Week in Review: Hemans, Romantic Geographies, and Final Thoughts

During our final class meeting, Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” returned us to the scene of naval battle, specifically the Mediterranean theater of many of the conflicts following the French Revolution. “Casabianca” sparked quite a heated discussion in class due to the poem’s sentimentality, its apparent alignment of patriotism with filial duty, and its focus on French casualties of war with Britain. It proved a fitting end to the class, which has in many ways been a semester-long conversation about the interplay between private and public feeling.

“Casabianca” also offers an opportunity for some final reflection on the geography of our syllabus. Much of the poetry we read was driven by a sense of the local within Britain, whether Burns’s Scots dialect, Wordsworth’s approach to rural life in the Lake District, or Clare, who seems to have framed “nature” in terms of particular plots of earth, rather than as a grand abstraction. But from the start, we saw Romantic-era writers turning outward as well, and countenancing Britain’s place within a wider world. Some of the first works we read together framed the 1790s as a decade of revolutions stretching from France to Haiti. As the semester rolled on, we found Romantic writers continuing to invoke Britain’s global sphere of action, even after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Think of Byron’s lament, at the outset of Don Juan, that the age of naval heroes, of Nelson at Trafalgar, seems a thing of the past; or Jane Austen’s Persuasion, set during a lull in the Napoleonic Wars, with characters recounting their experience in Honduras, the Bahamas, and other parts of the “West Indies.”

However, this mapping exercise also showed that there are limitations to thinking about “location” or “setting” strictly in terms of the physical, measurable globe: “Setting” or “place” can also “literary texts, after all, also track attitudes and ideas about place. Those ideas are often culturally and historically specific, like “Honduras” (which includes modern-day Belize) or “Darien” on the Caribbean map above. It would also include texts that are pointedly vague (like the Ancient Mariner’s use of equatorial and polar settings). And, perhaps most significantly, it would include cases in which the location tells us more about British writers’ sense of foreign locales than any actual point on the globe: how might we represent the homogenized “East” of De Quincey’s Orientalist nightmares, or the indeterminate Greek and Turkish settings of Byron’s “Eastern tales”? (If you would like to think more about these knottier aspects, especially representing subjective data, a good place to start would be Johanna Drucker’s 2011 essay “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.”)

Finally, on a personal note, I want to thank you all for a great, thought-provoking semester. It’s always a pleasure to find new ways of reading a text, and this term we produced new insights about a number of them, from Barbauld to Shelley to Austen. I look forward to the culmination of your final projects, and hope that a restful break follows. It is well-deserved.

Keats Google Doc

With a nod to those writing papers on Keats, here is the Google Doc for today’s note-taking on Keats, medievalism, femmes fatales, and the related topics we discuss during the class.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0u1Z0X9pqxiiC31bfXJ73oNpJGDGJ9M9lTCwKJGq1U/edit

Week in Review: “National Song,” “National Tale,” and Nationhood

Yesterday’s discussion centered on the Romantic-era vogue for “national tales” and “national songs,” two modes that were often linked to theories of “national character.” (To build on yesterday’s discussion of Byron, the Hebrew Melodies, and the geography of “character,” we might think back to Don Juan‘s troubling claims about the influence of geography upon morals, when the narrator contrasts the “moral North” and the passionate “southern nations.”) Walter Scott’s “The Two Drovers” brings some of those issues into play, especially in his caricatures of Highland superstition; but our main concern in class was how the tale portrays Britain as an amalgam of local cultures, languages, and codes that are not always easy to reconcile with one another.

Indeed, Scott’s cultural legacy stems from the way he addressed those stories of Scottish-English conflict–especially the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745–and made them serve the interests of British nationalism. With his novels, poetry, and work as a ballad collector, Scott helped turn a bloody history of conflict into a source of cultural heritage, something that could persist in memory even as it ceased to signify political opposition. One clear sign of that change, which we looked at in class yesterday, was the way Scott orchestrated the performance of Scottish national identity during George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh. This was the first visit to Scotland by a British monarch since the civil wars of the 17th century, and it served as an occasion to celebrate the union of the two nations. Celebrating distinctively “Scottish culture” (really, in Scott’s scripting, an amalgam of Highland and medieval costumes, music, and rituals) could ultimately serve as a local celebration of Britishness. George IV even wore a kilt, and presented himself (on Scott’s suggestion) as being equally Hanoverian and Jacobite, a monarch both English and Scottish in spirit.

Chorus from “Both Sides the Tweed,” Jacobite Reliques (1819); click the image to view the full volume via Google Books.

What we see, then, is Jacobite history becoming, paradoxically, an aid to the Union, to the sense that local, Scottish identity was part of a broader British identity. That interest marks many of the songs James Hogg collects in his Jacobite Reliques, with which we spent the rest of the class.

In-class writing: Shelley and Clare

Today we will be conducting our class discussion in four small groups, and each group will add parts of its discussion to a collaborative Google doc (which will, as a result, track the collective conversation). For those working on their own devices, here is the link for the doc:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GTEyuuMa0LdI-zwCQpR8U-DVOviBuaq6EvqsgKkAKw0/edit

*Update 11/20/12: This exercise produced some useful readings of all three poems; Shelley’s framing (“Bird thou never wert”) challenges some more straighforward, cursory readings of Clare’s poetry, and vice versa: Clare’s literalism and detailism prompted some of us to reconsider Shelley’s poem as implying an approach to real animal life (rather than simply making the skylark a figure for a better version of human life). The document remains open for editing.

New Reviews, Upcoming Assignments

Reviews of digital resources are continuing to appear on the course blogs, and the full list can now be found under the “Reviews” tab. Take a look—and while you’re browsing, keep your eyes peeled for that text you want to add to our end-of-semester anthology. Recent reviews include an overview of the Romantic Circles project (at Cloudless Climes and Starry Skies), a review of that project’s digital edition of Lyrical Ballads (from Confessions from the Batcave), and U Colorado-Boulder’s Women Writers of the Romantic Period archive (reviewed by Purple Camaraderie).

To help you manage your time for the rest of the term, here’s a summary of what lies ahead. First, there are the two short blogging exercises, which some of you have already completed. If you haven’t published it yet, your review is due in before the last week of classes, and fulfills your blogging requirement for that week. The same goes for your “find-and-retrieve” mission, in which you use one of those resources (perhaps the one you reviewed, perhaps one a classmate’s review showed you) to choose a short text or excerpt to add to our end-of-semester anthology. Among other things, this is an opportunity for you to make the whole class read something!

Second, there is the two-part final project. Today, you’ll turn in your annotated bibliography on the topic we discussed during the first round of writing conferences. In our second round of conferences, we’ll talk about how to develop your preliminary research into a specific, focused topic for the final paper. And during class, we’ll take some time to talk about the role of a “literature review” or “critical history” section in a literary-critical essay.

Reviews: Penn Sound, Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts

Our first two reviews are in, and in different ways they are each well-timed.

First, The Romantic Shea has reviewed Penn Sound, in continuation of our ongoing conversation about poetry, voice, and music. As you look for the text you want to add to our syllabus, you may well decide to choose one we can encounter in multiple media. Additionally, Penn Sound would be a great way to get your weekly poetry fix, as we continue to take Anne Elliot’s recommendation for “a larger allowance of prose in [our] daily study” (79).

Meanwhile, our current immersion in Persuasion makes it a good time to check out Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts, a digital archive that Estudiante del Romance has reviewed for us. Among other things, this resource might help link some of the Fate of the Book discussions to our current reading. (In case you missed the “Preservers” panel last Thursday, by the way, you can read a write-up from Psychometamorphosis.) The archive holds the final two chapters of Persuasion, which differ significantly from the final published version. (An edited version of this “original ending” is also included in our critical edition.) I’ll be interested to see what looking at the manuscript can add to our conversation, and encourage you to take up that challenge for Thursday.

I’ll keep you posted as additional reviews come in, above all so that we can use these resources during the remainder of the term.

Mapping Romanticism

Yesterday ended with some interesting but brief thoughts on the geography of our syllabus, a train of thought brought on by the strange and troubling way that De Quincey describes his fear and loathing of all points East, betraying what scholar Nigel Leask has called the “anxiety of empire.” De Quincey even collapses China, India, and Egypt into one geographically vague, horrific opium-dream. To follow up on some of your resulting questions (where is De Quincey’s anxiety coming from? How else have our readings been thinking beyond Britain’s borders?), I’ve started a ScribbleMap to help us map our readings.

Click to view, edit, and add locations (note: not mobile-friendly)

“ScribbleMaps” is a tool for collaboratively creating overlays for Google Maps. By clicking on the map above, you can all edit and add to it (no account needed). Let’s think about how mapping the locations shown, addressed, or considered in our readings can help us think about British identity, Romanticism’s global consciousness, and writing in what has been called both an “Age of Revolution” and an “Age of Empire.” How have our readings thought through “Britishness” in relation to the various nations and regions within Britain? To European nations like France and Germany? In relation to British colonies and trade routes?

Mid-Semester Roundup: Canons and Archives

During our last meeting–at the mid-point of the semester and of our period’s chronology–we took some time to regroup about the period’s major trends, ideas, and authors.  We spent some time talking about how the concept of poetic imagination developed in the period, and worked through two very different approaches to it: Coleridge’s philosophical account in chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria, and Keats’s pointedly anti-Coleridgean description of “negative capability” (which he describes as being “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”). Especially helpful was one of our classmates’ suggestion that Keats’s idea of “negative capability” might help explain why he loved Wordsworth’s line about lightening “the burden of the mystery,” as our footnote tells us he did. As we move forward, let’s think about the ways that younger writers like Keats inherit ideas, styles, and forms from their immediate forebears; but also–as in that “negative capability” letter–where they name the greats of their time but go on to disagree with them vehemently.

As we map those conversations, we’ll also have to keep an eye on the received wisdom that “Romanticism” refers to six poets in three generations (Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth followed by Byron, Shelley, and Keats). As we saw when we looked briefly at William Hazlitt’s lecture “On the Living Poets,” the Romantic era’s most influential and popular poets were not necessarily the ones we now read.

As such, this would be a great time to start thinking about your “find-and-retrieve” blogging assignment, for which you will post to your blog an informal edition of a text the syllabus omits (See rubric and example here). The goal is both to widen the scope of what we cover (since every syllabus necessarily gives a partial view of its subject), and to make us think about what historical, formal, or conceptual matters we have ignored as a result. You might simply take Hazlitt as your guide here, as he surveys well-known “Poetesses” like Hannah More and Joanna Baillie, now-chronically-underread “Laker” Robert Southey, or immensely popular writers of “metrical romance” like Thomas Campbell.

In any event, there are many good resources on the web (some of which we will soon see reviewed on this site), including under-anthologized writing by women:

• The Poetess Archive
• The Bluestocking Archive
• U Colorado-Boulder’s “Women Poets of the Romantic Period” Project
• U California-Davis’s “British Women Romantic Poets” Project

Studies of Romantic-era songs and popular ballads:

• Romantic-Era Songs Archive
• Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads

And the vast collection of digital editions at Romantic Circles, including, most recently, texts relating to Robert Southey, working-class poet Robert Bloomfield, and a collection highlighting how writers of the period were inspired by Norse mythology.

As these entries come in, I will add them to the “Student-Curated Gallery” in the main navigation menu, where they will form the mini-anthology we will read and discuss at the end of the term.

“Fate of the Book” Roundup 1

1. Nicholson Baker Write-Ups

For those interested in the “Fate of the Book” discussion, the write-ups of Nicholson Baker’s lecture are starting to appear. You can read abot this event over at Estudiante del Romance, The Hopeless Romantic, and on Marilyn’s Blog. If something piques your interest, feel free to ask for more context or respond to the ideas presented (by Baker, or by the event bloggers themselves).

Baker’s talk was timely for us, since we have been spending a lot of time with digital editions like the Blake Archive, the Poetess Archive, and Lyrical Ballads: An Electronic Scholarly Edition. Baker noted some of the real opportunities digital technology has created, but he also reminds us to think about the difference between screens and paper, and to consider the limitations of relying solely on reproductions. Let’s keep that in mind as we continue to engage with such resources in the next two class sessions. What do they enable you to see that you would not have seen otherwise? What is missing, or why might you want to head to an archive like the Ransom Center to view the originals?

2. Some Electronic Resources on the “Wordsworth Circle”

For next Tuesday, take a look at the table of contents to the various editions of Lyrical Ballads here. “Tintern Abbey” is framed as a dialogue with Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister, and we will also devote time to her writing. As we think about the relationship between them and their texts–and given the German connections we mentioned on Tuesday–you may want to take a look at a different type of electronic project, “From Goslar to Grasmere,” which maps the Wordsworths’ movement during this period, in Germany and England.

First, though: for Thursday, we are reading some examples of what scholars have termed the “conversation poem,” a form most closely associated with Coleridge. For a look at the way one of these poems, “Frost at Midnight,” was originally published, I’d encourage you to visit Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, an important facsimile database to which UT subscribes. Its facsimile of Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude can be found here. While you’re using ECCO, you might also try searching for some of the texts we’ve read, to see how their poems appeared. You might even find something useful to include in your “close reading” paper (since variations between editions, physical layout, and location within a volume can be important details).

Poetry and Song Roundup

We concluded our class on Blake and song by taking a quick look at this footage of the 2011 royal wedding:

Now common both as a church hymn and a national patriotic song, “Jerusalem” began life as an untitled prefatory poem to Blake’s epic Milton. It was only much later, during World War I, that it was set to music by Hubert Parry, to help inspire national pride. So, in addition to the way that phrases like “dark satanic mills” have entered into vernacular English speech, the poem took on a politically-charged afterlife, serving as a suffrage hymn, a party tune of both the left and the right, and one of England’s unofficial national anthems. That public afterlife serves as a good reminder that lyric poetry–even Blake’s, which is often considered only in terms of an idiosyncratic, inner personal vision–oftn invokes social, public literary forms like the ballad and the hymn.

Our class discussions and blog posts this week seem to be developing two different ways of approaching that link between (written/printed) poetry and (oral, pre-literate, or popular) song:

“Auld Lang Syne” in the Scots Musical Museum

I. Reviving/Preserving Tradition

Some of us have focused on attempts to revivify a past tradition of song, sometimes even by preserving, reconstructing, or approximating the tune. Those of you who have expressed interest in this kind of marked-up text can might find the Scots Musical Museum volume worth investigating–click the image to link to the full volume. For more thoughts on this continuity with the oral past, you might check out this post on “The Bards in the Barroom” in contemporary Ireland and Scotland, or this one that concludes by suggesting a line of influence that runs from “Lord Randall” to Bob Dylan. This is a fruitful direction for critical inquiry, especially if we ask questions about how and why collectors and performers try to present themselves as preserving or recapturing “tradition.”

II. Historical Differences/Old and New Media

Others have focused on how “modern” or “literary” song meditates on its difference from oral tradition. After all, whether we were discussing Robinson’s English renditions of Sappho in the sonnet form, Blake’s “songs” of Innocence and Experience, or Coleridge’s archaic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” one of the most interesting things we noticed was how those poems highlight the differences between the literary media of different time periods. Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, we saw, figures the movement from a wordless, piped tune “about a Lamb;” to a verbal song; to a written document. And that movement from orality to print has something to do with the play between “innocence” and “experience.”

So, too, we suggested, Coleridge’s “Rime” looks like a medieval seafaring ballad re-mediated in print, and in the 1817 edition even bears the marks of a later age’s readership. Most of the latest round of blog posts have taken up this question by focusing on one or another interpretive framework–medieval superstition, “orthodox” Anglicanism, folk tale, or moral fable–and showing how that framework ultimately proves insufficient to account for what happens in the poem.

Blake gets a similar treatment in this post, which discusses “London” as if it were spoken by the voice of the bard. That’s not the only way to read the poem, but it raises an important point: Blake often presents his speakers with heavy doses of irony, and that makes us step back and think about the mediating poetic voice. Is the speaker of “London” the outraged bard from the “Introduction?” Or is it a character who we should second-guess?

As we continue reading Lyrical Ballads this week, let’s keep thinking about who is speaking in these poems–who is narrating the events, how are the texts themselves framed, and what is their relationship to the various “poet figures” we have seen thus far?