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Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a “science” of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wave-like stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll’s children’s books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, the book focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on 20th- and 21st-century poetry. The introduction analyses the persistence of the Romantic. Chapter 1 dwells on images of ‘air’, using these to understand the efforts of a number of 20th-century poets to ‘sustain’ Romanticism or forms of it. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Yeats and Eliot, respectively, the latter apparently shunning the Romantic, the former seeming to embrace it, but both responding with acute subtlety and individuality to the Romantic bequest. Chapter 4 argues that Wallace Stevens's ‘Esthétique du Mal’ should be read as a work that illuminates the writings of the major Romantics, especially about evil and suffering. Chapter 5 discusses the work of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, exploring the complex response of both poets to the Romantic, Auden complicated in his post-Romantic attitudes, Spender daring in his attempts to renew a Romantic lyricism in a post-Romantic age. Chapter 6 investigates the response of a range of contemporary poets from or associated with Northern Ireland, including Heaney, Kavanagh, Mahon, and Carson, to Romantic poetry. Chapter 7 sustains the Irish connection, discussing Paul Muldoon's dealings with Byron and other Romantics, especially in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’. And Chapter 8 focuses on Geoffrey Hill's tense and tensed relations with Romantic poetry, and on Roy Fisher's sense of being a ‘gutted Romantic’, in order to illustrate two diverse ways of being post-Romantic in contemporary culture.

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they lived at a historical turning point, a transitional moment whose outcome, though still uncertain, would transform the French way of life—beginning with the French way of love. The literary works of the Bourbon Restoration ceaselessly return to the themes of love, marriage, and sexuality, partly as vital cultural questions in their own right, but also as a means of critiquing the unsatisfactory politics of the present and imagining the shape of the political future. In the literature of the Restoration, love and politics become entwined in a mutually metaphorical embrace. The Amorous Restoration, the first book in English devoted to literary and cultural life under the last Bourbon kings, considers this relationship in all its richness and many contradictions. Long neglected as a drab historical backwater, the Restoration emerges here as a vibrant era, one rife with sharp cultural and political disagreements, and possessed of an especially refined sense of allusion, discretion, and even humour. Drawing on literature, journalism, political writing, life writing, and gossip, The Amorous Restoration vividly recreates the erotic sensibilities of a pivotal moment in the transition from an amorous old regime to erotic—and political—modernity.

The interrelationship of the ideas of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern of British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but in their various ways the major Romantic poets—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley—question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. No matter how confidently the sequence of apocalypse and millennium seems to be affirmed in some of the major works of the period, the issue is always in doubt: the fear that millennium may not ensue emerges as a significant, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period. Related to it is the tension in Romantic poetry between conflicting models of history itself: history as teleology, developing towards end time and millennium, and history as purposeless cycle. This subject matter is traced through a selection of works by the major poets, partly through an exposition of their underlying intellectual traditions, and partly through a close examination of the poems themselves.

‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). This book considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this ‘Parliamentary people’, and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources — classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, and treatises on crowd theory — this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. The book focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending demands and allegiances in their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary engagement that could both resist and respond to the terms of contemporary political discussion. Providing a close reading of the relations between printed words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible civic conduct.

This book explores the ways in which exile concentrates the aesthetics of two generations of 19th-century British writers who felt forced to leave England and chose to live in Italy. Focusing on the Pisan circle (Byron, the Shelleys, Leigh Hunt, and the Williamses), the next generation of exiles, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and the mobile intermediaries who connected both groups (Anna Jameson, Walter Savage Landor, and Lady Blessington), the book traces the complex legacy of Byron and the Shelleys for the English in Italy in the 19th century. Self-consciously ostracized, singly or in groups, these writers favoured discursive modes of literary creation and used the disjunctions of exile to probe, challenge, and seek answers to compelling questions about literature, art, religion, law, history, and politics. Exile has always been a dialogical condition, fostering reflection on the difference between here and there, then and now, presence and absence. This book re-examines the literary traditions that influence the layered forms of exiled writing. Looking at the interaction of classical and Middle-Age writing with the mixed genres produced by English writers who rejected insular domestic mores and immersed themselves in European culture, the book offers a fresh approach to one of the most important motifs of 19th-century literature. Keeping the material and the mythic aspects of exile in dialogue throughout, the study contributes to current debates in Romantic studies about travel writing, cosmopolitanism and theories of affect.

The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums is the first book to describe how the writer’s house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been mythologized and materialized through the conventions of the writer’s house museum, The Author’s Effects anatomizes the how and why of the emergence, establishment, and endurance of popular notions of authorship in relation to creativity. It traces how and why the writer’s bodily remains, possessions, and spaces came to be treasured in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as a prelude to the appearance of formal writer’s house museums. It ransacks more than 100 museums and archives to tell the stories of celebrated and paradigmatic relics—Burns’ skull, Keats’ hair, Petrarch’s cat, Poe’s raven, Brontë’s bonnet, Dickinson’s dress, Shakespeare’s chair, Austen’s desk, Woolf’s spectacles, Hawthorne’s window, Freud’s mirror, Johnson’s coffee-pot, and Bulgakov’s stove, amongst many others. It investigates houses within which nineteenth-century writers mythologized themselves and their work—Thoreau’s cabin and Dumas’ tower, Scott’s Abbotsford and Irving’s Sunnyside. And it tracks literary tourists of the past to such long-celebrated literary homes as Petrarch’s Arquà, Rousseau’s Île St Pierre, and Shakespeare’s Stratford to find out what they thought and felt and did there, discovering deep continuities with the redevelopment of Shakespeare’s New Place for 2016

The book describes and analyses the condition of autobiographical writing in Britain during the Romantic period. As well as chapter-length studies of major autobiographical works by Coleridge, Byron, and Lamb, it provides a wide-ranging account of the rapidly expanding field of published self-writing during the period. The book also demonstrates that the category of ‘autobiography’ emerged in the literary public sphere during these years, and that instances of autobiographical writing need to be read in relation to the conditions under which they were circulated and read. Part I deals with the emergence of a sense of genre: the idea of autobiography, as it made its way into the literary environment. Part II examines how the anxieties and restrictions attendant upon the idea of self-writing are reflected in published texts, which present themselves as autobiographies. Part III focuses on readings of autobiographical works, exploring some examples of their representations of the situation of self-writing, and considering what sort of readings are involved when we interpret a given text as an autobiography. Overall, the book emphasizes the uncertain and contested transactions between Romantic autobiographical writing and the literary public sphere.

Exploring the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), this book examines how and why Baudelaire’s poetry has inspired so many composers to set it to music in different ways. The author proposes a new model for analysing song, through an ‘assemblage’ approach, which examines the complex relationships formed between common features of poetry and music, including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound properties/repetition, and semantics. The model also factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, revealing which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting and where composers diverge in their approach. The specific case studies that make up the second half of the book focus on Baudelaire song sets produced by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, the assemblage model is tested to uncover new findings about what happens to Baudelaire’s poetry when it is set to music. Analysing Baudelaire’s poetry within song settings uncovers richer features of the texts that we might otherwise not see or hear. Examining each song setting in close detail confirms that there are no overt resonances between the types of poems selected for musical interpretation, just as there is no single, perfect ‘ideal’ setting of Baudelaire.

This book provides the first examination of Ben Jonson's place in the texts and culture of the Romantic Age. Part I of the book explores theatrical, critical, and editorial responses to, and refashionings of, Jonson, including his place in the post-Garrick theatre, critical estimations of his life and work, and the politically-charged making and reception of William Gifford's 1816 edition of Jonson's Works. Part II explores allusive and imitative responses to Jonson's poetry and plays in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and explores how Jonson serves variously as a model by which to measure the poet laureate, Robert Southey, and Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley Coleridge. The introduction and conclusion locate this ‘Romantic Jonson’ against his 18th-century and Victorian re-creations. This book shows us a varied, mobile, and contested Jonson and offers a fresh perspective on the Romantic Age.

This book examines the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre. It uncovers a Blake deeply engaged with the cultural discourses of his time, in profound dialogue with Swedenborg, Locke, and Young. In the course of this conversation, Blake anatomizes a remarkable variety of cultural practices (including religion, science, and art) designed to achieve transcendence. He focuses in particular on the fate of the body in cultures of transcendence, developing perhaps the first theory of sexual sublimation. Blake's radical visual and verbal strategies in this poem are part of an attempt to defer the movement of transcendence, long enough for the reader to see the warring elements of the fallen world as the dismembered body of humanity.

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the 18th century, and exploring the variations it spawned — natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience — this book offers a fresh reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides a new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

This book argues that poetry played a major role in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and that the wars had a significant impact on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. It examines a wide range of writers, both canonical (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron) and non-canonical (Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans), and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines. It shows that poetry was a crucial form through which what were seen as the first modern or ‘total’ wars were imagined in Britain and that it was central to the cultural and political debates over the conflict with France. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars compelled poets to re-examine their roles, it was poetry itself which produced a major transformation of the imagining of war that would be influential throughout the 19th century.

This book examines the literary culture of Victorian mass settler emigration as it circulated across a broad range of contemporary periodicals. It argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form, which had an unrivalled capacity to register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. The first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres that featured within a range of mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of the book brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often drew upon mainstream representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations. It examines emigration texts featured in the Victorian feminist and women’s presses, Chartist anti-emigration literature, utopian emigration narratives, and a corpus of transnational westerns. Alongside its analysis of more ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of important works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. It also maps its analysis of settler emigration onto broader debates about Victorian literature and culture, Victorian empire, the global circulation of texts, periodical form, and the role of digitization within Victorian studies.

Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, this book examines British writers’ engagement with mid-nineteenth-century Paris. This historically grounded account of the ways in which Paris touched the careers and work of both major and minor Victorian writers considers both their actual experiences of an urban environment—distinctively different from anything Britain offered—and the extent to which this became absorbed and expressed within the Victorian imaginary. The first part of this book explores these writers’ reaction to the swiftly changing politics and topography of Paris, before considering the nature of their social interactions with the Parisians, through networks provided by institutions such as the British Embassy and the salons. The second part of the book examines the significance of Paris for mid-nineteenth-century Anglophone journalists, culminating in a chapter devoted to demonstrating the ways in which the young Thackeray’s exposure to Parisian print culture shaped him as both writer and artist. The final part focuses on fictional representations of Paris, revealing the frequency with which they relied upon previous literary sources, and how the surprisingly narrow palette of subgenres, structures, and characters they employed contributed to the characteristic, and sometimes contradictory, prejudices of a swiftly growing British readership.

In the early nineteenth century, the biblical sublime found expression in the visual arts, the novel, the oratorio, and poetry, but spoken drama remained secular by force of precedent and law. The maintenance of this ban on religious theatrical representation was underpinned by Protestant anxieties about impersonation, performance, and the power of the image that persisted long after the Reformation. But by mid-century, the turn towards medievalism in visual culture, antiquarianism in literary history, and the ‘popular’ in constitutional reform placed England’s pre-Reformation past at the centre of debates about the uses of the public stage and the functions of a truly national theatrical literature. In this changing climate, how was England’s rich heritage of vernacular sacred drama to be understood? This book probes the tensions inherent in the idea of ‘incarnational art’—whether, after the Reformation, ‘presence’ was only to be conjured up in the mind’s eye by the act of reading, or whether drama could rightfully reclaim all the implications of ‘incarnation’ understood in the Christian tradition as ‘the word made flesh’. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the recovery of the medieval mystery plays and their subsequent impact on the national imagination. The second half of the book looks at the gradual relaxation of the ban on the performance of sacred drama and asks whether Christian theatre can ever be truly tragic, whether art perpetually reanimates or appropriates sacred ideas, and whether there is any place for sacramental thought in a post-Darwinian, industrial age.

Charles Darwin presented On the Origin of Species to a reading public whose affective response to the natural world had been profoundly influenced by Wordsworth’s understanding of nature as benign, harmonious, a source of moral inspiration and spiritual blessing, and a medium through which one might enter into communion with the Divine. Long after his death Wordsworth continued to be revered throughout the English-speaking world not only as a great poet but as a theologian with a broader following than any prelate and an appeal that transcended or ignored sectarian differences. For believers and skeptics alike, the poetry offered an accessible and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin’s vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which divinity played no discernible role and where concepts like beauty and harmony were material conditions to be explained in scientific terms. While Wordsworth’s theology of nature became, for educated readers, a more effective counterforce to Darwin’s ideas than biblical orthodoxy, it did not act merely as a hindrance. It provided an enriching context for the reception of evolutionary theory, aiding theists in their effort to reach an accommodation with the new science. As the nineteenth century’s two most prominent theoreticians of nature’s life, Wordsworth and Darwin competed for attention among those seeking to understand humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and their disciples engaged in a productive, mutually transformative dialogue in which the poet’s cultural authority influenced the way Darwin was received, and Darwinian science adjusted interpretation and evaluation of the poetry.