Romantic Writers Research Articles

Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and romantic (in)visibility

ABSTRACT The Romantic period redefined translation in a way that is epochal; that is, its reconfiguration of translation betokened a shift from the early modern period to a fully experienced modernity. In British Romanticism, in particular, this redefinition paradoxically combines a marginalisation and a celebration of translation. This article examines this paradox and shows that even as many British Romantic writers rhetorically carved out a space for their literary authority by arguing for the fundamental untranslatability of literature, there is also a discursive strand that embraces translation. Through a reading of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, an 1816 sonnet by John Keats, which this article proposes to read as a poetical piece of translation history which fuses early modern translatio and modern translation, we show that these strands combine to create a poetically and historiographically potent way of imagining the reliance on international traffic and mediation which characterise modern literature.

‘Willingness for the Everyday’: Ordinariness and Agency in Three Romantic Prefaces

Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's framing of Romanticism as a ‘quest of the ordinary’, this essay revisits the amplification of the category of the ordinary in the English literature of the Romantic era. Focusing on a specific genre, the preface to poetry, it examines the construction of poetry as a special case of that category in three Romantic prefaces: Wordsworth's ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800) Hazlitt's prefatory lecture ‘On Poetry in General’ in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818) and Shelley's ‘Preface’ to Prometheus Unbound (1820). By tracing and comparing the conceptual bases of these prefaces, it attempts to nuance and discriminate their differing versions of ordinariness. Variations notwithstanding, the reciprocal characterisation of poetry and ordinariness, at the heart of the poetics of three major Romantic writers, is shown to be fundamental also to their arguments for agency and their resistance to what Cavell calls ‘the drive to the inhuman’.

“Make Rome Great Again” Preceded “Make America Great Again”: The Ancient Romo-Nationalism of Biblical Writers

The ideas about religious, sexual, gender, ethnic, urban, moral, and family decay that underlie “Make America Great Again’s” message have notable antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman mythologies about societal degeneration. Roman writers promoted a Romo-nationalist version we can call “Make Rome Great Again” that served to make the patriarchal, exploitative, and imperial power of elite Roman men seem like the solution to societal crisis. Biblical writers like Paul did not subvert these harmful Romo-nationalist logics but instead participated in them to describe gentile degeneration and sexual sin. Recognizing this troubling zone of contact between the Bible and MAGA-like ideologies can reveal the harm they cause and explain the depth of their attractiveness to White Christian nationalists.

“Floral Ornament of Reality”: Flowers in Worldview of E. T. A. Hoffmann and N. A. Polevoy

The relevance of this study is grounded in the scholarly significance of the issue of Russian-German literary connections as a crucial factor in intercultural interaction. This article analyzes works in which the authors articulate a mystical sense of nature, based on the natural philosophical ideas of F. Schelling. The focus of the investigation is the national distinctiveness of Romanticism, manifested in the peculiarities of nature perception, particularly floral imagery. It is demonstrated that the Romantic writers of Germany and Russia perceived love, within the value-emotional framework of the Romantic universe, as a mystical feeling that enables one to penetrate the mysterious forces of nature. The floral motifs within the works contribute an additional allegorical meaning to the artistic worlds of E. T. A. Hoffmann and N. A. Polevoy. The “floral background” of the characters in the analyzed texts (the tulip Gamachea, the thistle Pepush, the bride Tis — Little Rose; Emma — cornflower; Italy — “poor forget-me-not,” among others) establishes a symbolic language of nature. Attention is also given to motifs traditional to German literature: yearning, soul affinity, reminiscence of a “different world,” and the union of lovers in death, which are reflected in the examined works of Russian literature. The novelty of this research lies in its consideration of N. A. Polevoy’s dialogue with the German literary tradition represented by E. T. A. Hoffmann as a result of his philosophical and poetic explorations.

LA REPRESENTATION DU COMMUNISME DANS L’OEUVRE DE PETRU DUMITRIU, OANA ORLEA ET MARIUS DANIEL POPESCU

This article analyzes the representation of Romanian communism in exile and migrant literature from the ‘60s to the early 2000. The three authors that are discussed here belong to three generations of Romanian writers and their literary works revolve around communism. There are some common themes in their novels, such as: society described as a prison, the destruction of human trust under the strain of communism, the dissolution of identity in the context of exile and migration, the obsessive desire to leave the country. Another similarity between these works is the fact that they use autofiction, in order to emphasize the text’s authenticity; but Dumitriu, Orlea, and Popescu transform their personal experience by using complex narrative techniques in order to express a more general reflection concerning aspects such as: the freedom of expression, the influence of dictatorial regime on society, the conflict between the writer and the political power.

The symbol of the spider: from the myth of Arachne to the poem of Ion Hadârcă

The symbol of the spider maintains its relevance as a component part of the symbol of communication in the 21st century, being under the www (World Wide Web) sign. The internet network has as its functional prototype the spider. It is the meaning of information transmission networks. I researched the symbol of the spider and its connotations in antiquity, in the lyrics of several Romanian writers: Lucian Blaga, Leonida Lari, Ion Hadârcă. I have tinted the image in cinematography. The article contains concepts from different fields: psychology, mythology, cinematography, philosophy, Romanian literature and comparative literature

Ann Yearsley and the Poetics and Politics of Breastfeeding

ABSTRACT This article argues that Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman, mother, and poet, not yet fully recovered into the British literary canon, challenges stereotypical representations of breastfeeding mothers created and perpetuated primarily by male authors in Romantic poetry, philosophy, and medical discourse. Her poem “To Mira, on the Care of Her Infant” depicts breastfeeding as a complex labor that requires skill, intelligence, empathy, and discipline. In this poem, Yearsley rejects the arguments of Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Cadogan, who depict nursing mothers as passive vessels of milk or substitutes for a nurturing “mother nature.” I further locate Yearsley in rich networks of subscribers, printers, and periodicals adjacent to canon authors and texts. Thinking particularly about the conventions of epic and georgic forms, and their relationship to nationalism, labor, and motherhood, I ultimately show how Yearsley recasts the nursing mother as a subject rather than an object.

Pandemic Biopolitics in Romanian Literature

Pandemic Biopolitics in Romanian Literature. The biopolitics of the COVID pandemic years has had a powerful impact on all areas of activity, including literature and the arts. Contagion and isolation quickly became the governing terms of social interaction, and writers promptly echoed their impact in works that tried to capture the spirit of the time as it was unfolding. Romanian writers were particularly prompt in responding to the challenges of this unprecedented crisis in modern decades, therefore the first pandemic writings were published in the later months of 2020. Florina Ilis’ Pandemia veselă și tristă (The Happy and Sad Pandemic, Polirom, 2020), Teodor Hossu-Longin’s Măștile din spatele măștii (The Masks behind the Mask, Hyperliteratura, 2022) and collective volumes such as Izolare (Isolation, Nemira 2020) and Jurnal din vremea pandemiei. Proză de grup (Journal from the Times of the Pandemic, Brumar, 2021), edited by Marius Cosmeanu, are just the most visible examples that could be explored in this context. Drawing from theories concerning posthumanism, medical humanities, ethics and contagion, this paper aims to explore the manner in which the pandemic segment of Romanian literature could be integrated into a global literary framework that highlights a diversity of genres and a plurality of voices galvanizing the relationship between the massive effects of the pandemic and narrative art. My paper aims at mapping an emerging literary dialect that gives shape, voice and coherence to a collective experience that has left an indelible imprint on the present and will significantly shape the cultural climate of the near future. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, isolation, collective trauma, posthumanism, contagion, medical humanities, peripheral literatures.

Virility, fascism and regeneration in post‐Civil War Spain: On interpretations of literary Romanticism under the Franco regime

AbstractIn the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the political culture of Falangism developed a deeply gendered regenerationist discourse, which proposed that regeneration would only be possible if the nation recovered its virile attributes. This article focuses on a case study that allows us to better understand this gendered conception of the nation in terms of virility: the discourse developed around the Spanish Romantic writers of the 1830s, a literary movement difficult to incorporate within conceptions of the virile nation. This gained prominence particularly because several centenaries associated with these writers occurred during the war and post‐war period.

The Oppositional Writer Paul Goma and the Assassination Attempts by the Securitate (1977–1982)

In the political-diplomatic context of the preparations for the Belgrade Follow-up Meeting to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, inspired by the former, the initiative by the Romanian writer Paul Goma to start a human rights movement in Romania, at the beginning of 1977, was seen as an open declaration of war by the communist regime. All those who joined the Goma Movement were subject to repression. The writer would be in danger of losing his life because of the attempts to assassinate him by the secret police. A sudden death was preferable to a public trial, which would have seriously damaged the image of the regime in Bucharest, especially since in 1977 provisions dealing with political crimes had been removed from the Criminal Code. Released from prison under pressure from the West, the dissident writer, banned in Romania, continued to be one of the leading critical voices against the Ceaușescu regime while in exile. When he was forced to leave the country in November 1977, the writer was warned by the Securitate general Nicolae Pleșiță that the long arm of the secret police would reach him no matter where he was. In the 1980s, at the behest of the party leaders, the secret police were still working out ways to silence him. Just as he survived the first assassination attempt (in the Rahova prison in Bucharest, April 1977), Paul Goma would survive two more attempts, in 1981 and 1982, planned by the Securitate, under direct orders from Ceaușescu, the first attempt being carried out by the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, the second one by the Securitate officer Matei Haiducu, based in Paris.

The location of Tartessos: a fresh case for the reliability of Avienus’ Ora Maritima

Recent geomorphological, paleoenvironmental, and chronological evidence allows for a reconstruction of the coasts of southwest Iberia during the first millennium BCE that accords with descriptions of the region offered by authors of antiquity, most notably the description by the fourth-century CE Roman writer R. F. Avienus in his poem Ora Maritima. This poem contains information that appears to date from the sixth century BCE regarding, for instance, the pre-Roman polity of Tartessos. The reliability of this work as a historical source has been questioned for decades. Critics argue that the information is pertinent to our understanding of the literary, rather than historiographical, context of the Late Roman Empire. However, philological as well as historical analyses reveal no clear cause to doubt the documentary value of the Ora Maritima. Furthermore, geomorphological research makes it possible to identify most place-names in the poem; for example, the city embraced by the river Tartessos, apparently the political and trade center of the realm, may likely have stood on the present-day spit of La Algaida, which was an isle in the first millennium BCE. While this hypothesis has been advanced elsewhere, this article offers an entirely new set of evidences to support it.1

Cărtărescu vs. Cărtărescu: el imaginario literario de Melancolia, cambio y pervivencia

The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences and similarities between the latest volume of stories published by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu (Melancolia, 2019, Bucharest, Humanitas) and his previous literary production. Although Melancolia has been associated with Nostalgia and indeed exhibits many parallels with the first volume of short novels published by Cartarescu, the truth is that the 2019 volume refers to the literary universe created from other texts as well. By comparing and contrasting Melancolia with some of his main works, from novels such as the three volumes of the Orbitor trilogy (Aripa stângă, Corpul, Aripa dreaptă), Travesti or Solenoid to his poetry, through the stories of Nostalgia, the essay aims to demonstrate how this volume dialogues, more or less explicitly, with all the previous ones while distancing itself from them in some narrative and stylistic aspects. After examining elements such as characters, motifs, symbols, metaphors, subjects, intertextuality, and metafiction, the work focuses on space and time as the two main categories in which the most significant changes take place as they move away from their usual context, communist Bucharest (more precisely, from the late 1950s to the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime in the late 1980s). This temporal and spatial framework is one of the fundamental axes of all Cărtărescu’s literary texts, which gives them unity, stability, and continuity. However, as the article tries to demonstrate, the change is not total, but Mircea Cărtărescu, through his usual intertextual play, refers indirectly to this space well known by his readers and, consequently, perhaps also to that historical period. To argue this issue, this article outlines the direct allusion to a specific space mentioned in some of the author’s earlier texts. This is the factory where one of the most important episodes of the first story (Punțile) takes place. The spatial descriptions of the first and third stories are also analyzed to check the parallels between them and some settings of Nostalgia, Orbitor or Solenoid. The work also investigates the possible objectives of these changes and similarities. On the one hand, it is possible to identify some of Cărtărescu’s characteristic elements in Melancholy due to its thematic and stylistic permanence (child and adolescent characters, the games as creation and as a gateway to a magical universe, the mother, rites of passage, onirism, the use of polysemic symbols such as the butterfly, duality, symmetry and twins, fractal images, anti-mimetic references, etc.), as well as the allusions (explicit or implicit) to his previous works. On the other hand, by neglecting (at least unequivocally) the preferred space-time frame of his previous works, Melancolia can be universalized, and the fictitious components can prevail over any possible reference to extra-literary reality. In this way, the Romanian writer achieves a work that is both very similar to and very different from his broader literary corpus, from everything he had written until the moment of the publication of Melancolia.

Perfil revisado: Vicente Aleixandre, Antonio Machado y otros lectores de Carolina Coronado en la Edad de Plata

Important authors of the Spanish Silver Age such as Vicente Aleixandre or Antonio Machado show, at some point in their work, the reading and influence of the romantic writer Carolina Coronado (1820–1911). This article analyses the reception of Coronado's work in Vicente Aleixandre's La Destrucción o el Amor (1935) (specifically, in the poem "La luna es una ausencia", which the author dedicated to her) as well as in Antonio Machado's poem “A José María Palacio”, present in the second edition of his book Campos de Castilla (1917). It also traces the peculiar presence of the author in the work of other twentieth century writers such as Ramón Sijé or Gerardo Diego; but it mainly focuses on the authorial image that they all construct of Coronado, as well as the aspects and motifs that most interested them in her writing.

Homeland in Romanian children’s literature written in the Diaspora

Romanian children’s literature has always been situated at the crossways of cultural ideologies. The Romanian texts for children lack innocence due to the implicit level of cultural, social, and historical knowledge they mirror at different epochs. In this paper I investigate how literary texts for children written in Romanian communities living abroad present the idea of homeland. I examine literary works written by three contemporary Romanian writers living in Romanian communities in Serbia: Ana Niculina Ursuleanu, Radu Flora and Slavco Almăjan. My selection includes books published in between 1970 and 2010: Cu Soarele-n Creștet [With the sun on the head], (2006); Soare, Bună Dimineața! [Sun, good morning!], (1998); Cărările Nilului [The paths of the Nile], (2008); Piticii au Uitat să Crească [The dwarfs forgot to grow up], (1987); Pianul cu Păienjeni [The piano with spiders], (1991); Când Vine Primăvara [When spring comes], (1970). In my analysis, I focus upon the role of settings in building the image of an eternal Romanian homeland that transcends the national borders. Thus, I discuss three main types of settings that shape the fiction imagined by the proposed authors, related to the following environments: landscape, family, and school. My analysis considers the theory of landscape proposed by Mitchell (2002, p. 5) in Landscape and Power. According to it, landscape implies the interaction between the human, the natural, the self and the other. For each novel, I analyse the role of settings within the literary texts. I explore Radu Flora’s novel in connection with two elements of setting, landscape and school, respectively. In Ana Niculina Ursulescu’s books I look at the bond between family and landscape, while in Slavco Almăjan’s literary work I highlight the importance of landscape in building the image of childhood. These functions are classified according to a sophisticated range, from the purpose of clarifying the conflict or its function as a symbol (in When Spring Comes by Radu Flora), to the task of mood intensifier attributed to setting (in Balul Strugurilor [The party of grapes] by Slavco Almăjan). My conclusions validate the idea that literary texts constantly build and convey an image of the Romanian identity and a sense of belonging to the Romanian homeland as marked by borders. I focus on nostalgia and irony as the main feelings the authors transmit about the image of homeland. On the one hand, the image of homeland in the literary works written by these three writers implies nostalgia, a feeling conveyed through an adult’s perspective of childhood. On the other hand, sometimes, as it happens in the case of the novel When Spring Comes, the narrator adopts a humorous perspective on history and human interactions among characters. As a final remark, I show that the selection of these three settings (landscape, family and school) creates the image of homeland in connection with a nationalist ideology. More precisely, children’s books reinforce the idea of unity between the two Romanian speaking communities (in Romania and Vojvodina) that share common cultural values. The representation of homeland reiterates a history-oriented ideology and legitimates the assimilation of nation to childhood.

Literary history as bestseller: the life and opinions of a fraudulent philologue

In this article we reveal the publishing ventures of Octav Minar (1886-1967), one of the Romanian authors that was disesteemed by fellow literary historians on account of his counterfeiting acts such as forgery, plagiarism, plastography or trick photography. Related to the book market of interbellum Romania, Minar was frequently branded as the “man-of-the-day” while his publications followed the logic of the “hand-in-glove” ephemerides Notwithstanding the challenges of the term “bestseller,” we turned to it so as to better describe Minar’s cultural products as multiple-layered offers, catering for both low-brow and high-brow readership and seizing signals from both public’s expectations (myth-making, melodrama, sensation, narrative simplicity) and enormous patrimonial gaps (editing the classics, writing the recent authors’ biographies). After a careful examination of Minar’s works, we reached the conclusion that he was an exceptional entrepreneur of letters and, nonetheless, a literary historian endowed with a “melodramatic imagination” as well as with a playwright’s and a genre novelist’s plume. A swift intuition of marketing basics helped him realize, quite rapidly, that historical facts and documents could be merchandized: this is how his impressive collection of Romanian writers’ miscellanea was wrapped as a commodity for the public. If the juridical and moral aspects of his literary ventures were put in between brackets, we would discover an astonishing and ingenious personality who glided between different speech registers, and popularized literary history as a genre belonging to the big tent of mass culture. We should thus take into consideration that the logic of the paraliterary circuit can also be applied to literary history. Boiled down to essentials, counting on citations and on minimal critical comments, spiced with images (facsimile and pictures), Minar’s literary histories had their share in speeding the process of cultural literacy of average Romanian readers and in institutionalizing literary ideas.

Perpetual Fires in the Jerusalem Temple through a Mediterranean Perspective

Abstract The fires of the Jerusalem temple altar were said to be perpetual. Various writers from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE added explanations and perspectives to this practice: the argument that the fire came from heaven, that it continued even during the destruction of the temple, or that it remained lit only when the high priest was righteous. Though these texts are well known, they were never examined in a comparative context: how special were these practices and discourses in their Mediterranean and Persian contexts? Maintaining a perpetual fire on the altar or lamps was a known practice in Mediterranean sanctuaries. The discourses surrounding these fires, developed especially by Greek and Roman writers of the first century BCE and the first century CE, are in many ways similar to those in the Jewish texts. I will consider in detail the differences and similarities and their significance.

Intervention at Home: Representing Migrants in German Romanticism

ABSTRACT This article explores how German Romantic writing reflected on migration and thereby intervened in contemporary discourses about émigrés seeking refuge in German-speaking territories after the French Revolution in 1789. Discussing different representations of French exiles in both fiction and translation, I argue that some Romantics were participating in an “intervention at home:” staying put, observing both the unprecedented overthrow of the French monarchy and, later on, the aggression of French expansionism, Romantic writers contributed to contemporary debates about migration with stories and characters meant to reflect on, evoke empathy with, or create aversion to French migrants. German Romantic writing thus encouraged both emotional responses to and specific ideas about the intricate relationship between migration and nation-building in early nineteenth-century German-speaking countries.

Dreaming of Cydalise: Chimeras, disfiguration, translation

AbstractThis essay argues that translation, next to other kinds of language ferrying, can be profitably seen as remedial work. To make this point, I discuss five attempts at poetising ‘Cydalise’, a chimera dreamed into being by Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). After introducing it, I investigate three of Gautier's failed textualisations of this chimera and the resulting early tokens of literary chinoiserie and literary pastel. I then explore the disfigurations Cydalise suffers at the hands of Romanian writer Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890) as he appropriates, refashions and explodes chinoiserie (and distorts pastel) in his endeavour to capture Gautier's ‘dream in its reality’. I next trace the translatorial moves Chinese poet Shao Xunmei (1906–1968) enacts finally to transport Cydalise into text, as he also pays discreet homage to the powers of translation. I conclude by giving firmer contours to the hypertextual landscape I imagine, which equally welcomes originals, translations and everything in between.

Value Conflict and Personal Choice in The Scarlet Letter from the Perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the preeminent American Romantic writer of the 19th century. The Scarlet Letter, as Hawthorne’s classic work, has been praised by most critics. Hawthorne paid attention to the ethical problems of Hester and Dimmesdale and gave a comprehensive depiction of their ethical choices after they had violated the Puritan ethical norms. This paper intends to use ethical literary criticism proposed by Professor Nie Zhenzhao, based on ethical dilemma and ethical choice, within the ethical backdrop of New England, to analyze ethical conflicts and ethical choices of the protagonists in the novel. Ultimately, it seeks to warn people the importance of complying with the ethical norms of the society. Exploring the ethical and moral values embedded in The Scarlet Letter will enhance the domestic study of Hawthorne’s works and better realize the didactic function of literature.

Non-Verbal Communication in Ancient Rome: Eyebrow Gestures

This article analyses the communicative power of eyebrows in ancient Rome within the framework of broader research into gestures from the same period. Our research uses the corpus of Latin literature to describe evidence of gestures in said texts. It then identifies the expressions used by the authors to refer to them and describes how they were performed. Moreover, by analysing the context, it explains the meanings the authors attribute to them. Although the texts do not describe these gestures with the precision required by non-verbal communication research today, our analysis of the selected extracts has enabled us to identify four free eyebrow gestures—contracting, raising, relaxing, and lowering—and associate a meaning to them. In this regard, we have uncovered that Roman writers introduce eyebrow gestures in their work to communicate emotions such as arrogance and humility, and anger or seriousness, and even to identify certain characters. In turn, these gestures are also used to express disapproval and assent in place of speech.