This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott,...
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Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt / Zentrale
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This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth--one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing--such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles--that in turn remade the public's understanding of Romantic writers
The web of reception. Romantic writers in the Victorian media ecology -- Reception traditions and punctual historicism -- Minding the generation gap -- Illustrations. Illustration as renovation -- Renovating romantic poetry: retrofitted illustrations -- Turning the page: illustrated frontmatter -- Sermons. A religious reception tradition -- Converting Shelley -- Spurgeon, Byron, and the contingencies of mediation -- Statues. -- Secular pantheons for the reformed: Byron in Cambridge -- The distributed pantheon: Scott in Edinburgh -- The networked Pantheon: Byron in London -- Anthologies. Scattered odes in shattered books: quantifying Victorian anthologies -- Romantic short poems in Victorian anthologies -- Romantic long poems in Victorian anthologies -- Coda: Ozymandias at the Olympics; or, she walks in Brixton.
