An Outline of Romanticism in the West

John Claiborne Isbell

Description

Navigating the landscape of Romantic literature and art across Europe and the Americas, An Outline of Romanticism in the West invites readers to embark upon a literary journey. Showcasing a breadth of theoretical and contextual approaches to the study of Romanticism, John Isbell provides an insightful contemporary overview of the field, paired with wide-ranging comparative reflections on the art and literature that helped shape it.

Discussing seminal Romantic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, Isbell provides a foundation through which to investigate core concepts, such as the continuum of Romance, the Romantic hero, and Romantic literature’s characteristic repudiation of its own Romanticism. Unusually for a single-author monograph, the book includes both published and unpublished material covering Romantic creation across Europe and the two Americas.

Identifying Romanticism as an international movement, Isbell seeks to emphasise a theme frequently ignored by many academics: the roots of Romanticism, and its variations, as a national art. His arguments are supported by extensive interrogations of the political and historical contexts that moulded the outlooks of the writers and artists central to the period.

An Outline of Romanticism in the West underlines the interplay between nationalism, history, and artistic inspiration, and will therefore be of value to students and scholars of literature and history, as well as to general readers with an interest in Romanticism in the West.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Americas
• Romanticism
• Staël
• Shelley
• America
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800647459
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

AN OUTLINE OF ROMANTICISM IN THE WEST

An Outline of Romanticism in the West
John Claiborne Isbell





https://www.openbookpublishers.com




© 2022 John Claiborne Isbell
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
John Claiborne Isbell, An Outline of Romanticism in the West . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0302
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0302#copyright
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Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0302#resources
ISBN Paperback: 9781800647428
ISBN Hardback: 9781800647435
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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0302
Cover image: Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Th%C3%A9odore_g%C3%A9ricault,_la_zattera_della_medusa,_1819,_07.jpg
Cover design by Katy Saunders

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction
1
Chapter One: Romanticism and the Nations of the West
13
1.
German Lands, 1800. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen
13
2.
France, 1807. Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie ( Corinne, or Italy )
19
3.
Spain, 1814–1815. Francisco Goya, 3 de mayo 1808 ( 3 rd May 1808 )
27
4.
The British Isles (England), 1818. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
33
5.
Russia, 1825–1832. Alexander Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin ( Eugene Onegin )
40
6.
The United States, 1826. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
46
7.
Eastern Europe (Poland), 1834. Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz
52
8.
Northern Europe (Denmark), 1835–1837. Hans Christian Andersen, Eventyr (Fairy Tales)
59
9.
The Italian Peninsula, 1835. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti (Cantos)
65
10.
Latin America (Argentina), 1838/1871. Esteban Echeverría, El Matadero (The Slaughter Yard)
71
11.
The Low Countries (Belgium), 1838. Hendrik Conscience, De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders)
76
12.
Portugal, 1846. João de Almeida Garrett, Viagens na minha terra (Travels in My Homeland)
81
Chapter Two: The Frankenstein Dilemma. Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism, 1800–1830
87
1.
German Lands
89
2.
The Swiss Confederation
94
3.
The British Isles
97
4.
Italy, Russia, Sweden
100
5.
France
103
6.
Conclusion
107
Chapter Three: Romantic Novel and Verse Romance. Is There a Romance Continuum?
113
0.
Prefatory Remarks on Terminology
113
1.
German Lands
116
2.
The British Isles
121
3.
France
129
4.
The Italian Peninsula
134
5.
Northern and Eastern Europe
135
6.
Iberia and the Low Countries
138
7.
The Two Americas
139
8.
Conclusion
141
Chapter Four: Racine et Shakespeare ’s Sleeping Partners. The Return of the Repressed
143
1.
Private Life and Empire: Henri Beyle, 1803–1814
144
2.
The Birth of Stendhal: Romantic Milan, 1814–1821
150
3.
Paris in 1823–1825: Racine et Shakespeare
154
4.
Conclusion
167
Chapter Five: Thoughts on the Romantic Hero, 1776–1848
171
1.
Prelude: Manon Lescaut and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
171
2.
German Lands
174
3.
France
180
4.
The British Isles
187
5.
The Italian Peninsula
192
6.
Eastern and Northern Europe
194
7.
Iberia and the Low Countries
197
8.
The Americas
198
9.
The Drama
199
10.
Romantic Women Writers: The State of the Field
202
11.
Conclusion
206
Romanticism Outside the Western Ambit
211
Bibliography
213
Index
229

Acknowledgements
This book was conceived and largely written during the COVID-19 pandemic and without access to any research library beyond my own collection. I am sincerely grateful therefore to the various libraries I was able to access as they reopened: The University of Massachusetts Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Taylor Institution Library, Hertford College Library, the Cambridge University Library, Trinity College, Cambridge’s Wren Library, the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Trinity College, Cambridge’s Trinity Visiting Scholars Fund enabled a return to Cambridge in which much was accomplished. My sponsor there, and the immediate inspiration for this book, was Roger Paulin, who had earlier introduced me to the German Romantics as Dave Kelley had to the French. Others too left their welcome mark on this project: Gerald Gillespie, Kilho Lee, Todd Sjoblom, Gene Stelzig, Eunsil Yim, my friends, colleagues, and students in the University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley who encouraged my interest in Latin America, and the whole team at Open Book Publishers—Cameron Baillie, Laura Rodríguez Pupo, Luca Baffa, Melissa Purkiss, Katy Saunders, and Alessandra Tosi.
Two chapters of this book appeared in earlier versions with John Benjamins B.V. as well as the Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée: J.C. Isbell, “Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism, 1800–1830,” pp. 37–55 in Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding borders , ed. S.P. Sondrup et al. (2004), and J.C. Isbell, “Romantic novel and verse Romance, 1750–1850: Is there a Romance