bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
R
oche,
R
egina
M
aria
Authors: Kelly Jim
Published: July 2017

The writing career of Regina Maria Roche (née Dalton, 1764–1845) neatly provides a synecdoche for the change in literary taste for novelistic genres in the Romantic period. Her early novels
(The Vicar of Landsdowne
, 1789, and
The Maid of the Hamlet
, 1793) can be situated within a tradition of late eighteenth‐century didactic fiction with their emphasis on the importance of female modesty. Her breakthrough novel, and the one she is most remembered for now,
The Children of the Abbey
(1796), saw her follow the vogue for Gothic novels after the style of Ann Radcliffe. The works that followed on from this (including
Clermont
, 1798;
The Discarded Son; or, Haunt of the banditti
, 1807;
The Houses of Osma and Almeira; or, The convent of St. Ildefenso
, 1810;
The Monastery of St. Columb; or, The atonement
, 1813; and
Trecothick bower; or, The lady of the West Country
, 1814) all shared generic features and imagery from the Gothic tradition. Her later fiction, starting with
The Munster Cottage Boy
(1820) marks a shift into the developing genre of regional fiction with Ireland as the central location for her subsequent novels (
The Bridal of Dunmore; and Lost and Won
, 1823;
The tradition of the Castle; or, Scenes in the Emerald Isle
, 1824;
The Castle Chapel
, 1825; and
Contrast
, 1828). While generic intermixture occurs in all her works to a level that complicates such a neat progression, and an Irish setting is present in some of the earlier works, it remains useful to chart Roche's career in such a manner as it elucidates the extent to which she was conscious throughout her career of the audience her works would be encountering. Predominantly associated with the Gothic, due in no small part to being one of the authors of ‘horrid tales’ that completes Isabella Thorpe's education in Gothic fiction in Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey
(1818), as her work comes back into focus with the expansion and revision of the Romantic canon she can be seen as an important writer on national and gender issues.
Roman‐À‐Clef
Authors: Douglass Paul
Published: July 2017

The
roman‐à‐clef
or
livre‐à‐clé
(French for ‘novel (or book) with a key’) is fiction with thinly disguised allusions to real people, places, and events. This mode of writing has its origins in satire, adopting a form which enables the writer to deal with controversial topics while avoiding charges of libel.
Romans‐à‐clef
also reinforce social in‐groups, since one must be ‘in the know’ to recognize allusions to real people and events in supposedly fictional works. It is probable that many early works of literature partake in some degree of the genre. Chaucer's host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailly, was probably based on a real innkeeper from Southwark, and many of the other pilgrims in
Canterbury Tales
allude to real people. Merely showing that there are sources in real life for scenes, characters, and events in fiction does not, however, make the work a true
roman‐à‐clef
. An author may be inspired by a particular person – as so many were by Byron – to create a character, and yet the novel as a whole will not necessarily qualify as part of the genre. In the
roman‐à‐clef the
reader who is ‘in the know’ notices an obvious intention to evoke particular personages, places, and occurrences. However, the identification of a true
roman‐a‐clef
becomes more difficult with the Romantic period because of the wide use of autobiographical material in virtually all forms of writing.
Romance, Poetic Forms
Authors: Goslee Nancy Moore
Published: July 2017

Although critics have described the plot of romance as transhistorical, the resurgence of this genre in Britain from the mid‐eighteenth through the early nineteenth century has come to define the historical period we now call ‘Romantic’. While this name for the period emerged only in the mid‐nineteenth century (Duff 2010: 74), the connection has contributed to a still‐persistent misreading of its poetry and fiction as escapist fantasy unconcerned with the world's hard realities. The rehabilitation of Romantic literature in the mid‐twentieth century came, we might say, at the cost of casting off romance as its defining genre – and embracing the concise ironies and ambiguities of lyric. Yet a renewed understanding of the social and political forces at work in the romance revival that developed in the mid‐eighteenth century has shown us that the conjuring up and the dismissal of romance, that ‘Fair‐plumed syren, queen of far‐away’ as Keats called the genre in his sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, became a part of its structure and its significance for Romantic writers, especially for poets.
S
ans
S
ouci Theatre
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

On 31 October 1791, Charles Dibdin opened the Sans Souci Theatre in a room at No. 411 on the Strand, London, with a programme called
Private Theatricals; or, Nature in Nubilus
. The new theatre was located opposite the Adelphi Theatre. The Sans Souci, possibly named for Percival Stockdale's ‘Le Philosophe de Sans Souci’, was unique because it was run solely by Dibdin. He was the manager, and the only performer. As an advertisement in
The Oracle
announced that day, ‘The whole is written and composed, and will be spoken, sung, and accompanied by Mr Dibdin’ (Mander & Mitchenson 1968: 488). At this location, Dibdin performed one‐man shows that he had devised himself for the next five years. Each show consisted of around 20 songs, and Dibdin offered the public a total of nine such entertainments during the five‐year period. Annoyed with his fellow tenants, however, he had a building constructed at Leicester Place, Leicester Fields, and moved the theatre there to begin performances on 8 October 1796, with
The General Election
. The cost to build the theatre, completed in a mere three months, was £6000, and it could hold up to 500 spectators. Unfortunately, the new Sans Souci was not as successful as the first had been, partly because of hostile critics and partly because of the new location. After taking heavy losses two seasons in a row, Dibdin closed the Sans Souci at the end of the 1804–5 theatre season (the last performance being on 6 April 1805). The building was leased to a hosier in 1807, and it later became a warehouse. The theatre was devoted to vaudeville from 1832, and then a French theatre company took over in 1834. Thereafter, the facility became a linen draper's, a restaurant, and the Hôtel de Versailles before it was demolished in 1898.
Satire, Poetry
Authors: Jones Steven E.
Published: July 2017

The eighteenth century is traditionally seen as the high‐water mark of literary satire in English. ‘Augustan’ authors, such as Pope, Swift, Johnson, Addison, and Steele, were the standards of critical excellence, and it was in satires, both prose and verse, literary and journalistic, that their greatest influence was felt. The eighteenth century established satire as a powerful and effective weapon, a moral scourge for folly or vice, a public form of rhetoric through which to expose and reveal, mock and ridicule, discipline and punish. Augustan poetry inherited subcategories of satire associated since the Renaissance with the Classical satirists Juvenal (strident, morally indignant, in a lofty style) and Horace (urbane, conversational, and witty). A mixed mostly prose form of ‘Menippean’ satire flourished at the edges of polite culture in the eighteenth century (Swift's prose is the best‐known example), but, for the most part, poetry was seen as the highest form of literature, and the most powerful and effective mode of poetry was satire, especially lofty satires in heroic couplets.
Science Fiction
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: July 2017

It is a reasonable proposition that science fiction has its origins in the Romantic era. It is also true, though, that science fiction in its written form is often seen as a category of twentieth‐century commercial fiction that emerged out of the American pulp magazines. Although this definition is accurate to the degree that science fiction was not named science fiction until the appearance of magazines marketed as such, it is far too limiting. For what science fiction (SF) is, what it does, and what it means have come to range far from its literary origins, to encompass film and television, video games, art, and a host of other cultural forms, not the least of which is our day‐to‐day experience in a globalized, ecologically compromised, and hyper‐technologized world. As Isaac Asimov once said, we are living in a science fictional world. In a recent attempt to come to some sort of definition of SF, Farah Mendelsohn has suggested that SF is not so much a
genre
as it is an ongoing
conversation
. We can take this even further and suggest that science fiction is more than a conversation: it has become a
language
through which humanity contemplates the future, technology, ecology, and modernity itself. Though threads of that language are evident prior to the Romantic era, it was not until the series of revolutions – industrial, technological, scientific, political, educational, and aesthetic – that occurred from roughly 1780 to 1830 and which define modernity, that this language started to become ubiquitous.
Scientific Prose
Authors: Sha Richard C.
Published: July 2017

Scientists have a long history of wariness of figurative language, and it is easy to see why. Since 1663, Britain's leading scientific society, the Royal Society, has had as its motto
‘Nullius
in Verba’
, which roughly translates as ‘take nobody's word for it’, and Horace's statement implies the imperative of demonstration over language. Around the same time, the historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, warned its members to stick to ‘mathematical plainness’, and avoid ‘swellings of style’ whenever possible (1667: 113). Where science strives for the strictly denotative, for the accurate depiction of reality or a one‐to‐one correspondence between word and thing, figurative language, by contrast, threatens any univocality because it pushes language into connotation and multiplicity. The famous chemist and friend of Coleridge and Byron, Humphry Davy, put it thus:
S
cott,
J
ane, and the
S
ans
P
areil
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

Jane Margaret Scott (ca. 1779–1839) is best known for her role as manager of the Sans Pareil Theatre, where she also acted for more than a decade. Scott's exact birth date is not known, but her baptism is recorded as taking place on 6 June 1779 at St Martin‐in‐the‐Fields, Westminster. Her father John Scott (1752–1838) and mother Elizabeth (1750–1829) had at least three other children, and the family lived in relative ease in London. John Scott maintained a shop at 417 Strand, where he sold watercolour paintings and optical instruments, although much of his wealth came from a washing blue that he had invented called ‘Old True Blue’ (Baker 1904: 413).
S
heil,
R
ichard
L
alor
Authors: Saglia Diego
Published: July 2017

Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851) was one of the outstanding serious dramatists from the late 1810s. He first began to write for the stage at a time when popular interest in tragedy, by now a radically hybrid generic type, was at a decidedly low ebb. After some initial contacts with the theatrical world in Dublin (his first play,
Adelaide; or, The Emigrants
, was performed at the Crow Street Theatre on 19 February 1814), he moved from his native Ireland to London, where he signed off some of the most successful serious plays on the later Romantic‐period stage. The son of a merchant who had bought an estate in County Waterford, Sheil came from the wealthy commercial and professional Catholic middling ranks. He was educated at Stonyhurst, then at Trinity College, where he graduated in July 1811. He then kept terms at Lincoln's Inn before being called to the Irish bar. In the meantime, he cultivated his connections among the political and intellectual circles of Dublin and, in the mid‐ to late 1810s, became closely connected with the Vetoist faction, which favoured the introduction of some measure of governmental interference in the election of Catholic bishops to Irish sees as a further step towards Emancipation. Later, in the early 1820s, he joined forces with the charismatic anti‐Vetoist leader Daniel O'Connell, as he firmly believed that the latter's leadership was essential for a reorganization of Catholic politics. This historic reunion led to the creation of the powerful Catholic Association. In 1831, Sheil was elected MP for County Louth and gave his maiden speech on the second reading of the Great Reform Bill.
S
helley,
P
ercy
B
ysshe, Drama
Authors: Crisafulli Lilla Maria
Published: July 2017

One of the leading poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley was also a playwright whose dramatic output signalled an advance in the wider context of British and European drama: playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonine Artaud regarded his plays with admiration. Shelley himself was a devoted theatregoer, a passion that he must have developed early in his life, to judge by the letter he sent to Edward Fergus Graham in the summer of 1810, in which he mentions a tragedy he was writing and a farce a ‘friend’ was composing; he wanted to see both plays staged in London (Shelley 1964, vol. 1, no. 15: 14). In the letter, Shelley shows his awareness of the theatrical reality of his time, addressing with equal ease the legitimate and illegitimate dramatic worlds. Unfortunately, what became of the tragedy and farce in question is unknown, although he mentions them once again (ibid., no. 17: 16); it is likewise unknown if the farce was really by a ‘friend’, or by Shelley himself or by his sister Elizabeth, with whom he was soon to publish a collection of poems,
Original Poetry by Victor and Casire
(Sept. 1810). Another of Shelley's sisters, Helen, reported to James Hogg of a play written by Shelley and Elizabeth, when Shelley was only 18, which they had sent to ‘Mathew, the comedian’ (Hogg 1906, vol. 1: 14).
S
herwood,
M
ary
Authors: Schierenbeck Daniel
Published: July 2017

Mary Martha Sherwood (née Butt, 1775–1851) was one of the most prolific children's writers of the Romantic era. Though best known for
The History of the Fairchild Family
(1818), an immensely popular and influential work that was in print continuously until the twentieth century, Sherwood produced well over 300 tales, stories, novels, tracts, and pamphlets as well as a lengthy autobiography,
The Life of Mrs. Sherwood
, which was later edited by her daughter. Sherwood's career exemplifies the importance of the evangelical movement and how this vital religion influenced generic choice as well as publication venues. Furthermore, Sherwood's writings became a staple of Sunday reading throughout the nineteenth century and thus helped shape Victorian attitudes. While her writing, especially her early popular works, intersected with the Evangelicals’ missionary emphasis, Sherwood shifted and developed themes and genres throughout her lengthy career. Though she returns again and again to the theme of religious conversion, her later writings became more imbued with her anti‐Catholic sentiments. Sherwood's career demonstrates her important role in the shift away from tract works to realistic fiction, a movement seen especially in the evangelical movement but also mirrored in the wider world of nineteenth‐century fiction.
S
mith,
C
harlotte, Prose
Authors: Labbe Jacqueline M.
Published: July 2017

Between 1788 and 1802, Charlotte Smith wrote 11 novels. Her first three,
Emmeline
(1788),
Ethelinde
(1789), and
Celestina
(1791), combined the by then well‐established narrative of the travails of the heroine of sensibility (a form of extreme emotional susceptibility) with an astute problematizing of the social conditions that restricted the free development of human potential. Her next three,
Desmond
(1792),
The Old Manor House
(1793), and
The Banished Man
(1794), were strongly political novels that also contained the expected love story.
Montalbert
(1795) returns the focus to the romance, but one gone wildly wrong: both women and men are portrayed as victims of a social system that values rank and property over happiness. After 1795, Smith wrote novels that, increasingly, reject the comfortable notion that British culture represents the pinnacle of development:
Marchmont
(1796) explores the harrowing effects of debt;
The Young Philosopher
(1798) eschews Britain altogether and settles its characters in the New World;
The Letters of a Solitary “Wanderer
(1801, 1802) represents a fragmentation of character and narration. In all of her novels, Smith adheres to certain expected conventions of genre, but she also explores darker avenues, and blazes new trails.
Sonnet
Authors: Billone Amy C.
Published: July 2017

The sonnet, a 14‐line poem in rhymed iambic pentameter, was revived during the Romantic era after more than a century of neglect. Almost all Romantic poets, both male and female, wrote sonnets prolifically. The sonnet revival would continue throughout the nineteenth century and has in a sense never abated. With the emergence of free verse, the sonnet began to be seen as a somewhat antiquated structure, but a number of modern and contemporary poets have continued to write sonnets, albeit without always following strict rules of rhyme and metre. Indeed, the sonnet may be the oldest poetic form that still has popular appeal.
S
outhey,
R
obert, Prose
Authors: Bolton Carol
Published: July 2017

Robert Southey (1774–1843) was one of the most controversial writers of the Romantic period. His social theories, political beliefs, and published works often divided readers and critics, attracting praise and vilification in equal amounts. He was a prolific poet and author of prose works, and a valued contributor to the
Quarterly Review
(1809–1839). From 1813, he was Poet Laureate and he was also a well‐known public figure. A true ‘man of letters’, he wrote in a wide range of literary genres. In poetry he made the long narrative form his own, in works such as
Joan of Arc
(1796),
Thalaba the Destroyer
(1801),
Madoc
(1805),
The Curse of Kehama
(1810),
Roderick, the Last of the Goths
(1814) and
A Tale of Paraguay
(1825). He also wrote a great many shorter poems, for magazine publication and for his own collections. As a prose writer his works included history, biography, journals, and travel writing, as well as social and political commentaries. In his politics Southey is considered an apostate. He was an outspoken advocate of the French Revolution when it began, moderated his responses during the ‘Reign of Terror’, opposed Napoleon Bonaparte's ascendancy, and became a wholehearted supporter of the war with France (1793–1815). Despite his radical youth, by 1817 Southey could make a case for curtailing the liberty of the press if it posed a threat to national security or public morality. Yet, although Southey became more conservative over his lifetime, he still reacted spontaneously and emotionally to humanitarian or moral issues that moved him. Particular causes that drew his attention were: the abolition of slavery, the condition of the labouring classes, national education, and colonization. He never adopted the politics of a single party (and, in fact, such firm divisions along party lines did not really exist at that time) so despite the common view of Southey as an ultra‐Tory, he certainly did not perceive himself in this light. A complex mixture of radical and reactionary, reformer and conservative, a poet who practically gave up writing verse once he was Laureate, it is not easy to sum Southey up. In his writing career he was a literary innovator, who adopted unusual metrical styles in his poetry and was not afraid to blend different prose forms together, in works such as
Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella
(1807) and
Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society
(1829). Southey also experimented with fiction in his later, humorous, work
The Doctor
(1834–47). It is probably because of his voluminous output, and the difficulties in categorizing Southey as a writer, that he has been neglected since the Romantic period, despite being admired by his contemporaries, such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Lamb, and Walter Savage Landor. However, in recent years Southey's reputation and writings have been rejuvenated in several biographies (Storey 1997; Speck 2006), a critical edition (Pratt 2004), a collection of essays (Pratt 2006), and monographs (Bolton 2007; Craig 2007).
Spectacle
Authors: Nuss Melynda
Published: July 2017

The term ‘spectacle’ could encompass many different Romantic phenomena. In the theatre, ‘spectacle’ usually refers to the spectacular sets, costumes, and special effects that attracted playgoers to major and minor theatres alike. But the theatre was only one place that spectators could find events that were memorable because of their appearance. The British enjoyed a wealth of street shows, museum exhibits, scientific demonstrations, illustrations and engravings, performances at inns and fairs, panoramas, dioramas and replicas, ‘virtual reality’ experiences staged at private estates. Even war camps and political events took on the appearance of public shows (Russell 1995; Bolton 2001).
S
pence,
T
homas
Authors: Scrivener Michael
Published: July 2017

As a writer of political songs and prose, Thomas Spence (1750–1814) expressed a unique synthesis of provincial radicalism, religious Dissent, Enlightenment, biblical socialism, and ‘unrespectable’ London radicalism. The argument for a socialist land ownership for the residents of each parish, which was to be the nation's fundamental political structure, was articulated first in a lecture and several published works in Newcastle upon Tyne (1775–82). After he moved to London (between 1787 and 1792), Spence reshaped popular radicalism as a bookseller, member of the London Corresponding Society (1792–9), pamphleteer, language reformer, and finally leader of and propagandist for the movement struggling to realize his socialist vision. After his death (1814) the Society of Spencean Philanthropists was formed and continued to work for radical social change during the Regency and afterwards. Self‐identified followers of Spence like Allen Davenport (1775–1846) were active Chartists, and Spence was important to later socialists and radical reformers like Henry Hyndman (1842–1921) and Henry George (1839–97).
Theatre Audiences
Authors: Leach Nathaniel
Published: July 2017

Romantic theatrical audiences were generally perceived by dramatists and critics of the period as being crude and simple‐minded, but while it is true that the demands of audiences often hindered dramatic experimentation, such generalizations oversimplify the relationship between dramatists, performers and producers and the theatre‐going public in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While audiences did tend to favour spectacle over traditionally hallowed forms such as tragedy, they were by no means passive consumers of mass culture, but were active both in direct and indirect ways in shaping the kinds of plays that were performed during the period. In particular, the tastes of an increasingly large, urban, middle‐class audience contributed to the rise of genres such as melodrama that celebrated the dominant moral values of this class, and to an increasingly regulated conception of genre, since dramatic innovation was limited by what would be tolerated by audiences.
Travel Narrative
Authors: Colbert Benjamin
Published: July 2017

Travel writing is widely considered a hybrid genre, fusing factual reportage with fictional technique, on‐the‐spot observation with recollections in tranquillity, scientific detail with poetic allusion, verbal description with visual illustration. Ethnography, geography, history, economics, aesthetics, and other disciplines inform travel writing and at times provide its keynote. During the years between 1780 and 1840 periodical reviews and circulating libraries customarily listed ‘travels’ and ‘tours’ among ‘Voyages and Travels’, but even a glance at other headings, such as ‘Fine Arts’, ‘History’, or ‘Topography’, indicates the pervasiveness of related material across genre categories. In addition, as Shef Rogers has observed, ‘travel writing was probably the most self‐consciously print‐informed genre of the period’ (2009: 784), with the writers and readers of travelogues seeing and reading not with naive but with actively comparative minds. This breadth and depth is symptomatic of a general culture of travel in the Romantic period, the permeation of representations of travel across the arts, literature, and sciences, not to mention its importance to leisure pursuits: panoramas, museums, exhibitions, and tourism itself. As eighteenth‐century grand tourism, the preserve of the aristocratic few, gave way to mass tourism by the mid‐nineteenth century, travel writings both reflected and reinforced a cultural consciousness in which mobility, observation, curiosity, accuracy, and imagination (the chief province of the stay‐at‐home traveller whose ‘world’ is the world of travel books and illustrations) became qualities fundamental to a liberal understanding of the world.
Verse Epistle
Authors: Vargo Lisa
Published: July 2017

The Romantic verse epistle might be characterized as a poetic form in hiding. Unlike the ode or the sonnet, it has received little critical attention as a form of interest to Romantic poets. Partly this reflects a sense that the writers of a new age turned away from the conventions of the previous century, where the verse epistle was a major form. Bill Overton (2006) estimates that 5 per cent of British eighteenth‐century poems were verse epistles. The form's most celebrated practitioner is Alexander Pope, and his most notable examples are ‘Epistles to Several Persons’ (or ‘Moral Essays’), ‘Satires of Horace’, and the ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’. His Ovidian heroic epistle ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ (1717), in which Eloisa voices her struggles between memory of her passion for Abelard and her love of God, garnered great respect from Romantic writers and suggests continuities with the previous period. There is an added matter, that the verse epistle is subsumed in other genres such as satire or sentimentalism and therefore receives little direct recognition when it is in disguise. Romantic practice of the verse epistle should be viewed as balancing a backward look at tradition with a desire to communicate contemporary concerns about sociability, political perspectives, gender roles, and poetic self‐definition.
W
ebb
L
oudon,
J
ane
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: July 2017

The major contribution of Jane Webb (later Webb Loudon) to the Romantic period was her futuristic novel,
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty‐Second Century
(1827), which places her beside Mary Shelley as one of the foundational writers of science fiction. Later, after her marriage to the prominent landscape gardener and horticulturalist J.C. Loudon, Webb Loudon would become the leading writer on gardening and horticulture for women and children in the early Victorian period. She helped to make gardening a vocation for women of her generation and might well be considered the first professional woman gardener and writer on horticultural topics. With these two phases in her writing career, Jane Webb Loudon stands as a significant contributor both to the development of scientific and futuristic fiction and to women's writing and experience in the nineteenth century.
W
elsh Prose
Authors: Lichtenwalner Shawna
Published: July 2017

During the Romantic era Wales was undergoing a cultural revival that had started in the middle of the eighteenth century with the efforts of Richard and Lewis Morris of Anglesey and a close circle of their friends. The group actively sought out old and endangered Welsh manuscripts to copy and translate, formed a Welsh society that met regularly in London, and also sponsored promising young Welsh poets such as Goronwy Owen. The movement was calibrated to reignite pride in both the Welsh language, then in danger of disappearing, and in the cultural practices of the Welsh. It succeeded in capturing the attention not only of the Welsh, but of the English literati as well. Out of this initial enterprise was ultimately born much of the Welsh prose of the Romantic era. Unsurprisingly, most Welsh Romantic prose focused on topics of interest to the participants in the Welsh cultural revival, who used a variety of media to advance their cause. Thus information about Wales and the Welsh was published as travel narratives, historical essays on bards and Druids, biographies of notable Welsh figures, essays written for local and national competitions (eisteddfodau), entries in Welsh periodicals, and fiction. This entry deals exclusively with prose written by the Welsh themselves, rather than including non‐Welsh prose written about Wales and its people. The texts described below are not meant to be taken as a comprehensive list of publications about Wales by the Welsh during this time period, but rather are representative of the types of Welsh prose published during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries most directly engaged with literary concerns, and can generally be classified as some of the most important works of their kind.
W
est,
J
ane
Authors: Kimberly Caroline E.
Published: July 2017

Jane West (née Iliffe, 1758–1852), a novelist who published initially as Prudentia Homespun and later as Mrs West, was born into modest means in London, the daughter of an upholsterer and shopkeeper and the granddaughter of a gentleman farmer. West was educated at home by her mother and had no formal education. Her devout family would eventually move to the Northamptonshire countryside following her father's inheritance of the family estate, leading to her 1783 marriage to yeoman farmer Thomas West. While she wrote most often and quite substantially as a novelist, her literary career began with several volumes of poetry that indicate the influence of Thomas Gray in content and style. Her work continued in plays, which were generally unsuccessful, and periodicals, including a long‐term role as regular contributor to the
Gentleman's Magazine;
she later became popular for her contributions to conduct literature in
Letters to a Young Man
(1801) and
Letters to a Young Lady
(1806). All of her work is marked by conservatism and didacticism in both gender roles and politics, and her decision to move from the realm of poetry to that of fiction in the 1790s has been linked to her anti‐Jacobinism and disapproval of the French Revolution. While she approved of expanding the educational options of young women, she promoted the foremost importance of domesticity and motherhood in her work and set her views in opposition to more liberal writers of the era, including Mary Wollstonecraft.
W
ollstonecraft,
M
ary
Authors: Dolan Elizabeth A.
Published: July 2017

On leaving her post as a governess in 1787, the 28‐year‐old Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) informed her sister that she intended to support herself by writing professionally, to become, at the urging of publisher Joseph Johnson,‘the first of a new genus’ (Todd 2003). In the next ten years of her life, Wollstonecraft emerged as a leading writer and intellectual in a number of genres, including educational theory, feminist philosophy, and literary criticism. Best known for her political treatises, she also published a novel, an influential travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book for girls, and two children's books. She had another novel and a children's book in manuscript when she died ten days after giving birth to Mary Godwin, the baby who would become the celebrated author of
Frankenstein
. She had unconventional passionate relationships with both men and women, gave birth to her first daughter Fanny Imlay out of wedlock, travelled abroad when few women did, struggled with intensely depressive feelings, attempted suicide twice, and lived in revolutionary France. Wollstonecraft's letters suggest that at the end of this intense and unconventional life, she was perhaps the happiest she had been in her 38 years. Writing to her husband William Godwin, she confesses, ‘on the whole I may be termed happy’ (Todd 2003). She was clearly becoming ‘the first of a new genus’, and had achieved a level of contentment and stability in her relationship with Godwin. Posthumously, her treatises and educational writing have earned her the appellations ‘the mother of (liberal) feminism’, ‘the most famous female political writer in England’, and ‘the mother of co‐education’; her book reviews established new authority for women in the masculine world of literary criticism; and her fiction is now admired for its bold and innovative representation of women's social and economic circumstances. However, the critical reputation she began to enjoy in the twentieth century represents a major resurrection. Wollstonecraft was reviled for a century after Godwin's frank, posthumous portrayal of her emotional struggles and controversial life choices. Her remarkable and dramatic life story and her fluctuating reputation are as instructive as are her ground‐breaking literary achievements. Both her life and her work have much to teach us about class, gender, and the lives of intellectuals in the age of revolution.
W
ordsworth,
D
orothy
Authors: Levin Susan M.
Published: July 2017

Her gift was for prose, but she lived among poets. As a writer of journals, a short story, a pamphlet to raise funds after a village tragedy, and numerous travel narratives, Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) defined her world. Her correspondence is voluminous. In setting down precise details of what she sees, her prose takes up intimate personal details and large social issues, the most mundane, domestic concerns and world politics. She shapes forms such as the journal or travel narrative as intensely personal documents constructed through massed details demonstrating the flow of information through the mind. She produces a recording of natural and social phenomena that reveals her own story at the same time as it expresses awareness of new cultural forces and of the revolutionary literature produced by the Romantic writing community.
Wordsworth,William, Prose
Authors: Dick Alexander
Published: July 2017

It is difficult to image a course on Romanticism that does not mention ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, or ‘the language really used by men’, all of which first appeared in the 1800 ‘Preface toLyrical Ballads’. And yet, many critics have complained that it and Wordsworth's other prose works are vague, tentative, and obscure. Northrop Frye once quipped that the ‘Preface toLyrical Balladsis a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism it is worth only about a B plus’ (1957: 5). This tentativeness can also be seen as a response to an epistemological crisis attending the rise of a new intellectual middle class who identified with neither the Augustan ideas of aristocratic taste nor the Enlightenment's systematic principles, nor with the plethora of highly wrought sentimentalism and intransigent political opinion being produced by the burgeoning popular press. Wordsworth's solution to this crisis was a theory of metaphor: through a process of continuous interpretive recalibration, writers and readers participate in the creation of images and symbols with which they identify. The central genre of this process was poetry, but it was in his prose essays on politics, education, landscape, and, of course, poetry that Wordsworth explained this process in its theoretical and ideological registers.
D‐A1‐D‐A2 Backbone Strategy for Benzobisthiadiazole Based n‐Channel Organic Transistors: Clarifying the Selenium‐Substitution Effect on the Molecular Packing and Charge Transport Properties in Electron‐Deficient Polymers
Authors: Wang Yang , Hasegawa Tsukasa , Matsumoto Hidetoshi , Mori Takehiko , Michinobu Tsuyoshi
Published: July 2017

Unipolar n‐type semiconducting polymers based on the benzobisthiadiazole (BBT) unit and its heteroatom‐substituted derivatives are for the first time synthesized by the D‐A1‐D‐A2 polymer‐backbone design strategy. Selenium (Se) substitution is a very effective molecular design, but it has been seldom studied in n‐type polymers. In this study, within the similar conjugated framework, the Se substitution effects on the optical, electrochemical, solid‐state polymer packing, electron mobility, and air‐stability of the target unipolar n‐type polymers are unraveled. Replacing the sulfur (S) atom in the thiadiazole heterocycles with the Se atom leads to narrower bandgaps and deeper lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) levels of the n‐type polymers. Furthermore, the Se‐substituted polymer (pSeN‐NDI) shows shorter lamellar packing distances and stronger edge‐on π–π stacking interactions than its S‐counterpart (pSN‐NDI), as observed by the two‐dimensional grazing‐incidence wide‐angle X‐ray scattering (GIWAXS) patterns. With the deeper LUMO level and thin‐film microstructures suitable for transistors, pSeN‐NDI exhibits four‐fold higher electron mobilities (μe) than pSN‐NDI. However, the other Se‐containing polymer, pSeS‐NDI, forms rather amorphous film structures, which is caused by its limited thermal stability and decomposition during the thermal annealing processes, thus giving rise to a lower μe than its S‐counterpart (pBBT‐NDI). Most importantly, pBBT‐NDI demonstrates an electron mobility of 0.039 cm2 V−1 s−1, which is noticeable among the unipolar n‐type polymers based on the BBT and its analogs.
Positive Temperature Coefficient (PTC) Evolution of Segregated Structural Conductive Polypropylene Nanocomposites with Visually Traceable Carbon Black Conductive Network
Authors: Zhao Shuaiguo , Li Guojie , Liu Hu , Dai Kun , Zheng Guoqiang , Yan Xingru , Liu Chuntai , Chen Jingbo , Shen Changyu , Guo Zhanhu
Published: July 2017

Electrically conductive carbon black (CB)/polypropylene (PP) nanocomposites with a segregated structure are fabricated by localizing CB particles at the interfaces among the PP granules. Interesting double‐peak positive temperature coefficient (PTC) effect when exposed to temperature field is observed and ascribed to the breakage of unique segregated conductive network due to the volume expansion stemming from the crystal melting of interfacial PP and the bulk PP matrix. With extending thermal treatment time, the PTC intensity first increases and then decreases obviously. Long treatment time is required for the composites with high CB loadings to reach the PTC intensity maximum value. This phenomenon is attributed to the evolution of segregated microstructure during the thermal treatment, which is traced visually in situ through an optical microscope (OM). The diffusion due to the concentration gradient and the subsequent aggregation of CB particles lead to this behavior. A model based on the OM observation is proposed to reveal the origin of this novel resistivity‐temperature behavior.
Design of Efficient Bifunctional Oxygen Reduction/Evolution Electrocatalyst: Recent Advances and Perspectives
Authors: Huang Zhen‐Feng , Wang Jiong , Peng Yuecheng , Jung Chi‐Young , Fisher Adrian , Wang Xin
Published: July 2017

Oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) are the two most important reactions in rechargeable metal‐air battery, a promising technology to meet the energy requirements for various applications. The development of low‐cost, highly efficient and stable bifunctional ORR/OER catalysts is critical for a large‐scale application of this technology. In this review, the authors first introduce the fundamentals of bifunctional ORR/OER electrocatalysis in alkaline electrolyte. Various types of nanostructured materials as bifunctional ORR/OER catalysts including metal oxide, hydroxide and sulfide, functional carbon material, metal, and their composites are then reviewed. The crucial factors that can be used to tune the activity of the catalyst towards ORR/OER are summarized, including (1) phase, morphology, crystal facet, defect, mixed‐metal and strain engineering for metal oxide; (2) heteroatom doping, topological defects, and formation of metal‐N‐C structure for carbon material; (3) alloy effect for metal. These experiences lay the foundation for large scale application of metal‐air battery and can also effectively guide the rational design of catalysts for other electrocatalytic reactions.
Molten‐NaNH2 Densified Graphene with In‐Plane Nanopores and N‐Doping for Compact Capacitive Energy Storage
Authors: Lin Shuang , Zhang Chunyan , Wang Zhiyong , Dai Sheng , Jin Xianbo
Published: July 2017

Capacitive carbons are attractive for energy storage on account of their superior rate and cycling performance over traditional battery materials, but they usually suffer from a far lower volumetric energy density. Starting with expanded graphene, a simple, multifunctional molten sodium amide treatment for the preparation of high‐density graphene with high capacitive performance in both aqueous and lithium battery electrolytes is reported. The molten sodium amide can condense the expanded graphene, lead to nitrogen doping and, what is more important, create moderate in‐plane nanopores on graphene to serve as ion access shortcuts in dense graphene stacks. The resulting high‐density graphene electrode can deliver a volumetric capacitance of 522 F cm−3 in a potassium hydroxide electrolyte; and in a lithium‐ion battery electrolyte, it exhibits a gravimetric and volumetric energy density of 618 W h kg−1 and 740 W h L−1, respectively, and even outperforms commercial LiFePO4.
Chemical Synthesis of 3D Graphene‐Like Cages for Sodium‐Ion Batteries Applications
Authors: Cao Xinxin , Pan Anqiang , Liu Sainan , Zhou Jiang , Li Site , Cao Guozhong , Liu Jun , Liang Shuquan
Published: July 2017

Sodium (Na) super ion conductor structured Na3V2(PO4)3 (NVP) is extensively explored as cathode material for sodium‐ion batteries (SIBs) due to its large interstitial channels for Na+ migration. The synthesis of 3D graphene‐like structure coated on NVP nanoflakes arrays via a one‐pot, solid‐state reaction in molten hydrocarbon is reported. The NVP nanoflakes are uniformly coated by the in situ generated 3D graphene‐like layers with the thickness of 3 nm. As a cathode material, graphene covered NVP nanoflakes exhibit excellent electrochemical performances, including close to theoretical reversible capacity (115.2 mA h g−1 at 1 C), superior rate capability (75.9 mA h g−1 at 200 C), and excellent cyclic stability (62.5% of capacity retention over 30000 cycles at 50 C). Furthermore, the 3D graphene‐like cages after removing NVP also serve as a good anode material and deliver a specific capacity of 242.5 mA h g−1 at 0.1 A g−1. The full SIB using these two cathode and anode materials delivers a high specific capacity (109.2 mA h g−1 at 0.1 A g−1) and good cycling stability (77.1% capacity retention over 200 cycles at 0.1 A g−1).
Accelerated Optimization of TiO2/Sb2Se3 Thin Film Solar Cells by High‐Throughput Combinatorial Approach
Authors: Chen Chao , Zhao Yang , Lu Shuaicheng , Li Kanghua , Li Yang , Yang Bo , Chen Wenhao , Wang Liang , Li Dengbing , Deng Hui , Yi Fei , Tang Jiang
Published: July 2017

Sb2Se3, a V2‐VI3 compound semiconductor, has attracted extensive research attention in photovoltaics due to its non‐toxicity, low cost and earth‐abundant constituents. Herein, a combinatorial approach to optimize the performance of TiO2/Sb2Se3 thin film photovoltaics is employed. By simultaneously conducting a series of experiments in parallel rather than one after another, combinatorial strategy increases experimental throughput and reduces personnel costs. Key parameters such as TiO2 thickness, post‐annealing temperature and Sb2Se3 thickness are identified as 65 nm, 450 °C and 850 nm through the combinatorial approach. Finally, in combination with (NH4)2S back surface cleaning, TiO2/Sb2Se3 solar cells with 5.6% efficiency and decent stability are obtained, showcasing the power of high‐throughput strategy for accelerating the optimization of Sb2Se3 photovoltaics.
A Dual‐Carbon Battery Based on Potassium‐Ion Electrolyte
Authors: Ji Bifa , Zhang Fan , Wu Nanzhong , Tang Yongbing
Published: July 2017

Although potassium‐ion batteries (KIBs) have been considered to be promising alternatives to conventional lithium‐ion batteries due to large abundance and low cost of potassium resources, their development still stays at the infancy stage due to the lack of appropriate cathode and anode materials with reversible potassium insertion/extraction as well as good rate and cycling performance. Herein, a novel dual‐carbon battery based on a potassium‐ion electrolyte (named as K‐DCB), utilizing expanded graphite as cathode material and mesocarbon microbead as anode material is developed. The working mechanism of the K‐DCB is investigated, which is further demonstrated to deliver a high reversible capacity of 61 mA h g‐1 at a current density of 1C over a voltage window of 3.0–5.2 V, as well as good cycling performance with negligible capacity decay after 100 cycles. Moreover, the high working voltage with medium discharge voltage of 4.5 V also enables the K‐DCB to meet the requirement of some high‐voltage devices. With the merits of environmental friendliness, low cost and high energy density, the K‐DCB shows attractive potential for future energy storage application.
Role of Microstructure in Oxygen Induced Photodegradation of Methylammonium Lead Triiodide Perovskite Films
Authors: Sun Qing , Fassl Paul , Becker‐Koch David , Bausch Alexandra , Rivkin Boris , Bai Sai , Hopkinson Paul E. , Snaith Henry J. , Vaynzof Yana
Published: July 2017

This paper investigates the impact of microstructure on the degradation rate of methylammonium lead triiodide (MAPbI3) perovskite films upon exposure to light and oxygen. By comparing the oxygen induced degradation of perovskite films of different microstructure–fabricated using either a lead acetate trihydrate precursor or a solvent engineering technique–it is demonstrated that films with larger and more uniform grains and better electronic quality show a significantly reduced degradation compared to films with smaller, more irregular grains. The effect of degradation on the optical, compositional, and microstructural properties of the perovskite layers is characterized and it is demonstrated that oxygen induced degradation is initiated at the layer surface and grain boundaries. It is found that under illumination, irreversible degradation can occur at oxygen levels as low as 1%, suggesting that degradation can commence already during the device fabrication stage. Finally, this work establishes that improved thin‐film microstructure, with large uniform grains and a low density of defects, is a prerequisite for enhanced stability necessary in order to make MAPbI3 a promising long lived and low cost alternative for future photovoltaic applications.