A familiar strategy of elegy, anagnorisis is a form of teaching or guiding readers to a deep understanding of the poem’s subject through gradual, symbolic imagery and allusion. This paper argues that the spatial construction of the printed page became part of a new mode to gradually teach Romantic readers in the midst of a twenty-year conflict how to properly morn. Not only does spatial construction, as I define it, consist of the interplay of topic and genre on the periodical page, but its building blocks include intricate stanza shifts, locative words, and a collective voice. Mary Robinson’s ‘Stanzas supposed to be written near a tree, over the grave of an officer, who was killed at Lincelles, in Flanders, in August 1793’—despite its precise title—locates the act of mourning in the physical space of the poem. Her changing addresses and pronouns repeatedly tell readers and the gravesite itself what to do ‘Here’ so that correct acts are ‘record[ed]’ for future generations. Thus, I argue that the aim of such texts is to teach active mourning instead of effusion or meditation on personal loss. Active mourning typically consists of an obligation to the living, attention to ‘recording’ via the printed page, and close reading which is likened to travel. Such construction is reconsidered at the end of the long conflicts between Britain and France by critically overlooked poet Jane Alice Sargant. Her ‘Monody’ abruptly shifts from a meditation on death to a living, speaking ‘Warrior’ who finds a gravesite despite ‘no sculptur’d marble’ to mark it. Sargant’s text implies that ‘This mournful spot’ can only be found through the act of reading. The paper treats these two poems by Robinson and Sargant, respectively, with brief comparisons to other, anonymous periodical poems and to Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’. Continue reading →
As part of this ongoing series on Teaching Romanticism we will consider the ways in which we lecture on and discuss individual authors, whether during author-specific modules or broader period surveys. We thought it would … Continue reading →
This article explores Elizabeth Hamilton’s response to the abuse of Jacobin radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain. It situates Hamilton’s fictional representations of revolutionary principles and her outspoken caricatures of contemporary radicals in her three-volume Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) within the trajectory of the gradual decline of radical voices from the mid-1790s onwards. This article demonstrates how new philosophical principles are presented in the novel as impractical and subversive in nature, as a way for Hamilton to show readers that these principles are dangerous and likely to be falsely adopted to destroy all fair domestic and public values. Ultimately, it argues for the discursive space Hamilton created to challenge and destabilise Jacobin radicalism, and also aims to shed light on the gendered conventions of public participation in the period. Continue reading →
There are quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome; even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory,—of a temporary sort.—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (1837), p. 87 The French Revolution … Continue reading →
by Elias Greig I’m Elias Greig, a PhD student at the University of Sydney, and the Postgraduate Representative for the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia. I’m also, for better or worse, a Wordsworthian. In deference … Continue reading →
A reliable treatment of the work of ‘Robert des ruines’ (Hubert Robert, 1733–1808) has been wanting for many years, and Nina Dubin’s Futures and Ruins will amply meet this need for a considerable time. It … Continue reading →
Let’s begin with an irritated Elizabeth Inchbald. At the bidding of prolific and insistent publisher Thomas Norton Longman, she undertook the task of collecting and critiquing a series of plays spanning the two centuries between … Continue reading →
The final chapter of Humphrey Repton’s collected works on landscape gardening and architecture, published after his death in 1840, concludes with an encomium to Repton’s work from an unnamed source. ‘[What can bestow pure tranquillity?] … Continue reading →
