Early Romanticism Research Articles

Signs of the Style of Early Romances by N. S. Golovanov

Abstract. The article is devoted to the early romances of N. S. Golovanov, a great Russian and Soviet conductor and composer, who, due to circumstances, is not familiar to the general public. The work explores a wide range of stylistic features of the composer’s music and the infl uence of the contemporary composers’ styles, often very contradictory, on his work. Golovanov’s legacy is explored within the framework of the synthesis of the Russian classical tradition and modernist movements of the early 20th century. The principles of choosing a poetic basis and the genre sphere of their implementation are studied.

Exploring Optionality

The following paper considers the potential for optionality of anaphoric null objects in two early Romance languages: Old French and Old Tuscan. In both languages, anaphoric objects can be omitted in different syntactic contexts (e.g., in coordination with prepositional infinitives or in adjunct non-finite clauses). However, overt objects can be found in almost all contexts which also allow null objects. The current paper argues that null objects in both Old French and Old Tuscan were optional, in the sense that they were never the only option for objects, and that having a null or an overt object did not have bearing in the interpretation of the sentence.

«Где ты, звездочка?» К публикации вокального сборника М.П. Мусоргского «Юные годы»

This article is devoted to one of M.P. Musorgsky’s earliest romances, “Where Art Thou, Little Star?” which is the first number in his song collection The Years of Youth. The author of the article clarifies the circumstances under which the song was composed and reveals the circle of people connected with the dedicatee, the singer and writer I.L. Grünberg (Laskos). The article discusses author’s versions of the music, including the original manuscript stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris). The detailed textual-critical and literary-historical commentaries enacted in the Academic Edition of M.P. Mussorgsky’s Complete Works, the work on which is performed at the State Institute for Art Studies, demonstrate the principles of commenting on the composer’s chamber vocal legacy.

Ludwig Tieck’s Kaiser Octavianus as the Capstone of Early Romanticism

ABSTRACT When Ludwig Tieck started to publish his Schriften in 1828, he opened the edition with Kaiser Octavianus (1804), thereby setting the drama as the capstone to Early Romanticism. In this essay, I intend to explore what might have motivated Tieck’s decision and to what extent it can be justified. Firstly, I will argue that Kaiser Octavianus fulfils a requirement for good poetry formulated in the early essay ‘Über Shakspeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren’ (1793) that the poet should take subjects from folklore and sublimate them, thus creating a combination of simplicity and artificiality. Secondly, the drama can also be considered a contribution to the creation of a new mythology as proposed by Tieck’s associate Friedrich Schlegel. Thirdly, Kaiser Octavianus constitutes an example of Schlegel’s ‘Universalpoesie’, mixing genres and styles in a drama of epic proportions.

:Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

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Who is at the helm? Mary Wollstonecraft’s contribution to the romantic construct of the imagination

In my essay I pursue the line of inquiry which has recently been proposed by scholars who have reconstructed the historical context of Wollstonecraft’s feminism to bring into sharper focus what can be seen as consistent motives of her thought. Starting out from the thesis of Barbara Taylor that Wollstonecraft’s feminism was deeply rooted in the egalitarian theology of Radical Protestantism (Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination Cambridge University Press, 2003) I will argue that her brief career shows how, in her analysis of the hierarchy of the cognitive faculties, first she redefined reason by ascribing to it the power of intuitive apprehension, and eventually she replaced reason with imagination as the distinctive attribute of the human mind. Positioning herself—through Price’s theology and moral philosophy—in the Platonic and pagan as well as Christian Neo-Platonic traditions, she arrived several years before Wordsworth or Coleridge not only at an intuition of the creativity of human thinking but at a definition of the imagination as the supreme mental faculty. As a result, in some emotionally highly charged passages of her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she constructed her own version of early Romanticism in England. These passages can be read side by side with passages of epiphany in Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude as the most powerful examples of the imagination leading through an investment in the quotidian to an apprehension of immortality.

La Stimmung du paysage dans l’esthétique allemande et les concepts esthétiques chez Wang Fuzhi et Wang Guowei

This article examines the concept of qingjing (sentiment-landscape) and its related aesthetic notions, such as qingjing (sentiment-scene) and yijing (idea-scene) in Wang Fuzhi’s and Wang Guowei’s aesthetic theories. We will compare these categories of aesthetics with the German aesthetic notion of Stimmung from the early Romanticism to Schopenhauer and investigate into parallel evolutions and influence studies. Although Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer do not belong to the group of German Romantics, their conception of Stimmung and the spiritual eye draw on aesthetics of German Romanticism. Wang Fuzhi’s conception of qingjing is still inscribed into Chinese classical thought, such as Daoist cosmology based on the original Breath and the epistemology of Indian Buddhism, such as pramāṇa (measure). We will compare the parallelism in thought evolution regarding Wang Fuzhi’s theory of qingjing and the German concept of Stimmung, both as a crystallization and intertwinement of indissociable sentiment and landscape. Many German writers proclaim that landscape is the projection of subjective emotions from inside to outside, so it can be understood as an externalization of Stimmung. According to Wang Fuzhi, sentiment unfolds as landscape, and landscape, driven by a vital impulse, is truly endowed with emotion. There is still a dichotomy between subject and object related to Stimmung, but this is not the case for qingjing. Moreover, we will also investigate the direct influence of Stimmung on Wang Guowei’s conception of qingjing and jingjie, since Wang Guowei has already been influenced by the aesthetics of German Romanticism and Idealism, especially the notion of Stimmung. This influence also contributes to Wang Guowei’s deviation from Wang Fuzhi’s aesthetic theory.

Baroque tradition in early Romanticism •

AbstractThe elaboration of a canon of literary tradition was a key issue within the renewal of Hungarian literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The leading figures of the movement, Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831) and Ferenc Kölcsey (1790–1838), both saw Miklós Zrínyi's (1620–1664) poetry collection Adriai tengernek Syrenaia (Syrena of the Adriatic Sea), published in 1651, as a model that offered aesthetic value, national ideology, and an example for reforming the literary language. The present study examines the extent to which these aspirations may be linked to the poetic modernity of Zrínyi's time, the first half of the 17th century, and concludes that the Syrena volume was not simply a model for the successors, but it can be philologically proven that Kazinczy and his circle (mainly by following Francis Bacon) continued the agenda initiated by Zrínyi. In this sense, the waves of modernity do not follow one another, but are layered on top of one another in the history of Hungarian literature.

Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke

Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O'Rourke

The specificity of opera-vocal performance by Antonio Tamburini

The 19th century gave the world many talented opera performers, each of whom had his own artistic charisma and unique style of vocal performance. One of these singers was the bass-baritone Antonio Tamburini, a master of interpretation of the roles of Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Saverio Mercadante, Giovanni Paccini, Carlo Coccia and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The subject of the research is the work of the early 19th century operatic baritone Antonio Tamburini. The object of the study is the opera parts performed by Tamburini over the years of work in theaters. The relevance of the study is due to the role of Antonio Tamburini in the formation and development of the baritone art at the beginning of the 19th century, as well as the lack of knowledge of the processes that took place in opera art in the era of early romanticism. This period is covered in the musicological works of O.V. Zhestkovoy, L.A. Sadykova, I.P. Drach, G. Potter, A. Jacobshagen, J. Stark, A.E. Hoffmann, S.V. Reshetnikova, however, the mentioned works are mainly devoted to the study of the operatic performance of tenors and sopranos. The period of the birth of baritone performance was not considered in the above works, and the work of Antonio Tamburini remained unexplored, which indicates the undoubted novelty of the work. The article focuses on primary sources: the singer's creative biography, described by the 19th century music critic Castile-Blaz, contemporaries' reviews of Antonio Tamburini's stage performances. The work is dominated by historical and theoretical research methods. The main conclusion of the work is to identify the main aspects of the performing style of Antonio Tamburini, revealing the secret of the uniqueness of his art.

Adventure, art and architecture: Royall Tyler, a forgotten hispanist in the Spain of 1898

ABSTRACT This article examines Royall Tyler’s reorientation of Hispanic studies, from Moorish Andalusia to medieval Christian Spain. Drawing on archival material, the article traces this young American art historian’s visits to the Iberian Peninsula that culminated in the publication of Spain: A Study of her Life and Arts (1909). This unaccountably neglected text was pioneering in its exploration of the art of Romanesque Spain, describing, for the first time, uncharted monuments that did not feature on the cultural map of Spain. Part travel guide and part scholarly account, Spain: A Study of her Life and Arts represents a significant missing link between the type of impressionistic vistas of Spain produced by the early romantics and later nineteenth-century travellers and the work of the more thoroughly academic art scholars Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who followed in Tyler’s wake after the First World War.

Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul

Reviewed by: Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul Dennis F. Mahoney Gabriele Rommel, ed. Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik. Wiesbaden: S. Marix, 2022. 271 pp. Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul, eds. Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis. Halle: Coq-Art, 2022. 32 pp., 18 illustrations. Gabriele Rommel, the former director of the Research Center for Early Romanticism / Novalis-Museum at the birthplace of Friedrich von Hardenberg in Schloss Oberwiederstedt, has edited the first volume listed above within a series that hitherto has dealt largely with the writings of twentieth-century authors [End Page 204] such as Hans Fallada, Christian Morgenstern, and Stefan Zweig. Near the beginning of her well-organized introduction, Rommel provides a lengthy quote from Hermann Hesse's enthusiastic reaction to Ernst Heilborn's Novalis edition of 1901 for the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death, which rescued Novalis from decades of neglect. Clearly, Rommel hopes to make similar use of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich von Hardenberg on May 2, 2022, to encourage readers to (re)acquaint themselves with a writer and thinker who may be only a faint memory from secondary school. For this purpose, she provides an initial overview of Hardenberg's family background, education, and professional training as a lawyer and mining official in Saxony before situating him within the late eighteenth-century developments in politics, philosophy, and the natural sciences that he attempted to integrate and develop within his own writings. Rommel also provides concise introductions and overviews for each of the ensuing four sections: "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen," "Veröffentlichungen im Athenäum und in den Jahrbüchern der Preussischen Monarchie," "Zwei Roman-Projekte," and "Essay." A one-page list of primary and secondary sources concludes the volume. Given this volume's likely intended audience, it might have been better if its initial section, first published in Heilborn's edition from 1901, had either not been included or else listed in the otherwise chronological order of initial printed appearances of Novalis's writings: the Blütenstaub fragments and Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin in 1798, the Hymnen an die Nacht in 1800, the fragmentary novel projects Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen in 1802, and the speech from November of 1799, now known as Die Christenheit oder Europa in 1826. First-time readers of Novalis may become discouraged upon encountering complete or partial use of (untranslated) French within roughly 10% of the 105 notes within the so-called "Teplitzer Fragmente" written during Hardenberg's stay at this spa in the summer of 1798 due to his already worsening health. Those readers who do persist in their efforts, however, will be rewarded by encountering Novalis's major poetic, philosophical, and rhetorical works in an attractively produced and reasonably priced paperback volume. For the scholarly community, moreover, Rommel's introduction to the "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen" clarifies their relation to the other works contained in this volume. For example, she quotes from Hardenberg's letter to Friedrich Schlegel on August 20, 1798, that "die Centralmonaden "of his meditations in Teplitz, have been "die Frauen, die xstliche Religion und das gewöhnliche Leben." These three topics make up the entire content of the ensuing "Ergänzungen zu den Teplitzer Fragmenten," which includes a first version of the fairy tale of Hyazinth and Rosenblütchen that plays a key role in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais included later in the volume. In addition, the "Studien zur bildenen Kunst" anticipate the significance of the relationship between antiquity and modernity in the fifth of the Hymnen an die Nacht, while the essay "Über Goethe"—also from the summer of 1798—documents the importance of Goethe for Hardenberg's own efforts to integrate art and science into his literary work. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis's major attempt at a novel in response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), have the advantage of being self-enclosed units, but...

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “Details of A Sunset” by Vladimir Nabokov: The problem of influence

The article is dedicated to the problem of the influence of the American writer Ambrose Bierce on the early work of Vladimir Nabokov. This influence can be traced back to several Nabokov’s texts (“Details of A Sunset”, “The Aurelian”, “Perfection”, “The Eye”), where one can detect plot lines, motives, and images borrowed from Bierce’s paradigmatic story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The article focuses on Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Details of A Sunset” (“Catastrophe”), where the influence of Ambrose Bierce is unquestionable. This influence was pointed out by a number of researchers, but the problem has not been thoroughly developed yet. Bierce’s influence on early Nabokov’s work is not limited to this device per se. Both authors follow the respective tradition of Early Romanticism. In both short stories the protagonists set off on a journey that is romantic in its spirit. The mystical epiphany that Nabokov’s character experiences are based on the model introduced by Bierce. Both authors employ romantic clichés, quotes from paradigmatic romantic texts and literary irony. The article also examines the system of literary images that Nabokov borrows from Bierce. It includes the image of a rope, a star, a bridge, and lightning. The parallels between the two works that are being analyzed in this article lead to a conclusion that Nabokov’s short story “Details of A Sunset” (“Catastrophe”) was directly influenced by Bierce.

Skovorodynstvo and skovorodyntsi as an Alternative Sociocultural Trend (the End of the 18th and the First Half of the 19th Centuries)

The article examines the skovorodynstvo as the socio-cultural trend of the educated class of followers of philosophical views and, most of all, the lifestyle of Ukrainian travelling philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794). Common to the skovorodyntsi was the fascination with the person of Skovoroda. The skovorodynstvo was in agreement with some other nonconformist trends of that time, had a connection with the Ukrainian national movement. Thus, is it a coincidence that the initiators of the Ukrainian cultural and national revival such as Ivan Kotliarevskyi, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and their followers are included in this movement? What features of Skovoroda’s way of life did attract his followers, and what did they bring on their own? The nonconformism of Ukrainian pre-romanticism and early romanticism coincided with the nonconformist lifestyle of the philosopher, noticeable and attractive during his lifetime and especially after his death. The skovorodynstvo can be divided into two trends: popular (among the general public) and intellectual. Skovorodyntsi from intellectual movement (intellectuals) found themselves in literary work, discovering or propagandizing the ideas of the skovorodynstvo, as well as giving the image of the skovorodynets. During the period between 1790 and 1850, the skovorodynstvo remained as a marker of the alternatives. The intellectual moods of the 19th century perceived or rejected the skovorodynstvo, oscillating between realistic materialism and idealistic mysticism, but such a trend to some extent continued, thus enriching other alternative socio-cultural or intellectual-aesthetic moves (tolstovstvo, modernism etc).

Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism by Stephanie O’Rourke

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, architecture, and decorative arts across the globe.

SPINOZISMO E IRONÍA EN LOS AÑOS CRUCIALES DEL PRIMER ROMANTICISMO

This article analyzes the question of irony in the irruption of early Romanticism, in particular in the work of Friedrich Schegel. It interprets the notion of irony from a poetic and not a strictly philosophical approach, according to the reception model of Spinoza’s work, which, philosophically interpreted by post-Kantian systems, gives results quite different from the aesthetic position from which it is received by the Romantics.

Residues and Extensions of Perfective Auxiliary be: Modal Conditioning

This article provides both a diachronic and synchronic account of the generalization of perfective auxiliary be in specific irrealis modal contexts across numerous Romance varieties spoken in Italy and more widely within the Romània, which has essentially gone unnoticed in the descriptive and theoretical literature. In some cases (southern Calabrian, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese), the distribution of be is to be interpreted as a residue of an original unaccusative syntax which was exceptionally preserved under higher V-movement in irrealis contexts, whereas in others (person-driven dialects of central and southern Italy, southern peninsular Spanish, Romanian) this original unaccusative signal has been reanalysed as a specialized marker of irrealis (lexicalizing a high Mood head) and extended to all verb classes. In the case of Alguerès, by contrast, the generalization of irrealis be is argued to be the result of language contact with surrounding Sardinian dialects where a specific pattern of dedicated irrealis marking of Mood° has been replicated. Finally, the reverse pattern with generalization of irrealis have, the reanalysis of an aspectual distinction between resultative and experiential perfects found in early Romance varieties (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Spanish, Catalan), is shown to involve a similar pattern of dedicated irrealis marking in Mood°.

The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins

Reviewed by: The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins Walter Wadiak nicholas perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 270. isbn: 978-1526139917. $120. While medieval English romances have inspired readings in terms of 'the gift' since at least the early 90s, Perkins ambitiously reads the entire genre as structured around an ideal of generous exchange. In this remarkable study, the gift figures as nothing less than the founding gesture of romance and the impulse that drives these stories forward, in the process drawing readers themselves into the cycle of generosity and giving rise to responses in the form of new texts. Perkins concedes near the outset that such an approach might seem 'dreamily optimistic' (p. 31), yet the book feels bracing and even revelatory in its insistence that we attend to the ethical work of a genre that has often been dismissed as mere ideology. Chapter One reads a group of early romances (about a figure called Horn) as enacting the delay that makes the gift as opposed to the commodity. In romance, Perkins observes, it is often 'in the very delay or frustration of the return, in the gift's continuing journey, that narrative suspense and pleasure … is contained' (p. 44). The argument here is structuralist in its emphasis on the larger narrative picture, but Perkins adroitly zooms in to focus on, for instance, how the Romance of Horn plays on the idea of Horn as both a found object on the beach (le truvé el graver) as well as an inscribed or graven textual object, with a plausible pun on truver as poetic making (p. 33). Chapter Two extends the argument to the romances housed in the celebrated Auchinleck manuscript, though the links here are somewhat looser and more thematic, as Perkins admits. The last half of the chapter explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story in which, as Perkins reminds us, 'the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden', and in doing so he challenges what he sees as overly determined readings of the poem's many gifts and games. Perkins' writing here and elsewhere is frequently delightful, as when he describes Gawain, setting out for what he thinks will be his doom all trussed up in his sumptuous armor, as 'gift-wrapped for delivery' (p. 98). Those buoyant touches suit an argument that registers awareness of the darker possibilities lurking in romance but ultimately invites us to read the genre in recuperative terms. Chapters Four and Five, dealing with Chaucerian texts, feel a bit less fresh, but here, too, there is nuanced interpretation, as when Perkins remarks upon the limits [End Page 110] of our knowledge about the small keepsakes that Troilus and Criseyde exchange (as opposed to the public and ostentatious gifts—e.g., that heart-shaped brooch!—that tend to draw readers' attention). The notion of 'distributed agency,' first introduced in Chapter Four, helps Perkins to complicate the boundary between person and object in ways that bear upon gender-focused readings of, for instance, Chaucer's Knight's Tale, while Chapter Five outlines an intriguing notion of performative speech-acts as gifts, a return with interest on previous uses of this kind of 'citational' language. Since this is a book about how narrative returns with interest in subsequent retellings, both within and between texts, it makes sense that the final chapter, on Lydgate's Troy Book, is the richest in both close reading and theoretical heft. Hector's 'cyborg corpse' (p. 212), preserved by King Priam (via a weirdly intricate system of gold tubes) in a bid to raise the morale of the Trojans, becomes in Perkins' incisive reading an 'aureate body' (p. 228) that speaks both to the elaborate quality of Lydgate's own writing and to the blurred lines between people and things in Lydgate's narrative (this blurring being, as Perkins reminds us, a hallmark of the gift). That troubling of the boundaries between the human and the non-human is central to Perkins' effort to imagine what he calls a 'speculative anthropology,' one that might allow us to...

Oliver Wunsch. Review of "Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism" by Stephanie O'Rourke.

Oliver Wunsch. Review of "Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism" by Stephanie O'Rourke.

Crosses to Cullens

Although the figure of the vampire in Western culture has undergone significant alterations from the nineteenth century to the modern day in terms of presentation, there has always existed a strain of latent sexual concern in their depictions. In earlier works, this sexuality was couched in a negative light, often incorporating themes of sexual assault, the violation of private spaces and dangerous, ‘tempting’ aspects of sexuality. This article will argue that, although there is continuity between early Gothic vampire fiction and modern vampiric paranormal romance in terms of their connection to sexuality, there has nevertheless been significant evolution in the manner in which that sexuality is approached, as it transforms from sexualised assault to a dangerous romance.