Romantic Poetry Research Articles

Nature Sounds: Anthony Philip Heinrich and the Music of the American Environment

This essay examines the life and legacy of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861), a European-born composer who migrated to America in 1811. Heinrich is a nearly forgotten musician who spent his professional career working in an equally forgotten repertoire of music—the American symphony. In the nineteenth century, European composers, especially the German masters, dominated musical tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout this period, however, many Americans longed for a distinct musical identity, but the effort to place music from American authors in the performing canon was often rebuffed by critics and audiences alike. As a result, Heinrich would never become a mainstream voice, but in this battle for artistic supremacy, he deserves our attention because he wrote unique compositions influenced by the physical environment. Like the romantic poetry and landscape paintings drawn from the same era, Heinrich’s nature-inspired symphonies celebrated American political achievement by glorifying the nation’s environment.

Haizi and contemporary Chinese romantic poetry

Modernism and Post-Modernism are widely viewed as the mainstreams of the poetic scene in contemporary China. However, we can still find some Romantic poets of great importance, which illustrates the revival of Romanticism in contemporary China. Haizi, a talented poet who has been exerting great influence on contemporary and younger poets since his death, is a great example which profoundly suggests the opportunity Romanticism has and the dilemma it confronts in the cultural context of contemporary China. The intimacy between Haizi and Romanticism lies mainly in the self-positioning and self-fashioning. Haizi’s emphasis on ego, subjectivity and will, his claim of poets to be “kings,” is a quite unique phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese scene where poets are marginalized and their subjectivities are weakened by the society and even themselves. Therefore, Haizi’s poetry not only reveals its connection with Romanticism, but also the tension between the ideals of Romantic poetics and the reality of contemporary Chinese society.

Elégiák az 1945 utáni angol költészetben

As has frequently been remarked in poetry criticism, an elegy always suggests that the poet’s own death is inconceivable. What I add is that in many cases the lost person’s death is also inconceivable or, at least, unspeakable; therefore, the poet has to turn to something speakable, meaning repeatable: a form, a motif, etc. This means that there is always something in the poem that admittedly does not belong to the author’s subjectivity. In my study I offer a survey of three British poets’ elegies from the second half of the 20th century: sequences by Douglas Dunn, Peter Porter and Thom Gunn; the former two writing to commemorate their dead wives, and Gunn writing in memory of his lost friends. As I argue, all the three poets follow in the wake of classic examples to repeat and reiterate something that belongs to tradition: Dunn is inspired by the classic dramatic monologue and gaps in medieval ballads, Porter by Henry King’s poem, and Gunn by romantic poetry. All the three can be read as self-elegies: Dunn’s poems through the motif of the wedding rings, Porter’s through the motif of the dead wife waiting for him, and Gunn’s through the image of the dream where the two friends are united. Probably all elegies can be read as self-elegies, signifying that we speak about someone else’s death because we are unable to speak of our own.

Algunas claves para entender la vigencia de la poesía romántica del tango argentino desde un estudio de recepción

Este artículo expone los resultados de una investigación sociosemiótica realizada en Córdoba, Argentina, en torno a las interpretaciones que realizan los actuales consumidores de tango argentino para apropiarse de una poesía popular, edificada sobre una moral que tiene fuertes puntos de contraste con la de la clase media. Para ello, se realizaron dos ruedas de entrevistas a una muestra teórica compuesta de 26 personas, con el fin de indagar sobre sus preferencias y creencias en las que sustentan sus selecciones. Se ofrece, finalmente, una hipótesis que nos permite comprender por qué la poesía romántica del tango es la selección preferencial: el prototipo de amor que han incorporado es, en parte, coherente con estos poemas y, cuando no lo es, les basta juzgar ese caso particular como menos adecuado al tópico —en lugar de revisar el prototipo interpretativo—.

On the Use and Representations of Sound in British Pre-Romantic and Romantic Poetry, or “On The Power of Sound”

The aim of this paper is to attract the reader’s attention on the treatment of the sounds of nature by British poets in the pre-Romantic and Romantic era. It is demonstrated that, at a time when the age-old topos of world harmony was at bay in an increasingly dechristianized Europe, poets endeavoured to revive the idea of a pact of man with nature through the notion of aural sensation. From Thomson to Keats, natural noises and sounds came to the status of traces of the transcendence. In texts such as The Task (Cowper) or “On the Power of Sound” (Wordsworth), the topos of locus amoenus and that of harmony are outlined so as to point to an evanescent unity at work in nature which it is the poet’s task to find and to bring to the knowledge of his fellow human beings. It is striking that, in forgotten fragments and major works alike, the lexical field of music as an art is omnipresent, though unobtrusive, in bucolic or georgic depictions of landscapes. Used in metaphors, it hints at natural sounds to be heard and understood as a language that man must be aware of and make his. Poetry around 1720-1830 thus invited each of its readers, as an individual, to open themselves to the mystery underlying the sensible world and to re-enchant their vision of this world… through listening.

Europe's New Identity: The Refugee Crisis and the Rise of Nationalism.

Europe's New Identity: The Refugee Crisis and the Rise of Nationalism.

Briefing: Forensic engineering in the process of structural innovation

The ancient Greek saying ‘Scio nescio’, ‘I know I don’t know’ (by Socrates, commonly used in its Roman version), applies in structural engineering despite the impression that civil engineers perfectly understand the behaviour of their structures. Failures often hit them by surprise and very often they face more questions than answers. In this environment, forensic engineering helps them understand the performance of structures by using new technologies and materials. They also find that the current standards and practices do not cover all the complexity, record dimensions and non-linear behaviour of the built environment. It is most appropriate to learn from failures, disseminate this information widely and educate the engineering community. With changes in engineering education and often applied standard solutions, the risk of misconception increases. This paper provides an opinion on current practice and informs about the development approaches taken in various regions of the world.

Romanticizing the Chinese Landscape

ABSTRACT Through an analysis of Thomas Allom and George Newenham Wright’s four-volume China, in a Series of Views, Displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire (1843), this essay argues that mid-nineteenth-century domestic Sinology appropriated Romantic ideology and poetry to situate China within the British Empire. While Britain’s Chinese colonial acquisitions never extended beyond the infamous ceding of Hong Kong at the end of the Opium War (1839–1842), the British military victory over China provided domestic Sinologists with the latitude to admire the “exotic” locale while couching this admiration in familiar imperialist rhetoric. In so doing, domestic Sinology – both visual and textual – imaginatively surrenders the entirety of China, not just Hong Kong, to British rule. As Allom and Wright’s text demonstrates, domestic Sinology often relied upon Romantic ideology and literature to achieve this imaginative acquiescence. This incongruous use of Romanticism made it complicit in Britain’s imperial development in the Far East.

From Keats to Kanye: Romantic Poetry and Popular Culture in the Secondary English Classroom

AbstractThis case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students’ lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing ‘high’ Romantic poetry with ‘low’ popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic analysis of interview, survey, observation, and artifact data revealed three key findings. Firstly, through exploring popular culture texts, students believed Romantic concepts related to their world but not to them. Secondly, the extent to which students understood Romanticism through popular culture was influenced by personal, textual, and educational factors. Thirdly, students felt that the collaborative remixing process promoted freedom of expression. While many teachers are concerned that popular culture will displace canonical literature, this study found that this is not the case: incorporating popular culture is not an ‘either/or’ approach, but it is an enriching, complementary practice.

(the Political Context of Roman Poetry)

Russian Abstract: При изучении политической составляющей текстов классических римских поэтов следует сместить внимание с упрощенных вопросов о политическом лагере, к которому принадлежит писатель, на содержащиеся в художественных произведениях описания устройства мира во всей их полноте, со сложными и многообразными механизмами функционирования политического. В препринте предлагается проделать такую работу, двигаясь от разбора остающихся недообъясненными и спорными мелких деталей текстов Вергилия о Овидия к углубленному пониманию того, как работает политика в их великих поэмах. В первой главе исходной точкой разбора становится современное состояние дискуссий о XII книге Энеиды, одной из центральных в поэме для интерпретации того, как поэт относится к Энею и основанному им государству. Во второй главе обсуждается смысл спорадических отсылок к римской политике в I книге Метаморфоз Овидия и за на первый взгляд случайными обмолвками предлагается видеть продуманную поэтом систему.English Abstract: In the study of the political component of the classical Roman poets texts should move the focus from simplistic questions about the political camp, which belongs to the writer on the works of art contained in the device description of the world in its entirety, with a complex and diverse mechanisms of functioning of the political. The preprint is proposed to do this kind of work, moving from the analysis of the remaining nedoobyasnennymi and controversial small parts of the texts of Virgil Ovid to a deeper understanding of how the policy of the great poems. In the first chapter of the initial analysis point it becomes the current state of discussions on the XII book Aeneid, one of the central in the poem to interpret how the poet refers to Aeneas, and he founded the state. The second chapter discusses the meaning of sporadic references to the Roman policy in the I book Metamorphoses of Ovid and seemingly accidental slip of the tongue are invited to see the thoughtful poet system.

The Materialization of the Lyric and the Romantic Construction of Place: Bards and Beasts on Dartmoor

In an influential article of 1965, Geoffrey Hartman argued that the Romantic nature lyric was born when Wordsworth liberated from its material context a genre of poetry originally intended to be marked on an object in the landscape. 1 The ‘nature-inscription,’ was typically supposed to be written on a plaque, or a seat, or a stone; after Wordsworth's intervention, this ‘lapidary’ deixis was left behind – replaced by the poem's accentuated reference to ‘the meditative mind’ of the poet himself (223). ‘Romantic poetry,’ Hartman concludes, ‘transcends its formal origin in epigram and inscription and creates the modern lyric’ (229). In this article I trace Romantic poetry along a different path and argue that one of its most significant legacies has occurred not through de-materialization but through re-materialization – not simply by lyric's incorporation in the material context of printed books, 2 but also by its re-inscription on the landscape to which it points. By virtue of this re-inscription, I argue, Romantic poetry has brought a material place, 3 both mundane and sacred – in effect, uncanny –into being. Dartmoor – now marked on the map and enshrined in law as a National Park –is a Romantic region, a place first written into history and geography – into culture – on stone.

Tim fulford. Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries: The Dialect of the Tribe.

tim fulford. Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries: The Dialect of the Tribe.

American Romanticism, Again

I. Romantic Lyric THE DEFINITION OF ROMANTICISM MAY BE (LIKE ALL--ISMS) A MATTER of great debate, but little of that debate has had much to do with poetry. When in 1924 Arthur O. Lovejoy proposed abandoning term as literary historical frame, complaining that the word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing, nineteenth-century poetry was one of those too many things. (1) When Rene Wellek responded to Lovejoy in 1949 by arguing that one must conceive of period terms not as arbitrary linguistic labels nor as metaphysical entities, but as names for systems of norms which dominate literature at specific time of historical process, norms that dominated poetry in nineteenth century were one of systems he had in mind. (2) When these founders of history of ideas and of modern comparative literary study talked about Romanticism, it is safe to assume that they meant European Romanticism, and when Anglo-American literary critics today continue to talk about Romanticism--or when upper case noun becomes lower case adjective (as in, the novel, or, most often, romantic poetry), or even when it is shortened to Northrop Frye's stenographer's shorthand, Rcsm, which as Anahid Nersessian has recently reminded us, was Frye's unpublished vision of neither too capacious nor too normative, a low adjustment utopia--it is safe to assume that term refers to history of ideas that stretched from mid eighteenth--and nineteenth-century German idealism through late eighteenth--and nineteenth-century European national revolutions (especially French) and that found literary home in British poetics. (3) In departments of English, we know that when we talk about Romantic Poetry we don't just mean Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Shelley and Byron but also Hemans and Scott and Smith and Barbauld and Baillie and Bums and Clare and list goes on--or at least list of British, Irish, and Scots poets continues to expand. Romanticists themselves may admit that their original canon was framed by Paris editor and swiftly republished in Philadephia (and so, as Meredith McGill points out, was transatlantic from start), or that expressive poetics actually derived from Orientalist Sir William Jones's Sanskrit and Persian translations (and so, as Aamir Mufti points out, was Orientalized from start), or that historical coincidence of emergence of and middle of Middle Passage was no coincidence (and so, as Edouard Glissant and many others have pointed out, was invested in emergence of worst forms of modernity from start), but those admissions have made much difference in way we tell story of and almost no difference in way we conduct business of profession of literary studies. (4) When we do speak of Romanticism, we tend to mean Transcendentalism, and by Transcendentalism, we tend to mean Emerson and writers in conversation with his heady mixture of German philosophy, British poetics, and pragmatism: Fuller, Douglass, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and, as ever perverse exception: Poe. This is to say that just as can still dependably refer to small canon of late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century British poets, American Romanticism can be counted on to mean what continues to be taught as canon of nineteenth-century literature, which, as Maurice Lee has recently shown, remains (like British Romanticism) stubbornly canonical. (5) Though most scholars know that (as great new Teaching Transatlanticism project launched by Linda Hughes and Sarah Robbins attests) old Transcendentalist, mostly white Anglo-American canons are passe, that they mask all sorts of exchange by and through many writers and readers who occupied much wider and more complex version of Atlantic World than those canons represent, canons themselves don't reflect that knowledge. …

Irony in William Blake’s Poetry

Irony, stating something meaning another, turns into a philosophical method of understanding opposite concepts with Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments published in the eighteenth century. It accords irony an ontological and epistemological function and changes its scope. William Blake, one of the prominent names of Romantic poetry, employs the binary oppositions and creates a different perspective of irony. In addition to the usage of traditional binary systems such as; good and evil, heaven and hell, he structures new binary systems. The traditional binary systems used by Blake are challenging as he redefines the opposite concepts in a holistic manner. On analyzing these three poems; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” it would be fair to claim that he presents a different perspective of construing the world with the employment of irony using integrative binary oppositions in the Romantic period. Keywords: romantic poetry, irony, William Blake

Greek Mythology in 18th-to-19th English Romantic Poetry

In the 18th and 19th century of English literature, there were two generations of English Romantic poetry in Britain, who have produced great influences on the literature world. Those romantic poets were inspired more or less by the French Revolution, and advocated to the people to pursue beauty and inner freedom in nature or art. The most extraordinary features found in their poems are the abundant Greek and Roman mythological figures. But two generations of romantic poetry have shown different purposes in employing the Greek and Roman mythology, which needs further reading and exploration. The present study centers on the comparison of characters preference in poems between the two generations and shed light on the critical difference in their purposes and impacts.

Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism by John Bugg

John Bugg. Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 246. $60. Historicist criticism on the Romantic age from the 1980s to our present moment often appears to split into two different camps. There is the historicism that understands Romantic writing primarily in terms of what it sees, and the historicism that understands Romantic writing in terms of what it doesn't see (or refuses to see). Nicholas Roe's Keats and the Culture of Dissent provides a compelling instance of the first kind, for it shows how even images of classical culture in Keats's writing indicate his radical sympathies; Marjorie Levinson's work on Wordsworth provides a compelling instance of the second kind, for it shows how the poet's transcendent powers of imagination are achieved only by eliding or erasing features of a landscape that were present and visible in the poet's moment. The first kind of historicism, particularly when it claims that literary conventions are really political positions, occasionally looks like a resolute repudiation of literary form, or at least the formal work of literature is understood as a coding (even if covert and artful) of political affiliations or beliefs. The second kind of historicism might seem like a more open acknowledgment of literary form as an imaginative construction, although form is considered as a failed attempt to transcend the material circumstances of the author's moment. Thus what might seem like an acknowledgment of the work of imagination works out to be a more complete undermining of formalism than the first, since literary texts are not even considered as echoes of material contexts; they are re-established more firmly in that context (thanks to the critic's endeavor) than an author would willingly acknowledge. I mention this distinction in strategies to point out that in some ways John Bugg's exciting new book appears to be arguing against the second kind of historicism in order to embrace the first kind: a historicism that accounts for the way that literary works react to, and in a sense encode, specific historical conditions of the moment (Roe's work on Wordsworth and Coleridge is approvingly acknowledged throughout). Like other recent historicist critics like Daniel O'Quinn and E. J. Clery, who participate in something like a second wave of historicism, his work so carefully researches and synthesizes archival evidence that it changes our sense of what the historical conditions for writing actually were in the Romantic age. His book argues that the infamous laws known as the (The Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act, both of 1795) exerted a powerful effect on Romantic poetry. The acts need to be taken into account not because they simply stifled speech, writing, and publication, but because they provoked a range of creative reactions that have yet to be reckoned with completely in our critical commentary. The Ode to Liberty by the political prisoner John Augustus Bonney provides an opening example of Bugg's point in the introduction: the poem is spoken in the voice of a bird whose broken heart and silenced song reflect the atmosphere of the examined throughout the book (3-4). Neither entirely inhibited nor uninhibited in its utterance, the poem (like the bird) performs its constraint. The example of Bonney also shows how Bugg is actually producing an account that flexibly locates itself between the two dominant historicist methodologies: political engagement like Bonney's is not always explicit and requires a careful attention to literary figures and generic manipulations. When disguised, muffled, or even reduced to silence, that silence is spoken through the poem: it is expressive of the existence and persistence of repressive legislation. In his introduction and opening chapter, Bugg does for the Gagging Acts what John Barrell did for the treason trials of the 1790s in Imagining the King's Death. …

IIIMiddle English

This chapter has fifteen sections: 1. General and Miscellaneous; 2. Theory; 3. Manuscript and Textual Studies; 4. Early Middle English; 5. Lyrics and Shorter Poems; 6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Pearl , Patience , Cleanness ; 7. Piers Plowman ; 8. Other Alliterative Verse; 9. Verse Romance; 10. Gower; 11. Hoccleve and Lydgate; 12. Secular Prose; 13. Religious Prose; 14. Older Scots; 15. Drama. Sections 1 and 8 are by Anne Baden-Daintree; section 2 is by Katie Walter; section 3 is by Carrie Griffin; section 4 is by Alastair Bennett; section 5 is by Hetta Howes; sections 6 and 13 are by Michelle M. Sauer; sections 7 and 12 are by William Rogers; section 9 is by Holly Moyer; section 10 is by Yoshiko Kobayashi; section 11 is by Mary C. Flannery; section 14 is by Kate Ash-Irisarri; section 15 is by Daisy Black, with the assistance of Tamara Atkin.

Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle by James Henderson Collins II

Reviewed by: Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle by James Henderson Collins II Svetla Slaveva-Griffin James Henderson Collins II. Exhortations to Philosophy: The Protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 300. $74.00. ISBN 978–0-19–935859–5. This book examines the origin of the genre of philosophical and rhetorical protreptics (“turnings toward”) in the classical period. The topic is timely, despite the latest insurgent scholarly interest in physics as opposed to the traditionally predominant study of ethics. Although the question of recruitment strategies, as used by philosophy and rhetoric, carries in itself deep ethical connotations about the wares the two disciplines have to offer, Collins’ examination is not, nor does it intend to be, a philosophical analysis of their ethical nature. Instead, it falls—and markedly so—in the category of Quellenforschung and the theorization of literary genres such as F. Cairns’ Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh 1972) and M. M. Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin 1986). Bringing his predecessors’ course of study up to date, Collins applies to his investigation the trendy repertoire of intellectual culture as “a marketplace of ideas” wherein philosophic discourse becomes “philosophic advertising,” students are “prospective clients” and “consumers,” and philosophers and rhetoricians are “professional intellectuals” and “competitors” with “marketing campaigns” (ix–xiv). While the above branding may seem to some excessive, the book makes an original contribution to the study of the origin of philosophical (and, secondarily, of rhetorical) protreptics in fourth-century Athens. After a hefty introduction (hefty both in length and theoretical content), the book is divided into two parts, featuring the Platonic and the Isocratean sides of exhortative literature (parts 1 and 2, respectively), followed by an epilogue on the stabilization of the genre in Aristotle. For economy of space, I will highlight the main course of the argument in the individual parts, not in the individual chapters. The core argument is presented in the introduction. In it, Collins introduces what he refers to as “my theory of protreptic” (3) or “our more fluid model” (33) as configured against the background of the aforementioned studies and Aristotle’s rhetorical theory. Collins’ theory/model proposes that in the fourth century philosophy and rhetoric compete with each other to attract students as consumers of the different lifestyles they have to offer. While this competition gives the two disciplines an at first unique, and later a characteristic, protreptic bent (33), the protreptic genre itself does not mature in its fully-fledged form until Aristotle. The fluidity of the genre, Collins argues, is based on the interaction between external and internal levels of discourse. With time, this dynamic interaction, the author concludes, defines the form and content of the protreptic genre as found in Aristotle. The two parts of the main body illustrate the above thesis. Part 1 dissects the discursive levels of Plato’s dialogues into the categories of the intra- and extra-diegetic, the metaleptic, and the pro- and apotreptic. Collins correctly understands these levels as mutually embedded in the structure of the individual works, as, for example, in Plato’s Euthydemus. The dialogue aims at attracting and ultimately at converting an external audience to philosophy, in direct competition with the wares of the rhetoric-based model, by narrating its own internal “conversion” story. Part 2 turns to the Isocratean model. In comparison and [End Page 433] in competition with the Platonic model, the rhetorical model is more flexible, according to Collins. It stems from “lived experience” and allows the audience to voice its beliefs—beliefs that are only afterwards corrected by professional teachers. The epilogue examines the stabilization of the genre in Aristotle’s Protrepticus, now lost but indirectly documented through its rich reception. The organization of the work is unbalanced, and the inclusion of Aristotle in its title is an overstatement. The book is about the origin of the protreptic genre in the Platonic dialogue, with Isocrates’ speeches as a corollary, and Aristotle’s contribution as an aftermath. This imbalance, however, works well in proving the main thesis of the book: that, in the fourth century, there is no protreptic...

Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture by Ann Wierda Rowland

298 BOOK REVIEWS of Austen’s novels and letters, Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice succeeds most in demonstrating how “eroticism resides in the very forms of [Austen’s] fiction” (n). Raff’s argument that the phenomenon of “Janeism” is in fact the consequence of Austen’s intentional design, and stems from the novel­ ist’s rhetorical seduction of her readers, will surely challenge—and perhaps change—the way we analyze and discuss the often cult-like devotion the author and her works continue to inspire. Less successful, at least for this reader, is Raff’s characterization of Austen as a stalwart “prophet of love” (41), as well as her reduction of each ofthe later novels to a kind of roman a clef (10) about Fanny Knight. In terms of the former, I am not the only reader to note that, in her letters to Knight, Austen does not always come off as the confident, Pygmalion-like creator Raff describes; indeed, she not only expresses hesitation at offering love advice, but flatly instructs her niece not to rely upon the opinion of others in such matters: “Your affec­ tion gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your own feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point” (Letter to Fanny Knight, Wednesday, 30 November 1814). And for the latter, the larger payoff of Raff’s insis­ tence that Fanny Knight is a “key” to our interpretation of the later novels is not entirely clear (or, in my opinion, convincing). Perhaps Austen’s own advice applies as well to critical interpretation as to matters of the heart in this respect: “Your own feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point.” John C. Leffel SUNY, Cortland Ann Wierda Rowland. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+ 305. $90. Wordsworth’s inventive adage on childhood—“The Child is Father of the Man”—has by now become a familiar topos. For Wordsworth, this figuration of the child as generative source represented the poet’s idealized vision of a primitive, innocent, yet profound state of being. It is from this famous phrase that Ann Wierda Rowland initiates her recent study, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Cul­ ture. Because Wordsworth’s child embodies those qualities we associate with Romantic poetry—imagination, innocence, sentiment, spirituality, naturalism—Rowland sets out to uncover the rhetorical precedents that made Wordsworth’s seemingly paradoxical articulation an epistemological SiR, 55 (Summer 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 299 possibility at the end of the eighteenth century. She aims to track the his­ tory ofan idea: the Enlightenment search for origin stories that brought to­ gether a discourse of childhood and infancy with the history of history itself. Wordsworth’s ideological child was not produced in a vacuum. By trac­ ing writings across the Scottish Enlightenment to Romantic-era antiquarianism , Rowland demonstrates how Wordsworth’s notion was not only possible, but also inevitable. She begins with Wordsworth as well as with Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose parenthetical aside in Defence ofPoetry es­ tablished yet another important paradigm: “the savage is to ages what the child is to years.” For Wordsworth and Shelley, as well as for eighteenthcentury thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others, the imagery ofchildhood (the infant, the savage) epitomized the foundations and beginnings of human culture. Through its analogical links to the savage, the infant formed the iconic roots out of which European nations sprouted. Even though Wordsworth and Coleridge had enthusiastically ex­ perimented with child-like rustic and primitive diction in their Lyrical Bal­ lads, by the time Romanticism’s second generation rolled around, this seemingly rampant “infantilization” ofliterary culture was met with dispar­ agement. Byron haughtily dismissed Wordsworth’s “namby-pamby” vers­ ification, and newspapers complained frequently about the simplistic nursery-rhyme stylistics then becoming popular. The new vogue for natu­ ralism and primitivism, Rowland surmises, threatened poetry’s ethos as a masculinized form of high art. Taking these complaints of “infantilization” seriously, however, Rowland confronts such early nineteenth-century cri­ tiques in order to suggest that the fashion for the language...

Intertextuality Santa Maria della Salute in the light of literary criticism the second half of XX century

Santa Maria della Salute, exquisite poetic achievement of Laza Kostic, its modern poetic expression is confirmed by the fact that its ambiguity and layering owes many literary texts with which its author, but also the contemporary literary criticism referred to, and therefore represents the possibility of multiple interpretations intertextual. Although it belongs to the heritage of Serbian romantic poetry, its modernity brings it into direct frame with avant-garde poetic expression which is reflected in the semantic structure of its verses, but also through innovation of its rhythm and its rhymes. Its modernity is also in close modernity with which today can read Kostic theater pieces, such as Pera Segedinac and Maksim Crnojević. Important is Dnevnik Laza Kostic because through it can be interpreted interactivity psychological portrait of Laza Kostic and literary character Lenka Dunđerski intersecting in Anime psychological phenomenon through which Laza Kostic with the help of his poetic talent, he wrote his swan song, he enrolled at the top of Serbian poetry from its beginning until the present time.