Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

Andrew Radford, Mark Sandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351902472
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In tracing those deliberate and accidental Romantic echoes that reverberate through the Victorian age into the beginning of the twentieth century, this collection acknowledges that the Victorians decided for themselves how to define what is 'Romantic'. The essays explore the extent to which Victorianism can be distinguished from its Romantic precursors, or whether it is possible to conceive of Romanticism without the influence of these Victorian definitions. Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era reassesses Romantic literature's immediate cultural and literary legacy in the late nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian writings of Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, the Brownings, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and the Rossettis were instrumental in shaping Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon. Many of these Victorian writers found in the biographical, literary, and historical models of Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth touchstones for reappraising their own creative potential and artistic identity. Whether the Victorians affirmed or revolted against the Romanticism of their early years, their attitudes towards Romantic values enriched and intensified the personal, creative, and social dilemmas described in their art. Taken together, the essays in this collection reflect on current critical dialogues about literary periodisation and contribute to our understanding of how these contemporary debates stem from Romanticism's inception in the Victorian age.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Romanticism and the Victorians
• 1 A Finer Tone: Victorian Lives of Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Shelley
• 2 ‘Wandering between Two Worlds’: The Victorian Afterlife of Thomas Chatterton
• 3 Dead Keats: Joseph Severn, John Keats and the Haunting of Victorian Culture
• 4 ‘The Wind Blows Cold out of the Inner Shrine of Fear’: Rossetti’s Romantic Keats
• 5 Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy
• 6 ‘Mr Osborne’s Secret’: Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters and the Gender of Romanticism
• 7 ‘Fallen Angels’: Hardy’s Shelleyan Critique in the Final Wessex Novels
• 8 Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Versions of Byron and Wollstonecraft: Romantic Genealogies, Self-Defining Memories and the Genesis of Aurora Leigh
• 9 Wordsworth, Hopkins and the Intercession of Angels
• 10 ‘Echoes of that Voice’: Romantic Resonances in Victorian Poetic Birdsong
• 11 ‘Infinite Passion’: Variations on a Romantic Topic in Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Swinburne, Hopkins, Wilde and Dowson
• 12 Liberating Boyhood
• 13 Prometheus Rebound: The Romantic Titan in a Post-Romantic Age
• Selected Bibliography
• Index