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    Nick Groom

    University of Exeter, English, Faculty Member
    The Celtic, insofar as it is applied to Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish identity and culture, is, like traditional Scottish tartans, an invention. Barry Cunliffe describes the word in its current Anglophone usage as an ‘ethnonym’, and... more
    The Celtic, insofar as it is applied to Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Cornish identity and culture, is, like traditional Scottish tartans, an invention. Barry Cunliffe describes the word in its current Anglophone usage as an ‘ethnonym’, and dates it to the eighteenth century (2003: 5). Seamus Deane (1997: 77) likewise places ‘Celt’ within scare quotes and suggests it is a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century term carrying an antimodernist agenda ‘transposed from its nationalist, antiquarian origins of the eighteenth century into a pan-European combinatoire of evolutionary destiny, the preservation of difference, even of anachronism, as a refusal of those adaptations needed to survive into the world of international capital and the nation-state.’ (Deane 1997: 88)
    Review by Nick Groom (University of Exeter) of Daniel Cook, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 . Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xv + 259. £55. ISBN 9781137332486.
    ... Among many others who provided valuable advice and encouragement I would like to mention Meg Gay, Rhys Jones, Ananya Kabir, Simon Keynes, Christopher Page, Nicholas Perkins, SarahPeverley, Ad Putter, Wendy Scase, Richard Serjeantson,... more
    ... Among many others who provided valuable advice and encouragement I would like to mention Meg Gay, Rhys Jones, Ananya Kabir, Simon Keynes, Christopher Page, Nicholas Perkins, SarahPeverley, Ad Putter, Wendy Scase, Richard Serjeantson, James Simpson, Andrew ...
    INTRODUCTION: A HISTORY OF THE GOTHIC IN THIRTEEN CHAPTERS 1. Origins of the Goths 2. The ascent to heaven 3. The iconoclasts 4. The revenge of the dead 5. Liberty gothic 6. Gothic whiggery 7. The Sixties 8. The descent into hell 9. The... more
    INTRODUCTION: A HISTORY OF THE GOTHIC IN THIRTEEN CHAPTERS 1. Origins of the Goths 2. The ascent to heaven 3. The iconoclasts 4. The revenge of the dead 5. Liberty gothic 6. Gothic whiggery 7. The Sixties 8. The descent into hell 9. The poetics of blood 10. The gothic dream 11. New England goths 12. Goths at the movies 13. First and last and always FURTHER READING
    This essay describes the cultural history and folklore of contagion, from supernatural agents to contemporary fakenews, arguing that stories about Covid-19 draw upon and reflect cultural representations – notably the Gothic. This means... more
    This essay describes the cultural history and folklore of contagion, from supernatural agents to contemporary fakenews, arguing that stories about Covid-19 draw upon and reflect cultural representations – notably the Gothic. This means that in addition to scientific and political measures we also need to deal with the imaginative culture generated by the disease that has now permeated every aspect of life in the nightmare figure of the vampire. The essay accordingly draws on a range of sources, from fifteenth-century theories of disease to early models of circulation to contemporary news reports tracking the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, and concludes that ‘thinking with vampires’ can sensitise us to the new realities of pandemic living.
    Abstract The early modern history of the festivities associated with Hallowe’en and St Valentine’s Day reveals a significant overlap in early forms of celebration and customary practices. In the eighteenth century, however, each day... more
    Abstract The early modern history of the festivities associated with Hallowe’en and St Valentine’s Day reveals a significant overlap in early forms of celebration and customary practices. In the eighteenth century, however, each day developed its own distinctive traditional identity. This article argues that this was a result of mass print culture and the spread of literature: primarily in popular verses, the poetry of Robert Burns, and the influence of William Shakespeare.
    This article considers Romanticism in terms of racial migration and history, seventeenth-century political theory, Whig cultural identity, legitimacy, and commerce. By examining uses of race, heritage, and region I will explain how... more
    This article considers Romanticism in terms of racial migration and history, seventeenth-century political theory, Whig cultural identity, legitimacy, and commerce. By examining uses of race, heritage, and region I will explain how antiquarian historical theories are incorporated into developing notions of cultural identity. In particular, this approach adds a temporal dimension to the spatialities of archipelagic thinking: historicizing archipelagic understanding to develop a catachthonic approach that analyses the historicity of historiographical theories of nationality and identity, effectively through a doubled, or subterranean, history.
    This chapter explains that the movement that eventually came to be known as Romanticism had its origins in politicized canon-formation. A particular literary taste was developed by Whig writers as a reflection of commercial, Protestant,... more
    This chapter explains that the movement that eventually came to be known as Romanticism had its origins in politicized canon-formation. A particular literary taste was developed by Whig writers as a reflection of commercial, Protestant, and constitutional values that was focused on the sublime, originality and creativity, the power of the imagination, and anti-classicism. These ‘cultures of Whiggism’ became increasingly influential and blossomed in the 1760s—most notably in the work of literary forgers such as Macpherson and Chatterton—by which time they had combined with equally political eighteenth-century reactions to the medieval past, most powerfully expressed through the cultural movement of the Gothic. Gothicism provided the new aesthetics with a progressive model of history and national identity, as well as with a lexicon of supernatural imagery. Ironically, then, Romanticism was a consequence of the literary agenda of establishment party politics.
    In 1722, an anonymous author published Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel. This neglected work is a satire on both the South Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, capitalizing on the craze for speculation, scientific... more
    In 1722, an anonymous author published Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel. This neglected work is a satire on both the South Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics, capitalizing on the craze for speculation, scientific advances in hydraulics, resource management, political arithmetic, and improvement. This chapter accordingly argues that land reclamation was an effective metaphor for Anglo-Irish policy and British imperialism, which in turn raised questions of national identity, regional connectivity, and environmental management. It introduces new evidence to historicize coastal work by blending textual criticism, political and legal analysis, regional folklore studies, and counterfactual history. The chapter provides a history of the Irish Sea and an account of maritime trade and property rights, as well as an analysis of the pamphlet itself (including its connections to the work of Jonathan Swift). It ends with a thought experiment imagining the impact had the chan...
    Vicesimus Knox, an eloquent commentator on, among other things, eighteenth-century letters and the Rowley Controversy, found considerable entertainment in the antiquarian scramble for scraps of old literature and the ensuing uncritical... more
    Vicesimus Knox, an eloquent commentator on, among other things, eighteenth-century letters and the Rowley Controversy, found considerable entertainment in the antiquarian scramble for scraps of old literature and the ensuing uncritical eulogies sung over ancient poetry in the later eighteenth century. He laid blame for this revolution in literary taste clearly, if discreetly, at the door of Thomas Percy and his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an anthology of ballads and songs first published in 1765.2 When Knox published his essays in 1782, Percy, a persistent social climber, had just been promoted from Dean of Carlisle to Bishop of Dromore and over the next 30 years of life in his corner of Ireland, would assiduously distance himself from his early antiquarian interests. But the influence of Percy’s Reliques remained palpable – not simply in the encouragement it offered to subsequent collectors of antique literature (including Walter Scott), but to the succeeding generation of Romantic poets (notably in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads). And yet perhaps the most significant impact of the Reliques was on Thomas Chatterton.
    William Henry Ireland, “otherwise Shakspeare,” was a late eighteenth-century literary forger. By the time he was twentyone he had produced a substantial archive of Shakespearean manuscripts, had his supposedly original new Shakespeare... more
    William Henry Ireland, “otherwise Shakspeare,” was a late eighteenth-century literary forger. By the time he was twentyone he had produced a substantial archive of Shakespearean manuscripts, had his supposedly original new Shakespeare play Vortigern performed at Drury Lane, confessed to the forgery, been disowned by his father, revealed to be the illegitimate child of the housekeeper, and written his autobiography. He spent the remainder of his life as a Grub Street hack, counterfeiting his Shakespearean forgeries for collectors of curiosities. He died in 1835.
    In considering English Romantic poets and their relationship with the West Country, the place of Thomas Chatterton appears at first sight to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Chatterton is the Bristol poet. He was so in the eighteenth... more
    In considering English Romantic poets and their relationship with the West Country, the place of Thomas Chatterton appears at first sight to be straightforward and uncomplicated. Chatterton is the Bristol poet. He was so in the eighteenth century; he remains so today. Eighteenth-century commemorations such as The Ode, Songs, Chorusses, c indeed, the subtitle of an edited collection published in 2005 is Thomas Chatterton’s Bristol.2 He made the city and the city made him — and in a sense, Chatterton quite literally made its history: William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (1789) includes medieval material ‘forged’ by Chatterton.
    William Henry Ireland, “otherwise Shakspeare,” was a late eighteenth-century literary forger. By the time he was twentyone he had produced a substantial archive of Shakespearean manuscripts, had his supposedly original new Shakespeare... more
    William Henry Ireland, “otherwise Shakspeare,” was a late eighteenth-century literary forger. By the time he was twentyone he had produced a substantial archive of Shakespearean manuscripts, had his supposedly original new Shakespeare play Vortigern performed at Drury Lane, confessed to the forgery, been disowned by his father, revealed to be the illegitimate child of the housekeeper, and written his autobiography. He spent the remainder of his life as a Grub Street hack, counterfeiting his Shakespearean forgeries for collectors of curiosities. He died in 1835.
    Foreword: Thomas Chatterton P.Ackroyd Introduction N.Groom PART I: LIFE AND WORKS Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton C.Rawson The Originality of Chatterton's Art G.Lemoine 'On Tiber's Banks': Chatterton and... more
    Foreword: Thomas Chatterton P.Ackroyd Introduction N.Groom PART I: LIFE AND WORKS Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton C.Rawson The Originality of Chatterton's Art G.Lemoine 'On Tiber's Banks': Chatterton and Post-Colonialism C.Williams The Mythical Image: Chatterton, King Arthur, and Heraldry I.Bryden In Your Face T.Morton 'This Necessary Knowledge': Thomas Chatterton's Understanding of the Bristol and London Book Trades M.Suarez, SJ Appendix PART II: THE ROWLEY CONTROVERSY AND AFTER Chatterton and the Club P.Rogers Chatterton and Johnson: Authority and Filiation in the 1770s P.Baines Fragments, Reliques , & MSS: Chatterton and Percy N.Groom Truth Sacrifising To The Muses: The Rowley Controversy and the Genesis of the Romantic Chatterton M.G.Lolla Nostalgic Chatterton: Fictions of Poetic Identity and the Forging of a Self-taught Tradition B.Keegan Chatterton's Poetic Afterlife 1770-1796: A Context for Coleridge's Monody D.Fairer Forging The Poet: Some Early Pictures of Thomas Chatterton R.Holmes Afterword M.Wood Rowley's Ghost: A Checklist of Creative Works Inspired by Thomas Chatterton's Life and Writings J.Goodridge Index
    Sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as "sister arts" in the... more
    Sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as "sister arts" in the eighteenth century, the intimate relationship between poetry and music has been neglected by recent criticism in favor of text-based theories of interpretation. This paper investigates how noise defined the aesthetics of Englishness at the end of the eighteenth century and for the Romantic period, suggesting that it is possible to trace sound patterns in literature and in prints, and thereby to reconstruct certain soundscapes. Although the following account is itself profoundly text-based, it does attempt to consider how sounds, whether musical settings or background noise, can be articulated in literature, and how this noise may echo changing social conditions. My interpretation is underpinned by the "neo-pragmatist" poetics of Richard Shusterman, as elaborated for literary criticism by Ralph Pordzik. Pordzik's approach calls for an examination of the "situational embedment" of a text: how literature "functions as experience." (2) This is not merely investigating how literature "affects our emotions," but is "a method of recapturing a dimension of the written text that appeals to our sense of a more fully realized, sensual experience instead of our intellectual or analytical abilities." (3) Neopragmatist reading is not paraphrasing; "it should be seen as a literary practice that tries to be more adequate, more true, to the text's sensual import, one that brings us closer to achieving an internally more integrative experience of reading as 'collaboration' with the text." (4) For the purposes of the present paper, neo-pragmatist reading stresses the harmonic expectations of eighteenth-century readers confronted with a ballad or song text, and argues that acoustic references in verse should not simply be considered as metaphorical, but as the traces of a lost (and irrecoverable) physical reality. (5) Literature is, in other words, a secret history of noise. Lines may allude to the voice and music, the natural sounds of birdsong, wind, and rain, the insistent hubbub of the city, and so forth. All of these sorts of sounds can be emphasized with acoustic effects such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, but there is also in writing a secondary noise, like a background ambience, which carries sounds more covertly or implicitly. This is almost inaudible to readers today, but would have been more noticeable to contemporaries. Popular folk melodies such as "Packington's Pound" or "Derry Down," street cries, and even the unearthly strains of the Aeolian harp may no longer be familiar sounds today, but they were part of the phonic world of the eighteenth century. (6) They were not metaphorical sounds but actual experiences, and hence they whisper through the poetry of the period. I shall confine my discussion to one work: Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (popularly known as "Percy's Reliques," first published in 1765). My argument proposes that in eighteenth-century collections of "old ballads," and in particular in Percy's Reliques, textual sound effects are deployed in order to exemplify an emerging English identity, and that this subsequently influenced the antiquarian editing of later ballad collections and the composition of verse. These activities also attempted to distance the English tradition from political balladeering and the rude sounds of rioting. The Reliques is a collection of ballads, songs, romances, and historical poetry, liberally seasoned with Percy's literary-antiquarian annotation: there are traditional ballads, songs from Shakespeare, translations from the Moorish, Scottish songs, as well as popular and political verses from British history. Many of the pieces purportedly derived from Percy's "folio MS," the seventeenth-century commonplace book he had famously rescued from being used as a firelighter, but he also drew on many printed sources, including Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20) and the 1723 Collection of Old Ballads, as well as archives such as the Pepys Library and his own collection of contemporary broadsides. …
    ... In the same year Croxall himself published the verse, 'The Midsummer Wish' was included by Edmund Curll in a little handbook of erotic verse, The Pleasures of Coition.4 Curll may ... Published by Oxford University Press. ...... more
    ... In the same year Croxall himself published the verse, 'The Midsummer Wish' was included by Edmund Curll in a little handbook of erotic verse, The Pleasures of Coition.4 Curll may ... Published by Oxford University Press. ... WHO PLAGIARIZED THOMAS CHATTERTON'S 'ELEGY'? ...
    Sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as "sister arts" in the... more
    Sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as "sister arts" in the eighteenth century, the intimate relationship between poetry and music has been neglected by recent criticism in favor of text-based theories of interpretation. This paper investigates how noise defined the aesthetics of Englishness at the end of the eighteenth century and for the Romantic period, suggesting that it is possible to trace sound patterns in literature and in prints, and thereby to reconstruct certain soundscapes. Although the following account is itself profoundly text-based, it does attempt to consider how sounds, whether musical settings or background noise, can be articulated in literature, and how this noise may echo changing social conditions. My interpretation is underpinned by the "neo-pragmatist" poetics of Richard Shusterman, as elaborated for literary criticism by Ralph Pordzik. Pordzik's approach calls for an examination of the "situational embedment" of a text: how literature "functions as experience." (2) This is not merely investigating how literature "affects our emotions," but is "a method of recapturing a dimension of the written text that appeals to our sense of a more fully realized, sensual experience instead of our intellectual or analytical abilities." (3) Neopragmatist reading is not paraphrasing; "it should be seen as a literary practice that tries to be more adequate, more true, to the text's sensual import, one that brings us closer to achieving an internally more integrative experience of reading as 'collaboration' with the text." (4) For the purposes of the present paper, neo-pragmatist reading stresses the harmonic expectations of eighteenth-century readers confronted with a ballad or song text, and argues that acoustic references in verse should not simply be considered as metaphorical, but as the traces of a lost (and irrecoverable) physical reality. (5) Literature is, in other words, a secret history of noise. Lines may allude to the voice and music, the natural sounds of birdsong, wind, and rain, the insistent hubbub of the city, and so forth. All of these sorts of sounds can be emphasized with acoustic effects such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, but there is also in writing a secondary noise, like a background ambience, which carries sounds more covertly or implicitly. This is almost inaudible to readers today, but would have been more noticeable to contemporaries. Popular folk melodies such as "Packington's Pound" or "Derry Down," street cries, and even the unearthly strains of the Aeolian harp may no longer be familiar sounds today, but they were part of the phonic world of the eighteenth century. (6) They were not metaphorical sounds but actual experiences, and hence they whisper through the poetry of the period. I shall confine my discussion to one work: Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (popularly known as "Percy's Reliques," first published in 1765). My argument proposes that in eighteenth-century collections of "old ballads," and in particular in Percy's Reliques, textual sound effects are deployed in order to exemplify an emerging English identity, and that this subsequently influenced the antiquarian editing of later ballad collections and the composition of verse. These activities also attempted to distance the English tradition from political balladeering and the rude sounds of rioting. The Reliques is a collection of ballads, songs, romances, and historical poetry, liberally seasoned with Percy's literary-antiquarian annotation: there are traditional ballads, songs from Shakespeare, translations from the Moorish, Scottish songs, as well as popular and political verses from British history. Many of the pieces purportedly derived from Percy's "folio MS," the seventeenth-century commonplace book he had famously rescued from being used as a firelighter, but he also drew on many printed sources, including Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20) and the 1723 Collection of Old Ballads, as well as archives such as the Pepys Library and his own collection of contemporary broadsides. …
    ... In the same year Croxall himself published the verse, 'The Midsummer Wish' was included by Edmund Curll in a little handbook of erotic verse, The Pleasures of Coition.4 Curll may ... Published by Oxford University Press. ...... more
    ... In the same year Croxall himself published the verse, 'The Midsummer Wish' was included by Edmund Curll in a little handbook of erotic verse, The Pleasures of Coition.4 Curll may ... Published by Oxford University Press. ... WHO PLAGIARIZED THOMAS CHATTERTON'S 'ELEGY'? ...
    Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often 'more... more
    Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often 'more than biomedical' in complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and well-being can be built. The term 'healthy publics' allows us to shift the focus of public health away from 'the public' or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from ...

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