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English

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2012

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297

pages

English

Ebooks

2012

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Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

01 février 2012

EAN13

9780791485590

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright

I. NERVOUS CONTAINMENTS: RECOLLECTION AND INFLUENCE

1. De Quincey Collects Himself
Joel Faflak

2. Mrs. Julian T. Marshall's Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Lisa Vargo

3. Between Action and Inaction: The "Performance" of the Prima Donna in Eliot's Closet Drama
Grace Kehler

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

II. A MATTER OF BALANCE: BYRONIC ILLNESS AND VICTORIAN CURE

5. Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill's Response to Byron
Timothy J. Wandling

6. Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the Byronic Temper
Kristen Guest

7. "Growing Pains": Representing the Romantic in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters
Julia M. Wright

III. HESITATION AND INHERITANCE: THE CASE OF SARA COLERIDGE

8. Snuffing Out an Article: Sara Coleridge and the Early Victorian Reception of Keats
Joanne Wilkes

9. Her Father's "Remains": Sara Coleridge's Edition of Essays on His Own Times
Alan Vardy

10. Opium Addictions and Metaphysicians: Sara Coleridge's Editing of Biographia Literaria
Donelle Ruwe

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

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Publié par

State University of New York Press

Date de parution

01 février 2012

EAN13

9780791485590

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

ervous eactions N R

Victorian Recollections of Romanticism

Edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. W right

N E RV O U S R E A C T I O N S

SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Pamela K. Gilbert, editor

NERVOUS REACTIONS

V i c t o r i a n R e c o l l e c t i o n s o f R o m a n t i c i s m

Edited by J F OEL AFLAK and J M. W ULIA RIGHT

ST A T EUN I V E R S I T Y O FNE WYO R KPR E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nervous reactions : Victorian recollections of romanticism / edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright. p. cm. — (SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5971-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Faflak, Joel. II. Wright, Julia M. III. Series. PR468.R65N47 2004 820.9'008—dc21 2003045653 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments Introduction Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright

I. NERVOUSCONTAINMENTS: RECOLLECTION ANDINFLUENCE De Quincey Collects Himself Joel Faflak Mrs. Julian T. Marshall’sLife and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Lisa Vargo Between Action and Inaction: The “Performance” of the Prima Donna in Eliot’s Closet Drama Grace Kehler “Nervous ReincarNations: Keats, Scenery, and Mind Cure in Canada during the Post-Confederation Period, with Particular Reference to Archibald Lampman and Related Cases D. M. R. Bentley

II. A MATTER OFBALANCE: BYRONICILLNESS ANDVICTORIANCURE Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill’s Response to Byron Timothy J. Wandling Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the Byronic Temper Kristen Guest

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Contents

“Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Julia M. Wright

III. HESITATION ANDINHERITANCE: THECASE OFSARACOLERIDGE Snuffing Out an Article: Sara Coleridge and the Early Victorian Reception of Keats Joanne Wilkes Her Father’s “Remains”: Sara Coleridge’s Edition of Essays on His Own Times Alan Vardy Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing ofBiographia Literaria Donelle Ruwe Bibliography List of Contributors Index

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program for their generous support of our research in general and this volume in particular, and the staff and faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University for the myriad ways in which they helped to further this project. We would also like to thank Lisa Butler and Holly Crumpton for their research assistance dur-ing the final preparation of the manuscript, as well as James Peltz and others at State University of New York Press who provided invaluable guidance throughout the publishing process. We are also grateful to the anonymous readers of this volume for their astute and timely suggestions, and our contributors for their pa-tience and commitment to this project. Tilottama Rajan is not a contrib-utor to this volume in the usual sense of the word, but in some measure it stands as a synecdoche for her vast but uncharted influence on scholar-ship through her work as a teacher. We realized as the manuscript was going to press that nearly half of the contributors here were, at one time or another, her students. We, in particular, are deeply grateful for and always cognizant of her generosity and acuity as a reader and teacher. And, finally, we would like to thank our partners for their continuing support. They are probably as relieved as we are delighted to see this project go to press. Cover Art: “Horses in the Paddock,” attributed to Théodore Géri-cault, Oil on paper on canvas. 24.533 cm. Used by permission, Foun-dation Emil G. Bührle Collection.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

Joel Faf lak and Julia M. Wr ight

The relationship between the Romantic period and the Victorian era has long been a subject of scholarly enquiry, from tracings of literary and ideological debts between specific writers to formulations of the transformation of English culture from the “Age of Revolution” to the age of “muscular Christianity.” Recent volumes such as Andrew Elfen-bein’sByron and the Victorians, Stephen Gill’sWordsworth and the Victorians, and C. C. Barfoot’sVictorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periodstestify to the ongoing 1 interest in this fertile area of enquiry. The present collection seeks to contribute to this general project of interrogating the complex, and mu-tually determining, relationship between Romantic and Victorian liter-atures. But it does so not in the well-established terms of authorial influence, especially among poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold. The chapters in this volume, rather, consider the construction of nervousness as a figure through which Victorian writers represented their response to the Romantic in a variety of genres. This response is not monolithic but, in many regards, pivots on the changing denotation ofnervousness. TheOxford English Dictionaryrecords that, from the fifteenth century forward,nervouswas commonly used to refer to musculature, and so denoted strength, energy, and force in a variety of senses. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, nervousness was used to describe feel-ing: In the literature and philosophy of sensibility, the nervous subject was connected to his or her fellow beings through a capacity to sympa-thize that writers such as David Hume and Adam Smith argued was the

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