New Publication from Ashgate of Interest to Bars Members
Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed. Peter J. Kitson (Ashgate, 2001).
ISBN 0 7546 0602 3. Hardback £45.
The essays collected in this volume by leading scholars of the subject
address the current issues of 'placing' and 'displacing', 'place' and
'displacement' in Romantic period studies. These terms are discussed with
respect to both their literal and figurative meanings and are responded to
with imagination and subtlety.
Romanticism as an aesthetic has always been intimately concerned with
'place' in the literal sense, and a number of the contributors to this
volume explore Romantic period writing's preoccupation with physical
setting, stressing its relevance to other literary, political, scientific
and historical concerns. 'Placing' Romanticism is more controversial and
vexed issue in the light of contemporary new historicist critiques of the
movement's complicity with conservative ideologies. This has given rise to
seminal and crucial debates about the necessary taxonomies of the field and
the issue of canon-formation. The question as to whether Romantic writings
should be positioned within extra-literary contexts, such as the
historical, the political and the social, or of other cognate art forms,
including visual art and panorama, is a key theme that recurs within the
pages of this volume. This collection is concerned not just with canonical
Romantic writing, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, but also with the
importance of other contexts and other non-canonical writers, most notably
Robert Southey.
Revisiting Romantic period texts with an awareness of alleged displacements
and evasions provides a series of fresh and exciting readings and combining
the virtues of theoretically aware criticism with sensitive close readings,
the essays in this collection reawaken an awareness of the complexity of
Romantic texts enhanced by a new understanding of the contexts in which
they were written. These essays combine the virtues of new critical
textual analysis with an awareness of the pressures and contexts of
history, politics, and society, encouraging a new stance of an aware and
engaged formalist and contextual criticism.
Contents: List of Figures; Acknowledgments; List of Contributors; List of
Abbreviations; 'Placing and Displacing Romanticism', Peter J. Kitson;
'Cultivating Margaret's Garden: Wordsworthian "Nature" and the Quest for
Historical "Difference"', Paul D. Sheats; 'Wordsworth's "The Haunted Tree"
and the Sexual Politics of Landscape', Tim Fulford; 'John Clare's Gypsies:
Problems of Placement and Displacement in Romantic Critical Practice',
Philip Martin; 'How Wordsworth keeps his Audience Fit', Lucy Newlyn;
'Jacobin Romanticism: John Thelwall's "Wye" Essay and "Pedestrian
Excursion"', Michael Scrivener; 'Patriot Poetics and the Romantic National
Epic: Placing and Displacing Southey's Joan of Arc', Lynda Pratt;
'Re-placing Waterloo: Southey's Vision of Command', Philip Shaw;
'Subverting the Command of Place: Panorama and the Romantics', Michael
Charlesworth; 'Displacing Romanticism: Anna Seward, Joseph Weston, and the
Unschooled Sons of Genius', John Williams; 'Keats and the "Poetical
Character"', Michael O'Neill; Masking in Keats, Thomas McFarland;
Locationary Acts: Blake's Jerusalem and Hölderlin's Patmos', Angela
Esterhammer, The Romantics: Cosmopolitan or Nationalist? Mary Anne
Perkins; 'Romantic Displacements: Representing Cannibalism', Peter J.
Kitson; Index.
Readership: 19th-century literature; ancient and classical history; British
history.
December 2001 234 x 156 mm 248 pages
Hardback 0 7S46 0602 3 £45.00
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