Romanticism and the Object

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction: Romanticizing The Object

   • Larry H. Peer

   Pages 1-7

3. “Things Forever Speaking” and “Objects of all Thought”

   • Marilyn Gaull

   Pages 9-16

4. “Perfectly Compatible Objects”: Mr. Pitt Contemplates Britain And South America

   • Jocelyn M. Almeida

   Pages 17-36

5. Children as Subject and Object: Shelley v. Westbrook

   • Lisbeth Chapin

   Pages 37-49

6. “I‘ll Contrive a Sylvan Room”: Certainty and Indeterminacy in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head, the Fables, and Other Poems (1807)

   • Mark K. Fulk

   Pages 51-69

7. “A Better Guide in Ourselves”: Objects, Romantic-Protestant Ethics, and Fanny Price’s Individualism

   • Rodney Farnsworth

   Pages 71-94

8. The Literal and Literary Circulation of Amelia Curran’s Portrait of Percy Shelley

   • Diane Long Hoeveler

   Pages 95-107

9. Shelley Incinerated

   • Michael Gamer

   Pages 109-116

10. Keats and the Impersonal Craft of Writing

    • Magdalena M. Ostas

    Pages 117-135

11. “Tun’d to Hymns of Perfect Love”: The Anglican Liturgy as Romantic Object in John Keble’s The Christian Year

    • Chene Heady

    Pages 137-157

12. Journeys to the East: Shelley and Novalis

    • William S. Davis

    Pages 159-175

13. Weighing It Again

    • Charles J. Rzepka

    Pages 177-199

14. Back Matter

    Pages 201-223

    PDF

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

• aesthetics
• Great Britain
• John Keats
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• poem
• British and Irish Literature

"Modern criticism of Romanticism as a cultural movement has often struggled with the near fetishization of the object by Romantic artists. In Romanticism and the Object the complexity of the transforming Romantic gaze is explored in a series of compellingly argued essays that demonstrate that romanticizing the world and the objects in it was, and continues to be, a creative act that embraces all of culture. This book represents a substantial and timely contribution to modern Romantic criticism, as it is characterized by its enormous range and the precision of analysis of the individual essays." - Ray Fleming, John Francis Dugan Professor of Modern Languages and Humanities, Florida State University

"Romanticism and the Object is an engaging, diverse, and perceptive collection of essays that impels us to pay attention to the complex significations resonating from things and objects in Romantic-period literature . . .an important contribution to Romantic scholarship and to our understandings of the Romantic foundations of our contemporary preoccupations with objects and commodities." - Marjean Purinton, Professor of English and Associate Dean, University Honors College, Texas Tech University

• International Conference on Romanticism, Brigham Young University, USA

  Larry H. Peer

LARRY H. PEER is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, USA, Executive Director of the International Conference on Romanticism, and editor of the journal Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, as well as author of several volumes.

Policies and ethics