Download or read book Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination written by Philip Shaw and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-07-23 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination offers a new and challenging look at the cultural significance of the Battle of Waterloo, and the impact it had on British Romantic culture. Drawing on a range of approaches it aims to redefine the Romantic period as an age of inter- and intra-national conflict, thus overturning conventional notions of 'The Romantic Project', and re-writing the period from first principles. Topics covered include: the impact of Waterloo on Romantic ideas of individual and national identity, the representation of the dead and wounded in poetry, painting and prose, the work of canonical and non-canonical poets.

Download or read book The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination written by Carl Thompson and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl Thompson explores the romance that can attach to the notion of suffering in travel, and the importance of the persona of 'suffering traveller' in the Romantic self-fashionings of figures such as Wordsworth and Byron. Situating such self-fashionings in the context of the upsurge of tourism in the late eighteenth century, he shows how the Romantics sought to differentiate themselves from mere tourists by following alternative models, and alternative travel 'scripts', in both their travelling and their travel writing. In a rejection of the more conventional roles of picturesque tourist and Grand Tourist, Romantic travellers often preferred to style themselves as heroic explorers, oppressed and endangered mariners, even shipwreck victims. The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination accordingly returns to the sub-genres of Romantic-era travel writing - the shipwreck narrative, the exploration narrative, the captivity narrative, and the like - that first kindled the Romantic fascination with these figures, to consider the travel scripts seemingly enabled by this source material. Paying particular attention to the narratives of shipwreck and maritime suffering that were a hugely popular part of Romantic-era print culture, and to the equally popular narrative of exploration, the book considers firstly the examples, traditions, and conventions that trained Romantic travellers to think that misadventure as much as adventure could be a route to visionary experience and literary authority. It then explores the political resonance that the figure of the suffering traveller could possess in this Revolutionary era, before treating Wordsworth and Byron as especially influential examples of the 'misadventurous' tendency in Romanticism. In so doing, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination offers interesting new perspectives not only on British Romanticism and on travel writing of the Romantic era, but also on many attitudes, practices, and typologies still current in travel and tourism.

Download or read book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780 1835 written by Neil Ramsey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose written by Robert Morrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-18 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

Download or read book British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars written by Simon Bainbridge and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that poetry played a major role in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and that the wars had a significant impact on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. It examines a wide range of writers, both canonical (Wordsworth,Coleridge, and Byron) and non-canonical (Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans), and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines. It shows that poetry was a crucial form through which what were seen as the first modern or 'total' wars were imagined inBritain and that it was central to the cultural and political debates over the conflict with France. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars compelled poets to re-examine their roles, it was poetry itself which produced a major transformation of the imagining of war that would be influentialthroughout the nineteenth century.

Download or read book Empires of the Imagination written by Holger Hoock and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book explores how Britons appropriated ancient cultures from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and India, and casts a fresh eye on iconic objects such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.

Download or read book Shelley s Radical Stages written by Dana Van Kooy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dana Van Kooy draws critical attention to Percy Bysshe Shelley as a dramatist and argues that his dramas represent a critical paradigm of romanticism in which history is 'staged'. Reading Shelley's dramas as a series of radical stages - historical reenactments and theatrical reproductions - Van Kooy highlights the cultural significance of the drama and the theatre in shaping and contesting constructions of both the sovereign nation and the global empire in the post-Napoleonic era. This book is about the power of performance to challenge and reformulate cultural memories that were locked in historical narratives and in Britain's theatrical repertoire. It examines each of Shelley's dramas as a specific radical stage that reformulates the familiar cultural performances of war, revolution, slavery and domestic tyranny. Shelley's plays invite audiences to step away from these horrors and to imagine their lives as something other than a tragedy or a melodrama where characters are entrapped in cycles of violence or struck blind or silent by fear. Although Shelley's dramas are few in number they engage a larger cultural project of aesthetic and political reform that constituted a groundswell of activism that took place during the Romantic period.

Download or read book Romanticism in the Shadow of War written by Jeffrey N. Cox and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey N. Cox reconsiders the history of British Romanticism, seeing the work of Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats responding not only to the 'first generation' Romantics led by Wordsworth, but more directly to the cultural innovations of the Napoleonic War years. Recreating in depth three moments of political crisis and cultural creativity - the Peace of Amiens, the Regency Crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication - Cox shows how 'second generation' Romanticism drew on cultural 'border raids', seeking a global culture at a time of global war. This book explores how the introduction on the London stage of melodrama in 1803 shaped Romantic drama, how Barbauld's prophetic satire Eighteen Hundred and Eleven prepares for the work of the Shelleys, and how Hunt's controversial Story of Rimini showed younger writers how to draw on the Italian cultural archive. Responding to world war, these writers sought to embrace a radically new vision of the world.

Download or read book Writing War in Britain and France 1370 1854 written by Stephanie Downes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions brings together leading scholars in medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, and Romantic studies. The assembled essays trace continuities and changes in the emotional register of war, as it has been mediated by the written record over six centuries. Through its wide selection of sites of utterance, genres of writing and contexts of publication and reception, Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854 analyses the emotional history of war in relation to both the changing nature of conflicts and the changing creative modes in which they have been arrayed and experienced. Each chapter explores how different forms of writing defines war – whether as political violence, civilian suffering, or a theatre of heroism or barbarism – giving war shape and meaning, often retrospectively. The volume is especially interested in how the written production of war as emotional experience occurs within a wider historical range of cultural and social practices. Writing War in Britain and France, 1370-1854: A History of Emotions will be of interest to students of the history of emotions, the history of pre-modern war and war literature.

Download or read book Heroic Imagination written by Frederic Ewen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroic Imagination Describes the historical period and the wide manifistation of creativity that took place between 1815 and 1848 in Europe, from Napoleon's downfall in the battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the "Restoration" that sought to bring back the old order preceding the French Revolution. While revolutions and historicle events were shaping the world, the "collective consciousness" of the public began to integrate with the creative consciousness of the individual. The creative energies of artists, philosophers, poets, political and social thinkers emerged and produced some of the most revered artistic geniuses in history, such as Beethoven, Byron, Pushkin, Balzac, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Goya, and Goethe. Frederic Ewen vividly depicts the "new" world of the early nineteenth century, and the assemblage of genius that produced a body of art that has become the unforgettable property of all ages.

Download or read book Wordsworth After War written by Philip Shaw and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich, illuminating study of how Wordsworth's late poetry reflects his lifelong engagement with the poetics and politics of peace.

Download or read book Literature as History written by Simon Barker and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature as History presents a selection of specially commissioned essays by a range of key contemporary thinkers on the interdisciplinary study of literature and history. The unifying theme is the interrelationship between literary / cultural production and its historical moment. The essays in the collection are astute and exciting in terms of their engagement with ever-changing developments in critical and theoretical practice while retaining an invaluable focus on familiar and engaging texts and authors. The contributors offer a reappraisal of the nature of literary studies today, looking back over the thirty-five years of Peter Widdowson's career - a career which has coincided with the emergence of, challenges to, and reformulations of critical theory - and ask what the future holds, particularly for the interdisciplinary ways of working which Widdowson pioneered. Bringing together distinguished scholars in the interdisciplinary study of English and History, it seizes the opportunity to take stock of the current field of literary studies and to ask searching questions about its future development.

Download or read book Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art written by Philip Shaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw's timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw's particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs. Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw's story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons' notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw's study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of 'liberal' sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.

Download or read book The Varieties of Historical Experience written by Stephan Palmié and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers how history is not just objectively lived but subjectively experienced by people in the process of orienting their present toward the past. It analyses affectivity in historical experience, examines the digital mediation of history, and assesses the current politics of competing historical genres. The contributors explore the diverse ways in which the past may be activated and felt in the here and now, juxtaposing the practices of professional historiography with popular modes of engaging the past, from reenactments, filmmaking/viewing and historical fiction to museum collections and visits to historical sites. By examining the divergent forms of historical experience that flourish in the shadow of historicism in the West, this volume demonstrates how, and how widely (socially), the understanding of the past exceeds the expectations and frameworks of professional historicism. It makes the case that historians and the discipline of History could benefit from an ethnographic approach in order to assess the social reception of their practice now, and into a near future increasingly conditioned by digital media and demands for experiential immediacy.

Download or read book Watching War written by Jan Mieszkowski and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be a spectator to war in an era when the boundaries between witnessing and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred? Arguing that the contemporary dynamics of military spectatorship took shape in Napoleonic Europe, Watching War explores the status of warfare as a spectacle unfolding before a mass audience. By showing that the battlefield was a virtual phenomenon long before the invention of photography, film, or the Internet, this book proposes that the unique character of modern conflicts has been a product of imaginary as much as material forces. Warfare first became total in the Napoleonic era, when battles became too large and violent to be observed firsthand and could only be grasped in the imagination. Thenceforth, fantasies of what war was or should be proved critical for how wars were fought and experienced. As war's reach came to be limited only by the creativity of the mind's eye, its campaigns gave rise to expectations that could not be fulfilled. As a result, war's modern audiences have often found themselves bored more than enthralled by their encounters with combat. Mieszkowski takes an interdisciplinary approach to this major ethical and political concern of our time, bringing literary and philosophical texts into dialogue with artworks, historical documents, and classics of photojournalism.

Download or read book Equestrian Cultures written by Kristen Guest and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As much as dogs, cats, or any domestic animal, horses exemplify the vast range of human-animal interactions. Horses have long been deployed to help with a variety of human activities—from racing and riding to police work, farming, warfare, and therapy—and have figured heavily in the history of natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Most accounts of the equine-human relationship, however, fail to address the last few centuries of Western history, focusing instead on pre-1700 interactions. Equestrian Cultures fills in the gap, telling the story of how prominently horses continue to figure in our lives, up to the present day. ​ Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld place the modern period front and center in this collection, illuminating the largely untold story of how the horse has responded to the accelerated pace of modernity. The book’s contributors explore equine cultures across the globe, drawing from numerous interdisciplinary sources to show how horses have unexpectedly influenced such distinctively modern fields as photography, anthropology, and feminist theory. Equestrian Cultures boldly steps forward to redefine our view of the most recent developments in our long history of equine partnership and sets the course for future examinations of this still-strong bond.

Download or read book Napoleon and British Song 1797 1822 written by Oskar Cox Jensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers, and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea of Britain itself.