			Home About us Contact

Romantic Period (romantic + period)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Popular Magazines, Popular Culture: Gradations of Celebrity in the Romantic Period

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 8 2010
Brian Rejack
Celebrity and popular culture emerged simultaneously, and synergistically, in part through the agency of the periodical press during the romantic period. As modes of fame multiplied, the audience of celebrity understood itself as a collective,often British, polite, class-oriented,and as individuals modeled through the individualized celebrity that periodicals could project. This process,centered on fashion and fame,integrated notions of the popular and the common with those of the spectacular and the unique. For emerging discourses that consolidated middle-class ideals, such as gastronomy, sports, and contemporary etiquette, the popular magazines occupied a crucial position in what Jon Klancher has denominated "the social text" and helped legitimize themselves by producing their own localized celebrities. Exploring articles from a range of periodicals on a diverse set of topics, this essay shows the reliance of popular magazines on popular culture, understood both in terms of those celebrities of popularity and those commonplace games, sports, and activities associated with the populace. [source]

Diet Studies in the Romantic Period

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2009
Samantha Webb
The burgeoning interdisciplinary field of diet studies examines representations of food, eating and drinking, and other aspects of consumption in literary and non-literary texts. It emerged in the field of British Romanticism, at the intersection of materialist and formalist criticisms, and draws on food anthropology, food history and consumption studies. It also seeks to intervene into philosophy and aesthetics by revealing the corporeal and gustatory tropes that sometimes ground these fields. The Romantic period has proven to be a fertile literary moment for questions about diet. Coinciding historically with the consumer revolution, the period between the 1780s and 1830s saw many changes in diet, including the rise of haute cuisine, and the introduction of luxury foods like tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate. Dietary reformers also sought to introduce potatoes into the diets of the poor in the wake of food shortages. In tandem with this historical context, the 18th century is also known as the ,century of taste', and diet studies examine the gustatory dimensions of the aesthetic concept of taste. In diet studies, food is read as a sign that can demystify ,Romantic ideology' but that can also maintain its status as a figure. In this article, I review some of the most important works in the field, and suggest some of the reasons that diet studies has proved to be such a productive intervention into Romantics studies. [source]

War, Empire, Slavery: Radicalism in the Work of Robert Tannahill

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2008
Jim Ferguson
This essay was runner-up in the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. This essay surveys the political content of the poetry and song of Paisley weaver-poet Robert Tannahill (1774,1810). The argument is that most nineteenth-century commentators ignored the political content of Tannahill's work by presenting him primarily as a poet of nature. It looks at Tannahill's view of the war with France; his expression of anti-imperialist and anti-slavery outlooks in his poem, ,Lines on The Pleasures of Hope', dedicated to Glasgow-born Whig poet, Thomas Campbell. The broad democratic-humanism of Tannahill's song lyric, ,Why Unite to Banish Care' is also analysed to reveal a poet who felt deeply about political and social justice during the early Romantic period. [source]

Law and Literature in the Romantic Era: The Law's Fictions

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2006
Sue Chaplin
This essay examines the emerging ideological relation between literature and law in the Romantic era and the significance of this relation to modern Western conceptualisations of what constitutes ,law' and ,literature'. In particular, the article explores the problematics of juridical textuality in the Romantic period , the extent to which the law comes to be regarded as text, and seeks to set this within the context of developing conceptualisations of ,literature' as a juridically defined commodity. The modern understanding of ,literature' began to be shaped in the Romantic era by a juridical re-formulation of the relation between the author, the text, the reader and the publisher: creative, original writing ,,literature', becomes a commodity copyrighted to an author/publisher. This development is accompanied by the State's recognition of the growing cultural and political power of new and diverse textual forms in an era of the mass production and consumption of ,literature', and the article considers alongside the contemporaneous formulation of copyright regulations the draconian censorship of textual production in this period. With reference to diverse juridical and literary sources (Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance, Blackstone's Commentaries, Bentham's Fragment on Government, Godwin's Enquiry and Caleb Williams, amongst others), I examine the extent to which these various phenomena reveal the subjection of textuality in the Romantic era to the modern force of law. [source]

Popular Magazines, Popular Culture: Gradations of Celebrity in the Romantic Period

LET THERE BE IRONY: CULTURAL HISTORY AND MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY IN PARALLEL LINES

ART HISTORY, Issue 5 2005
WOLFGANG ERNST
Stephen Bann is well known as an art critic, art historian, cultural historian and museologist, but his writings have yet to be discovered from the point of view of media theory. This article applies Bann's proposal of an ,ironical museum' to a self-reflective media culture, while at the same time establishing the difference between a media-archaeological and an art-historical approach, particularly in accounts of new media in the first half of the nineteenth century and in the present. To what extent was the historical imagination developed in the romantic period an effect of new media and new media technologies? It is argued that although the discourse of history has always depended on the media of its representation (verbal and visual), its character changed dramatically with the arrival of mechanical means for recording historical evidence. The ,antiquarian' method of archival investigation of the past, with its almost haptic taste for the mouldy, decaying fragment, is considered and compared to narrative aesthetics. A key question is considered from different disciplinary perspectives: can we speak of a cultural transition or a radical break with the emergence of photography? The essay concludes that what we learn from Stephen Bann's analyses is the significance of an ever-alert awareness of the intricate relations between cultural and technological phenomena, a kind of media self-irony which, apparently, was present in the past to antiquaries and historiographers, to painters, engravers and to creators of historical museums. [source]