In 1777, during the early stages of the American War of Independence, a young American woman called Jane McCrea was murdered by American Indians who were in the pay of the British. The incident instantly became a media sensation and a propaganda coup for the American forces. The fact that McCrea was on her way to meet her fiancé, a British officer, gave her story a convenient sentimental and sexualized appeal. It has been argued by some historians that American outrage was so intense that the McCrea ‘myth’ changed the course of the war. John Vanderlyn’s famous painting of the murder became the most famous single visual image of Indian cruelty from the Romantic period. In fact the incident was used on both sides of the Atlantic to criticise the British policy of utilizing ‘native’ Indian aggression. Edmund Burke argued that Indian violence was in essence merely a ‘proxy’ form of British imperial oppression. In this paper I will argue that it is a mistake to read the political impact of the McCrea incident as the effect of the sentimental construction of female distress: the discourse of sensibility competed with an older tradition of emblematic political caricature in which the violated female body was an icon of the nation in crisis. Seen in this light, the McCrea murder condenses a much wider context of colonial conflict which includes white ‘savagery’.

Tammy L. Durant
Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State University

Sympathetic Curiosity's Sadistic Shadow: Theories of Moral Representation in Joanna Baillie's 'Introductory Discourse'

In her project to defend Romantic drama and the nineteenth-century stage from charges of immorality and depravity, playwright Joanna Baillie argued that the interaction between dramatic representation and audience response, an interest she called "sympathetic curiosity," provides an ideal vehicle for moral instruction. Modern scholars such as Anne Mellor and William Brewer have interpreted Baillie's concept of "sympathetic curiosity" as denoting a feminist moral epistemology based on communality and identification with the Other. Baillie's own elaborate defense of sympathetic curiosity, however, demonstrates her worry that the mechanics of both sympathy and curiosity place the spectator in a peculiar, oppositional, power-imbalanced, and potentially sadistic relation to the Object.

Believing that dramatic spectatorship is nevertheless a highly moral activity, Baillie's defense of sympathetic curiosity requires nothing less than that she construct a recuperative theory of the potentially violent gaze itself. She accomplishes this task with the interpolation of a third viewer into the subject/object dyad. In her dramatic works, Baillie provides us again and again with representations of spectacles filtered through characters who are supposed to be performing the actual active gazing. She thus literalizes the imaginary ?moral spectator? described by eighteenth-century moral philosophers Hume and Smith.

This triadic structure challenges current theories of the symbolically masculine gaze which tend to invoke a binary, oppositional, and gendered power structure of spectacle. Baillie's theory complicates this binary structure with the addition of the moral spectator, which, rather than emphasizing a feminist ideal of identification, underscores and even exaggerates the distance between the sympathetically curious subject and the twice-removed object.

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Painting, Visuality and Performance

John Williams
Professor, University of Greenwich

James Barry and the `spectacularization` of politics and power in Lear Weeping over the Body of Cordelia (1774 and 1786-7)

Barry was the first artist to portray the final scene of King Lear in Shakespeare's version of the story. Between 1681 and 1834 all publicly performed productions of the play were based on Nahum Tate's version, and Tate was following Shakespeare's sources where there was no Fool, and Lear and Cordelia were in the end restored to power and happiness. This paper considers the way Barry identifies with Shakespeare as a subversive artist. I shall offer a reading of the 1786-7 version of the painting by way of discussing Barry's hostile engagement with the eighteenth century politics of power. I compare his Lear with The Phoenix, or the Resurrection of Freedom of 1776 (note that this didactic political work comes between the two versions of Lear). I shall contextualise his work with specific reference to paintings by West, Copley, and Reynolds, discussing the different ways these artists made use of religious iconography from earlier work, specifically Carracci's Dead Christ Mourned, an acknowledged source for Barry's Lear and Cordelia. Finally, I hope to clarify the precise moment in the play Barry intends to portray, suggesting that a correction of previous commentaries in this respect serves to emphasise the critique of politics and power intended by the artist.

Ian Waites.
Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design, University of Lincoln

'Darkness terrible in its own nature': Turner's Sublime in the common heathlands of South East London c.1796-7.

When Viscount Torrington in 1791 described an expanse of common waste land in Lincolnshire as a 'staring, black moor ... a wild, dreary prospect', it is understandable that this type of landscape could genuinely provoke a sense of threat and danger. This paper will examine some contemporary visual equivalents to Torrington's description, JMW Turner's dark and dense watercolour sketches of the common heathlands of Blackheath and Lewisham. On the face of it, these sketches appear to be typical products of a traditional view of Turner and his work: as an artist of the Sublime, and of a Romantic temperament. This paper will argue that these sketches were actually the result of a more conventional personal and artistic development, and will analyse them in relation to contemporary accounts of common heath and waste, and the more prosaic context of late eighteenth century urban development on the fringes of London. The paper will therefore consider some parameters of Romanticism arguing that while these sketches certainly accord with Burke's typology of the Sublime via the experience of 'darkness', 'privation' and so on, they only accidentally evoke a modish and somewhat vicarious Sublime 'thrill' that could conveniently and safely be found in a very local and quite domesticated setting.

Crystal Gauger,
Graduate Fellow, The University of Iowa, USA

Two Simple Cups: The Transcendence Beyond the Enlightenment into Romantic Religiosity in Francisco Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta, 1820

The intrinsic desire for a metaphysical, extraordinary, sublime experience is at the heart of Romanticism and Francisco Goya’s painting of his Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta. As so few primary documents exist concerning his inspiration and aesthetics, it is his art itself that offers us an insight into the mind of the elusive, mysterious, and often mythologized artist, Francisco Goya. The following paper will seek to elucidate one of Goya’s most famous paintings, Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta. I contend that the painting serves as an example of Christological symbolism within the context of Romantic aesthetics. Furthermore, the iconography of the two cups, one held by a doctor, the other by a priest, ideologically represent the intersection and ultimate artistic resolution of the traditionally held dichotomy between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement.

Goya’s paintings are Romantic in the sense that they encourage exploring the indefinable, illogical, and sublime aspects of human experience as tools to uncover truth, which is beyond empiricism, reason, and logic. This exploration could eventually lead his audience to question the ability of Enlightenment ideals to reconcile the “dark” side of life, e.g. war, famine, death, thus, ultimately evoking a post-Enlightenment faith in the divine. Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta offers not only a window into his psyche, but it also reveals the use of his artistic virtuosity to translate a personal experience into a universal truth.

Invisibility

Karin Tomosky Chambers

Political Invisibility in Thomas Holcroft’s Three Novels

Thomas Holcroft, the English actor, playwright, novelist and political activist wrote three politically charged novels during the 1790s. His social, economic and political messages were masked by the female characters in his novels who delivered his radical political ideas. Holcroft spoke through the female voice in his novel Anna St. Ives 1792 to remain invisible to promote female independence, equality and liberty. In his utopian communal society there is no government, no marriage or property laws, no inequality, no discrimination, no poverty and no differences in gender politically, economically or socially. His intense optimism for this dream society is evident in Anna St. Ives. But, in his novel The Adventures of Hugh Trevor 1797 his high state of enthusiasm diminishes after he was convicted of High Treason for assisting in the publication of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet ‘The Rights of Man’. Holcroft’s pessimistic outlook of politics and society did not alter his radical political beliefs even though he knew his invisible dream would never become a visible reality. His optimism in Anna St. Ives faded in The Adventures of Hugh Trevor 1797 and then Holcroft moved from pessimism to cynicism in his last novel the Memoirs of Bryan Perdue 1805. Holcroft promoted the political ideas he shared with Thomas Paine in the Memoirs of Bryan Perdue. In this novel the main female character is the invisible voice of Thomas Paine who expounds Paine’s ideas for religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and capital punishment.

Travis Feldman, Visualizing the Spectre as a "Medium" of Work, Conflict and Subjectivity in William Blake's The Four Zoas

Blake developed his theorization of the Spectre as he worked on detailing the "redemption" of "fallen" human consciousness in his manuscript poem, The Four Zoas. The poem has two spectres (Tharmas and Urthona) whose entrances foreground their visible and "spectacular" aspects in displays of power and legitimacy; shortly thereafter, each merges or "mingles" with another character and produces its own spectral invisibility and apparent illegitimacy. Spectres, whose beginnings emphasize their visibility, become important for their invisibility as ideological and psychological features that present or make apparent the (reconstituted) potential for "visibility" itself. In the case of the Spectre of Urthona and Los in Night VIIa, spectrality is crucial for the deployment of a more self-aware conceptualization of the practices of seeing the world and visualizing social relationships -- or, as W. J. T. Mitchell has phrased it, of "showing seeing."

This paper reconsiders Blake's theory of the Spectre, by focusing its analysis on the visual and invisible aspects of Spectres with emphasis on their work, labour, control, and modes of making or producing things in The Four Zoas. Special attention is paid to the concept of the Spectre as a "medium" (FZ 87:26-27, E355). The paper contextualizes the visualization of work and conflict in The Four Zoas -- Blake's unique and nuanced approach to the issues surrounding imaginative or Romantic subjectivity as a site of "mediation" between interior and exterior, private and public, rural and urban -- by briefly comparing the Spectre as "medium" to the strategic role of visualization in Romantic anti-pastoral poems by Cowper, Crabbe, and Wordsworth. While the visual depiction of work contexts, social conflicts and imaginative subjectivity in The Four Zoas bears significant similarity to other Romantic poems, Blake's poem goes further in visualizing the dialectically active "medium" that catalyzes psychological potentials for (socially revolutionary) recovery from within the conditions of a given present context, and in that respect Blake's Spectre is an essential, if invisible, contributor to the processes of "redemption." The paper concludes by reflecting upon the spectral characteristics of Urizen in The Four Zoas.

Dennis Low, Independent Scholar, ‘A power so organized, so subtle, so complete’: Romanticism and the Invisible Hand of the Illuminati, 1787-1829

Public awareness and fear of the Illuminati (a secret society with roots in radical Ingoldstadt, and an agenda that aimed at nothing less than complete and unquestioned world domination) spread slowly at first. Writing in Reflections on the French Revolution (1792), Edmund Burke warned his readers that ‘a confused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world. Already confederacies and correspondencies of the most extraordinary nature are forming’, he added soberly, footnoting his claim with references to books such as System und Folgen des Illuminatenordens (1787).

After the publication of John Robison’s highly popular Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (1798), however, the same fantasy of a grand conspiracy, masterminded by an invisible network of arch-criminals that permeated through every level of society and spanned entire continents, would be widespread and forever etched upon the public imagination.

As well as looking at the unexpected ways in which conservative writers, such as Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer, responded directly to the Illuminati threat, this paper will examine how fear of the Illuminati soon spread to America; how America responded with its hastily written Alien Enemies Act (1798), which gave the state extra-ordinary powers to arrest and imprison suspected conspirators indefinitely and without trial; and how America’s knee-jerk reaction then raised paranoia in England to a level that enabled the British government, despite opposition, to pass its Secret Societies Act (1799), which granted them unprecedented access and control over the private lives of citizens.

Theatrical Performance - Romantic Spectacle

Clare Webster, PhD Student, University of Newcastle

Coleridge and the Dream of the Theatre

‘Do the actions and attitudes depicted in a work of art have moral significance as images of reality? And: can the content of a work of art be adequately understood in terms of moral insights?’ (Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 1928, p.104).

Debate surrounding Romantic theatre has often focussed on its inability to support romantic preoccupations with the idealising or transporting abilities of the mind. Its presentation of bodies and actions, positions it closer to reality than vision and this apparent inappropriateness has led to the assumed failure of Romanticism in the theatre.

The recent revival of studies in Romantic theatre has refocused this debate on the possibilities presented by a form which both imitates reality through acting and action, and yet also becomes the ‘stuff, and psychic process, of dreams’ (Carlson, p. 24) under the gaze of the audience. In this sense, the duality of theatrical representation provides romantic poets with a space in which to explore the limits of the imagination in the representation of (moral) life.

This paper will engage with issues of representing the romantic mind on stage by comparing the treatment of tragic drama in Coleridge’s Remorse to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the German mourning play in The Origins Of German Tragic Drama. The paper will take into account the opposition of illusion and delusion within the play by analysing the attitudes of Alvar, Ordonio, Teresa and Valdez towards the value of the image as presented in both Alvar’s painting and Teresa’s locket. Secondly, I will analyse Coleridge’s projection of the illusory nature of aesthetic representation into the action of the theatre. By comparing Alvar, the painter to Coleridge, the playwright, it appears that Alvar’s failed hope of Ordonio’s moral redemption through remorse anticipates Coleridge’s own acknowledgement of the paradoxical nature of realising moral life on stage.

Jacqueline Mulhallen, PhD student, Anglia Ruskin University

Shelley's 'Charles the First'

This paper applies to Shelley's unfinished play, Charles the First, recent theatre history findings to show his theatrical imagination. Shelley left four uncompleted scenes which reveal strong argument, powerful poetry and vivid characterization. There is also a scenario indicating what he might have included in Act II and notes which suggest a grand scale, covering a period of over 30 years and including possibly as many characters. The opening crowd scene is of a consistent grandeur, utilizing all the resources of the early nineteenth-century stage: scene painting, models, music, dancing, perhaps even live horses to present a procession and masque. The staging drew on Shelley's experience of theatre in both England and Italy.

Dramatic writing by the Romantic poets is often described as for the 'closet', a term used by contemporary critics for an unstageable play. Shelley's earlier play, The Cenci, however, has been frequently professionally performed since censorship expired and was described by no less a Beatrice than Sybil Thorndike, as "a really great play". Covent Garden only refused The Cenci for censorship reasons and expressed interest in another play by its author. Charles the First appears to have been written for this theatre, which commissioned a play on the same subject in 1824. Shelley's friend, Edward Williams, believed that had Shelley continued "in the spirit of the lines he read me last night" it would "undoubtedly take a place before any other that has appeared since Shakespeare".

David Snowdon, PhD Candidate, University of Newcastle

Drama Boxiana: Pierce Egan's Pugilistic Writing

Whether describing a snaking convoy of spectators journeying to an illegal prize-fight, or conveying the anticipation of the pugilists' gladiatorial-like entrance and ferocious yet "scientific" trading of blows, Pierce Egan infused his Boxiana series reports (1812-29) with a distinctive theatricality. This dramatic dimension is augmented by the extensive use of sporting slang, or "flash", which formed part of Egan's linguistic flourish. Featuring a socially diverse range of colourful Regency characters, the appeal of these pugilistic commentaries extended beyond the confines of the sporting set ("the Fancy").

Was the sporting argot one-dimensional, impenetrable, and coarse for more cultivated sensibilities and potential female readers? Or, is this countered by Egan's comparisons with the chivalric ideals surrounding medieval tournaments? Similarly, the association of principal pugilists with legendary Homeric champions swiftly followed by pantomimic touches creates questions relating to whether the classical allusions are undercut, or if some readers are alienated by such references and can only appreciate the slapstick, slang, and gambling aspects. This paper looks at how Egan's Boxiana style accentuated the spectacle of events, which could transcend differing attitudes and intrigue a widespread readership, mirroring the fusion of generic types that attended prize-fights, and eroding social barriers as a stage production might appeal to a heterogeneous theatre audience.

Egan's Boxiana writing encouraged the visualisation of this transient pugilistic culture, and this paper looks at how the author reinforced his assertion that the English "are not automatons" by animating the pages of these pugilistic texts with his innovative imagery and language.

Periodicals and Public Romanticism

David Higgins, Lecturer, University of Chester

William Maginn, Fraser’s Magazine, and the Spectacle of Genius

Romantic writers often imagined genius to be force that transcended the realms of politics and economics, but representations of it played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within literary culture. In particular, magazines used biographical accounts of genius in order to emphasise their own political, critical and commercial superiority to their competitors. However, these texts were riven by tension and contradiction: genius, after all, was supposed to be superior to the ‘debased’ literary culture in which such journals were produced and read, and to despise ‘false’ contemporary celebrity in favour of ‘true’ posthumous fame. This paper will examine these issues by considering William Maginn’s ‘Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters’, an extensive and powerful set of literary portraits that helped to establish Fraser’s Magazine as the major literary journal of the 1830s. These short, informal articles were based on Daniel Maclise’s accompanying drawings, which often depicted the subject in a state of private, domestic relaxation. I will focus in particular on ‘The Fraserians’, which depicts twenty-six of the gallery’s male subjects seated at a convivial dinner over which Maginn presides, and ‘Regina’s Maids of Honour’, which depicts some of the major women writers of the day enjoying a genteel tea party. Like the other articles in this series, these texts, I will suggest, are highly self-conscious, not only about their role in the self-fashioning of Fraser’s, but also about the tensions and contradictions produced by turning genius into a spectacle for their readers.

John Halliwell, PhD Candidate, University of Bristol

Shakesperean Parody in Daniel Isaac Eaton’s Politics for the People

ABSTRACT UNDER REVISION

This paper will examine the publication, in April 1794, of “A Parody for Mr. P—’s Perusal, on the third Scene of the Fifth Act of Richard the Third” in the pages of Daniel Isaac Eaton's radical periodical, Politics for the People. I will offer a brief introduction to Eaton and his periodical, arguing that the work of Eaton should be understood within a tradition of radical satire which leads from Eaton and his contemporary Thomas Spence to William Hone and Thomas J. Wooler. I will then examine how Eaton's parody deployed a number of the satiric effects at work in the graphic satires of figures such as James Gillray in an attempt to appropriate Shakespeare as a representative figure of the aspirations of radical political discourse.

Sarah M. Zimmerman, Associate Professor, Fordham University, New York, NY

Coleridge and Campbell at the Royal Institution

This paper compares two very different performances of the Romantic literary critic at London’s Royal Institution (R.I.), by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Campbell. Both men launched successful public lecturing careers in the R.I.’s celebrated theater (Coleridge in 1808 and Campbell in 1812). Although public lectures on literature have recently been treated by Jon Klancher, Gillian Russell and Peter Manning, we don’t yet sufficiently understand the implications of that forum for our understanding of the critical arguments made in it. I focus first on the relationship between each speaker’s performance style and his interpretive arguments, before turning to the implications of differences between their performances for their criticism’s fate in literary history.

I compare what each lecturer made of the R.I.’s prominent stage, drawing upon the reports of auditors and the lecturers themselves to juxtapose Coleridge’s largely extemporaneous style with Campbell’s preference for reading aloud from prepared texts. I also focus on their diverging attitudes toward women auditors, and the “fashions” of the literary marketplace with which both associated their presence. I argue that, in developing his concept of a “willing suspension of disbelief” on the R.I.’s stage, Coleridge elicited his auditors’ “faith” in envisioning him as the “poet-philosopher” that he wanted to be rather than a paid public entertainer. I then consider whether Campbell, in contrast, helped to lower his stock in literary history by avidly courting his women auditors, who in turn introduced him into aristocratic circles, where he made connections that promoted his short-term literary and social ambitions.

Observation and Synaesthasia

Ruth Skilbeck, Researcher, University of Technology, Sydney

A SPECTACULAR SYNAESTHESIA: VISIONS OF SUBLIME TRAUMA, SUDDEN DEATH AND EMPIRE IN DE QUINCEY’S DREAM-FUGUE

In the Dream-Fugue, the culmination of The English Mail-Coach triptych, Thomas de Quincey evokes Romantic, spectacular images and sublime visions using techniques inspired by the musical fugue. Recurring motifs of personal traumatic shock, deriving from the death of his sister in childhood, are re-enacted and transformed within the context of an intoxicated dream. Spectacular images of sudden death, imperilled maidens, war, divine redemption, empire and the power of the printed word, are interwoven in a fugal counterpoint, which recalls Beethoven’s emotional and symphonic Grosse Fugue rather than Bach’s Baroque Art of Fugue. The Dream-Fugue’s tumultuous, hallucinatory, opium-dream imagery reflects, through De Quincey’s rhetorical “literature of power”, early modern concerns with empire, volition, and the Napoleonic Wars – expanded to “the infinite” realm of the waking dream. Through Baudelaire’s translation, De Quincey subliminally influenced the subjectivity of European literary modernism, which Benjamin argues involves the individual’s experience of traumatic shock in modernity (Benjamin 1989; Clej 1995). Musicalization, in the form of word-music synaesthesia, was taken up by modernists including Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf who praised De Quincey’s “impassioned prose” style. This paper examines the significance, and effects, of De Quincey’s use of musicalized fugue techniques in his spectacular articulation of emotion and subjectivity. How authentic is the spectacle? What semantic functions are performed by musicalization in the Dream-Fugue?

Dr. Caecilie Weissert (Institute for Art History, University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Prof. Dr. Julika Griem (Institute for English Language and Literature, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany)

“Exclusive Spectacles: The Synaesthetic Architectures of William Beckford, John Soane and E.A. Poe”

In their studies of early 19th century visual culture in Britain, Jonathan Crary (1992) and Gillen D’Arcy Wood (2002) have demonstrated that high cultural, experimental esthetic practices can be shown to be intricately related to an increasingly powerful field of a more democratic form of visual entertainment and scientific instruction. In our talk we would like to suggest elements of a “history of oppositional moments” (Crary) counteracting this hegemonic set of discourses and practices which have not yet been sufficiently explored. As a point of departure, we will reconsider Philippe de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon of 1781 as a symptomatic spectacular site enabling him to experiment with perception. We will then relate Loutherbourg’s miniaturised perceptual theatre to the spectacular rooms at the center of the architectural fantasies of Beckford (Vathek), Soane (Soane House) and Poe (The Oval Portrait, The Philosophy of Composition). These spaces will be analysed with regard to esthetic as well as political implications: We hope to be able to show that a) the tendency towards predominantly visual forms of prodesse et delectare provoked a synaesthetic opposition demanding for an intermedial approach; and that b) these synaesthetic experiments (in most cases conducted in secluded, locked rooms) were meant to defend elitist notions of culture and taste by exluding popular audiences.

Science and the Spectacle

Martin Priestman, Professor, Roehampton University

‘Some Such Dignified Pantomime’: Hieroglyphics and the Visual Enactment of Science in Erasmus Darwin

Though often satirically portrayed as an over-verbose poet, Erasmus Darwin had a deep distrust of the diachronicity of language for conveying scientific truths. From his belief that Egyptian hieroglyphics encoded such truths synchronically, to the chiasmic symmetry of his verse and the relentlessly visual emphasis of his metaphors, he conveys a constant concern to replace the provisionality of time with the permanence of pictorial space. His images of development (including biological evolution) depend on a separation into stages whose supreme model is the ‘dignified pantomime’ of the mimed Eleusinian Mystery enactments – and perhaps those of Freemasonry. As well as these matters, the paper will discuss his use of illustrations to coalesce the meanings of his texts, his iconographic theories of art, his interest in light-shows (‘chromatic music’) and his involvement in scientific demonstrations like those celebrated by his friend Joseph Wright of Derby.

Caroline Bertonèche, Lecturer and Research Fellow, Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle

Keats's poetry and Romantic medicine: Scenes of dissection or the anatomy of influence (with medical illustrations by Rembrandt, Sir Luke Field, Dürer, Hogarth, etc.)

This presentation would reflect on the dissected visions of the mind and body in Keats's art or the influential role of medical exhibitions during his time, including the rise of surgery (1800-1830; Anatomy act in 1832). Keats, the apothecary-surgeon develops an anatomical conception of poetry, choosing to dissect his characters while preserving their spirits.

The poet-healer and dresser is here inspired by a medicine of 'conservation' treatments such as incisions, injections, dressings, 'venesection', and so forth. Hence our poet's bloody narrative, his scenes of exhumation, decapitation and aesthetic reconstructions in an art of skulls and corpses. Exploring the living world, this poet-physician offers his reader a gothic spectacle of a realistic medical vision and scientific 'disinterestedness'. A medical student of the barbaric approach to dissection (or the 'butcher' of Guy's Hospital, 1815), the young Romantic innovates with a modernisation or 'medicalisation' of medieval romances, scenes of poetic and corporeal resurrections. The crude verses of the poet-anatomist are those of a physician hoping to repair the monstrosity or grotesqueness of Romantic bodies.

The magical creatures of Keats's Shakespearean dream are therefore transported in this amphitheatre of scientific exactitude. The cutting of wounded bodies is of interest only for the beauty of their surgical reconstruction.

Keats adds to the memory of Renaissance medicine and its decrepit images of bodily decomposition, with a Romantic scenery "sublime in that it combines the pain and pleasure of scientific discovery" deprived of exterior decay. The Keatsian fascination is for interior mechanisms (veins, blood vessels, fluids): scenes of bodies inside out, incisions of freshly deceased human beings almost impossible to bear! From these sometimes repelling medical experiences or the diabolical symbol of the scalpel, Keats has extracted some of his most powerful visual 'in-betweens' life and death, torture and surgery, healing and hurting. Thus, Boccaccio's Elisabetta, innocent lover, becomes Keats's Isabella, morbid fetishist and modern surgeon.

Finally, Keatsian dismemberment and Romantic fragmentation can only be counter-balanced by acts of preservation and medical resuscitation, in other words a poetic unity between the healing virtues of the pharmakon and the modern spectacle of the surgeon's dissecting table.

Sharon Ruston, Lecturer, University of Wales, Bangor

Godwin and the Animal Magnetists

It appears that William Godwin was the author of an English translation of the French Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of Animal Magnetism, as now Practised at Paris, which was published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1785. Animal magnetism, or mesmerism, named after Anton Mesmer, conceives of a transferable life-force that can be channelled and manipulated. The mesmerist would move their hands over the body of the patient, hovering without touching the skin, to transmit electricity, or life, into the body of the patient. The treatment was highly theatrical and posed great concern among mainstream medical practice, particularly because the patient was often female and the practitioner male. The French commissioners reported on a set of experiments performed at Franklin’s house designed to prove that animal magnetism was quackery and the treatment merely spectacle.

This paper will examine Godwin’s translation of the report for what it says about the influence of the imagination upon the body. It offers numerous instances where gullible patients are duped into believing they have been magnetised when no such treatment has been performed, and who proceed to evince the most spectacular convulsions, the most gullible and least trustworthy of subjects being those from the lower classes and women, described euphemistically as ‘most susceptible to the magnetism’ (p. 69).

Theatrical Spectacle in the Political Sphere

David O'Shaughnessy, PhD Candidate, University College Oxford

The dog that didn’t bark: Godwin’s Antonio and the absence of spectacle

Spectacle was a central trait of many of the most popular plays of the London theatre around 1800. As a dedicated theatregoer, Godwin was witness to this phenomenon, attending the opening nights of landmark ‘spectaculars’ such as The Castle Spectre (1797), Ramah Droog (1798), and Pizarro (1799) amongst others. There can be no doubt then that he was conscious that spectacle was a critical component of a commercially successful drama. The opening panoramic scene of St Leon (1799), a novel which shows the influence of the Georgian stage in a number of ways, provides definite evidence of Godwin’s awareness of spectacle and his willingness to deploy it in a certain context.

However, Antonio (1800) was composed over the same period of time as St Leon. A list by Godwin outlining his proposed works from September 1798 reveals that this was intended to be only the first in a series of ‘five or six tragedies’. But the play was, to use Charles Lamb’s phrase, ‘damned with Universal Consent’ and his account of its sole performance explains its lack of appeal to contemporary audience. This paper will offer an explanation as to why Godwin might have chosen to write a blank verse tragedy at a time when tragedy was not in vogue. It will specifically address the deliberate absence of theatrical spectacle and I will suggest how this might help us read Godwin’s intentions regarding Antonio in a more generous fashion than has been the case to date.

Kai Merten, Lecturer, University of Giessen, Germany

“A theatre on which his fancy was mustering her own dramatis personæ”: The politics of representation in Walter Scott’s Kenilworth

My paper is part of a book-length project on the relationship of theatrical culture and (textual) literature in British Romanticism. In this context, I aim to read Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) as a novel obsessed not only with the spectacularization of politics and power but also with questions of visual mediality as such. The famous pageant scenes set at Kenilworth Castle have already been analysed as instances of Scott’s ideas of the effective – and affective – display of a national identity, and the novel has hence been seen as ‘a model of [Daniel] Terry’s staging of the nation’ (Cairns Craig) during George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. The castle scenes, however, have not yet been connected to the reflections on representation and mediality undertaken by some of Kenilworth’s most prominent characters throughout the novel. What I want to demonstrate in my paper is that the novel negotiates two different attitudes to visual representation and proceeds to associate them with two different modes of visualizing ‘the political’. While Edmund Blount and his followers support the violent rituals of bear-baiting and tournaments as unmitigated presentations of war and martial signs of national power, Walter Raleigh is joined by Queen Elizabeth herself in advocating more modern – and more conciliatory – forms of representing the nation. These include the pageants organized for the Queen, the theatre of William Shakespeare but also, and importantly, the description of the nation’s more martial traditions. I argue that Scott in this way writes his own medium, the historical novel, into the British culture of (predominantly visual) popular media arising around 1800, which, among other things, strove to disseminate an accessible imagery of the British nation.

Anxiety of the Visual - Percy Shelley

Sophie Thomas, Lecturer, Sussex University

“Vision and Revulsion: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria”

This paper explores a palpable Romantic anxiety about the visual, apparent in responses to certain situations in which the visual has a somewhat repulsive and overwhelming force. Moving from a detailed reading of Shelley’s ekphrastic poem on a Flemish painting of the Medusa, the paper turns to the phantasmagoria shows in Paris and London. Representations of the Medusa were a popular feature of these “ghost” shows, and relate not only to the way anxiety about the visual fuelled an interest in the phantasmatic, but also to the prominence of the Medusa in the visual symbology of the French Revolution (itself represented, by Carlyle for instance, as inherently phantasmagoric). At the phantasmagoria, looking has particularly terrifying features, and the subversiveness of the image, and of the illusory, is debated and displayed. The politics and aesthetics of terror may be said to converge in a form of visual spectacle that plays on the status of the visual, trading on a form of representational anxiety that I argue is also implicit in ekphrastic texts such as Shelley’s. The phantasmagoria undoes or overturns the representational “fix” of ekphrasis, by turning loose the Gorgon look—upon its audience, if not on the streets of revolutionary Paris.

Sarah Peterson, Graduate Student, Emory University

Mediating Vision: Shelley and Ekphrasis

This essay considers Percy Shelley’s poetic and philosophical emphasis on the power of the “unseen” in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” in light of his interest and private writings on sculpture and painting and his 1819 poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.” By privileging the invisible, Shelley also encourages his readers to consider how the visual and vision more generally, threaten an individual’s relationship with nature and her access to the imagination. In his letters to Thomas Peacock between the years 1818-1820 as well as in other writings during his time in Italy, Shelley revealed his investment in the potential of Italian paintings and sculpture to realize ideal beauty in external forms (Letters 2: 127). This insight into the potential power of the visual is also communicated, perhaps more strangely, in his ekphrastic poem, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci.” This poem raises many questions about the nature of vision. Of all the artworks he saw and wrote about privately in letters, why did he chose to publish a poem about a painting so bound up in questions of vision? Because the image or a reproduction is not ever published alongside the poem, Shelley creates an imagined juxtaposition of text and image. This essay explores Shelley’s relationship to the visual through an examination of this juxtaposition and his poetic privileging of the invisible over the visible. The complex frame of Shelley’s Medusa poem calls into question the poet’s usual emphasis on the unseen, and locates him within a culture uncertain about visuality and the impact of the visual on the imagination.

Todd David Verdun, Assistant Professor, Washington & Jefferson College

Invisible Magnitude: Seeing the Power of Sound in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”

As the highest peak in Europe and thus a chief spectacle of the Grand Tour, Mont Blanc offered its attendants copious visual signs of natural power. Yet Shelley, exploring the Vale of Chamonix in July 1816, continually turns in “Mont Blanc” from the visual to the auditory: the echo of the river in the ravine, the “voice” (80) of the mountain, the unique and complex rhyme scheme and rhythms of his own pentameter lines. Each verse paragraph of the poem enacts a meditative, undulating movement from sight to sound, with the passages about sound at the middle or end of each section being the most heavily revised lines of the manuscript in his Geneva Notebook. Shelley’s poetic response suggests that sound, as a form imposed on air, attracts and communicates an affectivity that the visual impression alone, mighty as it is, does not. At the same time, some of the poem’s salient sound patterns, including the rhymes completed at great distance, demand visual as well as aural acuity and an imagination searching for correspondent forms. Such formal arrangement underscores the way Shelley’s movements from sight to sound become passages through which he discerns more deliberately the distinction between what is seen and unseen, heard and unheard. This heightening of sense and intellect in and through the poetic medium unveils for Shelley a way to conceive not only how the mind receives and gives “fast influencings” (38) but also how contemporary theories of aesthetics and ethics inform, contend with, and articulate his developing poetics.

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Cultural Imaginings

David H. Chisholm, Professor of German Studies, University of Arizona

Romantic Idealism in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Don Juan”

Like many German Romantic writers, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann believed that Music “is the most romantic of all the arts – one might say the only genuinely Romantic one – for its sole subject is the infinite.” In fact one can say that for Hoffmann, music and Romanticism were largely if not completely synonymous. Himself a musician, composer and music critic as well as one of the greatest German Romanic writers, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Mozart’s music, so much so that he changed his third name from “Wilhelm” to “Amadeus” early in life.

The traditional story of Don Juan, written by the Spanish monk Gabriel Téllez in 1630 as a warning against pursuing the seducer’s dissolute lifestyle, contains a few basic plot elements which remained essentially unchanged in the many retellings until Hoffmann infused it with a new spirit of Romanticism in 1813. Lorenzo da Ponte’s 1787 libretto for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (subtitled dramma giocoso, “lighthearted or playful drama”) added almost nothing new to this legend, and many music critics have expressed the view that the listener endures a rather banal, silly, unconvincing story for the sake of Mozart’s great and inspiring music.

Where then did Hoffmann find the spiritual and Romantic elements of his story, given that they are nowhere to be found in previous treatments of the original tale? In this paper I propose that it was primarily the transcendent power of Mozart’s music that evoked a deeper meaning for Hoffmann and led him to look beyond the merely literal interpretations of the story which had predominated up until 1813. The paper argues that a deeper appreciation and understanding of Hoffmann’s Don Juan is to be found in the unique Romantic perspective which the music opened up for the writer, whose reception and literary recreation of the opera represents a radical departure from previous interpretations.

The paper concludes by showing how Hoffmann’s version paved the way for later treatments of this old story of the hedonistic libertine.

Charles Carroll, Doctoral Candidate, The City University of New York

The Theatre of Excuse: Concealment, Display and Justification in Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility and Rousseau’s Confessions

The question of display - what to show and what to hide is a crucial one in the works of Jane Austen. Should Anne Elliot reveal that she still loves Captain Wentworth despite not having seen him for these eight years then the drama of the novel is lost. Should Mr. Darcy show too soon that he loves Elizabeth, he will never get the chance to show his true character. This contrast between hiding and display is perhaps most evident in Sense & Sensibility. The differences between Elinor, who is always concealing her feelings, and Marianne who is always showing them, could hardly be greater. As Marianne says to Elinor: “We have neither of us anything to tell; you because you communicate, and I because I conceal nothing.” (120) Of course, there is much to tell, but it is in the tension between concealing and revealing that the novel finds its force. Austen is always on the side of concealment; she finds in the propriety of concealment a wellspring for order, happiness and moral good.

Rousseau might have been her opposite, for in his Confessions he, like Marianne Dashwood, conceals nothing: “I have displayed myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behavior was such, as good, generous, and noble when I was so.” (17) Yet Rousseau’s theatrical behavior (his indecent exposure and his famous theft of a ribbon) and his perpetual concerns about his reputation lead him into the extended excuse of The Confessions. Rousseau’s ideas about moral good flow out of his own self-revealing character. For him, the abasement of confession is sufficient justification for his crimes. In an important scene in Sense & Sensibility Austen uses the theatre of excuse to condemn Willoughby, Marianne’s purported lover, while pretending to give him a chance. Austen and Rousseau thus reveal very different attitudes about display, truth, and how one is to live a moral life.
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Figures of Reading as Spectacle

Simon Hull,
PhD Candidate, University of Bristol

'From Tragedy to Comedy: Reading the Theatrical City with Charles Lamb'

Through a parallel of two famous examples of Lamb's dramatic criticism which span a ten-year period, I trace a transition in the author from an essentially anti-theatrical to a theatrical relation to the city.

First published in Leigh Hunt's short-lived 'Reflector', in the 1812 essay 'On the Acting of Garrick and the Plays of Shakspeare...', Lamb privileges the experience of reading the tragedies over seeing them performed. Unfortunately, Hunt's magazine folded before Lamb could fulfil the promise at the end of this essay of a sequel on the comedies. Lamb's anti-theatrical stance on Shakespeare is thus established, and is indeed subsequently developed by Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Hunt into a familiar tenet of Romantic criticism. All three voice a similar concern over the spectacularization of theatre, as epitomised by the 'pantomimic' acting style and pre-eminent celebrity of Edmund Kean.

Yet perhaps Lamb's omission of comedy is also owing to an appreciation of its cultural significance which is not fully developed until Elia's arrival in the early 1820s. Certainly, it is through Elia that Lamb can be found ten years later lamenting the passing from the stage of 'artificial comedy', in an essay which reflexively describes the conversely pro-theatrical vision of the older Lamb. Broadening the implications of this transition further, as itself an essayistic 'performance' for a London periodical - the London Magazine - Elia can be read as a key figure within the cultural discourse of the 'city as theatre', one which suggests that this phenomenon is about much more than ritualized behaviour and social conditioning.

Tone Brekke, Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College, Oxford

Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View: “the exercise of the most enlarged principles of humanity.”

Although Wollstonecraft was present at the “scene” and stayed in France from December 1792 to April 1795, her discourse in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) contains no direct traces of her own personal observations. Presented as the account of an omniscient narrator, whose presence in the narrative is limited to the occasional “we,” Wollstonecraft’s style contains few of the self-reflexive comments which characterizes her Vindications. In adopting a more impersonal narrative voice, Wollstonecraft diverge from the epistolary, eyewitness model associated with Helen Maria Williams’s widely read account on the revolution,

Letters from France (1790). Yet in spite of Wollstonecraft’s distancing from Williams’ eyewitness model, Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View repeatedly relies on the tropes of spectatorship and theatricality, a vocabulary that permeates not only Williams’ text, but a whole range of other British eyewitness accounts from the French revolution and its aftermath. Wollstonecraft in fact opens her text with such tropes, “The revolution in France exhibits a scene, in the political world” (v). She also personifies rationality precisely in similar terms, as when she describes “reason” as “beaming on the grand theatre of political changes” (vi). Moreover, by describing the French national character as inherently theatrical, Wollstonecraft also resorts to the spectacle as a model that both explains the revolution and its failure. Read in conjunction, An Historical and Moral View and the review of Williams, reflect Wollstonecraft’s ambivalence about the discursive praxis of the affective, first person account of the revolutionary events which was emerging out of the revolution controversy: while she questions Williams’ use of the epistolary, first person discourse, she at the same time adopts this tradition’s reliance on spectatorship. My paper will focus on this particular ambivalence as a framework for a discussion of how Wollstonecraft’s attempt to articulate an affective basis for the social, in the form of her revised and “sympathetic” version of universal benevolence, or “the most enlarged principles of humanity,” involves a negotiation of genres and their implicit affective tropes. Whereas she aligns theatricality and epistolary spectacles with the reifying, individualizing, transitory tropes of sensibility, she nevertheless identifies the remedy against all of this in such tropes. These positive spectacles attempts, however, to revise some of the individualistic implications of the sympathy associated with Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. Wollstonecraft’s preface projects the theatrical tropes onto a discourse of enlightenment history, thereby supplementing this affective site with a durable, rational and collective aspect. In this sense Wollstonecraft , who frequently experiments with contradictions, or with identifying, as she puts it, “the antidote in the poison,” uses theatrical metaphors to combine a regulative framework with the production of social affect, in short, to balance benevolence with the universal.

Michelle Landauer, PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne

“Images of Virtue: Reading, Reformation and the Visualization of Culture in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse”

In this essay I discuss the visualization of culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by examining Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. I argue that this novel highlights the relationship between interpretation and identity formation by outlining a style of reading that focuses on the visual aspects of interpretation.

I start by describing the manner in which Rousseau relates the development of language to identity formation. Assuming that “passions stimulated the first words” (Rousseau, “Essay” 11), Rousseau argues that language originated in a natural, feminine, maternal form of unity (pure passion in speech). With the emergence of writing, however, language came to occupy a patriarchal realm of absence and deferred presence, in so far as writing is the graphic representation of passion, and thus a symbol of absence. Rousseau explains that the system of substitution instituted by language is the basis for a split or divide in the “modern” subject. This split occurs due to the introduction of temporality, where a sign system allows for expression of the past, present and future; it is also the result of the manner in which the subject is defined by and through the “sign,” which is always external and thus establishes a division between an “inner” and “outer” sense of self. Rousseau believes that if we can find a way to overcome mediation then this modern sense of fragmentation will be defeated, and we will be able to experience “a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul” (Rousseau, Reveries 88).

For Rousseau, one of the answers to this modern dilemma was to be found in a reading project where the subject is unified through “his” engagement with the “other” (the text). Rousseau defined this reading project in his novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Through close examination of this text, I describe Rousseau’s theories on reading. I discuss how Rousseau considered the imagination as the primary medium through which interpretation occurred and explain how the passions were believed to influence the imagination and limit one’s ability to read properly. Wary of the powers inherent to the imagination, especially while it is under the influence of passion, Rousseau sought to repress passion and control the imagination through an image – the image of the ideal woman. This image needed to be internalized in the reader’s heart and mind. Readers would then interpret bodies/texts/objects through an imagination that is stabilized by this enduring symbol, allowing them to have access to “truth,” and regain a sense of unity and happiness.

I conclude by arguing that Rousseau’s reading project, with its emphasis on the internalization of the image of the feminine ideal, played a significant role in promoting the visualization of culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I then briefly outline the many ways in which these theories influenced writers of the Romantic period, particularly those writers working within the Gothic tradition.

Spectacular Performances

Angela Esterhammer, Distinguished Professor, The University of Western Ontario

Romanticism at the Improv: Tommaso Sgricci and the Spectacle of Improvisation

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the term “improvisation” referred specifically to the art of the (male) improvvisatore or (female) improvvisatrice, a performer who composed poetry extemporaneously, in public, on topics proposed by an audience. Strongly associated with Italy and Italians, this mode of performance was witnessed by many northern European writers who travelled to the South. It received remarkably mixed responses, ranging from fascination and admiration to skepticism and scorn – or sometimes all at once. The intimate association of the improvvisatore with Italy helped to shape foreigners’ views of the Italian “national character.” By way of contrast, the experience of improvisational performance could not help but have an effect on English viewers’ own ideas about inspiration, composition, the persona of the poet, and the involvement of poetry with spectacle.

My paper will examine the formation of these attitudes by focussing on the English encounter with Tommaso Sgricci (1789-1836), the most sensational of the nineteenth-century improvvisatori. A flamboyant and controversial performer, radical in his homosexual lifestyle as well as his political affiliations, Sgricci was known for extemporizing entire Classical tragedies before packed houses. His “star” status spread beyond Italy through reports in English periodicals, particularly the Literary Gazette. Mary and Percy Shelley were closely acquainted with Sgricci in Pisa during the winter of 1820-21, and their differing responses to his performances and his personal behaviour left revealing traces in their depiction of Italy, particularly in Mary Shelley’s Valperga, the novel she was writing that winter. Byron’s ambivalent attitude toward Sgricci may shed light on his ironic pose as a writing improvvisatore, especially in Beppo and the later cantos of Don Juan.

With the help of comments by Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, and other expatriates who wrote about their encounters with poetic improvisers in Italy, I will analyse the effect of Sgricci’s mode of performance on English notions of poetic composition, spectacle, and Italian culture. The performance of extemporized poetry presented an audience with poetic composition as a visual and physical phenomenon. Indeed, it represented the creation of poetry as bodily suffering, since Sgricci and his fellow performers were often observed to collapse under the strain of a performance, and Sgricci’s improvisational practice was eventually blamed for his debilitating illness and early death. At the same time, stage improvisation occasioned a responsive, sympathetic, and even participatory relationship between the poet-performer and the audience. As Lady Blessington reported when witnessing an improvvisatore extemporize on the death of Byron (The Idler in Italy [1839], 2: 259), the listeners experienced vicarious triumphs and failures by identifying with the on-stage performer. My paper will consider some of the dynamics of the encounter between this “foreign” spectacle of spontaneous, public composition, and viewers who were typically more at home with a Romantic poetry composed in solitude, or recollected in tranquility.

Susan Matthews, Senior Lecturer, University of Roehampton

Happy Copulation: enthusiastic looking and the multitude.

Starting from Blake’s striking phrase, used in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion to describe both looking (a ‘free-born joy’) and sexuality, this paper traces the association of enthusiasm with images, sexuality and the body. These associations are satirised in Hogarth’s print Enthusiasm Delineated (c.1761) (revised as Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism 1762). The Hogarth prints were published and discussed in 1798 by John Ireland in A Supplement to Hogarth Illustrated, published by Boydell for the Shakespeare Gallery. The association with Boydell suggests the attempts of public art culture to produce a revised version of looking which severs the association of looking with the body and with a vulgar audience for images. This is a continuation of a concern which dates from the 1760s to control access by the ‘multitude’ to the viewing of art by means of an entrance charge. This move was opposed by Blake’s friend George Cumberland who attacks not only the effects of the Royal Academy on the public culture of art, but also Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. In his 1796 Thoughts on Outline he rejects the idea that ‘by multiplying impressions, we lessen the value of our original’ and claims that there is no loss of enjoyment to the owner if possessions are ‘exposed to the eyes of the multitude’. Cumberland’s model of viewing sculpture is inescapably sexual, in contrast to the argument of Priestley’s 1777 Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism. Priestley uses an associationist model derived from Hartley to set up a hierarchy of the senses in which the eye and the ear are superior to the ‘grosser senses’. The association of Priestley with Fuseli’s Milton gallery associates the galleries with polite and regulated viewing. In contrast, the figure of the ‘raree show’ is often used in the period as short-hand for the ‘strange effects resulting from literal and low conceptions of sacred things’ which Ireland sees represented by Hogarth.

David Sigler, Doctoral Candidate, University of Virginia

Two Masquerades and their Spec(tac)ular Discontents in Mary Robinson's Walsingham

Thanks to influential readings by Anne Janowitz, Sharon Setzer, Chris Cullens, and Eleanor Ty, Mary Robinson's fifth novel Walsingham, or the Pupil of Nature (1797) has provided a late-eighteenth century example of the ways that femininity can be constituted by and through masquerade. Walsingham stages two scenes of "Romantic Spectacle" in its third volume, when, shortly after arriving in London, Walsingham attends consecutive masquerade balls. At the first masquerade, Walsingham mistakes his date Amelia for his sister Isabella, with whom he has been in love. At the second masquerade, Walsingham accidentally has sex with Amelia, mistaking her for Isabella. When he awakes the next morning to discover his error, he finds that has indeed made a "spectacle" of himself.

Terry Castle's famous analysis of the masquerade in Masquerade and Civilization focuses on the symbolic aspects of its festivities, revealing how social relations are temporarily suspended, overturned, and contested in these carefully delimited scenes of festival. But the plot of Walsingham demands that we examine how the masquerade depends on the imaginary order for its structure and support, in that, for Lacan, the imaginary provides the conditions for the "lure." The scene of the masquerade - and the lure that Amelia extends - is for Walsingham situated on the imaginary plane, characterized by "a somber similarity, which levelled all forms and features to one gloomy mass of insipidity" (Walsingham 273).

Through a reading of the novel's two masquerade scenes, this paper will show how (and, more surprisingly, why) Walsingham makes a spectacle of himself as he enters the very scene of social spectacle. We will find that his entrapment in the imaginary order - a product of his having made a series of specular identifications - establishes the very conditions of his humiliation even as it establishes the conditions for his eventual entry into the symbolic order. At the masquerades, we find that Walsingham begins to interpret the world not as a mesh of interwoven similarities and differences but rather as a series of signifiers, linked one by one in a chain to an inaccessible master signifier and held together, however tenuously, at specific anchoring points.

Oriental Spectacles

Abdul Kidwai, Professor, Aligarh Muslim University, India

“Samples of the Finest Orientalism”: The Spectacle of the Orient in Lord Byron’s “Turkish Tales”

A study of the Oriental landscape/settings, figures of speech, names, characters, diction, religion, customs and costume as employed by Byron in his “Turkish Tales”.

This account will be concluded with some remarks on the Orientalism of his contemporaries (Robert Southey and Thomas Moore in particular) and his empathy in portraying the Orient/Orientals.

Lisa Nevarez, Assistant Professor, Siena College, New York

Inscribing the "Ruins": The Act of Gazing in Lady Maria Nugent's India Journal

In this paper, I examine how in her India Journal Lady Maria Nugent presents and conflates literal and figurative representations of "ruin," the Indian structure and the Indian woman, through her spectacular gaze. In the Journal, which spans the years 1811 to 1815, Nugent offers descriptions of her encounters with these "objects" and these entries enable her to imagine a pre-British Indian past and to place herself as a participant in it, destabilizing and threatening her role as a British military official's consort. I argue that Nugent's presentation of this woman-edifice construction can be interpreted via Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity. As well, Nugent's performative deployment of humor in her descriptions of her encounters with Indian women reveals not only a Western cultural objectification of the Indian but also pinpoints Nugent's simultaneous fear of and attraction to the female Indian body. The link between woman and edifice in Nugent's account and her emphasis on "decay," as seen specifically through her visits to the Taj Mahal and to the elderly Bahu Begam, widow of Shuja ud Daula, provide an approach to analyzing this travel narrative. By exploring the India Journal from a postcolonial theoretical perspective and drawing on recent studies of travel accounts by Tim Edensor, Indira Ghose, Sara Suleri, and others, this paper examines the joining of women and structure with an emphasis on decay, "ruin," and humor and seeks to unravel some of the complexities of Anglo-Indian encounters through Nugent's spectacular gaze.

Heather Braun, Doctoral Candidate, Boston College

“By my power is her beauty veil’d”: Exotic Spectacle in Keats’ Lamia

The spectacle of the nineteenth-century femme fatale sustained erotic desire, even as it threatened to sever ties to a world of individual prudence and social progress. John Keats’s Lamia (1820) appears as a fatal hybrid of ethereal goddess and grotesque monster; she elicits both lust and terror in those seeking to describe and contain her troubling excess. Keats’s final narrative poem returns to la belle dame in the forest, re-fashioning her more sympathetically with keener attention to her own intense desires. Perhaps more than any of Keats’ other poems, Lamia highlights the luxurious exoticism of a supernatural creature in pursuit of an unsuspecting male mortal. Transforming herself from a brilliantly-colored snake into a less exotic yet still beguiling woman, Lamia seduces Lycius not only with spectacles of Oriental intrigue and unbounded sensuality but also with a detachment from the “cold philosophy” of Apollonius’ rational thought. Portraying herself with the “airy texture” (l. 19) of medieval romance, Lamia dissolves into a landscape of courtly extravagance that she herself creates, embellishes, and, until the poem’s final scene, powerfully sustains. The success of this exotic spectacle relies almost entirely upon Lamia’s ability to re-shape herself and her immediate surroundings according to a romantic cycle of enchantment and disillusion.

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Femininity, the Gaze and the Body

Clare Parfitt,

The Sylph and the Seductress: romanticism and the construction of the female dancing body as spectacle

Abstract will be posted shortly

Patricia Smyth, Lecturer, Kingston University

Unmasking: The performance of authenticity in early nineteenth century theatre and painting

Stendhal’s Salon criticism attacked the theatricality of expression in painting and its consequent failure to emotionally engage its audience. However, as he acknowledged, reality offered no suitable models of ‘authentic’ expression for the artist. Theatricality was thought to have infected society at a deep level. Revolutionary rhetoric was blamed for a legacy of “attitudes forcées” and “expressions outrées”. Physiognomists argued that the ‘real’ self lay beneath the corrupt realm of public roles. Artists and actors responded to this notion through the theme of unmasking and the pursuit of naïve behaviour (i.e.: the expression of a figure when unobserved, absorbed in an action or experiencing strong emotion).

Diderot had asserted that real emotion appeared awkward and incomprehensible and should, therefore, be transformed on stage into a graceful, expressive performance. However, melodrama actors began to deliberately court clumsy attitudes and jerky delivery as markers of ‘natural’, naïve expression. Marie Dorval’s emotional performances held the audience in thrall and spread to them like a contagion, prompting tears and fainting. In response to these ideas, painters such as Richard, Vermay and Delaroche transgressed traditional demands for clarity and grace in favour of uncommunicative, clumsy and ambiguous poses, provoking similar demonstrations of emotion at the Salon.

Audiences claimed bourgeois identity through such displays, believing that the transfiguring effect of emotion revealed the true self so that “a chamber-maid believes herself to have the feelings of a princess when she cries at a melodrama” (Geoffroy 1822). However, satirical caricatures by Gavarni and others lampooned the new acting style and insisted upon the humble backgrounds of the audience. They undermined claims to sensibility, exposing them as contrived and clumsy performances.

Letitia E. Landon

Jason Goldsmith, Assistant Professor, Butler University

The Romantic Poet as Spectacle: Staging Letitia Landon's Celebrity

After her mysterious death in Africa, Letitia Elizabeth Landon dropped from the literary firmament nearly as swiftly as she had ascended. One of the Romantic-era's most talked about figures, Landon was 'rediscovered' during the feminist turn in literary criticism in the 1980s. Anne K. Mellor, for example, took note of the complex dialectic through which L.E.L.'s celebrity-image was manufactured: "her life was regarded (as are the lives of famous literary and artistic figures today) as 'public property'; indeed L.E.L. can be seen as among the first of a long line of media-created 'stars' in the new print culture of the nineteenth century." Identifying Landon as a 'star', Mellor succinctly links the Romantic-era poet to the celebrities of twentieth-century Hollywood. Both a participant and a product in the mediated circuit of Romantic-era celebrity, Landon, like the stars of today, became a brand-name.

Building on Mellor's insight, this paper traces the connections between Landon's extraordinary literary celebrity and the late eighteenth-century stage. Landon was an avid theatergoer: her letters, novels, and criticism abound in references to productions and performers, and she wrote tribute poems to some of the leading theatrical figures of the day. My interest, however, is in how Landon?s sense of the theater shaped her career and poems, which offer a complex response to the pressing demands of mass-media celebrity. Landon, whose popularity rivaled that of Lord Byron?to whom she was frequently compared?negotiated her celebrity, I argue, by looking back to developments in eighteenth-century theories of acting. Bringing to her poetic performances a keen sense of theatricality, stardom, and gender derived from the iconic figure of Sarah Siddons, Landon developed a poetic strategy through which she simultaneously staged and subverted the lyric identity, L.E.L., for which she became so widely renowned. Although I refer in passing to several mediated representations of Landon as L.E.L., my argument in this talk will focus on her 'autobiographical' poem, 'A History of the Lyre?' and the strategies of spectatorship she develops therein.

Sharifah Aishah Osman, Lecturer, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur

Displaying the Byronic Heroine: Letitia E. Landon's Orientalist Fiction as Nationalist Literature

Much of Letitia E. Landon's popularity as a female author was derived from her association with the annuals or gift books that dominated the English literary market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s, namely The Keepsake, Heath's Book of Beauty, and Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book. The annuals consisted of poems and stories provided by well-connected contributors that were frequently accompanied by illustrated plates or fine steel engravings of various beautiful young women, or portraits of stately homes or exotic landscapes visited only by the affluent. Since the annuals were mainly concerned with the representation of women, they played a crucial role in the construction and consolidation of a middle-class female domestic ideal, one that was achieved through the linking of the female images that appeared within them with English national character. These idealized depictions of womanhood--embodied in the visual and poetical illustrations of beautiful young women, both English and foreign--were highly influential in the perpetuation of such middle-class domestic virtues as monogamy, Christianity, and the imperial civilizing mission, and were thus used to "[help] legitimize both England's sense of moral superiority and the imperial ambitions this superiority underwrote," as Glennis Stephenson notes.Fashionable and commercially successful annuals like Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book and Heath's Book of Beauty, in which Landon was a frequent contributor, provide important insights into how she deployed images of sentimental womanhood in her Orientalist fiction in order to assert and cultivate notions of English national identity in an era of colonial expansion.

Central to Landon's achievement in promoting a sense of national consciousness among her female audience is her sympathetic characterization of the Byronic Oriental heroine in the annuals, a portrait that she combines with the visual appeal of Byron's literary exoticism to draw attention to a universalized female experience. In fact, Landon's 'domestication' of that most recognizable of Oriental characters, the female harem slave, illustrates how she appropriates this liminal figure to promote a nationalist ideology that emphasizes the strength and nobility of the female spirit and the moral role of women in the cultivation of the domestic affections and civic virtue. Thus, this paper examines Landon's depiction of the refigured harem slave in poems like 'Gulnare' (1833) and 'Immolation of a Hindoo Widow' (1836), as well as tales like 'The Indian Orphan' (1825) and 'A Scene in the life of Nourmahal' (1837) in order to demonstrate how these Orientalist texts provided English women with the opportunity to embrace their role as benevolent Christians through their empathy for the subjugated Eastern woman--a view that paralleled the maternal and nurturing duties of nineteenth-century Britain towards her colonies.

Peter Simonsen, Research Fellow, University of Southern Denmark

Making a Spectacle of One's Self: The Ekphrastic L. E. L.

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in Romantic ekphrasis (Heffernan 1993, Grant Scott 1994, 2001), which has run parallel with a new focus on the Romantic visual culture of spectacle (Galperin 1993, Pascoe 1997, D'Arcy Wood 2001). Drawing on this body of work, the present paper describes and contextually situates the ekphrastic work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Landon was possibly the most persistent and varied ekphrastic poet of the period, but she has not been systematically studied as such. Examples of her ekphrastic art range from shorter poems published in the Literary Gazette in the 1820s, in the New Monthly Magazine in the 1830s, and in numerous annuals and giftbooks, to longer works such as The Improvisatrice (1824) and The Vow of the Peacock (1835). This latter, critically neglected poem is an ekphrasis of a spectacular history painting by Daniel Maclise, which reads as both the culmination of Romantic ekphrasis and the decentring of its predominantly male tradition. The poem is read in the light of Landon's awareness of herself as a spectacular visual performance in the 'text' of London's social circles, in portraits of her published in popular magazines and as frontispiece to The Vow of the Peacock, and finally with the knowledge (common at the time) that Maclise had used Landon as a model for a figure in his painting. Landon fully realised the potential of the visual arts in her artistic project, which was centred from first to last in imagining and producing spectacular versions of her self. The paper shows that we find a far less anxious sense of the visual arts in Landon in comparison to e.g. Wordsworth, Shelley or Keats. In Landon works of art are not silenced but speak for themselves and they are never seen as paralysing Medusas. The paper suggests that this congenial ease of reference was both determined by Landon's gender and a reflection of her cultural moment, which saw the proliferation and popularisation of visual art, and it concludes that to understand the ekphrastic L.E.L. is to better understand the Romantic age as an age of spectacle.

Caricature, Satire

Val Scullion,

Associate Lecturer, Open University

The influence of the grotesque, caricature, masquerade and the commedia dell-arte on E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman'.

Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman' (1816-17) is famous largely because of Freud's seminal essay, 'The Uncann'? (1919), which reads its ocular imagery as representing the author's castration complex. This paper, by contrast, focuses on Hoffmann's skills as a cartoonist and factotum in the theatre and opera world. It interprets 'The Sandman' as a satiric attack on social hypocrisy, charlatanism and the ascetic Romantic artist. It aligns with the critical commonplace that Hoffmann's syncretic writing was shaped by the visual arts, such as the popular engravings of Daniel Chodowiecki, William Hogarth and Jacques Callot. This is confirmed, for example, by Hoffmann's dedication of his first story collection to Callot (particularly Callot's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1635). However, an artistic connection between the visual art of the grotesque and Hoffmann's fiction has not been developed with respect to ?The Sandman?. Unlike Freudian interpretation, the paper reads this anti-Romantic tale as an expression of the grotesque in both graphic and theatrical comic traditions. Images of eyes, eye-wear, magnifying optics and bodily distortion derive as much from carnival masks with small eye apertures and elongated noses as from the repressed sexual desires of Hoffmann or his characters. By tracing the effect of popular visual and theatrical motifs and allowing for the increasing cultural familiarity with telescopic lenses in the early nineteenth century, this paper contextualises 'The Sandman' in its historical moment. It emphasises the lampooning of society, and demonstrates the synthesis of spectacle and written word in an important text of the Romantic period.

Lucy Morrison, Assistant Professor of English, Salisbury University

Thomas Hood’s Comic Annual: Satirizing the Empire

In recent years, the Annuals published in the 1820s and 1830s have begun to receive more and more critical attention, since they allow us insight into some of the period’s dominant cultural concerns. While Letitia Elizabeth Landon, as Editor of Fisher’s Drawing-Room Scrap-Book for much of the 1830s, repined at having to illustrate thirty-eight plates depicting China, a place she had never visited, knew relatively little about, and, judging by the poem written to “illustrate” plate number thirty-six, certainly cared little for, many of the Annuals endorsed foreign scenes as reflections of the glorious empire booming. For British readers at home, the Annuals enforced their sense of the splendors of Britain’s landscapes and heroes, while their tales of exotics abroad underscored their sense of international dominance and superiority.

But one Annual, Thomas Hood’s Comic Annual, published 1830-1842, stands out. It is the only one to satirize the others, to mock their silk embossed covers and contents. Hood, instead, scorns the famous writers deigning to sell their wares in a Holiday token piece, with much of the contents of his volumes being satirical odes or sonnets aimed at such literary personages as Joanna Baillie. But also within these pages are several pages satirizing the Empire of the time. In my paper, I propose to explore what Hood’s satires reveal about contemporary attitudes toward cultural dominance and, especially, toward the racism prevalent in society of the time. Considering two pieces --the poem “A True Story” and the short prose piece, “Letter from a Parish Clerk in Barbadoes, to One in Hampshire”--from the 1830 and 1831 issues respectively, Hood’s satires (as well as the accompanying illustrations, which I shall also address) point out the ignorance of many of Britain’s Annual-reading subjects in their misconceptions of imperial life. Giving voice to servants overseas*as well as taunting their masters in negative depictions--Hood highlights the dissonance between perspectives. In doing so, he challenges readers’ easy assumptions about cultural imperialism and demands that they reconfigure the simple reductiveness often found on the surface of contemporary society.

Laura O'Brien, PhD Candidate, University College Dublin - IRCHSS 'Government of Ireland' Scholar/HII Scholar

La poire est mort, vive le roi? : fallen monarchs, caricature and political culture in France, 1830-1848.

The Romantic period in France was one of both political and cultural tumult and upheaval. Alongside developments in art and literature, the period witnessed the fall of the First Empire, the restoration and demise of the Bourbon Monarchy, and the reestablishment of the Republic, as well as a string of insurrections and violent protests in the late 1820s and 1830s. The fates of these dynasties and regimes, as well as the (mis)adventures of France’s political actors, were contemporaneously being captured and interpreted by the burgeoning medium of political caricature, which had developed and formalised in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Epitomised by the success of Charles Philipon and Le Charivari in the 1830s, and more particularly by the enduring and all-encompassing association of Philipon’s symbol of the poire (pear) with the king Louis-Philippe, it was caricature which was the essence of the visualization of French political culture during the Romantic era.

Acknowledging the key role played by caricature in recording and reflecting the contemporary political mood at this time, this paper will examine the caricatural representations and depictions of deposed monarchs in the aftermath of revolutionary upheaval and regime change. It will concentrate on representations of Charles X after the July Revolution, which brought down both he and the Bourbon restoration in 1830, and on the treatment of Louis-Philippe, France’s final king, after the February Revolution of 1848. It will seek to examine and compare the satirical treatment meted out to these two monarchs after their fall from grace, and in so doing to explore these caricatures as visualizations of the prevalent contemporary attitudes to Charles and to Louis-Philippe, both as symbols of anciens régimes and as individuals. In conclusion, the paper will also examine the relationship between the nature of royal representation in post-revolutionary satire and the political culture of the new regimes established by the revolutionary process.

Inscription

Alex Watson, PhD Candidate, University of York

NOTES AND NOTORIETY: THOMAS JAMES MATHIAS' NOTES FOR THE PURSUITS OF LITERATURE (1794-7)

In the 1790s, Thomas James Mathias' notes for his ultra-conservative satire The Pursuits of Literature (1794-7) quickly became notorious for their extensiveness and censoriousness. The notes dominated the text to such an extent that the three-hundred and eighty-one pages of the 1798 collected edition contained only one-thousand four-hundred and six lines of poetry (an average of roughly three and a half lines per page); the remainder comprising the introduction and the notes.

In these notes, Mathias launched vituperative attacks on a series of prominent Whig radicals: the philosopher and novelist William Godwin, the antiquarian Joseph Ritson and the Whig scholar Richard Payne Knight. All the while, he avowed that "[I]n whatever shape French Philosophy may approach"I"resist and repel it." [1] Respondents characterised Mathias as "the fierce zealot", [2] an "inflated pretender to the throne of Criticism", [3] and a "dark assassin". [4] Annotation's position on the periphery of the text enabled Mathias to respond to such attacks from edition to edition, raising new issues as events unfolded.

This paper will consider Mathias' use of annotation as a means of creating a series of public spectacles, with the wider aim of furthering the Anti-Jacobin cause. I will conclude by examining the spectacle that gathered around The Pursuits - as Mathias' ideological enemies represented his use of private gossip as a transgression of the rules of play in the public sphere.

[1] Anonymous (Thomas James Mathias), The Pursuits of Literature?Part the Third (London: J. Owen, 1796)., p. iv.

[2] Anonymous, A Poem: on the Authors of Two Late Productions; Intitled ?The Baviad? and ?Pursuits of Literature? (London: J. Rivington, 1797), 101-2, p. 14.

[3] Anonymous, The Progress of Satire: An Essay in Verse. With Notes, Containing Remarks on ?The Pursuits of Literature? Second edition (London: J. Bell, 1798), p. 31.

[4] ?Andrew Oedipus?, The Sphinx?s Head Broken: or, a Political Epistle with Notes, to Thomas James M*th**s, Clerk to the Q***n?s Tr**s*r*r, proving him to be the Author of the Pursuits of Literature, A Satirical Poem. With Occasional Digressions and Remarks (London: J. Bell, 1798), note, p. 6.

Paula R. Feldman, Professor, University of South Carolina

Literary Annuals, Inscriptions, and the Display of Affection

The literary annuals of the 1820s, '30s, and '40s were best sellers and are, thus, a remarkable index to the taste and popular culture of Britain during this period. Designed to be given as gifts, they were often placed on the drawing-room tables of their recipients; most sported a presentation page, with space for a personalized inscription and became treasured mementos as well as status symbols. They reproduced important works of visual art by such painters as Lawrence, Reynolds, Turner, and Gainsborough. Within their pages appear the first publications of poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction works by such important figures as Coleridge, Shelley, Landon, Scott, Hemans, Moore, Howitt, and Wordsworth. Based largely on reviews, other anecdotal sources, and the physical appearance of the volumes, their readership is widely believed to have been middle class young women of marriageable age, and their purchasers are widely believed to have been their suitors. But these are assumptions, which this study tests by examining archival evidence never before considered?the hand-written inscriptions found within the pages of these volumes. I have recorded and analyzed inscriptions in hundreds of literary annuals, which document the genders of the recipient and the giver and the occasion and date of the gift. Inscriptions sometimes include a sentiment which indicates the relationship between the recipient and the giver. Thus, they provide concrete evidence, of a kind found nowhere else, of who the readership of these annuals were, who their purchasers were, and what the market for these volumes was. This power-point presentation includes images of representative inscriptions and documents how the cultural work of literary annuals was far more complicated than what has so far been imagined.

Gavin Edwards, Professor, University of Glamorgan

Capital Letters: the invisibility of the visual

The paper argues that the use of the capital letter in printed texts has a crucial effect on their meaning, but an effect which has been largely ignored by critics and editors because texts are usually read as prompters to oral performance. Most capital letters are not audible. Capital letters are a visual feature of the printed text which have real semantic effects. In the Romantic period, however, the meaning of the capital is often especially interesting and especially illusive because there was no firm convention among printers about when the capital should normally be used. Before about 1750 all nouns had normally been given initial capitals and proper names were distinguished by italic; by 1848 (when Dickens started to use the initial capital as a precision instrument in Dombey and Son) the modern system, which dispenses with italic and uses the initial capital to distinguish proper nouns from all other parts of speech, was firmly established. The typographic instability of the intervening period was one factor contributing to semantic instability.

The paper will look at two instances – the references to revolution and Revolution in Burke’s Reflections; the use of capitals in the 1812 and 1823 editions of Crabbe’s Tales - where writers were probably trying, in conditions of typographic instability, to control the use and meaning of the capital letter.

Architecture, the Gothic and the Picturesque

Deborah Philips, School of Arts, Brunel University, UK

William Gilpin and Walt Disney: the picturesque in the theme park

The entrance to each Disney theme park offers the visitor a vista of beautiful scenes¹ and of distant horizons ; from Main Street the visitor is offered glimpses of the themed lands¹ that are there to be pursued; the vistas offered include mountainous landscapes, European chalets, foliage and ruins. All the elements that William Gilpin proscribed for the landscaping of the picturesque are to be found in the contemporary theme park. William Gilpin was an instrumental figure in firmly establishing theTourist Gaze¹, in John Urry¹s phrase and in defining what elements a picturesque landscape should contain. This paper will argue that Gilpin¹s recommendations to the picturesque traveller¹ continue to be principles in the landscaping and design of the contemporary theme park. While the modern visitor to Disneyland may well have no knowledge of the picturesque, of Gilpin or the romantic imagination, the expectations of the contemporary theme park, and especially of Disneyland parks, continue to evoke the romantic traveller, in search of picturesque vistas and the excitement of the new.

The confusion in the genres of the theme park has been taken by many as symptomatic of a post-modern bricolage; this paper will argue instead that the contemporary carnival site is a collage of stories and images that have a long history in the popular imagination, and that the categories which shape the stories and iconography of the theme park remain those of the moment of Romanticism

Paul L Yoder, Ph.D Candidate--Saint Louis University (United States)

The Unseen Scene

The gothic castle plays a major role in the Romantic literature of the nineteenth-century, as the castle wall often represents a literal divide of individual perception, separating internal and external realities. I argue that the image of the castle wall, as a symbol of divided perception, is recast as the egotistical sublime and becomes a point of contention between such poets as Keats and Wordsworth. In this paper I will begin with the gothic castle as a literal symbol of psychoanalytic boundaries between an interior and exterior spatial divide and move on to the more abstract nature of Romantic imagination and perception. My argument is that what in the context of the gothic is a tangible representation of division, becomes a textual discourse for the major Romantic poets, specifically Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake. Much has already been said about how the Romantic imagination recasts perception based on Coleridge's reading of primary and secondary imagination; however, I would like to further this discussion beyond simply a reformulation of imaginary perception as it relates to internal and external boundaries, and examine these boundaries as a means of creating textual meanings. I will argue that it is with these meanings that Wordsworth's spots-of-time, Keats? Negative Capability and Lacan's object a all come together under an umbrella of post-structuralism and the concepts of readerly and writerly texts.

Nick Groom, Reader, University of Bristol

A Right Bloody Spectacle: Megaliths and the Romantic Imagination

Abstract under revision

Celebrity

Tom Mole, Assistant Professor, McGill University

"Thrice Beautiful the Outward Show": Byron's Spectacular Image

Through archival research, this paper will trace the proliferation of Byron's image in a variety of media from 1806 to the 1830s. I will contend that Byron's image was an essential element of his cultural impact and unearth the conventions of a Byronic pictorial discourse, which shadowed his poetry and supported his celebrity. Byron permeated Romantic culture not just because the portraits he commissioned were faithfully reproduced as engravings, but also because their image of Byron was appropriated, altered, improved, rethought, varied, or transformed. The result was a free-standing visual discourse that can account for Captain Forrester's "great [...] astonishment" when he met Byron in 1824 and found himself facing, "a being bearing as little resemblance to the pretended fac-simile, as I do to Apollo". [1] Byron became visible to his readers through the series of transformations that were worked upon a relatively small number of 'authorized' images. In the process, visual representations of the poet became cheaper and more widely distributed, simplified and commercially appropriated, eroticized and available to view in private. Byron's image slipped further and further out of his control. But the less Byron could control his representation, the more it could saturate Romantic visual culture, complementing the popularity of his poetry and extending his visual impact to those who could not see him in the flesh.

[1] Cited in Richard Walker, Regency Portraits, 2 vols (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985), I, 82.

Eric Eisner,

Assistant Professor, George Mason University

Systems of “Literary Lionism”: Romantic Authorship and the Star System

The Romantic period sees the rise of a market-based, mass-mediated culture of literary celebrity, what Harriet Martineau will call by 1839 a “system” of “literary lionism.” By the 1820s and 30s, the literary field is often visualized as a collection of celebrities, as in the illustrated “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters” that ran in Fraser’s from 1830 to 1838. My proposed paper considers the way the Fraser’s series both broadcasts a certain image of literary culture and reflects, in its commentary on the figures, on the circulation of the very kinds of images it markets. Briefly comparing the Fraser’s series to contemporary imaginations of the literary scene in Blackwood’s Noctes Ambrosianae, Martineau’s essay and M.J. Jewsbury’s The History of an Enthusiast, I argue these works register in different ways a new perception of the literary field as an abstract structure independent of the figures who participate in it, a star “system” of which authorial personality is increasingly seen as a mere effect. I then briefly consider the alternative vision of the Romantic literary scene offered in a magazine essay by Leigh Hunt describing his collection of celebrity locks of hair, arguing that Hunt’s peculiar spin on the trope of the collection of celebrities gives us not only an interesting way to think about his own professional activity as an author and impressario, but also an angle from which to rethink how other Cockney poets, especially Keats, negotiate the impersonal machineries of literary and market systems to create celebrity effects.

Claire Knowles, PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne

The De-Spectacularization of Mary Robinson

The beautiful, streetwise and scandalously fashionable Mary Robinson was one of England’s first multi-media celebrities. As a prominent actress and woman-about-town, Robinson featured regularly in the burgeoning media culture of the 1780s and 1790s. She also participated wholeheartedly in what might be termed the theatre of ‘real-life.’ Robinson was notorious for driving herself around the streets of London in expensive equipages, while her outings to the theatre and appearances at various high society gatherings were the subject of endless speculation. At a moment in which most female authors struggled to keep themselves out of the public spotlight, Robinson seems to have been drawn irresistibly to its glare. Indeed, for the early part of her public career Robinson was, as Tim Fulford suggests, “the embodiment of a culture of display” (30).

By the end of her life, however, Robinson had managed to distance herself from her earlier association with theatricality and artifice to become the “British Sappho,” one of the most popular poets of her era. This paper, then, traces Robinson’s movement away from her early-career association with public spectacle. It argues that Robinson effects her transformation into one of the leading lifts of British poetry by adopting elements of the poetic persona established by Charlotte Smith in her famously introspective Elegiac Sonnets (1784).

Works Cited

Fulford, Tim. “The Electrifying Mrs. Robinson.” Women’s Writing 9:1 (2002): 23-35.

Blake, Politics and the Spectacle

Katrin Hakkinen, Doctoral Student, University of Tartu

Blake's Europe as a critique of the apotheosis of liberty

Europe: a Prophesy is a text in which Blake has relegated the core narrative action to Enitharmon, a fresh addition to his evolving mythopoesis. Unlike her roughly simultaneous appearance in The (First) Book of Urizen, in which she primarily serves a procreative function, Enitharmon of Europe is shown as a domineering mother who has broken free from the matrimonial trappings (there is hardly any interaction between her and Los) and has committed herself to the shaping of the society's belief systems through the agency of her children. The abode of Enitharmon 'her crystal house' is the key attribute which circumscribes her meaning in this poem signaling an important deficiency.

I will argue that the double invocations of Enitharmon around the night of her sleep (first summoning the repressive counter-revolutionary forces, second inviting another set of her children to the liberated 'the sports of night/ Within her crystal house') can be read as Blake's critique of the conceptions and articulations of liberty and the Lockean philosophy underlying these. I will discuss the iconography of the figure of liberty during the Revolution debate and its representations in various writings, such as critical responses to Paine's Rights of Man, or works by radical women poets. The apotheosized form of liberty these representations evoke is transfigured by Blake in the character of Enitharmon whose yearning for 'bliss' incites into action both warring parties. However, Blake's visual rendition of liberty/Enitharmon in Europe contests her textual meaning, modifying likewise the poem's reading of Los as a righteous warrior-bard.

Jon Saklofske, Assistant Professor, Arcadia University (Canada)

Conscripting Imagination: The National “Duty” of William Blake’s Art

All aspects of William Blake’s work display an anti-commercialism and anti-institutionalism that were at odds with contemporary British counterrevolutionary economies. However the “Descriptive Catalogue” (1809), his “Public Address,” the “Laocoön,” and description of his work “The Last Judgement” highlight his sense of national duty. Although Blake could have been a successful commercial engraver, his creative nationalism drove him beyond reproduction toward an innovative antagonism to traditions and accepted aesthetic notions of the period. His notebook poem “When Klopstock England defied” (E500) showcases a satiric theatricality between individual and collective performances of “nation” on poetry’s stage. “Now Art has lost its mental Charms” (E479) clarifies Blake’s notions of the nationalist functions of artistic individualism, but its unfinished state highlights his inability to successfully communicate or complete such intentions. Such failure is echoed by his 1809 exhibition that attempted to circumvent dependency on authoritative aspects of production and display. Few have examined the implications and ironies of his equation between the strength and success of this exhibition and the “Glory of [his] Nation” (E528). Regardless of whether Blake was a small-scale John Boydell, participating in patriotic rhetoric to encourage public patronage or a genuine patriot unmotivated by a desire for acceptance and commercial success, his revolutionary nationalism, expressed through this largely invisible exhibit, was a public failure. Blake’s inability to normalise his idea of England’s path to national redemption and triumph through exhibition interrogates the mutual imposition between commerce, display, nationalism, and creative individualism during this time of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary activity.

Diana Forman, PhD Candidate, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

"Jerusalem" - a Vision of Utopia

In this paper, I explore the visualization of culture through the multidimensional rhizomatic text of William Blake’s final prophetic poem, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion. I argue that the application of Deleuze and Guattari’s Literary Rhizome Theory helps in the understanding of Jerusalem’s structure and content. Blake paints a picture of his era - the events, places, institutions and personages - in order to develop his utopian vision for England in the midst of war, industrialization and social upheaval. Blake’s reconstructed society, renewed through creative impulses – especially the Imagination, is visualized as occurring through the multiple entry ways of reform and revolution.

The Rhizome Theory propounds that certain texts are becomings on a line of flight of process and transformation. Jerusalem is the heavenly city in Britain, a new becoming of utopia, the earthly paradise. This dimension includes combinations of Albion’s idyllic past, rural delights, urban activity, revolutionary ideas, the Brotherhood of Man, and spiritual visions of an enhanced life. Assemblages of images of desire converge and connect on the plane of consistency, capturing Blake’s dream of saving Albion from the devastating effects of modernization. These interwoven multiplicities are found on the line of flight which develops and releases them into the future. The text resonates with past and present utopian visions, thus realizing the continuity and relevancy of the rhizomatic text.

Militarism, War and Conflict

Neil Ramsey, PhD Candidate, The Australian National University

Horrid Scenes and Marvellous Sights: Suffering and the Panoramic Spectacle of War in the Work of Sir Robert Ker Porter

Sir Robert Ker Porter was one of the leading painters of panoramic battle scenes in Britain in the late 1790s and early 1800s. His enormously popular works, such as The Storming of Seringapatam and The Battle of Alexandria, are regarded as having played an important role in fostering patriotic support for the British war effort, producing a spectacular vision of war for the British public. Porter later accompanied the British army on campaign to Portugal and Spain and wrote about his experiences in a series of letters home to his friend in Britain. These letters were collected and published, anonymously, in 1809 as Letters from Portugal and Spain. This paper will focus on the contrasting ways in which Porter visualised war for the British public in his panoramic paintings and in his published letters. It will argue that where his paintings were seen to have generated a ‘shuddering awe’ at the sight of war’s horrors, enabling killing and the death of soldiers to serve the purpose of national aggrandizement, his letters reframe such suffering by imagining the wounded soldier in relation to a narrower circle of mourning family and friends. Though his letters retain a patriotic impulse that would ask his readers to see the glory of military death, they ultimately posit suffering as the stark truth about war. His personal view of war could be seen to have posed a challenge to the panoramic spectacle of war he had earlier helped to create, collapsing the detached distance of the panoramic spectator into a visceral experience that would ‘send my reader weeping from the tale’. Porter’s changing representations of war offer an important insight into the visualisation of war and the role of suffering in Romantic period culture.

Norbert Lennartz, Professor, University of Saarbrücken, Germany

"The noble art of killing" - War as pageantry and horror in Romanticism

Although Romanticism is generally considered to be a pacifist movement, many Romantic poets did not shrink from writing about war or even from idealizing it as providential interference. In order to justify the bloodshed of the 1793 'terreur', William Blake referred to the imagery of the Eucharist and maintained that it was compulsory both to crush the grape to get good wine and to grind the grain to win nourishing bread.

Closely resembling the 1639 war poet Sir John Suckling, who saw war as an operatic spectacle, Byron designed uniforms which were meant to cater to a time-honoured aesthetics of war and belligerent manliness (cf. also his predilection for pugilism). This form of war idolatry, however, clashes with Byron's horrifying depictions of battles in his major poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. Thus, himself exemplifying that man is "antithetically mixt," Byron sees war both as a lavish pageantry and as a monstrosity which reduces men to savages and tragicomic buffoons. In stark contrast to the unnumbered historic paintings devoted to the heroism of the warrior, in his poetry Byron approaches the ghastly realism which characterizes the sequence of engravings Desastres de la Guerra by Goya.

Wavering between a kind of philhellenic attraction to war and a deeply ingrained repulsion towards anything that is an atavistic reminder of man's animal nature, Byron more than any other Romantic writer destroys the myth of war and thereby anticipates the 20th-century war poets who, after eulogizing the cathartic and spectacular effect of warfare, gave utterance to a shattering feeling of disillusionism and disgust.

Biblical Spectacle in Blake and De Quincey

John E. Grant, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Iowa

The Spectacle of Blake's Goliath Confronting David

In a watercolor posthumously (and misleadingly) entitled Goliath Cursing David (Butlin 457), Blake departs from iconographic tradition to emphasize Goliath's pre-combat exhibitionism as he flaunts his own strength and provocatively displays an image of the Philistine fish-god Dagon. For the Israelites, whose God is imageless, ineffable, there can be no proportionate counter-emblem in this contest between two nations' deities and their champions (I Sam. 17:42-44, 45-7).

Unlike earlier artists, Blake represents Goliath as an ugly and stupid show-off, a ranter who gesticulates with one six-fingered hand and grasps a spear big as a weaver's beam in the other, oblivious to the calm defiance of the beautiful, apparently unarmed shepherd youth ahead of the Israelite front line; Blake also includes Goliath's arms-bearer (I Sam. 17:7, 41) to display the tremendous shield emblazoned with Dagon's image. The two Philistines and their god won't look at David; but beneath their feet, unnoticed, the earth cracks, foreshadowing the earthquake of Goliath's imminent fall.

Instead of depicting David approaching with sling in hand, or decapitating the fallen giant, or displaying the severed head in triumph, Blake shows him standing at sling range (presumably wearing his pouch on his right, like "The Shepherd" of Songs of Innocence) and coolly eyeing his target, the exposed forehead beneath Goliath's flamboyant helmet.

My slide-illustrated paper will show how Blake's iconographic innovations, including notable alterations of his preliminary drawing, constitute a graphic reinterpretation of the biblical text.

Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Senior Lecturer, Queen's University, Belfast

“The Bible illustrated with many pictures”: De Quincey’s Oriental Nursery

In the first chapter of his Autobiographic Sketches De Quincey speaks of the favourite item “amongst our vast nursery collection of books,” the “Bible illustrated with many pictures” which “ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music.” As he explains, this was the source of his first visual imagining of the orient, geographically categorized for him and his siblings through the agency of his much-loved younger nurse who, “according to her simple powers, […] knew and explained to us the chief differences in oriental climates.” The comment points to the use of Biblical texts and illustrations as a tutelary aid to historical, geographical, antiquarian and natural history lessons in the late eighteenth-century, as the Bible was rationalized by Enlightenment knowledges within evangelical codes of education. Yet such appropriations of the Bible were deeply problematic, as De Quincey well knew from his speculative excursions into Humean and Kantian thinking. Take, for instance, the notion of Jerusalem as the “omphalos (navel) or physical centre” of the earth: “Such a pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for a Grecian city; and both pretensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the planet became known.” On the level of morality too, the centrist analogy for Jerusalem was fraught with theological difficulties. “There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also it was that the divine had been swallowed up by the abyss.” My paper will address the spectacularization of the orient through Biblical imagery for De Quincey, seeking to interpret his oriental dreams and visions with regard to theological and moral dilemmas of evangelicalism in the age of empire.

Malgorzata Luczyñska - Holdys, Junior Lecturer, University of Warsaw

THE FOURFOLD MAN – W. BLAKE’S CONCEPT OF JESUS IN HIS POETRY AND DESIGNS

In the art of William Blake we can detect a visible interest in uniting the verbal and the visual aspects of artistic expression into one, multimedial form. In his art, designs and poems enter an interactive pattern, whose effect is correspondence and complementarity of both forms of expression.

The aim of this paper is to focus on William Blake’s presentation of the figure of Jesus both in his writings – mostly later Prophetic Books - and illustrations. Jesus, however, denotes much more than the figure from the Scripture. As with other concepts taken directly from the Bible, Blake added his new dimension to it, modified it and transformed according to his own philosophy and beliefs. The figure of Jesus is absolutely central to Blake’s system of thought and upon it Blake rests major concepts of his art.

A novelty of approach of the reading I would like to propose consists primarily in my claim that there are four major ways of presenting Jesus in Blake’s art, traceable in his poetry and designs. What is more, I hope to prove that these four ways can easily be seen as corresponding to four major aspects of human nature (emotional, rationalistic, imaginative and sensual), as Blake conceived of it. Furthermore, according to the artist’s philosophy, these four aspects, or, to use Blake’s term, Zoas, on the macrocosmic level of his myth are the humanised living principles, figures who people most of the Prophetic Books. This novelty of approach leads in turn to a more coherent presentation of Blake’s major philosophical and religious ideas.

Nationhood and Empire

Padmini Ray Murray, PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh

"My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe": Byron's specularization of nation

The gendered personification of the nation was endemic to the project of nation building in the 19th century. England was no exception, and its allegorised avatar Britannia was used widely in contemporary images, poems, newspaper articles and political writings. Though Byron has overwhelmingly been regarded as a figure who disliked England and everything it stood for, his reliance on the trope of Britannia (and her classical predecessor, Minerva) betrayed a brand of nationalism that was unique to his poetical practice. Byron’s youthful visions of himself as part of a male political elite who would influence the fate of the nation collided with his poetical ambition, whose fruition he envisioned as largely contingent on female reception. Caroline Franklin has suggested that Byron was constantly “experimenting” with his representation of women, and this seems to find recurrent parallels with Byron’s contradictory figurations of nation in his poetry, not only in his portrayals of England but also of other nations such as Italy, Greece and Spain. These factors made complex Byron's continued deployment of feminised anthropomorphications of the nation in such disparate works such as The Curse of Minerva and The Island. My discussion of Byron’s use of landscape and topography in these works will be informed by Jacqueline Labbe's hypothesis of the distinctly gendered prospect view, and I will attempt to demonstrate that Byron’s poetic career was shaped by the two forces that he was the most anxious to seem inured to: female influence and nationalist feelings towards England.

Karen Fang, Assistant Professor, University of Houston

Later Romanticism and the Externalization of the Mind

The literature of the later Romantic period is often characterized by a verbal ornamentation and sensory excess that sharply distinguishes it from the “language of plain speech” which early Romantics like William Wordsworth espoused. This paper argues that this stylistic contrast is symptomatic of an overall turn towards visuality in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, and results from the transformative impact of post-Napoleonic (1815-1837) imperial culture, particularly the exotic artifacts and commodities which imperial expansion brought to the metropole. Such an argument, importantly, is not merely an historical argument, but also is a significant reconception of Romantic literary history. Conventional accounts of Romantic poetry suggest that it adapts the patterns of chivalric romance, which its transposes to a psychic locale. Building upon—but also modifying this account—I argue that imperialism, the preeminent historical development driving postwar economy and culture, inflects contemporary literary production, as apparent in the writing of key later Romantic figures such as Keats, who willfully adapts Wordsworthian principles into a palpable poetic sensuality that retains Romantic idealism through a counterintuitive commitment to materialist aesthetics. Not an “internalization of quest romance,” then, but an externalization of the exotic expeditions and iconic trophies sought by imperial expansion, imperialism, in my account, is the predominant motivation for the increased visuality of later Romantic writing.

Dr Luisa Calè, Lecturer, Birkbeck College, University of London

Paul et Virginie on the London stage, a nationalist adaptation of a cosmopolitan text?

This paper proposes to investigate the translation and adaptation of Bernardin de Saint Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788) as James Cobb's Paul and Virginia: A Musical Drama, performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden Theatre, in London on 1 May 1800. Saint Pierre's text and Helen Maria Williams's 1795 translation exemplify the trans-national novel advocated by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Devers, a form which invokes cosmopolitan readers and aims to constitute trans-national 'communities of sentiment' in-between nations and against metropolitan nation-spaces. Yet when Saint Pierre?s story is turned into a play for the London stage in May 1800, the trans-national or cosmopolitan appeal of the novel gives way to an inter-national plot for a national audience. The action is transposed from the Mauritius to the West Indies, a theatre of war and competition between France and England. Players assume different nationalities in a nationalistic inflection of abolitionism which evokes the Black legend in turning the slave-owner into a Spaniard. These transformations at the level of the plot undergo further change in their performance on stage, where the trans-national sympathy evoked by the novel takes the local features of known actors. Thus the plight of West Indian slaves is 'brought home' to a British theatre audience by British actors in black face, a stereotyped impersonation which reviewers praised for its comic inflection. Where Margaret Cohen calls for a revision of Benedict Anderson's focus on nationalist imagined communities and identifies transnational and international forms and readerships, the theatrical adaptation enhances the nationalistic appeal of the story. This paper hopes to initiate a discussion on the national, transnational and cosmopolitan circulation of the text in different media and adaptations.

Reading Landscape

Dr Christopher Crouch, Head of Cultural History and Theory, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Terra Nullius: The visual reading of the Western Australian landscape and its material consequences.

In his Reveries of the solitary walker Rousseau established a paradigm for the European individual in nature - surrounded by the beauty of 'brilliant flower' and 'enamelled meadow'? the individual becomes lost 'with a delicious drunkenness in the immensity of this beautiful system'. When faced with the indigenous peoples and the landscape of Western Australia however the post Rousseau European explorers were unable to see the beauty of the landscape, or its inhabitants. The land and people of Western Australia did not match any of the paradigms of either the picturesque, the exotic or the sublime. The French artist Jacques Arago wrote home in 1818 that 'no rivulet consoled the eye, no tree attracted it, no mountain gave variety to the landscape'. Using an Euro-centric visual template that ill-fitted the vast sandy scrubland of coastal Western Australia, all that was seen simply re-enforced the eighteenth century European perception of a wasteland inhabited by the ?most miserable people on earth?. The British in their colonising process further perpetuated this view.

This paper draws on the work of the French artist Louis de Sainson (of the D'Urville expedition of 1826) and British documents from the Swan River Colony (1828-38). It proposes that; sitting outside the visual paradigms of romanticism, the landscape and people of Western Australia were ascribed no aesthetic value by Europeans, a reading that was to have profound material, political and cultural consequences for the colony's indigenous peoples.

Dr Mark Haywood, Lead Researcher, Centre for Landscape & Environmental Arts Research, Cumbria Institute of the Arts.

My proposal is based on the theoretical background to a virtual artwork I am currently constructing. The paper would be particularly informed by the theories of Augé (tourism and non-place), Baudrillard (simulation) and Virillio (dromology, substitution and tourism); writings on contemporary art by Biro and McEvilley and a recently published essay of my own on the tourist’s gaze.

Claife Station: looking at looking at the world through coloured glasses

In 1967 US artist Dennis Oppenheim made a series of artworks called Viewing Stations; these were small raised platforms on which people could stand and gaze at their surroundings. The art work became a thing to be looked from and the act of viewing became the subject of the work. – ‘the act of beholding was itself beheld.’

Despite Oppenheim’s avant garde status the term ‘viewing station’ had been in used since the eighteenth century; my paper would consider Claife Station, a now ruined, mock gothic pavilion built on a cliff above Windermere during the 1790s at one of the most popular ‘viewing stations’ set out in Thomas West’s seminal Guide to the Lakes of 1778 (rather appropriately in light of McEvilley above, the building itself is mentioned in some later editions).

Modern Lakeland guide books often suggest one may encounter all four seasons in a single day, but Claife sought to guarantee this through technology - its six drawing room windows were each a different colour, tinting the view to simulate the four seasons, a moonlit scene and the gloom of an impending storm.

Although viewing stations and Claude glasses are commonly associated with picturesque tourism, I believe Claife’s physically internalising the experience of landscape and its chromatic simulation of the seasons had far more in common with the valorising of individual imagination so characteristic of Romanticism and aesthetic modernism. In addition a complementary argument I would propose is that architecturally framing the perception of landscape in this manner also reinforced the social exclusivity of aesthetic experience.

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Panel 1 - Violence as Spectacle

Panel 2 - Painting, Visuality and Performance

Panel 3 - Invisibility

Panel 4 - Theatrical Performance : Romantic Spectacle

Panel 1 - Periodicals and Public Romanticism

Panel 2 - Observation and Synaesthesia

Panel 3 - Science and the Spectacle

Panel 4 - Theatrical Spectacle in the Political Sphere

Panel 1 - Anxiety of the Visual: Percy Shelley