Home » Items tagged with 'Lord Byron'
Items tagged with 'Lord Byron'
Article: Affecting Retreats and Academic Follies
In Jerusalem, William Blake makes it clear that he sees universities as complicit in processes of mechanisation that threaten to destroy creativity and enslave minds: ‘I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe | And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire | Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton’. However, surveying Romantic-period poetry more generally reveals that Blake’s view is an unusual one, breaking from eighteenth-century modes that remained the dominant discourses for addressing university life during the Romantic period. Poems on academic environments – particularly Oxford and Cambridge—commonly combined gentle satire on scholarly characteristics with presenting colleges as tranquil retreats. More pointedly, many university-educated poets sought to inscribe the special value of the elite subjectivities they imagined that their university experiences inculcated: this essay examines poems by William Mason, John Duncombe, Richard Polwhele, Thomas Dermody, Frederick William Faber and Christopher Pearse Cranch that work in this vein. However, such claims did not go unresisted, as shown through verse by Mary Alcock, Joanna Baillie, Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Howard Sigourney, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and George Crabbe and in more active models advanced by John Wilson and John Mayne in their depictions of the University of Glasgow. As higher education was diversified through urban foundations and institutions, spearheaded by the University of London, a project initiated in large part by the Glasgow-educated poet Thomas Campbell, the privileged scenes of eighteenth-century university verse became increasingly atypical. Nevertheless, the powerful ideal of the college-idyll lingered for a considerable time, being both reinscribed and ironised in writings such as Charles Lamb’s ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, which combines a sense of the attractiveness of academic retreat with evocations of its fragility and performativity. Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism XXIII: Lord Byron
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. I thought it would … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism XX: Transatlantic Romanticism, part 1
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. I thought it would … Continue reading
Review: Chase Pielak, Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period (rev.)
Chase Pielak’s Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period explores the disruptive potential of animals in British Romantic literature and the surprising encounters that they induce, both in life and from beyond the grave. For this … Continue reading
Review: Mark Sandy, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (rev.)
Mark Sandy’s latest monograph, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, builds upon his previous work on Romantic subjectivities, legacies and constructions of place. This study unites these previous interests in an exploration of how the language of … Continue reading
Article: The Protean Poet
Since his rise to fame in the early nineteenth century, Byron and his work have been significant subjects for visual art, from book illustration to oil painting. This essay explores Byronic art across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking as a case study the treatment of his late narrative poem, Don Juan. Byron’s wide-ranging appeal was a result of both the popularity of his poetry and the public fascination with his life, but it was also determined by the multiple, fluid qualities of his work which facilitated a huge variety of readings across the centuries. Here, the visual implications of these ways of reading are considered, and the essay argues that pictorial Byronism played an important role in presenting evolving perceptions of the broader Romantic movement. Continue reading
Post: A ‘passion which consumed me’: Byron and Foscolo’s Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis
by Helen Stark, Newcastle University In September 2013 I was lucky enough to spend 5 days in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, largely – despite the myriad treasures there – consulting … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism III: Scottish Literature
by Daniel Cook This semester I’m convening a new upper-level undergraduate module: Scottish Literature before 1900. A couple of years ago our resident Scottish literature expert, a highly affable and active George MacDonald scholar, David … Continue reading
Post: Teaching Romanticism II: Examination
I know, I know, this isn’t Christmassy. But it is timely. And, I promise, there will be poetry – oodles of the stuff – in the new year. In fact, if you read to the … Continue reading
Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana: An Introductory Blog
by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Greetings Fellow Romanticists and Print Culturists, I am excited about my first blog-posting for Romantic Textualities. Thanks to the editors for the opportunity and their assistance. Like many of us, ever … Continue reading