Romanticism and Popular Culture

This evolving bibliography collects media that represent Romantic-era works and historical figures in fictional contexts. We welcome feedback and additions from the RC community.

Literature

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Morrow

Date:

1981

"It wades in boredom like a night/ Of bad TV and frozen pies... No, Lord Byron didn't write that--but he might have if he'd read this fictional mash intended to chronicle his adult life. Because, somehow, through this gawky assemblage--random scraps of correspondence, manufactured conversations and meditations, bits of Byron's poetry (flickering feebly like lost rubies in Jello pudding), mass upon mass of unexamined events—Lord B. emerges as a raging twit, and a tiresome twit at that.

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T. Hookham Jr. and Baldwin, Craddock & Joy

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1818

"Nightmare Abbey was the third of Thomas Love Peacock's novels to be published. It was written in late March and June 1818, and published in London in November of the same year by T. Hookham Jr of Old Bond Street and Baldwin, Craddock & Joy of Paternoster Row. The novel was lightly revised by the author in 1837 for republication in Volume 57 of Bentley's Standard Novels.

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1845

"'P.'s Correspondence' is an 1845 short story by the 19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, constituting a pioneering work of alternate history. Some consider it the very first such work in the English language (depending on whether or not Benjamin Disraeli's "Alroy" of 1833 is defined as being alternate history). In any case, it is certainly among the earliest works of this genre in any language and apparently the first to introduce some features which were to become an essential part of it." -Wikipedia

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William Marion Reedy

Date:

1915

The poem references Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (1915) includes a poem Percy Bysshe Shelley[62] as the namesake of the speaker, whose ashes "were scattered near the pyramid of Caius Cestius / Somewhere near Rome." -Wikipedia

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Chatto & Windus

Date:

1990

"for the later end of the matter" —T. Dillingham

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies book cover

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Quirk Books

Date:

2009

"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a 2009 parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. It is a mashup combining Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice with elements of modern zombie fiction." -Wikipedia

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Marvel Comics

Date:

2006

In reference to the writing of William Blake.

Garth Ennis also cites Blake's work in the Punisher MAX one-shot titled "The Tyger." -Wikipedia

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G. P. Putnams, Dell Publishing (USA)

Date:

1981

"The Tooth Fairy" is actually a psychotic named Francis Dolarhyde who kills at the behest of an alternate personality he calls "The Great Red Dragon." He is obsessed with the William Blake painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, and believes that each victim he "changes" brings him closer to "becoming" the Dragon. His pathology is born from the severe abuse he suffered at the hands of his sadistic grandmother after he was orphaned at a young age. -Wikipedia

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Knockabout Comics

Date:

1989

"Do we all know about the comic book version of Rime? It's a lovely, lovely parody, complete with an albatross that just won't die--it keeps climbing back up the side of the ship. Reminds me of R Crumb in a way--not that it's that violent but in its drawing." —Megan O'Neill

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters book cover

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Quirk Books

Date:

2009

"Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009) is a parody novel by Ben H. Winters, with Jane Austen credited as co-author. It is a mashup story containing elements from Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility and common tropes from sea monster stories." -Wikipedia

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Tor Books

Date:

1987

"The first book in an alternate history of early nineteenth-century North America; portrays William Blake as an itinerate prophet." —M. Sites

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Hodder Children's Books

Date:

1998

Skellig is deliberately ambiguous about its title character. The implication is that he is some kind of angel is obvious, but his general demeanour and attitude differ sharply from traditional ideas about angels, leading the reader to consider ideas of religious imagery and the role of mysteries in life. There are obvious religious references in the text but, like the poet William Blake (who is quoted in the novel), many of them revolve around unconventional religious concepts.

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North Atlantic Books

Date:

1982

Sparks of Fire: William Blake in a New Age "My fingers Emit sparks of fire with Expectations of my future labors," wrote William Blake in 1800. In our own time enthusiasm for his works has led artists, scholars, poets, and musicians into new worlds of creation.

Gathered in this anthology are their voices and visions:

MUSIC: "Notes on the Songs of Innocence and of Experience" by Allen Ginsberg and excerpts from Evan Tonsing's score "A Transformation of The Book of Thel–for flute and Toy Piano."

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Image Comics

Date:

1990

Blake's Urizen appears in ... Todd McFarlane's occult superhero comic Spawn. -Wikipedia

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H. Liveright

Date:

1930

John Keats is the primary subject of this novel. —New York Times

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2020

Press description: "What if the lady -- Jane Austen's contemporary --who conceived the world's most intriguing modern monster (Doc Frankenstein's creature) -- was also a proto-suffragette, precursor-feminist, and, simultaneously, much to her chagrin, wedded to a narcissist poet, whose liberalism urged on his libertinism? How would such a woman think? What would she say about her majuscule Romantic dilemma and miniscule romantic predicament? Such are the questions that Chad Norman pursues in his act (and art) of sympathetic re-animation: Squall: Poems in the Voice of Mary Shelley."

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1965

In chapter 10 of the novel Stoner (1965) by John Williams, the character Charles Walker (during his oral exams) describes his dissertation on "[Percy] Shelley and the Hellenistic ideal" with references to "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," Godwinian necessity, Adonais, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas. Walker also quotes Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." He is stumped by a question on Byron's English Bards and Scottish Reviewers [sic] when he claims that the poem was actually written by Keats.

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Doubleday

Date:

1972

"Farmer's biography of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. Byron is mentioned briefly several times. Most notable is Farmer's assertion that Lord John Roxton (from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World) and several pulp heroes, The Shadow, The Spider, and G-8, are all descended from Byron's daughter, Augusta Ada Byron. See also Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Bantam, 1973)." —J. Leys

Teen Frankenstein: High School Horror

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Feiwel & Friends

Date:

2016

Synopsis (from Amazon.com): "High school meets classic horror in Teen Frankenstein, Chandler Baker's modern reimagining of Mary Shelley's gothic novel."

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Dodd, Mead & Co.

Date:

1966

"A biographical novel written in third person with George Byron as the protagonist. It begins with Byron's life as a small child under the care of May Gray and his tempestuous, extremely fat mother. It ends with Byron's death in Greece, and the footnote even tells the reader of the autopsy performed on Byron's body, complete with the size of his brain, the degeneration of his liver and kidneys, and other pertinent information. Many of the episodes are particularly brief, and Byron's trip to the East with Hobhouse is completely excised.

Publication Information:

Ace Books

Date:

1983

"The former deals with a professor travelling back in time and meeting Byron, while the latter very ingeniously attributes a type of vampire possession to Byron, Shelley, and Keats, cleverly incorporating incidents in their lives and quotations from their poems into a very coherent system." —A. Stein

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