{"title":"The Mother Palimpsest: Reproduction in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria de Profundis1","authors":"H. Markley","doi":"10.3828/eir.2017.24.1.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2017.24.1.6","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates the figurative and textual effects of De Quincey’s mother. By emphasizing the integral role of maternal narratives and figures for his claim that the brain is “one great palimpsest,” I argue that De Quincey invests the palimpsest and its imaginative capacities with reproductive functions that give “birth” to his sisters. In this respect, my rereading of the brother-sister dyad through his maternal figures has broader implications for both De Quincey’s work and an understanding of how the coterie culture, so important to Romantic literature, depended not only on fraternity and friendship, but also certain exceptional sisters. By asserting the primacy of the mother as mediating figure between brothers and sisters, this essay brings the reproductive fantasies of Romanticism to the fore.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133822367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mary Robinson’s Female Vagrant","authors":"M. Hurwitz","doi":"10.3828/eir.2017.24.1.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2017.24.1.5","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Robinson’s Traveller, the narrator of Lyrical Tales, is actually a female vagrant and a response to William Wordsworth’s “The Female Vagrant” in Lyrical Ballads. Through this narrator, Robinson makes two revisions to Wordsworth’s volume. First, she frees the objectified female vagrant from stereotyping inherited from balladry to make her a more naturalistic subject who interrelates with her community—an important effort at a point in history when vagrant women outnumbered men two to one. In addition, the female vagrant works as an analogue for the female poet, who contests the male poet’s strategy of self-isolation as a means to genius. If men need solitude to reach heights of genius, why wouldn’t women rejected into solitude also be capable of similar accomplishments? Robinson argues through this character-narrator that true isolation may not be fully possible let alone necessary.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116124901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Production of Transparency: Hölderlinian Practices","authors":"D. Whistler","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.3","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the idea that the last, post-1806, Holderlin is a speculative poet, a poet that achieves the transparent inscription of a neutral nature to which speculation as such aspires. I compare Holderlin’s project at this period to the Deleuzian conception of perversity in the Logic of Sense, arguing that the poems map a new regime of sense by means of three perverse practices: desubjectivation, intemporalisation and abstraction (or the creation of phantasms). I consider each of these practices in turn in terms of Holderlin’s own attitude as well as the poems themselves. What emerges is a series of concepts that characterise Holderlinian speculation: the window, the asylum, secular time, measureless wonder, utopia and the specularised death drive.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114290957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Mock’d the Sight”: Misdirection of Interpretation in Byron’s The Giaour","authors":"S. Tedeschi","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.6","url":null,"abstract":"In The Giaour Byron experiments with a style of poetry that both gratifies and resists his readers’ expectations. Reflecting on how readers seized the biographical hints of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and interpreted the hero of the poem as a figure of the poet, Byron invites similar biographical inferences in The Giaour. Yet he also turns the interpretive distortions that such inferences produce into a theme of the poem. The fragmentary form of the poem, for instance, invites readers to fill in the gaps of the story according to their preconceptions about Byron’s work, while the scenes of reading in the poem emphasize how these preconceptions cover up significant omissions, obscure unexpected details, and exclude alternate possibilities. Signaling the beginning of an important stage in Byron’s rhetorical relationship with his audience, The Giaour denies any hermeneutic privilege to personal intimacy with the poet and presents every image as subject to the limits of interpretation.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128642802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Limpid Waves and Good Vibrations: Charlotte Smith’s New Materialist Affect","authors":"K. Singer","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"Although Charlotte Smith’s trademark emotional intensity has often been ascribed to her talent at channeling the discourses of sensibility and sympathy, this essay examines Smith as an arch-theorist of affect, or the fluctuations of matter in motion and at rest. The increasingly pervasive attention to the aqueous motion in several editions of Elegiac Sonnets reveals how affect crosses human and nonhuman boundaries through dynamic waves, winds, and voices working together. Dispersed yet fluid, this particulate materiality evinces a radically transposable, posthuman affect that circulates amid the human body and within nature. Smith’s elemental flow moves past discrete psychological and physiological emotion, subjects and bodies, into a more extensible affect that is materiality hospitable to nonhuman and even virtual worlds. The volume’s ever-changing, liquid contexture, finally, shapes the body of the poetic collection to be a continuously emergent field of affects, offering a wide array of materialities ...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134295303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Forms of Living Death”: Mockery, Marronage, and Sovereignty in Percy Shelley and John Gareth Stedman","authors":"Lenora Hanson","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.2.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.2.7","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents a novel interpretation of the “trope” of mockery offered at the end of Percy Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant.” It argues that mockery undoes the sympathetic relation established between sovereignty and Nature during the romantic period. By comparing Shelley’s poem and John Gareth Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, I locate a political and poetic practice that evades such sovereignty by disfiguring the human form. I propose a connection between Shelley’s use of mockery and Stedman’s account of slave marronage, a process in which escaped slaves were oftentimes described as decaying into or becoming part of a distinctly non-anthropomorphic nature. Both Shelley and Stedman’s work asks us to consider how the decay of the human, as a primary reference point for romantic nature, might offer new ways to think the politics of life in romantic literature. Specifically, they help us to think beyond the terms of bare life that Giorgio Agamben has offered in favor of an ecological, ant...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115036767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A tongue in every star”: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Poetics of Influence","authors":"Alexis Chema","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines how Barbauld develops an idiosyncratic theory of poetic influence enabled by her revaluation of fancy, a contested term I define as a figure for rhetorical excesses that confuse art and life. While her attraction to fancy begins as a matter of taste, fancy accrues ethical significance as she becomes skeptical that poetry can stimulate virtuous action by eliciting sympathy. Barbauld’s waning faith in sentimental rhetoric leads her to formulate an inventive model of how poetry might move readers to be good: fancy’s mystifying extravagances can weaken self-interested attachments, thereby producing (or approximating) the ingenuous state. The late prophetic poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven illustrates the political radicalism of this new conception of fancy, making the utopian—and today, highly suspicious—proposition that by stimulating imaginative acquiescence, flights of fancy can influence readers against their will, and against the entrenched exceptionalism that was keeping the nation a...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116449812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Bridge Thrown Over the Stream of Time”: “The Triumph of Life” between the Divina Commedia and “Shelley Disfigured”","authors":"B. Guthrie","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.2.2","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that both the material history of the manuscript of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s \"The Triumph of Life\" and its own presentation of literary history challenge longstanding readings of the poem as an illustration of the fundamentally modern nature of Shelley’s romanticism. It demonstrates how Shelley's final poem represents instead an “untimely” combination of pre-modern and modern understandings of (literary) history and associates these understandings with two texts central to the poem's own literary history: Dante's Divina Commedia, whose influence on Shelley's poem is felt both thematically and metrically, and Paul de Man's “Shelley Disfigured,” one of the most influential twentieth-century readings of \"Triumph.\" It demonstrates the poem’s liminal position between these texts by drawing on formal, historical, and archival approaches to Shelley’s poem.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122854810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Habituat[ing] to Reflection”: Hannah More’s Romantic Novel","authors":"Rachael Isom","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.13","url":null,"abstract":"This essay re-examines Hannah More’s controversial novel, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife (1809), in light of its formal connections to the occasional meditation, the soliloquy, and the poetic genre M. H. Abrams has termed the Greater Romantic Lyric. The essay argues that More, in attempting to attract both Evangelical and secular readers, creates the prototype for a new novel form. Her protagonist learns and models a reflective practice that, like Romantic lyrics and their devotional predecessors, transforms quotidian subjects matter into objects of structured, meditative soliloquies. By reading Cœlebs as a hybrid text that invokes devotional, dramatic, and lyric traditions, this essay suggests that More’s novel disrupts notions of separate male and female, secular and religious Romanticisms. Despite Cœlebs’s near disappearance from the canon of Romantic fiction, More’s influence on the novel persists in the borrowing of her reflective trope by female novelists well into the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131683566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hegel, In and Out of the Woods: Nature, Reflection, Capital","authors":"G. Ellermann","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.2","url":null,"abstract":"In the essays and lectures of his Jena period (1801–6), G. W. F. Hegel takes the measure of a nascent industrial capitalism, along with its consequences for life, consciousness, and labor. This article focuses on the philosopher’s resistance to the exploitation of nature, essential to capitalist modernity and justified by a post-Enlightenment ethic of freedom. For Hegel, writing against the theorists of the autonomous, self-reflecting subject, nature is woven in with the spirit. So when he investigates the leap between the hand-tool and the machine, he is concerned not only with the machine’s reshaping of consciousness. Just as disconcerting is the way machinery “deceives” nature, as it hastens on the “evaporation” of a bond between worker and world. If, under capitalism, all that is solid melts into air, for Hegel this change in the weather can be attributed to an industrial revolution in the mastery of nature.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114507525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}