Welcome back, readers! As Managing Editor, I am excited to say that we have an all-star lineup of new bloggers, roundtables, and conferences to share with you this Fall. (For the identities of these mysterious new bloggers, who represent a wide selection of American and Canadian universities, take a look at Our Writers).
In the midst of getting organized for the new semester of NGSC blogging, though, I’m also preparing to give a presentation for my friend Katie Gemmill’s undergraduate seminar at Columbia, which she has brilliantly titled “Miss Behaviour: Transgressive Women in 18th-Century British Fiction.” In response to the assigned primary-source texts on dress, disguise, and gender, I will be providing some historical background for female cross-dressing during this period. Since I think blog readers are just as likely as students to be intrigued by the topic, I’ll introduce to you now some fascinating (and, most importantly, * real *) cases of female cross-dressing and concealed identity — especially in the context of same-sex relationships — in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Continue reading “Female Cross-Dressers in 18th-Century and Romantic England”
Constructing an Academic Self: The Worksheet
This follows up on my previous post, concerning the necessity of renewing resolve and reorienting goals for the forthcoming academic year. Over the last month, in starting to capitalize on the commitments I explored there, I’ve increasingly realized the importance of utilizing reflective writing to actively work through the process of beginning the dissertation, and for the first time really envisioning what type of scholar I’d like to become through that particilar endeavor. As I imagine is the case for most romanticists, certain professional investments have started to become clarified as a result of engaging in the intense, challenging, and rewarding project of dissertation writing–in my case, guided by reading Donald Hall’s The Academic Self, Jean Botkin’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, and Timothy Morton’s Ph.D Advice. To honestly think through these core themes that I’m realizing connect work, communities, and more (and, especially, because I’ll be going on the predoctoral fellowship market next year, and think the activity will be helpful for writing research statements), I’ve developed a series of fifteen questions to answer to better understand how areas of academic research, values, and goals are shaped by a longer history of development, different institutions, multiple great mentors, and romanticist friendships. In this blog–an unconventional one, admittedly–I am posting these questions I’ve generated, in hopes that they might be helpful for other grads to think through. I also invite others to post additional questions in the comments you’ve found helpful in creating fulfilling academic trajectories. Continue reading “Constructing an Academic Self: The Worksheet”
Report from the Front: Professor Jeffrey N. Cox on the Waterloo Bicentennial
June 18, 2015 marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, that decisive event that signaled the end of the Napoleonic Wars and, more broadly, constant military conflict on the European continent since 1756. Notable not only for Napoleon’s defeat by the combined forces of England, Prussia, and the Netherlands under the command of the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Orange, Waterloo remains one of the bloodiest military conflicts in history with nearly 48,000 causalities in only ten hours. Yet, even more than a political turning point, Waterloo left an inedible mark on the period’s cultural productions; as graduate students studying Romanticism, we remember the battle in terms of the massive literary and artistic output it inspired. From Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode” to a theatrical production at Sadler’s Wells that included the song ‘The Bellerophon, or Nappy napped,'” Waterloo became a permanent fixture in Europe’s cultural memory. Continue reading “Report from the Front: Professor Jeffrey N. Cox on the Waterloo Bicentennial”
Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry
Endymion is one of the funniest heroes in Romantic poetry, mainly because he is so frequently fainting and falling asleep. He sleeps so often that I struggle to separate his waking and sleeping, a common problem for Keats that I want to talk about in this post. I have written previously about shared feeling and cognition, and dreaming is a particularly interesting case study for these topics, I think.
Let me catch you up to the ideas I’ve been toying with for my dissertation. I have come to believe that for Keats communion across time and space is enabled by acts of reading and the shared feelings reading encourages. Feelings circulate, via a text, among the bodies engaged in acts of reading (or other aesthetic experiences), and feeling is always an embodied cognitive experience. Therefore communion is realized (not just imagined) in the embodiment of transferred or circulated affect, a reactivation or revitalization of feelings in the moment of reading. From these assumptions, I begin my study of sleep and dreams. Continue reading “Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry”
Studies in Romanticism: An Assistant’s Perspective
By Talia Vestri
This post discusses some of my experiences as an Editorial Assistant for Studies in Romanticism since 2012. These are, of course, my own experiences in journal publishing, and all journals probably work differently, having their assistants focus on different tasks. Below, I offer some reflections about the job and my copyediting projects. In my next posting, I’ll offer a follow-up conversation with SiR editors, including some advice on the publishing process and insights for grad students—so stay tuned! Continue reading “Studies in Romanticism: An Assistant’s Perspective”
Austen's Names and Romantic Espionage
I was very excited to hear about Margaret Doody’s new book, Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). In this text, Doody traces the etymological contexts for the nomenclature of each of Austen’s characters, while exposing curious patterns of naming throughout her corpus. Who knew that Austen’s Marys were uniformly negative, or that, with the name “Fitzwilliam,” Mr Darcy naturally followed as the inheritor of William Collins’s suit for Elizabeth’s hand?
When I peeked into the book itself, I was impressed with the etymological research, and I was inspired to think about how the names could be explained further with historical correlatives. The Romantic-era histories behind the names give the characters even more flair, while showing Austen’s awareness of some of the most fraught and intriguing elements of English public life — including espionage. Continue reading “Austen's Names and Romantic Espionage”
Interview: Dr. Patricia Fara
The Romantic Period’s scientific achievements affected all aspects of writing and poetry, especially as the public witnessed new discoveries. Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the globe influencing Coleridge’s writing of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and William Bligh’s mutiny on the Bounty influencing Byron’s “The Island” are two examples of this fascination. Joseph Banks, an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences participated in Captain Cook’s voyage and has remained an important figure in Romantic science scholarship as well as the history of science.
Dr. Patricia Fara is one of the scholars who has written about Banks and Romantic science. Famous for publishing work beloved by both academia and the wider public, Fara urges scholars to resist limiting themselves with disciplinary boundaries, categorizations, and stiff formalities. Filled with fascinating historical context and beautiful prose, reading Fara’s work is both intellectually stimulating and fun. Continue reading “Interview: Dr. Patricia Fara”
The Art of the Book and Romanticizing Landscape
For several months now, I have had the pleasure to work on a project with my friend and fellow artist Cat Snapp. On a Texas summer evening, we discussed over dinner our overlapping interests in the outdoors and the influence it has on our work. Through connection to the geological past or ties to personal culture, we each use print media to speak about the personal, historical, and psychological relationships we have with the world around us. At a certain point, we realized that the project that would best unite our voices and express the feeling we wanted was a letterpress printed artist’s book. It has the power to be intimate with the reader, yet it transcends the starkness of simple text on a page – it can reach into places travelled and landscapes desired.
Continue reading “The Art of the Book and Romanticizing Landscape”
Guest Post: A "Radiant" Digital Edition of Wordsworth's Prelude?
By Peter N. Miller
Dedicated readers of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude must at some point grapple with the disconcerting question of which version of the poem they’re looking at.
In 1799 Wordsworth produced a fair-copy manuscript of what would later be called The Two-Part Prelude. Between 1801 and 1805 the poet drastically revised this material to create a longer autobiographical poem, which consisted at various points of five books, eight books, and thirteen books. Wordsworth continued to revise the work over the coming decades, breaking Book 10 in two in 1829 to create a fourteen-book Prelude. His most substantial final revisions came in 1839, yet the poem was still not published, in any form, until shortly after the poet’s death, in 1850. To confuse matters further, Wordsworth never actually called The Prelude by that name. For him it was always “the poem to Coleridge.” The poet’s widow, Mary Hutchinson, suggested the title The Prelude. There is not a poem called The Prelude, it would seem, but multiple poems, each with a certain claim to legitimacy. Continue reading “Guest Post: A "Radiant" Digital Edition of Wordsworth's Prelude?”
Will the Real Mr. Darcy Please Stand Up?
By Talia Vestri
Jane Austen was in the news again last week—I know this, because when I log onto Google News, it offers tailored entries based on my previous web searches and sticks them right at the top of the feed. I honestly don’t know whether to be delighted or terribly disturbed by this fact. But artificial intelligence issues aside, I found this most recent bout of Austenmania to be quite a curious one.
It’s not a rare occasion these days that Miss Jane appears in the news, especially during this decade that celebrates “200 years since…” each of her famous tomes, published during the 1810s. Austen’s popularity endures: in 2013, Britain announced it will finally commemorate her in currency (Austen will appear on the 10-pound note, beginning in 2017) and last month she even got a musical in Chicago.
The most recent news cycle that got my attention (to be fair, it was hardly a sidebar item) highlights a new book that claims to make a striking and long sought-after discovery: the “true” identity of the real-life Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy—and (sadly) it’s not Colin Firth. Continue reading “Will the Real Mr. Darcy Please Stand Up?”