Cody-Rose Clevidence's Beast Feast and the Romantic Legacy (original) (raw)
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Creaturely Shifts: contemporary animal crossings through the alluring trace of the Romantic sublime
This paper considers the transformative use of the sublime aesthetic in two contemporary Gothic novels, Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969) and Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things (2015). My exploration begins with the Romantic sublime, defined here as a mode of perception created through art that is concerned with the awe-inspiring, the frightening and the ineffable. Sublime metamorphosis extends the Romantic sublime alongside the more fragmentary postmodern sublime through posthumanism. Sublime metamorphoses occur in these two speculative novels when their protagonists pause in the moment of sublime arrest in response to nonhuman others. Such moments create new embodied potentialities that may reshape human/nonhuman relations. When Carter's central protagonist Marianne considers her position in moments of terror, she improves her marginalised status. She pushes through the boundaries of her species and the limitations of an injured world of mutation and brutality, evolving, in the end, to Tiger Lady. In Wood's novel, the entrapped Yolanda shifts from prey to predator to a new kind of self-determination that frees her from her human confinement. Yolanda's friend Verla follows with her own radical transmutation. In these novels sublime metamorphosis resists ideas of human exceptionality and troubles typologies that separate humans from other creatures. This approach may be of interest to creative writers concerned with more generative relations with the world's nonhuman creatures. My own creative efforts are learning from such work.
Romanticism, 2000
, 1998), pp. xv+278. £40 hardback. 0 5216 3100 9. This is an important book because Professor Cox presents, for the first time, the group of poets formerly known only by the names of its most revered members (the Keats Circle, the Shelley Circle) as a cultural collective, with Leigh Hunt at its centre, united by the common goal of a reformation of early nineteenth-century culture and society. Cox has advanced the scholarship in this area considerably, and has laid a solid foundation upon which successive studies will be built. At times, though, he performs the very acts of isolation and canonization he intends this book to counteract. Cox makes a bold claim for Cockney poetry by reading some of High Romanticism's texts-Prometheus Unbound, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Adonais-as productions informed by the cultural world of Cockneyism. In so doing, however. Cox seems to me to renege on the deal he makes with his readers from the outset, that is, to 'reintroduce ... lost populations, lost groups' (p. 2). Had Cox done more close reading of the great Cockney poems that are not commonly anthologized (poems from Hunt's Foliage, for example, or the lost poems of the other lesser-known members of the group) rather than devoting large portions of his book to already canonized poems, the literary, rather than just the cultural, work of this lost group could have also been given a voice. After summarizing the critical attacks that christened Hunt and his followers 'The Cockney School' (which comprised a vast array of poets, Cox tells us, from Percy Shelley to Cornelius Webbe), Cox gives a fascinating and detailed account of the Hunt circle's communal practices, their participation in what he calls a 'coterie mode of cultural production' (p. 62). The Hunt circle, Cox believes, 'found that they could best contribute to the struggle to change their society through cultural acts' (p. 61). Such acts included giving poems as gifts, inscribing them in friends' commonplace books or albums, or inserting them into letters to family and friends. Cox successfully resituates their occasional verse, collaborations, sonnet-contest poems, and 'response' verses-poems that were held up by their critics as proof of the circle's incestuous self-aggrandizement-by seeing them as part of a larger project collectively to design a new aesthetic and cultural space. Cox also succeeds in clarifying one of the more obscure aspects of the Hunt circle's poetry, what he calls 'Cockney classicism'. The group's use of mythological subjects has confounded critics who have found the themes and images haphazard, superficial, contradictory, andperhaps worst-gratuitous. 'While the Hunt circle's engagement with myth is sometimes dismissed as a kind of aesthetic of rococo embellishment', Cox argues, 'they too found in paganism an ideology of sexual liberation' (p. 109). As a case in point, Cox relates the
Introduction: The Times of Romanticism
Romanticism and Time, 2021
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the This book originates from an international conference on 'Romanticism and Time' held at the Université de Lille in November 2018 and organised jointly by the French Society for the Study of British Romanticism (SERA) and the Universités de Lille and Lorraine. Our warm thanks go to the SERA, who set this project in motion, and to the scientific committee of the Romanticism and Time conference,
ENG 5005-031: British Romanticism
2009
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Somewhat in defiance of our "Studies in" rubric, this will be a sprawling survey of English literature during the Romantic Period, that tumultuous era spanning the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and a decade or so of the ensuing uneasy peace, when revolutions in art and literature kept pace with those in politics. Readings will include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Keats, and Byron. Most of this will be poetry, but we'll also find time for The Cenci (Percy Shelley's hair-raising drama about incest and murder), Austen's surefire classic (and recent bestseller) Pride and Prejudice, and Mary Shelley's ever-interesting Frankenstein. Along the way we will read (or perhaps more properly, re-read) many lyrics that are among the most famous and enduring in the language, and will learn how their authors' ideas about art, imagination, identity, depression, love, and politics have had a profound influence on modern thought. Two takehome exams, final, class presentation, and a term project. The pace will be demanding but not inhumanly so. If the material and the period are absolutely new to you, you would be well advised to read the two novels in advance of the summer's starting gun.
Exegesis VI: Romanticism - the British Romantic Tradition
This piece, written originally during my postgraduate studies of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Anglo-American University in Prague, maps the Romantic cultural movement on the British isles, beginning with its early incarnations in the works of Blake (section 1), Wordsworth and Coleridge (section 2), and then moving on to the High British Romanticism as embodied by Byron and Keats (section 3).
"Confounding Present with Past: English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads, and Gothic Romance"
Poetica, 1994
The aim and role of our journal POETICA arc threefold: First, POETICA attempts to build up a comprehensive theory of texts and carry out minute analyses of them, thereby making literary interpretation and criticism as intellectual, objective and scientific as possible. Second, with its interest in theory and methodology, POETICA endeavours not only to explore the potentialities of the literary language through the analyses of texts and. through an imaginative approach to them, but also to analyse and describe the language in literary texts at all its levels: sound, word, syntax, style and meaning. Thus emphasis is attached to the language of literature and its empirical research as a basis for thinkin~ about principles and theories of literature from a linguistic side. Third, l'OETICA gives serious attention not only to the historical and social or psychosocial aspects of language as revealed in literary texts against the background of the historical contexts in which such texts were produced, but also to the originators or such texts, poets and writers whose philosophy must naturally be revealed through language and literature. POETICA appears in spring and autumn in two issues per year, each consisting or approximately 120 pages.