The Visual And Verbal Sketch In British Romanticism

With their broken lines and hasty brushwork, sketches acquired enormous ideological and aesthetic power during the Romantic period in England. Whether publicly displayed or serving as the basis of a written genre, these rough drawings played a central role in the cultural ferment of the age by persuading audiences that less is more. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism investigates the varied implications of sketching in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culture. Calling on a wide range of literary and visual genres, Richard C. Sha examines the shifting economic and aesthetic value of the sketch in sources ranging from auction catalogs and sketching manuals to novels that employed scenes of sketching and courtship. He especially shows how sketching became a double-edged accomplishment for women when used to define "proper" femininity. Sha's work offers fresh readings of Austen, Gilpin, Wordsworth, and Byron, as well as less familiar writers, and provides sophisticated interpretations of visual sketches. As the first full-length work about sketching during the Romantic era, this volume is a rich interdisciplinary study of both representation and gender.

This book discusses the visual and verbal city sketches which proliferated during the 'journalistic revolution' of the 1830s and 1840s. It shows how sketches transformed models of visual and printed media and of life science into a unique kind of sociology, presenting a self-critique of the middle class on the brink of industrial modernity.

A fully updated edition of this popular Companion, with two new essays reflecting new developments in the field.

As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.

This study argues for Hogg's centrality to British Romanticism, resituating his work in relation to many of his more famous Romantic contemporaries. Hogg creates a unique literary style which, the author argues, is best described as 'kaleidoscopic' in view of its similarities with David Brewster's kaleidoscope, invented in 1816.

'Nation and Migration' provides a literary history for a nation that still considers itself a land of immigrants, exploring the significant contributions of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the development of a British Atlantic literature and culture.

The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism. Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years

By November 1822, the British reading public had already voraciously consumed both Walter Scott’s expensive novels and Rudolf Ackermann’s exquisite lithographs. The next decade, referred to by some scholars as dormant and unproductive, is in fact bursting with Forget Me Nots, Friendship’s Offerings, Keepsakes, and Literary Souvenirs. By wrapping literature, poetry, and art into an alluring package, editors and publishers saturated the market with a new, popular, and best-selling genre, the literary annual. In Forget Me Not, Katherine D. Harris assesses the phenomenal rise of the annual and its origins in other English, German, and French literary forms as well as its social influence on women, its redefinition of the feminine, and its effects on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture. Harris adopts an interdisciplinary approach that uses textual and social contexts to explore a forum of subversive femininity, where warfare and the masculine hero were not celebrated. Initially published in diminutive, decoratively bound volumes filled with engravings of popularly recognized artwork and “sentimental” poetry and prose, the annuals attracted a primarily middle-class female readership. The annuals were released each November, making them an ideal Christmas gift, lover’s present, or token of friendship. Selling more than 100,000 copies during each holiday season, the annuals were accused of causing an epidemic and inspiring an “unmasculine and unbawdy age” that lasted through 1860 and lingered in derivative forms until the early twentieth century in both the United States and Europe. The annual thrived in the 1820s and after despite—or perhaps because of—its “feminine” writing and beautiful form.