What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History

Tom Mole

Published by Princeton University Press 2018

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism

Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History

Tom Mole

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400887897

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Author / Editor information

Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, the editor of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, the coeditor of The Broadview Reader in Book History, and the coauthor of The Broadview Introduction to Book History.

Reviews

"A splendid book. Mole provides a much needed perspective on how the broader culture of the Victorian age responded to a highly selective and heavily mediated and remediated version of Romanticism."—David G. Riede, author of Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language

"Original and compelling. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism presents a number of valuable insights and perspectives on its topic."—Antony H. Harrison, author of Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology

"What have Victorian temperance lectures to do with Shelley, retrofitted illustrations to say about Wordsworth, or snuffboxes and postcards to tell us about Scott? In fascinating case studies, Tom Mole traces the unexpected shapes that literature is requisitioned to fill in the interests of its own survival. Mole writes with relish and flair, and with a canny awareness that these are the stories of what happens as texts and reputations are remade and reused for more purposes than those of the professional critic."—Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford

"This ambitious book is a major contribution to our understanding of Romanticism, not only what it was but also what it became. It will be an essential guide to the web of reception and remaking for period specialists, while also posing urgent questions—and answers—for our own moment of hypermediation."—Clifford Siskin, New York University

"Convincing and nuanced. Mole extends existing knowledge of the Victorian reshaping of Romanticism by tracing the cultural transmission of selected Romantic poets through often overlooked reception practices such as sermons, illustrations, anthologies, and statues."—Kim Wheatley, author of Romantic Feuds: Transcending the "Age of Personality"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations & Tables Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction: Don Juan in the Pub Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. THE WEB OF RECEPTION
Romantic Writers in the Victorian Media Ecology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Reception Traditions and Punctual Historicism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
Minding the Generation Gap Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
PART II. ILLUSTRATIONS
Illustration as Renovation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Renovating Romantic Poetry: Retrofitted Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
Turning the Page: Illustrated Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	72
PART III. SERMONS
A Religious Reception Tradition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
Converting Shelley Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
Spurgeon, Byron, and the Contingencies of Mediation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
PART IV. STATUES
Secular Pantheons for the Reformed Nation: Byron in Cambridge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
The Distributed Pantheon: Scott in Edinburgh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
The Networked Pantheon: Byron in London Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
PART V. ANTHOLOGIES
Scattered Odes in Shattered Books: Quantifying Victorian Anthologies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Romantic Short Poems in Victorian Anthologies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Romantic Long Poems in Victorian Anthologies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Coda: Ozymandias at the Olympics; or, She Walks in Brixton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307