Tom Mole

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media.

Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers.

Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Plus d'un million de titres à notre catalogue ! ... Date de parution : 05-2009 Langue : ANGLAIS 290p. Hardback Disponible chez l'éditeur (délai d'approvisionnement : 10 jours). ... Introduction Tom Mole, Part I. Apparatus: 1. Celebrity and the spectacle of nation Jason Goldsmith, 2. ...

Sthe Frame Bill," understandably eager to get to Childe Har-J old's Pilgrimage, which was published only eight days later, when Byron famously awoke to find himself famous. But to linger on the "Ode" is to hold Byron on the threshold of fame, to capture him in a freeze-frame just ...

... Wilson's collection Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Culture (1999), to the coda of Fiona MacCarthy's 2002 ... examined Benjamin West's portrait of Byron (the last formal portrait to be taken from life) and Letitia Landon's poetic responses to it. ...

The beginnings of Byron's longer poems reveal a number of anxieties about the poetic act of beginning. He dealt with these concerns in several ways: revising opening lines, using translations from other poets to begin his poems, repurposing lines he had written in another context, multiplying prefatory paratexts, or asking other people to make decisions about how his poems should begin. His poetic beginnings reflect a concern about whether his poems would find well-informed and sympathetic readers, and they are often concerned with what his readers can be expected to know. In his later poems, however, Byron overcame some of these anxieties as he developed a different understanding of beginnings. Beppo and Don Juan are sustained by beginning gestures, which recur repeatedly throughout the poems. These beginnings reflect the poems' openness to contingency, which tends to make all beginnings necessarily provisional, in life as in art. Byron was a poet who had trouble beginning his poems. Not that he had trouble starting to write, or wrestled with writers' block, or stared for hours at a blank page. He wrote rapidly and fluently, drafting The Bride of Abydos in four days and The Corsair in ten, and writing three cantos of Don Juan in as many months in 1823. He did not experience long dry spells between moments of inspiration, but began new poems often, and published regularly throughout his writing life, despite his occasional claims to have given up authorship and his statements that he did not consider poetry to be his vocation. The problem was not beginning to write a poem, but writing the poem's beginning. Byron often returned to the beginnings of his poems, revising and adding to them. He also employed a range of paratexts that complicated the beginnings of his longer poems, including subtitles, dedications, advertisements, prefaces, proems, and epigraphs. The frequency with which he revisited, added to, or complicated the beginnings of his poems suggests the extent to which the poetic act of beginning was one fraught with difficulty for him. But over time Byron's difficulty with writing beginnings led him to make beginning a central concern of his poetry, both as a poetic necessity and as an existential condition. The beginning of any work of writing is an especially conspicuous part of it, and so writers often devote special attention to how a work begins. Beginnings are momentous, but also arbitrary. It can be difficult to explain why a narrative (syuzhet) should begin where it does, since the story it tells (fabula) will always extend back before the beginning of its

John ‘Walking’ Stewart (1747-1822) was a remarkable figure of the Romantic period, and one who has been almost entirely forgotten. In his seventy-five years, Stewart walked across most of the known world, tramping from India to England, detouring through Ethiopia and into unmapped regions of Africa, visiting the Arab and Mediterranean countries, travelling on foot across much of Europe as far east as Russia and as far north as Lapland, before crossing the Atlantic to walk around North America and into northern Canada.  Along the way, he formulated an eccentric but fascinating philosophy, which he articulated in a slew of self-published books.  Thomas de Quincey called him ‘a sublime visionary’ whose ‘mind was a mirror of the sentient universe’.  He met Wordsworth in 1792, and provided a possible model for the traveller in the ‘Arab Dream’ passage of The Prelude. This essay will recover Stewart’s key ideas from his philosophical and political writings.  Stewart was a familiar presence in Regency London, and the essay locates him in his metropolitan context.  The time is ripe to recover Stewart’s writings, because they speak to our current aspirations to develop a global account of Romanticism, and to evolve a non-anthropocentric ontology.  This essay will therefore suggest ways in which Stewart’s ideas resonate in the present.