The Shadow of Death by
The Shadow of Death is a timely and ambitious reassessment of English Romantic literature and the unique role it played in one of the great liberal political causes of the modern age. Mark Canuel argues that Romantic writers in Great Britain led one of the earliest assaults on the death penalty and were instrumental in bringing about penal-law reforms. He demonstrates how writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen defined the fundamental contradictions that continue to inform today's debates about capital punishment. Celebrated reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and William Ewart campaigned against the widespread use of death to punish crimes ranging from murder to petty theft, but they were most influential for initiating a system of penalties built upon conflicting motivations and justifications. Canuel examines the ways Romantic poets and novelists magnified these tensions while treating them as uniquely aesthetic opportunities, seized upon contending rationales of punishment to express imaginative power, and revealed how the imagination fueled the new penal code's disturbing vitality. Death-penalty reform, Canuel argues, in fact emerged from a new way of thinking about punishment as a negotiation among rationales rather than a seamless whole, with leniency and severity constantly at odds. He concludes by exploring how Romantic penal reform continues to influence contemporary views about the justice--and injustice--of legal sanctions.
The Legacies of Romanticism by
This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.
Building Romanticism by
"Building Romanticism is engaging, closely argued, and well written. It will be a valuable addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that considers the built environment and its role in constructing relationships and worldviews both real and imagined." ---Barbara Penner, Bartlett School of Architecture "This insightful book will dramatically influence our appreciation of the spaces and places involved in 'built' environments, both in Romantic-era culture and in its Victorian aftermath, and of how their resonances in literature and the arts map complex cultural and ideological mind-sets at all levels of society." ---Stephen Behrendt, Department of English, University of Nebraska "Building Romanticism fills a gap in the existing scholarship that has not yet dealt with relationships between architecture and text in the Romantic period, and Nicole Reynolds clearly demonstrates a mastery of the scholarship around Romanticism and its legacy, across genres of literature and in the field of architecture." ---Charles Rice, School of Architecture, University of Technology, Sydney Building Romanticism sets the literary culture of Romantic Britain within the context of the period's architectural productions in order to recover a relationship between these arts that, though deeply valued by writers and architects of the day, has been neglected by modern scholars in both fields. Toward this goal, Nicole Reynolds explores the centrality of architecture and architectural tropes to Romanticism's dramatic reconceptualization of the individual subject and of the world that subject inhabits. Focusing on the correspondence between the period's built environments and its literary pursuits, Building Romanticism argues that at this turbulent moment in British history a number of politically charged and aesthetically resonant architectural spaces, both real and imagined, negotiated intense anxieties about shifting notions of gender and sexuality, increased class mobility, the individual's uncertain place in history, challenges to the British national character and to the project of nation building, and the very form and function of art itself. By tracing the reception of Romantic topoi---rhetorical and literal common places---through the nineteenth century, this book explores how Victorians remodeled Romanticism, its ideological preoccupations and cultural artifacts, according to their own era's social agendas. Nicole Reynolds is Associate Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Ohio University. Cover art: "Monks [sic] Room and Gallery," from John Britton's Union of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (1827). (Courtesy Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Ohio State University.)
The Taming of Romanticism by
Looking at a broad spectrum of writers--English, French, German, Italian, Russian and other East Europeans--Virgil Nemoianu offers here a coherent characterization of the period 1815-1848. This he calls the era of the domestication of romanticism.The explosive, visionary core of romanticism is seen to give way--after the defeat of Napoleon--to an expanded and softer version reflecting middle-class values. This later form of romanticism is characterized by moralizing efforts to reform society, a sentimental yearning for the tranquility of home and hearth, and persistent faith in the individual, alongside a new skepticism, shattered ideals, and consequent irony. Expanding the application of the term Biedermeier, which has been useful in describing this period in German literature, Nemoianu provides a new framework for understanding these years in a wider European context.
Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature by
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