Nervous reactions : Victorian recollections of Romanticism / edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Faflak, Joel.

Wright, Julia M.

Series:

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Physical Description:

vii, 287 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors (and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways—as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured—this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability.Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill.Contributors include D. M. R. Bentley, Kristen Guest, Joel Faflak, Grace Kehler, Donelle Ruwe, Alan Vardy, Lisa Vargo, Timothy J. Wandling, Joanne Wilkes, and Julia M. Wright.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Nervous Containments: Recollection and Influence

De Quincey Collects Himself

Mrs. Julian T. Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Between Action and Inaction: The “Performance” of the Prima Donna in Eliot ’s Closet Drama

Nervous ReincarNations: Keats, Scenery, and Mind Cure in Canada during the Post-Confederation Period, with Particular Reference to Archibald Lampman and Related Cases

A Matter of Balance: Byronic Illness and Victorian Cure

Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill’s Response to Byron

Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the Byronic Temper

“Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters

Hesitation and Inheritance: The Case of Sara Coleridge

Snuffing Out an Article: Sara Coleridge and the Early Victorian Reception of Keats

Her Father’s “Remains”: Sara Coleridge’s Edition of Essays on His Own Times

Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-274) and index.

ISBN:

9780791459713

0791459713

9780791485590

0791485595

9781417577569

1417577568

OCLC:

57759001