something that a respectable man should be doing. As Doyle demonstrates, aspiring male-midwives, seeking to desexualize the experience, shifted the focus during birth from the woman to the uterus. Medical texts and advice manuals depicted the womb as an active agent in charge of expelling the child, and in illustrations as physically separated [End Page 277] from a woman with a voice, a will, or even complete legs. As male practitioners divided and dismembered the female body, women were essentially erased from the event; their maternal bodies became invisible and inactive. At the same time, Enlightenment projects crafted idealized womanhood as a mother focused on the emotional, moral, and spiritual nature of producing and raising children. Prescriptive literature, fiction and poetry, and images appearing in women’s magazines depicted an orderly, gentle, calm maternal body. Doyle highlights the presentation of breastfeeding in these narratives, the one physical activity that could be reconstructed as a moral, orderly pursuit. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers could portray breastfeeding as a pleasurable emotional activity, unlike childbirth. The typified sentimental mother only received pleasure from her mothering; it was dangerous to acknowledge the pain, distress, and the supreme physicality of motherhood. To fulfill her goal of restoring the body “to its rightful place in the history of motherhood,” Doyle cannot rely only on the print culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (210). She also analyzes the impact of these genres by investigating the centrality of the body within women’s personal writings about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Doyle discovers a range of women’s reflections on and reactions to their physical...

“Something like mine”: Catherine Hutton, Jane Austen, and Feminist Recovery Work

Despite her output and connection to several well-known early nineteenth-century writers, Catherine Hutton has remained almost completely absent from the historical record. This essay begins some recovery work on Hutton, focusing on the ways in which she styled herself as a woman novelist and depicted women’s reading within her texts. In addressing the question of authorial self-fashioning, I also examine the comparisons Hutton made between herself and Jane Austen and build on the work of contemporary feminist critics to consider the benefits and drawbacks to reading understudied women writers in relation to Austen.

Romantic sobriety: sensation, revolution, commodification, history

This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj i ek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Bronte, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

‘Wipe the Dust off your Feet’

This article looks at the missionary – widely defined – as a character in late eighteenth-century literature. Specifically, it asks why authors would choose to include stories about failures in missionary endeavours. The paper argues that the answer lies in the pervasive influence of biblical stories on colonial religious discourse. The authors treated here view the failed missionary as a harbinger of the gospel's ultimate success because Jesus himself said as much to his apostles, warning of opposition and rejection prior to the kingdom's ultimate victory. Whether consciously or not, biblical precedents shape the expansionist, Christian rhetoric of these eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers in such a way that they can accommodate both missionary successes and disappointments in their narratives, without doubting their religious superiority over the non-Christians they describe.

Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism

Aesthetic Embarrassment:The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism Linda M. Austin The late twentieth-century indictment of tourism in Britain and America, launched almost half a century ago by Daniel J. Boorstin, has focused on the industry's embrace of simulation and its tendency to transform everything in its field into, as Jonathan Culler has written, "a sign of itself, an instance of a cultural practice."1 The suspicion of the tour as an inauthentic experience is at least two centuries old, however, and has guided the development of tourism as middle-class recreation since the start of the nineteenth century.2 Inevitably this suspicion affected the aesthetic experiences of tourists themselves. The idea of travel as an exercise in the individual cultivation and display of distinctive taste induced discomfort, even self-contempt, among those of moderate means who were eager to emulate their aristocratic predecessors and develop artistic appreciation and connoisseurship. They suffered from "touristic shame," to use John Frow's words; and their shame educed what Dean MacCannell has called a "rhetoric of moral superiority."3 Although this rhetoric privileged romantic conditions such as authenticity and autonomy, it depended on prestigious aesthetic codes to structure individual experiences. It is the self-conscious and often hapless deployment of these codes in the second half of the nineteenth century that I shall examine. Not only were the codes regularly undermined, but their users were frequently embarrassed. This usually occurred in one of two ways: either the material circumstances of tourism desublimated the aesthetic code of a tourist's consumption or the viewer's efforts to encounter the new and to defamiliarize the customary lapsed into a dependence on a familiar (and shunned) visual paradigm, that of the picturesque. The precariousness of the nineteenth-century tourist's visual pleasure is blatant in the prosaic accounts of ordinary persons in unfamiliar settings; but it is noticeable as well in the records of practiced writers on native ground. When Richard Jefferies, renowned in the second part of the century for his contributions to a literature of English [End Page 629] husbandry and rural life, composed the three travel essays he later collected for The Open Air (1885), he concentrated on the Victorian tourist's sedulous and frustrating efforts to isolate himself from other excursionists and to elevate his observations into an almost abstract formalism. Likewise, John Davidson, a journalist too, as well as a poet—and one, moreover, on the fringes of avant-garde circles of the nineties—remained uncomfortably aware of the obstacles to his pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and legitimacy while on his walking-tours of the Chiltern Hills and the environs of London. A collection of his sketches entitled A Random Itinerary (1894) records the ambitious traveler's efforts to avoid the vapidity of sightseeing and elevate it into an art of description allied with contemporary trends in aesthetic appreciation and the production of the lyric. Written by men of known cultural competence and easily linked to their own travels, these texts exhibit the aspirations of many ordinary travelers who were eager to elevate their tourism not simply into memorable moments but into legitimate ones linked to elitist modes of production and consumption. In recording their embarrassments, the following pages historicize the conflict between the physiological apparatuses of enjoyment and the contemporary aesthetics of authority and prestige. I. Richard Jefferies, Connoisseurship, and Touristic Shame In his reverent study of the writing, and countryside, of Jefferies, published 22 years after his death in 1909, Edward Thomas declared his subject a romantic observer who "was clearly as much of the soil as the things which he described."4 More than a half-century later, Raymond Williams read Jefferies' nature and field studies, as well as his commentaries on the condition of agriculture, as illustrations of "green language," a term he borrowed from John Clare's "Pastoral Poesy" (1832) to illuminate the social and political dilemma of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who had not profited from improvements in agriculture and tourism. The attention of "green language" to the weather, lighting effects, birds, and botanical life reflected the lonely imaginations of its users and registered, as Williams...

Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (review)

Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. By Robert S. Nelson. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 278, 11 color plates. $65.00.) This fascinating investigation of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul amasses a wealth of documentation-some of it well known and some of it new-to document and assess how it became a modern icon. It focuses on the people, writings, and illustrations that illuminate this history. Intelligently and beautifully written, and well produced, with 119 figures and ten color plates, the important monograph of the Byzantine art historian Robert S. Nelson should appeal to the scholar and the general reader alike. Nelson begins his inquiry with the completion of the last major restoration of the building from 1847 to 1849 by the Swiss architects, the Fossati brothers, and concludes around 1950, a rather arbitrary date, as he admits. But the century of his overview was crucial for the transformation of Hagia Sophia as artifact of the past-first as the cathedral and patriarchal church of Constantinople and then as the sultan's and the caliph's principal mosque Aya Sofya, into a monument of the present-since 1934 a museum seen by virtually all visitors to the city. We learn about the critics, poets, archeologists, architects, illustrators, photographers, philanthropists, government officials, and religious congregations who are tied to the fabric of Hagia Sophia's modern reception. The monograph is selective, focusing upon the European and American reception of the building, and excluding interpretations by Turks of the late Sultanate and early Republic, modern Greeks (except for some Greek Orthodox communities who migrated to the United States and built churches), and Orthodox Christians in late Czarist and early Soviet Russia. Nelson's narrative unfolds in eight chapters. In Chapter One he sketches the lines of the Early Byzantine church of the sixth century, its post-Iconoclastic mosaic decoration, and the liturgical processions associated with the building. Then he outlines the scornful attitudes about or neglect of the building by late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers. A few writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, however, offered positive appraisals of Hagia Sophia. For example, in her popular illustrated travel book The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London, 1838), Miss Julia Pardoe,who gained admittance to Hagia Sophia, termed it an architectural wonder (p. 63). Chapter Two analyzes how certain scholars and architects in Germany, France, and England appropriated Byzantine architecture in the service of their respective countries. The next chapter discusses the sympathetic attitude toward Byzantine architecture in the writings of John Ruskin and how Ruskin made it relevant to Victorian building. No matter that Ruskin never visited Constantinople and based his grasp of Byzantine architecture on Venice, especially on architectural sculpture and mosaics in San Marco inVenice.Yet his The Stones of Venice (1851-1853J) launched a general reappraisal of Byzantine architecture in general and Hagia Sophia in particular. Chapter Four is to my mind the most important in the book. In the second half of the nineteenth century both photographic images of the building and its first scholarly studies appeared.The latter are well known in academic circles, but the photographs, engravings, and other reproductions gathered by Nelson are less familiar. The superhero of this period was the British artist James Robertson, who moved to Constantinople in 1841 to modernize the Ottoman mint and who within a decade had taken up photography. …

Typee: "An Almost Incredible Book"

In the lucid and learned essay, Flight to Taipi, the archaeologist Robert C. Suggs raises new questions about fact and fiction in specifically about the accuracy of the narrator's description of his five-day journey from Taioha'e (Melville's bay of Nukuheva) to Taipi (Melville's Typee), and Suggs does something more.1 Of course, questions about the authenticity of Melville's Pacific Eden are not a new phenomenon. During the last great wave of skepticism about Robert S. Forsythe, in Herman Melville in the Marquesas (1936), documented Melville's expansion of his several week's stay to his narrator's four months with the Taipi. Charles Roberts Anderson, in his influential Melville in the South Seas (1939), showed Melville's indebtedness in detail and language to the travel narratives of such early nineteenth-century writers as the naval captain David Porter, the maritime chaplain C. S. Stewart, and the naturalist G. H. von Langsdorff. Anderson argued that the autobiography in Typee was thin and the ethnography, while accurate, was largely compiled from his sources. Anderson saw himself as correcting the mistakes of Melville's biographers, who conflated fiction with fact. As Raymond M. Weaver, the biographer who helped to fuel the revival of interest in Melville's work in the 1920s, had put the case, Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. While suggesting that much ofthe book was the product of Melville's reading and his imagination, Anderson also concluded that it was grounded in fact, point

Celebrating the Yu Fan Shrine: Literati Networks and Local Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou

Celebrating the Yu Fan Shrine:Literati Networks and Local Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou Steven B. Miles, Assistant Professor of History Late in 1811 the Guangdong lieutenant-governor, Zeng Yu (1760-1831), and a group of local Cantonese and sojourning literati gathered at Guangxiao Monastery in Guangzhou to celebrate the construction of a shrine in honor of Yu Fan (164-233), a scholar and minor official who had been banished to the far south. While this 1811 gathering was a relatively minor affair, it coincided with a period in which Cantonese literati both turned with growing intensity toward writing about local culture and increasingly gained stature among the literary elite in the major cultural centers of the empire. The literary and scholarly ideals associated with the site and the celebrants would become mainstream in urban Cantonese literati circles with governor-general Ruan Yuan's (1764-1849) opening, a decade later, of the Xuehaitang academy. Moreover, subsequent portrayals of the Yu Fan Shrine, the cultural hero that it honored, and its creator persistently reappeared in local literature throughout the nineteenth century. An examination of the participants who attended the event and the cultural meanings attached to the site of the Yu Fan Shrine provides an opportunity to explore connections between two developments in early nineteenth-century China: localism and empire-wide literati activism. Regarding the first of these developments, recent studies have drawn attention to several periods in which the production of texts was increasingly focused on local themes. One instance of this occurred in the late-eleventh and twelfth centuries, another in the sixteenth.2 The early nineteenth century is another period for which this type of "localist turn" may be documented in many places across the Qing [End Page 33] empire. In Guangzhou this was certainly the case, as Cantonese literati produced an unprecedented number of anthologies and histories focused on local culture.3 Yet it is important to remember that the production of localist texts could also be stimulated and maintained through trans-local networks of literati.4 Furthermore, in addition to the increased attention devoted towards local cultures in the early nineteenth century, James Polachek and other scholars have identified this period as a time when literati activism was on the rise throughout the Qing empire.5 That is, Chinese literati sought to enhance their influence in the bureaucratic administration, often through factional politics formed in part through shared aesthetic ideals. While this paper is not primarily concerned with "national" politics, a consideration of the writers and writings associated with the Yu Fan Shrine relates to the issue of the "ascendant literati" in two ways. First, since Zeng Yu was tied to the literati groups that would begin to assert themselves only a few years later in the capital, an examination of the interactions between Zeng and the Cantonese poets who celebrated the Yu Fan Shrine provides a means of exploring the evolving relationship between Cantonese literati and their northern—from the Cantonese perspective designating every place "north of the range"—patrons and like-minded associates. Second, if Polachek is correct in asserting that "belletristic friendship" or "aesthetic fellowship" was a means of forming trans-local patronage relationships in the early nineteenth century, then it behooves historians to take seriously the literature through which such relationships were forged.6 While members of the same literati "group" may have shared cultural icons, the cultural meanings associated with those icons likely varied over time and place, and among individual members of the group. An examination of commemorative essays and poems associated with the shrine provides an opportunity to further our understanding of the role that "aesthetic fellowship" and the celebration of local sites played in constructing elite culture and building literati networks in late imperial China. This article begins with an examination of the backgrounds of the northern patron in this case, Zeng Yu, and of the Cantonese poets he mobilized to celebrate the Yu Fan Shrine. This is followed by an overview of the history of the site of the shrine in order to understand the range of symbols available to early nineteenth-century writers. We then turn our attention to the 1811 construction [End Page 34...

Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art

In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable.The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era?Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Contemporary Reviewers

POE'S NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM AND THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWERS Burton R. PoIHn* Almost without exception the biographies and commentaries concerning Edgar Allan Poe have repeated several errors made by James A. Harrison, George Woodberry, and Killis Campbell in 1902, 1909, 1921, and 1932 on the subject of the contemporary reception of the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The misleading opinions may be listed as three: that in England and occasionally in America the book was treated as true or authentic;1 that it was virtually ignored by the reviewing magazines, with only three reviews discoverable in American magazines; that these three reviews condemned the book unequivocally.2 It is strange that these misconceptions were ever entertained and even stranger that they have not been corrected sooner by students of Poe able to consult the full text of the three, not to mention the thirteen others that I mean to present. These sixteen comprise reviews in periodicals of New York, Philadelphia, and London: the three cited by Campbell, in the New-York Mirror, the Knickerbocker and Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and, in addition, in those of Philadelphia—the Saturday Courier and Waldie's Select Circuhting Library; in those of New York—the Family Magazine, the New-Yorker, the Evening Post, the Albion, and the New York Review; and in those of London—the Metropolitan Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, the Monthly Review, the Spectator, the Atlas, and the Torch. I propose to furnish the full text of all of these save thelast two, most of them being in magazines unavailable in any one library. My chief aim is to correct the •Dr. Burton R. Pollin, Professor of English at Bronx Community College, CUNY, is the author of Discoveries in Poe, Dictionary of Namesand Titles in Poe's CoUected Works, and the forthcoming Poe as a Creator of Words, as well as over fifty studies on Poe alone. He has also published, as author or editor, nine books by or about William Godwin and Shelley, and thirty articles on Godwin, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Southey, Arnold, Wilde, Emerson, and Hawthorne. Having received grants and fellowships from the ACLS, APS, Pforzheimer Foundation, SUNY Research Foundation, and CUNY Research Foundation, he is now working on a new study of Poe under a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and is initiating his editorship of the Harvard edition of Poe's works. 38Burton R. Pollin historical record of what has been assumed to be the response of the critics and, implicitly, of the public of Poe's day. A scarcely less important reason is to enable students of Poe to compare the moderate degree of interest in Pym in 1838 with our own increasing respect for Poe's chronicle of grotesque horrors afflicting Pym, the "ymp of the perverse," before his confrontation with the Melvillean white horror of the polar abyss. Within the past twenty years there have been many ingenious theories about the autobiogripical implications of the story and about the shaping or formative themes: the suicidal, the oneiric, the premature-burial, the doppelganger, et al.3 While there need be no correspondence at all between what the contemporary reviewers found in the book and what modern Poe criticism has found, we cannot help regarding any marked discrepancy as cause for greater caution in our interpretations of Poe's intent or his implications. Poe was clearly trying also to cater to the current popular taste for sea stories involving discoveries of strange lands, shipwrecks and narrow escapes, and violent action. James Fenimore Cooper, Captain Marryat, and Captain Benjamin Morrell were only a few of the early nineteenth century writers about the sea whose popular books made Poe determined to exploit a field promisingly begun with "Manuscript Found in a Bottle." The early part of Pym was published in the January and February issues of the Southern Literary Messenger, just after he left the editorship. During 1837 he was busily engaged in completing what he hoped would be a very vendible piece of literary merchandise, drawn from a variety of sources, including Benjamin Morrell's book of 1832. The "table-of-contents" type of title of that work demonstrates Poe's emulation of this...

ACUTE METASTATIC GONORRHEAL DACRYOADENITIS

<h3>OUTLINE</h3> Literature History Clinical picture of acute dacryoadenitis Etiology of acute dacryoadenitis Gonorrheal dacryoadenitis Report of a case Clinical course Pathologic changes Conjunctival epithelium Submucosa Supporting tissue Excretory ducts Extralobular ducts Contributory Primary Dilated Intralobular ducts Parenchyma Blood vessels Bacteriologic observations Comment Comment Summary and conclusions <h3>I. LITERATURE</h3><h3>A. HISTORY</h3> Knowledge of disease of the lacrimal apparatus is recorded in the earliest medical literature. Hirsch 1 found reference to lacrimal disease in the Ebers Egyptian Papyrus of 1500 B. C. Schirmer²found seventy-three references to it between 1659 and 1800. Early nineteenth century writers on the subject include Schmidt³(1803), Beer⁴(1813) and Weller⁵(1821). Schmidt's treatise on the diseases of the lacrimal gland is an extensive work of value chiefly for its historical interest. He was the first to designate inflammation of the lacrimal gland as dacryoadenitis. Some of the etiologic factors named by him

“... And On His Crest Sat Horror”: Eighteenth Century Interpretations of Milton's Sublimity and His Satan

Milton's reputation in the eighteenth century has already been so thoroughly examined that another article on the subject must seem superfluous. I am however less concerned with Milton and his influence on literary practice than with the development of certain ideas which played an important part in the evolution of Romanticism and readily found illustration in his work. Few of us still believe that the paradoxical interpretation of Paradise Lost set forth by Blake and Shelley, expanded by other early nineteenth-century writers, and given respectability by Sir Walter Raleigh, sprang fully-armed from the miraculous marriage of Heaven and Hell effected by Romantic inspiration over the dead body of Neo-classicism. We understand nineteenth-century Romanticism better through seeing it as the fruit of a steady (though complex) growth. I propose to trace and document two minor elements in this complexity which have not, I think, received much attention: the interpretation of Milton's sublimity, and of his Satan. Such a study should throw some indirect light on our own interpretation of Paradise Lost; but its purpose is to examine the emergence of the romantic attitude from the neo-classical, not in aesthetic theory or literary practice, but in one specific critical instance.