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

Author:

Publication Information:

Macmillan and Co.

Date:

1888

"The Aspern Papers is a novella written by Henry James, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, with its first book publication later in the same year. One of James' best-known and most acclaimed longer tales, The Aspern Papers is based on the letters Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to Mary Shelley's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who saved them until she died.

Author:

Date:

2020

In Suzanne Collins's The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020), the prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, a major character is named Lucy Gray. In chapter 26, another character references the "really old [song] by some man named Wordsworth" and sings a version of the poem which the protagonist, Coriolanus Snow, cannot understand: "He couldn't make sense of it...It reminded him of the time he hadn't understood a poem in rhetoric class and Livia Cardew had humiliated him in front of everyone. What a dreadful song."

Publication Information:

Nth Dimension Media

Date:

1938

The Black Drama by Manly Wade Wellman, originally published in Weird Tales, involves the rediscovery and production of a lost play by Byron (from which Polidori's The Vampyre was plagiarised) by a man who purports to be a descendant of the poet. -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Dodd, Mead & Co.

Date:

1937

"First rate and rather unusual type of biographical material. Shelley is treated not as a budding poet, but as an eccentric, anti-social youth, with lovable qualities, hatred of cruelty, a twisted sort of courage, and a point of view which made him the butt of his school fellows, and unpopular, with the herd, but generally beloved by the underdog. This story shows his luxurious—but none too sympathetic—home surroundings, his small boy school days, his later public school years, and the university period. There it stops—but the picture left is of a personality.

Author:

Publication Information:

Chatto & Windus

Date:

2008

Shelley appears as himself in Peter Ackroyd's novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008). -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Bantam Spectra

Date:

1995

". . . another beautifully rendered and detailed imagination of [a cyberpunk] world, though ... more gentle and erudite in tone than picaresque. The use of the Romantics, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, is clear. But the real heart of the book is the 'clave' or "phyle" (corporate clan) of the Vickys, who style their life and ideology after the Victorian age.

Publication Information:

Victor Gollancz Ltd

Date:

1990

"An alternate history which recognizes Ada, Countess of Lovelace (Byron's daughter) as the world's first computer programmer. Alternate lives are imagined for other Romantics, like Keats, and Byron, who leads the Rad Lords in Parliament" —M. Sites

Author:

Publication Information:

Chatto & Windus (UK), Harper & Row (US)

Date:

1954

The Doors of Perception is a short book by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1954, detailing his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon, and takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision".[1] He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion. -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Doubleday

Date:

1990

"A far-future science fiction tetralogy in which an Articial Intelligence reconstruction of John Keats plays a major role. They're long books and quite a commitment of time, but they're excellent, and the treatment of Keats's life (and death) is very movingly integrated into the story. . . . Aside from the fact that the words "I was an English major" seem to scream from every page (the first novel is a version of Canterbury Tales, among other things), [the novels] are very engrossing and explore Keats's life and poetry in a fascinating way.

Author:

Publication Information:

Mass Market Paperback

Date:

1987

In Crawford Kilian's novel The Fall of the Republic, when a gateway is found to a parallel world equivalent to 18th-century Earth, it is named Beulah, and other worlds at different points in the timestream are named for other Blake entities, such as Orc, Ahania, Los, Urthona, Thel, and Tharmas. In particular, a future world whose atmosphere has been devastated by unknown forces is called Ulro. -Wikipedia

Publication Information:

Ballantine Books

Date:

2008

Lord Byron appears in a parallel story line in the novel The Fire by Katherine Neville. -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Arthur Barker Limited

Date:

1966

"A series of brutal and bizarre murders has London on edge. Near the dismembered corpse of each victim, the killer has scrawled cryptic quotations from the eighteenth-century mystic poet William Blake. Baffled, the police enlist the aid of Damon Reade, a brilliant but reclusive Blake scholar, who reluctantly agrees to help. Reade’s combination of instinctive deduction and psychic penetration leads him to Gaylord Sundheim, who may be the murderer. But when Reade befriends Sundheim and becomes convinced he is incapable of having committed the crimes, is he right and Sundheim innocent?

Author:

Publication Information:

Geoffrey Bles

Date:

1945

The Great Divorce is a work of theological fantasy by C. S. Lewis, in which he reflects on the Christian conception of Heaven and Hell. The working title was Who Goes Home? but the final name was changed at the publisher's insistence. The title refers to William Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Sphere

Date:

2006

In the novel The History of Lucy's Love Life in Ten and a Half Chapters, Lucy Lyons uses a time machine to visit 1813 and meet her idol, Byron. -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Harper & Brothers

Date:

1944

"The Horse's Mouth follows the adventures of Gulley Jimson, an artist who would exploit his friends and acquaintances to earn a quid, told from his point of view, just as the other books in the First Trilogy tell events from their central characters' different points of view. Cary's novel also uses Gulley's unique perspective to comment on the social and political events of the time." -Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Berkley

Date:

1984

"[in which] Coleridge's interruption during his composition of 'Kubla Khan' was orchestrated by the Sidhe, who were afraid that the Song of Power embodied in the poem would result in a cleansing of our world's evils, which are themselves orchestrations of the Sidhe to keep humans in chains." —M. O'Neill

Author:

Publication Information:

Vertigo

Date:

1994

In The Invisibles, Morrison has Urizen, a figure from Blake’s mythology, half-submerged in the polluted river. Mad Tom quotes Blake, “Urizen, deadly black, in chains bound.” For Blake, Urizen represented “your reason,” and was a negative figure bound in chains because man’s reliance on logic and reason to the exclusion of imagination and feelings is what traps us. Blake saw polluted London as an outward manifestation of these inner problems of man. -FantasyLiterature

 

The Jane Austen Cookbook book cover

Author:

Publication Information:

McClelland & Stewart

Date:

2002

"One of Jane’s dearest friends, Martha Lloyd, lived with the family for many years and recorded in her “Household Book” over 100 recipes enjoyed by the Austens. A selection of this family fare, now thoroughly tested and modernized for today’s cooks, is recreated here" -Amazon

The Jane Austen Handbook book cover

Publication Information:

Quirk Books

Date:

2011

"Every young lady dreams of a life spent exchanging witty asides with a dashing Mr. Darcy, but how should you let him know your intentions? Seek counsel from this charming guide to Jane Austen’s world." -Amazon

Author:

Publication Information:

Henry Colburn

Date:

1826

"The Last Man is an apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown until a scholarly revival beginning in the 1960s. It is notable in part for its semi-biographical portraits of Romantic figures in Shelley's circle, particularly Shelley's late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron." —Wikipedia

Author:

Publication Information:

Harcourt Children's Books

Date:

2011

Byron is also a minor character in the ninth novel of L.A. Meyer's Bloody Jack series The Mark of the Golden Dragon. -Wikipedia

Pages