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Genius and Originality 1750–1830
Abstract
In the eighteenth century, “genius” became a ubiquitous word that crystallized a central cultural concern: the question of how human knowledge and the arts advance. Earlier, the term narrowly denoted a talent or inclination, but writers during this period expanded its meaning by associating it with sublimity, with prodigious creative power, and above all, with originality – the ability to produce something that has never been seen or heard before. This chapter traces that intellectual development; and it concludes with a study of the ways that Romantic-era writers built upon the idea by casting the genius as an artist whose deepest influence and social relevance could be fully appreciated only by future generations.
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This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions.
This book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romantic literature. Analysing numerous examples from 1760 to 1830, it examines the generic innovations and experiments which propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, epic, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drives to 'make it old' and to 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical writing of the period as well as its creative literature. Incorporating extensive research on classification systems and reception history as well as on literary forms themselves, the book shows how new ideas about the role and status of genre influenced not only authors but also publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The focus is on poetry, but a wider spectrum of genres is considered, a central theme being the relationship-hierarchical, competitive, combinatory-between genres. The book establishes a new way of reading Romantic literature which brings into focus for the first time its tangled relationship with genre.
This book bridges a perceived gulf between materialist and idealist approaches to the reader. Informed by an historical awareness of Romantic hermeneutics and its later developments (as well as by an understanding of the circumstances conditioning the production and consumption of literature in this period), the book explores how readers are imagined, addressed, figured, and theorised in Romantic poetry and criticism (1790-1830). Models of canon-formation, intertextuality and reader-response are examined alongside the existence of reading-coteries, the social practices of reading, and reforms in copyright. Consideration is given to the philosophical and ideological influences which bear upon the status of reading at this time, as well as to the educational theories and practices which underpin reading-habits. Non-canonical writers are included, and special attention is given to the emergence of women's poetry - its repercussions for the poetics of reception.
This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the first Lives of Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey and others, in the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. It argues that, from Johnson and Boswell onwards, the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers 'domesticated' Byron, Shelley and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness. Biography was an influential transmitter of a myth of 'the Romantic poet', as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. Victorian biographers of the Romantic poets have been criticized for taming their subjects - making them respectable - and biography was regarded with suspicion by the Romantic poets themselves. Yet Lives of the poets were also celebrated by critics, publishers and readers at the period, for their capacity to bring these poets home to the reader, in a sense that the poetry itself could not.
In this reissue of a classic work in modern literary criticism, W. Jackson Bate presents a thoughtful and informed investigation of the responses of English writers to the perennial dilemma of modern literature, concentrating especially on the period between 1660 and 1830.
Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature
- T. M. Kelley
A Dissertation upon Genius
- W. Sharpe
- Locke
