Romanticism And Illustration

Explores a vital aspect of British Romanticism, the role of illustration in Romantic-era literary texts and visual culture.

"This collection of essays takes a fresh look at the important role of illustration in Romantic literature. The late eighteenth century saw an explosion of illustrated editions of literary classics and the emergence of a new culture of literary art, including the innovative literary galleries. The impact of these developments on the reading and viewing of literary texts is explored in a series of case studies covering poetry, historical texts, drama, painting, reproductive prints, magazines and ephemera. Romanticism and Illustration argues for a more detailed study of illustration which includes the context of a wider circulation of images across different media. The modern understanding of the word 'illustration' fails to convey the complex relationship between the artist, the engraver, the publisher, the text and the audience in Romantic Britain. In teasing out the implications of this dynamic cultural matrix, this book opens up a new field of Romantic studies"--

According to Charles Dickens, real love is “blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust . . . giving up your whole soul to the smiter.” Oscar Wilde said of love: “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” And Rainer Maria Rilke advised: “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” Like Dickens, Wilde, and Rilke, countless writers throughout history have attempted to encapsulate the essence of love through their words. But the theme of love is not restricted to the medium of the written word; love has also launched billions of images. The Look of Love is a celebration of love through the ages, gathering more than one hundred illustrations from the flirtatious to the kitsch, the charming to the ironic. The vintage imagery is drawn from a huge range of sources—fashion magazines, medieval illumination manuscripts, book covers, paintings, and cartoons—and it ranges from exquisite depictions of courtly love in the Middle Ages to the pulp novels of the twentieth century, from elves in fairyland to a honeymoon in space. Great lovers from literature—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, Vishnu and Lakshmi, among others—are lavishly represented alongside a host of first kisses, assignations in the garden, moonlight serenades, and walks down the aisle. A gorgeous pictorial survey of how artists from around the world and throughout time have visually imagined love, The Look of Love will make the perfect gift for any beloved with an eye for art.

A lively, richly illustrated study of iconic caricatures, showing the interrelationship between art, satire and politics in the Romantic period.

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

Suitable for art and fashion professionals, this book offers an overview of the development of fashion.

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales or fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s. She discusses the work of well-known figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers' fatal women in historical, political and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory's ongoing dilemma regarding the status of 'woman' as a sex.