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In spite of the recent prevalence of historical and sociological concerns in Romantic scholarship, the aesthetic insists: indeed, its very mode is one of insistence. The essays by Balfour, Ferris, and Swann collected for this issue address the question of "Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic" by turning in various forms to…
Digital Designs on Blake brings together recent and more seasoned Blake scholars who have worked in new media. Contributors explore how new media representation of William Blake's work provides a heuristic for another mode of inquiry into Blake's complex verbal and visual texts. The volume looks at Blake's designs as well as new…
This volume on the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is part of the Romantic Circles Praxis series on seminal texts in Romantic literature. The eleven contributors were asked not for original scholarship on the "Urn," but for an account of how they teach this hypercanonic text. If it can be assumed that every English major knows something about this…
In this volume, three divergent critics—representing Romanticism, contemporary poetry, and more formal concerns, such as prosody and rhythm—present analyses of five contemporary poets viewed in relationship to several different strains of Romantic practice or theory. All three essays make creative conjectures as to what Romanticism looks…
This collection offers five outstanding Romanticists focusing on the nightmarish sleep into which Victor Frankenstein falls after seeing his creature take its first breaths in Mary Shelley's original novel of 1818. That dream, the dark side of Frankenstein's glorious daydreams about the future of humanity after his experiment, has been…
An interview conducted by Kari Kraus with Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, who reprise their prophetic roles in consideration of the Blake Archive with emphasis on themes such as reproduction, materiality, and representation.
This Praxis volume began as two modern stagings of the 19th century play Obi; or Three-Finger'd Jack. The first staging was at the Playwright's Theater in Boston, on July 18, 2000. It included, besides staged portions of the play, papers read by Charles Rzepka, Peter Buckley, Jeffrey Cox and Debbie Lee. These papers formed the backbone of…
This dialogue is designed as a multi-linked site organized around a constellation of topoi, each with its own icon. In addition to concretizing the dialogue's overarching theme of "the commonplace," this plan serves a couple of other purposes. The first is flexibility, giving the reader the option of moving…
On June 17, 2000, the Romantic Circles MOO hosted a conference called "Romanticism and Contemporary Culture." The papers appearing in this issue by Ron Broglio, Jay Clayton, Atara Stein, and Ted Underwood were first "delivered" at that conference. That is, shorter versions of these essays were posted on a web site, and then approximately…
English Romanticism first emerged as a literary movement from a heady combination of political revolution and cosmic optimism, nowhere better expressed than in William Wordsworth's famous lines on the French Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" (1805 Prelude, book 10…