What the Victorians Made of Romanticism : Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History / Tom Mole.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mole, Tom, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romanticism--Great Britain--19th century.

Romanticism.

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

English literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth-one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media.Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing-such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles-that in turn remade the public's understanding of Romantic writers.Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations & Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Don Juan in the Pub

PART I. THE WEB OF RECEPTION

Romantic Writers in the Victorian Media Ecology

Reception Traditions and Punctual Historicism

Minding the Generation Gap

PART II. ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration as Renovation

Renovating Romantic Poetry: Retrofitted Illustrations

Turning the Page: Illustrated Frontmatter

PART III. SERMONS

A Religious Reception Tradition

Converting Shelley

Spurgeon, Byron, and the Contingencies of Mediation

PART IV. STATUES

Secular Pantheons for the Reformed Nation: Byron in Cambridge

The Distributed Pantheon: Scott in Edinburgh

The Networked Pantheon: Byron in London

PART V. ANTHOLOGIES

Scattered Odes in Shattered Books: Quantifying Victorian Anthologies

Romantic Short Poems in Victorian Anthologies

Romantic Long Poems in Victorian Anthologies

Coda: Ozymandias at the Olympics; or, She Walks in Brixton

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-305) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9781400887897

1400887895

OCLC:

1132688407