Romanticism Research Articles

Geology, the Imagination, and Speculative Writing: Gideon Mantell’s Fossil Poetry in Anna Birkbeck’s Album

This article considers the literary and scientific significance of a poem written by the geologist Gideon Mantell in Anna Birkbeck’s album in 1825. ‘On a Group of Organic Remains of a Former World’ considers a cluster of fossils and asks them to give up information about the prehistoric world in which they had lived. Mantell’s speaker is particularly keen to discover whether a race of angelic beings might have inhabited earth before the biblical creation, as this would help to explain why no fossilized human remains had been found by geologists who had discovered innumerable other creatures buried in the rocks. This article considers why Mantell was interested in these questions, why he chose poetry as the best form in which to explore them, and what his contribution to Anna Birkbeck’s album tells us about the imbrication of scientific and literary writing in the Romantic era.

Correction to: Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Correction to: Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Romantic Concerns About Toxicity and Public Health: Literary Exploration of Contaminated Environment and the Significance of Literature in Historical Toxicology

Poems of William Blake, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, and their contemporaries are freighted with allusions to the contaminated environment during the industrial revolution and post Tambora eruption (1815), reflective of socio-environmental realities of the Romantic period and their concerns about public health. This paper endeavors to examine Romantic poetry and assess early 19th-century toxic English landscapes to comprehend how environmental contamination was culturally perceived during this period. The study follows a critical convergence design between historical toxicology and Romantic literature for the synthesis of scientific analysis to reveal the thematic preoccupations of Romantic writing. Findings of the study demonstrate substantial references to the impact of direct release of industrial toxins into atmosphere and Tambora eruption’s toxic fallout. Literary engagements such as these foreground profound socio-ecological ramifications of toxic pollutants and offer richer insights for modern environmental policy-making and sustainable development. The study also follows an interdisciplinary approach to serve as a resource for the integrative analysis presented here and benefit the future research from its insights in filling out the understanding of how early 19th-century poets approached industrial and volcanic pollution.

The lasting effect of the Romantic view of nature: How it influences perceptions of risk and the support of symbolic actions against climate change.

Culture can have a major impact on how we perceive different hazards. In the Romantic period, nature was described and portrayed as mysterious and benevolent. A deep connection to nature was perceived as important. We proposed that this romantic view would be positively related to people's risk perceptions of man-made hazards and, more specifically, to concerns about climate change. Further, we hypothesized that the Romantic perception of nature leads to a biased perception of natural hazards and that the moral component of action is of particular importance above and beyond the mere efficacy of the action. We conducted an online survey in Germany (N=531), a country where Romanticism had a very widespread influence. The study shows that individuals with a Romantic view of nature perceived greater risks associated with climate change than those without such a view. In addition, those with a Romantic view of nature were more likely to support measures to reduce the risks of climate change, even when it is said that such measures are not effective. Finally, the study found a significantly higher positive correlation between Romantic views of nature and risk perceptions of man-made versus natural hazards. The results suggest that ideas developed during the Romantic era continue to influence hazard perception in Germany.

Humphry Davy, transatlantic slavery and his constructions of racial difference in an early notebook

Humphry Davy was the most celebrated chemist of his day in Britain, but he has been absent from discussions of Romantic-era constructions of race. It is well known that Davy was an experimental chemist, popular lecturer, and, as has been recently explored by the Davy Notebooks Project, a poet; this essay expands this narrative to include his connection to transatlantic slavery and writing about race, which are neglected aspects of his life and writing. In this essay, I examine Davy’s response to the slave-trade debates and for the first time his close family links to transatlantic slavery, focusing on his wife Jane’s stepfather, the major enslaver, Robert Farquhar. I discuss Davy’s writing on the chemical causes of Black skin colour and a draft essay on the climate in notebook 13F in which he constructed the racial difference of Black Africans. I argue that his essay can be understood by recognizing 13F as a school notebook used during his period of self-education and that it reflects the messy and unstable nature of writing about race in the Romantic period. Davy’s racial thinking was influential and he was recognized as an authority on skin colour by his contemporaries, Thomas Beddoes, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Sir Everard Home.

Plastic Surgeons and Portraits Before the Invention of Photography.

The aim of this paper is to review portraits from the Renaissance to the Romantic eras, created before the invention of photography, and to discuss their usefulness to plastic surgeons. Before photography and film were invented, portraits played a critical role in documenting individuals, conveying power, and immortalizing people's appearance and identity. Portraits were not merely simple representations of a person's physical appearance; they played a crucial role in conveying the subject's inner qualities and social position, as well as the cultural values of the era. Artists often idealized or embellished certain features to align with the cultural and aesthetic ideals of their time. Portraits of the Renaissance to Romantic eras could have a significant impact on plastic surgeons' understanding of beauty and aesthetics. A plastic surgeon drawing on Renaissance ideals might prioritize symmetry and balanced facial features, which continue to be regarded as attractive in contemporary beauty standards. Beauty standards during these times favored curvaceous and lively figures, potentially inspiring modern plastic surgeons to focus on creating more dramatic or unique appearances. A plastic surgeon inspired by Romantic art might value uniqueness and avoid rigid beauty standards, focusing instead on enhancing a person's natural traits rather than conforming to a singular "ideal" appearance. Plastic surgeons could gain a richer, more classical perspective on aesthetics by studying historical art, potentially leading to more personalized and balanced outcomes. However, integrating these classical ideals into modern practice must also consider the diverse and varying definitions of beauty prevalent in today's multicultural society.

Matthew Leporati, Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire

Matthew Leporati’s wide-ranging and compelling study considers two features of the Romantic era that are rarely contemplated side by side: the explosion of epic poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century and the turn toward a more evangelical and proselytizing form of Christian missionary activity. The latter is, as Leporati observes, often in opposition to the demands of empire in the early stages of colonization, but then is effectively co-opted into colonial activities as the century progresses. His book deals only tangentially with Blake, the subject of one of its chapters, but in many respects Blake’s writing in general and Milton a Poem in particular fuel several of the more critical conclusions.

Chopin’s Nocture Style in the Romantic Period: A Case Study of Nocture Op.9 No.1

Nocturne had a great development in the Romantic period of the 19th century. Chopin, as a typical representative of the Romantic period, pushed the development of nocturne to a new climax. His works have a very high artistic value and are a precious artistic heritage for future generations. Chopin has made great contributions to the development of romantic music. Therefore, Chopin's works have left a lot of places worth exploring and studying, which has had a profound influence on the development of Western music. This paper will be based on the general situation of romantic music, starting from Chopin's life and creation process, through the analysis of Chopin's “Nocturnica Op.9 No.1” piano works as the theme of detailed discussion, from the music melody style, touch keys, pedal use and music emotional expression, to grasp the style of the work and processing. The performance skills in the works and rich artistic expression show. By understanding the musical style and artistic characteristics of the Romantic period, we can further grasp the style and treatment of Chopin's works, and apply his performance personality to Chopin's other music works, so as to improve the level of performers' playing skills, restore the musical emotional expression that the composer wants to convey to the audience, and improve the performance of music.

Palimbiosis

How does one begin to talk about the end? Contemporary artistic and literary responses to climate change frequently invoke Romantic traditions, in part because many theorists attribute our current crisis to historical developments in the Romantic period, but also as means of representing how climate change collapses the familiar orderliness of time. This essay is about the narrative forms that emerge when our place of safety is revealed to be as unstable as melting permafrost. It centers on Mary Shelley’s 1825 essay about a frozen Englishman reanimated during that especially warm summer. I read Shelley’s essay anachronistically alongside contemporary climate art in order to explore narrative forms that disrupt the linear progression of time and suggest the possibility of other narratives that might emerge in the plurality of our endings. We are accustomed to thinking of Romanticism as environmentally informed by ice. This essay is about the thaw.

Bildung and the Moral Topography of the Self

Abstract The ideal of authenticity that developed in the Romantic era emphasized that both individuals and places find their own authentic process for cultivating their identity and humanity, a notion that has become controversial in modern philosophy. This paper will explore the concepts of authenticity and place and discuss their relevance for Bildung theory today. Based on the works of Charles Taylor, we will argue that Bildung can be seen as constituted by and constitutive of language and moral spaces that go beyond the self and its individuality. In this view, Bildung can be understood as a ‘moral topography of the self’ with both substantial and procedural aspects. However, language and moral spaces (i.e. communities) can both enable and constrict our Bildung processes. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi, we thus argue that alienation is an equally important concept to understand the complex and dialectical relationship between individuals and communities in our current moment.

‘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’.

THE VOCAL HERITAGE OF JOHANNES BRAHMS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RELIGIOUS AND ETHICAL PRINCIPLES OF 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN CULTURE

The article is devoted to the exploration of spiritual and religious principles in the works of Johannes Brahms and their manifestation in the composer’s vocal and choral opuses. The aim of the study is to reveal the spiritual, ethical, and religious foundations of Brahms’ creative personality and their reflection in the composer’s vocal heritage (using A German Requiem and the vocal cycle Four Serious Songs as examples). The methodology combines intonational, genre-stylistic, etymological, and hermeneutical approaches. The scientific novelty of the study is marked by the introduction into musicology of not only materials concerning the religious worldview of Brahms but also their influence on the formation of the conceptual content inherent in his works, shaped at the intersection of Protestant-Lutheran principles of the German cultural-historical tradition and their metamorphoses during the spiritual quests of the Romantic era. The findings show that the generalization of bibliographic and analytical sources on Brahms’ works, including his vocal heritage, reveals the depth of the spiritual, ethical, and religious principles of his creative personality, which trace back to the German Protestant tradition and the culture formed on its basis. At the same time, these principles were enriched by the spiritual searches of German Romanticism and the Biedermeier period. The appeal to the age-old principles of past national culture and its illustrious representatives, combined with the revival of the “spirit” of the nation and the characteristic Protestant convergence and mutual spiritualization of sacred and secular genres, contributed to the consolidation of German society and its movement towards the unification of Germany. These aspects are also reflected in the poetics of Brahms’ A German Requiem and the vocal cycle Four Serious Songs, which exhibit the tradition’s characteristic focus on eternal themes of life and death in their Protestant interpretation, the use of relevant biblical texts and their authorial re-interpretation, as well as the appeal to the “intonational dictionary” of the Protestant chorale, ranging from direct citation to free compositional realization of broadly interpreted chorality.

Library of Stone

This article examines cemeteries as repositories for vernacular literary culture, in the form of epitaphs, and as the inspiration for literature that brings necrogeography into tension with programmes of growth. It starts in the early nineteenth century, when Romantic period notions of individuality, intertwined with the novel, gave birth to modern cemeteries. These spaces have, in the interceding centuries, grown old and been threatened by expanding cities, infrastructure, and changing modes of memorialisation. As sprawling cities encroach on cemeteries, ‘perpetual rest’ has been challenged and headstones have been removed or consolidated, to make way for parks and amenities that benefit the living. Literary depictions of cemeteries in the twentieth century have both reinforced, and troubled the notion, that cemeteries are ‘archives in stone’ that must be protected at all costs.

The Motif of Death in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Short Poems

In the early 19th century poetic tradition, there was a great emphasis on the poet as the creative genius, and subjectivity was cherished more than ever. As a poet of the Romantic Era, Percy Bysshe Shelley conveyed his emotions, philosophical beliefs, and religious convictions, as well as his fears and motivations, through his literary works. Death was an omnipresent theme in Shelley’s life, and he used poetry as a means to express his thoughts and feelings about it. The passing of those close to him, such as his wife Harriet and children Clara and William, confronted him with his own mortality. He responded to the death of his beloved ones by composing poems. In addition to expressing his grief over these losses, he also voiced the decrease of his life instincts and his death wish. This paper will examine Shelley’s short poems (“Death”, “On Death”, “To William Shelley”, “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To Night,” and “O world! O life! O time!”) through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholy, as well as death wish. The chosen autobiographical poems reveal Shelley’s mourning process and his journey towards accepting death, showcasing his death drive, and reflecting his genuine emotions as well as his Neoplatonic philosophy.

REGGAE E POEMA: O NAVIO NEGREIRO PASSADO E PRESENTE

The present work aims to propose an intertextual relationship between Castro Alves' poem “Navio Negreiro” and the song by the group O Rappa “Every camburão has a bit of a slave ship”, leading to a reflection in the classroom on racism in Brazil. The aim is to demonstrate to the 9th year elementary school student, who is the target audience, how elements of the literary text belonging to the romantic movement of the 19th century find correspondence in the lyrics of the song by the group O Rappa. Understanding literature as a universal manifesto of all men at all times, as Antônio Candido (2004) said in “The Right to Literature”. In the book “República sung do choro ao funk”, Diniz and Cunha (2014) say that through music, black people could sing their suffering. In this way, we can see the importance of these works of art for the individual's education and the need to use them in the classroom, enabling quality teaching that seeks to motivate the student to learn.

Bringing the London Monster Online: Sarah Sophia Banks's Ephemera Collection

Abstract: This essay discusses an online exhibit we are developing on Sarah Sophia Banks's collection of ephemera relating to the London Monster, who attacked women in London between 1788 and 1790. Our exhibit contextualizes Banks's collections of print illustrations and clippings describing the Monster's attacks on white women amid the exploitation and rape of women of color across the British Empire. Bringing together scans from Banks's collections on the Monster alongside other illustrations on the topic from the Huntington Library, our exhibit offers opportunities for uncovering relationships across these collections, while examining colonialism and the nature of print culture in the Romantic era.

Literary Adaptation and Digital Humanities: Laurence Sterne and Sterneana

Abstract: Literary afterlives occupied a significant place in the cultural life of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. Laurence Sterne's work, especially Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey , attracted diverse and extensive adaptation in various forms and media, collectively known as "Sterneana." Digital Humanities initiatives have provided unprecedented opportunities for exploring literary afterlives, bringing obscure and rare materials to light that enrich understanding of adaptation as a broad phenomenon and its role in this period. This article discusses online resources that bring Sterne-related material to new audiences, focusing on Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, a dataset hosted by Cambridge Digital Library.

Communities of Collaboration: Building the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project

Abstract: The Maria Edgeworth Letters Project ( MELP ) is a digital, searchable, open-access archive of Edgeworth's correspondence that is building a collaborative international community, simulating the sprawling network encompassed in her letters, and demonstrating how Edgeworthstown in Ireland became an important node in the exchange and production of knowledge in the Romantic period. With more than 15,000 manuscript pages from over thirty archives, MELP crowdsources transcriptions through the Zooniverse platform, edits and encodes them through collaborative workflows across five universities, and assembles taxonomies of people, places, and works mentioned in the letters in order to create a sustainable digital project.

The Emotional Outpour of Character Pieces in the Romantic Period

Romanticism, as a significant period in development of music, refers to the appearance of new deeper and more intimate musical compositions. Previously, absolute music concentrated on the formal structure of the particular piece taking its references from composers such as Bach and the Viennese school composers. In contrast, program music narrates stories or suggests imagery. Notable examples like Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’ in F, Op. 68 foreshadowed the idea of program music. This paper will focus on the phenomenon of definite character pieces that depict certain moods, as composed by Schumann, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and others, and demonstrating how programmatic works serve the Romantic concern with individuality and emotional profoundness. Inclusion of various character pieces written by major composers, including Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin, will demonstrate how music was used to narrate complex emotional stories and their own experiences.

Reanimating Romantic Print and Periodical Culture through Digital Humanities: The Noctes Ambrosianae Project

Abstract: This article considers the author's digital project, an edition of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 's " Noctes Ambrosianae " series, as a test case to explore the value of digital editions for better understanding Romantic print culture. The essay provides an overview of the project, including the process of developing customized TEI typologies to capture different literary and cultural elements of the series. It argues that the process of digital editing should be considered a practice of critical making and affords deeper insights into the texts edited, particularly when those texts emerge from a complex, allusive print culture such as is found in Romantic periodicals.