Romantic Circles Publications

Romantic Circles Publications displays all the peer-reviewed content published by Romantic Circles.
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October 2021

Mary, the Osier-Peeler

This electronic edition makes the text of Mary Morgan's Mary, the Osier-Peeler available for the first time in over 200 years from the single known copy in the world. As an electronic edition in Romantic Circles, the poem is machine-readable, enabling access not only to those without physical access, but also to those with sight disabilities in the spirit of its twentieth-century collector, Marguerite Hicks.

June 2021

Teach (the) Romantic / Romantic Teaching, Vol. 1
For the past several years Romantic Circles Pedagogies Commons has published special volumes that speak to specific issues within romanticist pedagogy, such as “Romanticism and Technology,” “Teaching Global Romanticism,” or “Teaching the Romantic with the Contemporary.” For this 2-part volume, assembled during the COVID 19 crisis, we purposely stepped back and focused more broadly on essays that offer innovative approaches to teaching romanticism. By focusing on innovative pedagogies that seek to redefine “the romantic” in various ways and consider the romanticism as a place of engagement rather than administration. The essays collected are keen examples of this revisionary and processual pedagogy. They ask us to reconsider our relationship to the two key moments of any pedagogical project, what was and what is yet to be.

May 2021

Anna Letitia Barbauld Letters to Lydia Rickards, 1798–1815
Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose collected works are in progress from Oxford University Press, was eminent as a poet, a path-breaking writer for children, a political writer during the years of the French Revolution and the Reform movement in Britain, and a woman of letters whose literary criticism went far to establish the modern canon of British novelists. Because most of her unpublished papers were destroyed in the bombing of London, it long seemed that only the letters published by her niece, Lucy Aikin, in Barbauld's Works (1825) survived today. In 2011, by sheer good luck a series of forty-three letters from Barbauld to a pupil, Lydia Rickards, came to light. Five of those letters were instructional (Lydia was one of Barbauld's many pupils) and will appear in the collected works. Thirty-eight others were social and sociable, and they are presented in this edition in texts that aim to reproduce as fully as practicable the characteristics of the holographs.

December 2020

Hubert Parry’s Scenes from Prometheus Unbound

A Selection of Piano Recordings by Jennifer Castleton

On the 140th Anniversary of Parry’s Composition
and the Bicentenary of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

November 2020

The Sundry Faces of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Literature

Nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish literature engages a wide range of thematic and aesthetic preoccupations.  This volume brings together several essays that highlight such breadth, even as the essays converge upon several questions that recur consistently throughout this literature:  what does it mean to advertise one’s subjectivity, especially where the expression of such subjectivity is inflected by aesthetic and formalist concerns that are historically connected to English nationalism? Such questions are especially relevant when considered alongside the historical context:  Jews in England did not achieve political emancipation until 1858, and they were widely regarded as racially other for much of the century.  Jewish writers do not answer such questions with one voice; however, their political and cultural contexts put pressure on their aesthetic choices, and we explore these choices in the essays that follow.

Raymond Williams and Romanticism
This volume considers the place of Romantic works and the Romantic period itself in the work of one of the most important twentieth-century theorists of culture, Raymond Williams. After an introduction that pays particular attention to central concepts passed down from Williams like “structure of feeling” and “cultural formation,” these essays revisit Williams over thirty years after his death to reconsider his bearing on particular Romantic authors or broader sociohistorical processes in order to ask how his work helps us ask questions about the contemporary university and the place of the humanities within it.

September 2020

Keats in Popular Culture
Keats in Popular Culture posits Keats’s two-hundred year reception history as an exemplary case for examining popular culture as a generative, shape-shifting borderland where liking/loving and responding to literature intermingles, sometimes indistinguishably, the tastes of the people and the elite. This collection of essays recalls three longstanding embarrassments for teachers and scholars of literary history—popular culture, media, and affect—which routinely have been defined in opposition to (while continuing to inform) the high canon of English literature. These essays aim to: 1) spotlight the positive affinity, and not antithesis, between Keats and popular culture in our time and his own; 2) examine Keats’s afterlives in multi-media creations involving authorial fashioning and participatory poetics; 3) posit what we might learn through such creations about how to read, view, and hear Keats in a growing new literary middlebrow culture; and 4) prompt reflections on how we as teachers and scholars can connect with broader mass audiences interested in Keats.

July 2020

Latin American Afterlives
This volume investigates the afterlives of British Romantic poets in the Hispanophone world with an emphasis on Latin American authors. Reframing the outdated model of a European center and a New World periphery, we ask the following questions: To what extent has translation shaped or impeded the dissemination of otherwise global Romantic texts throughout countries like Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela? How do Latin American reinterpretations of Romantic texts assume or elide the colonial burdens of influence from English works, as compared to those imposed by continental Spanish texts? How do Latin American writers negotiate their position in relation to a European literary and cultural canon? And in what ways do these Anglo-Latino interactions differ from those recently explored in transatlantic studies, of North America, the West Indies and the Black Atlantic?

June 2020

Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene
The essays on Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene collected in this volume craft an intersectional Romantic pedagogy of resistance to human-made climate change in the Anthropocene. The contributors variously demonstrate across texts, periods, and media that such a pedagogy rejects ideas about “humans as one unified species” and seeks instead a dialogue between race, class, gender, sexuality, nonhumans, and queer alignments, among others.

May 2020

Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes
Romantic Circles is delighted to announce the revised second edition of Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, edited by Paul Westover and Nicholas Mason. Corresponding with the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the revised edition reveals new discoveries and insights about the text’s complex origins, publication history, and afterlives. First published in 1810 and then revised over three decades, Wordsworth’s Guide has long been recognized as a crucial text for students of Romantic-era landscape aesthetics, ecology, travel writing, and tourism. While several resources remain largely unchanged—notably the fully annotated, illustrated text of the 1835 edition and the bibliographic, cartographic, and textual tools for studying the Guide—the editors have significantly reworked, extended, and, in some cases, corrected their earlier account of the essay’s origins, composition, and initial publication.

March 2020

Teaching Global Romanticism

The essays on Teaching Global Romanticism collected here present varied approaches to teaching Romanticism in a global context through individual assignments, units, and syllabi. The contributors share ways to enrich pedagogical approaches to Romantic literature and culture with texts and ideas from beyond Britain and America. These essays discuss how literature guides students’ engagement with international themes and issues in the Romantic period and after. The initiative for this volume began under the leadership of William Stroup.

February 2020

NASSR/Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest

Newest Winners Announced

The contest was devised in the hopes of celebrating recent pedagogical innovation, inspiring creative new approaches and creating an additional forum for conversations about Romantic pedagogy—both its boons and challenges.  Teachers of all ranks may submit teaching materials, and a panel of three to four finalists are selected to discuss their pedagogy during a panel at the annual NASSR conference. Exemplary submissions consider how teaching revivifies Romanticism, in any of its myriad forms.

November 2019

Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield

Admired by Wordsworth and Southey, called by Clare 'the greatest Pastoral Poet England ever gave birth too’, Robert Bloomfield was one of the bestselling poets of the nineteenth century. A labouring-class writer famed for his rural verse, Bloomfield was not only a major influence on Clare but also a children’s author, playwright, tourist writer, and literary critic. The Collected Writings of Robert Bloomfield is the first ever scholarly edition of his entire oeuvre. The editors have collated all the lifetime editions of his publications, making it possible as never before to study the range of his work and the many revisions it underwent. The poems’ textual histories are displayed in variants, editorial footnotes and explanatory introductions. The literary and biographical contexts are discussed, as are the works' critical receptions and publication histories. The effect on his publications of Bloomfield’s vexed position, caught between the traditional expectations of a patron and the demands of a commercial bookseller is detailed. As a result, it is now possible to see Bloomfield both as a major nature poet and as a dramatic illustration of the new pressures on the author caused by the expansion of print culture in the Romantic era. The Collected Writings takes its place alongside the other Bloomfield resources on Romantic Circles—the Electronic Editions of his Letters and of his poem/tour journal/sketchbook The Banks of Wye—and the essay collection ‘The inestimable blessing of letters’.

October 2019

Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now
This volume attests to the continuing relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft to twenty-first century feminist thought. Making connections between Wollstonecraft's efforts to think within and beyond Enlightenment principles of liberal humanism and various significant issues and debates in contemporary culture from the impacts of social media to the impasses in theories (and practices) of social justice, the essays collectively address questions about what counts as feminism(s) now. Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now explores the range of concerns its contributors take up in considering the feminist afterlives of Wollstonecraft’s controversial writings and ideas.
The Futures of Shelley's Triumph
Ever since Paul de Man’s "Shelley Disfigured," we have come to see Percy Shelley’s final, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, as a symptom of the end of Romanticism and Romanticism as end. If or once things are over, why bother to re-visit the end? This is one of many questions Shelley’s poem compels its readers to ask, which is in turn to ask why we any longer need to re-visit the poem at this a time when so little apparently rests on our doing so. So, as if to prolong the idea of an end (whatever that might be), this volume is comprised of four essays compelled to return to the same poem, as if to read the poem as a crime scene that leaves a barrage of clues, none of them adding up to a crime, but each lingering differently with Shelley as Shelley lingers with life and history and as we linger (or not) with the shadows his future casts (or not) upon our present moment, which seems more than ever beyond our grasp, if it ever was within our ken. Why even bother? But then again, and just in case: if so little and so much is at stake, why not?

June 2019

On the 200th Anniversary of Lord Byron's Manfred: Commemorative Essays
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817) and based on original talks given at an international symposium at New York University on April 21, 2017, this special Romantic Circles Praxis volume offers not only a collection of essays that reassesses Lord Byron’s drama from an array of angles but also recent artistic adaptations of the script and an audio recording of a reenacted musical scene from the 1834 London production of Manfred. Among the subjects addressed in these essays are the play’s dramaturgical and staging potential, the curious history of its publication, circulation, and reception, and the authorial intent of a work based on Byron’s scandalous life. The readings also revisit the complexities behind Manfred’s hybrid genre, while expanding the range of cultural influences and source materials that have previously been associated with the play. With Manfred Byron created a work that fused his own celebrity myth with elements from various cultures, faiths, myths, epochs, genres, and traditions. Byron fired the public imagination with a drama that, in pushing well beyond its rootedness in a Swiss landscape and in his own biography, transcends the limits of the personal and the local as an eccentric and eclectic work of global horizons.

December 2018

The Griffin (1820) and Other Works
This edition showcases the poetry of Thomas D’Arcy Morris (1792-1835), a significant figure in the Bombay literary scene of the early nineteenth century. It identifies and attributes Morris’s works, originally published anonymously or pseudonymously in contemporary newspapers and periodicals. The central text is the long review / poem The Griffin, accompanied by some related earlier works by Morris, and some contextual correspondence. The edition also includes a list of later anonymous and pseudonymous works by Morris from the Oriental Sporting Magazine (1828-1833).

July 2018

A Description of the Valley of Chamouni, in Savoy

By the time that Samuel Glover published A Description of the Valley of Chamouni, in Savoy in 1819, Mont Blanc was well established as a place of great scientific importance and as a key attraction for tourists and travellers seeking the mountain sublime. This edition re-situates Glover’s Description in the context of eighteenth-century and romantic-period writing about Chamonix-Mont Blanc and details its connections to Jean-Baptiste Troye’s popular exhibition of relief models of the area and the controversy surrounding the inscriptions left in the registers of various hotels and tourist sites around Chamonix by Percy Bysshe Shelley in July 1816. It also attempts to solve what is now the mystery of who Samuel Glover might have been: hardly any information about him survives, and what few details are available are all connected with Description.

May 2018

Charlotte Smith Story Map

The British author Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806), best known for her acclaimed and innovative Elegiac Sonnets (1784), has a life story as interesting and difficult as her literature was admired and influential. This StoryMap, by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Gillian Andrews, demonstrates the way in which Smith's residential (in)security was related to her dependence on her father and husband, a situation common to eighteenth-century women. The Charlotte Smith Story Map is the first piece of scholarship to integrate information from all the known letters that Smith wrote; those included in Judith Stanton's 2003 Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, and also all the letters discovered in the last 15 years.

May 2018

Romanticism and Affect Studies
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.

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