bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Haydon, Benjamin
Authors: Scott Matthew
Published: July 2017

John Keats regarded Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) as one of the three great geniuses of the age, placing him alongside William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth, both personal friends with whom Haydon worked closely. Of the four, Haydon's reputation has endured the least well but he retains a central place in the history of British painting and was also one of the most important writers on art between Reynolds and Ruskin. He is known today chiefly for four things: his portraits of Wordsworth, his diaries, his championing of the Elgin Marbles against Richard Payne Knight and the establishment, and his hosting in 1817 of ‘the immortal dinner’ at which Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb sat beneath his enormous canvas of
Christ's Entry into Jerusalem
, which depicts both poets as members of the crowd.
Hayley, William
Authors: Crosby Mark
Published: July 2017

William Hayley (1745–1820) was a successful poet and biographer, whose most enduring work,The Triumphs of Temper(1781), was considered by many contemporaries to be an exemplum of moral purpose and poetic form. Composed in heroic couplets, the six‐canto poem was designed to improve polite society by instructing adolescence girls how to exercise temper to regulate the socially damaging effects of spleen. Chiefly remembered for his friendships with various authors and artists including Anna Seward, George Romney, Joseph Wright, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Amelia Opie, and for his patronage of William Blake, Hayley's literary influence has been overshadowed by various derogatory remarks about his poetry, such as Robert Southey's comment that ‘Everything about that man is good except his poetry’ (Southey 1856, vol. 1: 156). In addition, Hayley's reputation has suffered at the hands of Blake's biographers and critics. Armed with Blake's correspondence from early 1803, which charts his increasing unhappiness at undertaking commercial engraving work for Hayley, and a series of satiric epigrams dated circa 1809, Blake scholars typically cast Hayley's patronage as creatively benumbing and Hayley as an unimaginative and tedious man. Hayley's contemporaries, however, did not see him this way. On the contrary, he was considered the poetical successor to Alexander Pope, and his literary productions, which encompass plays, poetry, at least one novel, didactic prose tracts, the first English translations of Dante and Ercilla, and numerous biographies, proved extremely popular with late eighteenth‐century readers. Indeed, while dismissive of his poetry, Southey also observed that ‘[Hayley was] the most fashionable of living poets [who] would, in no inconsiderable degree, excite the attention of what is called the reading public’ (Southey 1825: 263).
Hazlitt, William
Authors: Scott Matthew
Published: July 2017

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote memorably that though ‘we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt’ (1881: 79), and William Hazlitt (1778–1830) is certainly among the most powerful writers of English non‐fictional prose. What is more, the subjects of his writing are dazzling in their variety. Anger (both political and personal) motivated him often – a recruiting sergeant for detractors during his lifetime and since – but so did his many enthusiasms. Excited by philosophy, he was not always the most coherent of thinkers and there are many contradictions in both his life and his work. But of all the great Romantics, William Hazlitt was perhaps the most consistent in his determination to uphold the principles of republicanism and the French Revolution, whose aftermath marked him as a very young man. He knew many of the other important figures of the time: Coleridge and Wordsworth were early acquaintances and friends; Lamb and Keats were close admirers; Hunt and Haydon were literary collaborators. But he was not a convivial man who maintained friendships easily, and although he was at the heart of English Romanticism, his work is singular and makes a part of larger trends only uneasily. Although he is arguably the period's greatest critic of art and literature as well as being a political journalist, autobiographer, philosopher, historian, lecturer, and editor, it is chiefly as an essayist that we should remember him; and in those essays, many of which aspire to the quality of lyric poems, he surely has few if any equals. The rivals, if indeed there are any, are Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and George Orwell.
H
ogg,
J
ames, Prose
Authors: Inglis Katherine
Published: July 2017

During his lifetime and for much of the nineteenth century, James Hogg (1770–1835) was regarded as an inspired but unpolished autodidact poet, whose prose was imaginative, ephemeral, but too often ‘coarse’. His failure to gloss over such ‘impolite’ subjects such as mental illness and prostitution drew class‐inflected accusations of impropriety. Hogg's work attempted to bridge the social and linguistic divide between rural and metropolitan Scotland. He wove the traditions and forms of a vanishing oral culture into the more rigid forms of print culture, promoting the distinct voice of a class that was too often silenced or sentimentalized in contemporary fiction, and incorporated his imaginative response to contemporary materialist science and philosophy into historical, fantastic, and supernatural tales. Posthumous bowdlerized collections of his work obscured his playful, innovative treatment of form, Anglicized his virtuoso Scots demotic, and neutered his satire. Admonished by his peers for incongruity, indelicacy, and his idiosyncratic style, Hogg's reputation now rests on the very qualities for which he was once condemned. His prose is characterized by hybridity and variety in tone, voice, form, and content, producing a uniquely disorienting brand of fiction that resists explanation and closure. These qualities are concentrated in
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824). The revival of interest in Hogg in the twentieth century focused primarily on
Confessions
, sometimes to the exclusion of his lesser‐known work; however, the establishment in 1990 of the journal
Studies in Hogg and His World
confirmed the repositioning of Hogg as a significant Romantic author. Since 1995 Edinburgh University Press has been publishing reliable, affordable editions of Hogg's writing, which when complete will run to 34 volumes. The Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg demonstrates that the ironies and ambiguity of
Confessions are
characteristic of Hogg's writing. It is a measure of the transformation in Hogg's reputation that he is now recognized as a writer of sufficient stature to require a collected works, something he was unable to arrange in his lifetime. Autodidactism was central to his persona as ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, the natural genius and heir to Burns, but hindered genuine acceptance by literary society: the autodidact might be patronized as a phenomenon, but not recognized as a peer.
H
olcroft,
T
homas
Authors: Taylor George
Published: July 2017

William Hazlitt maintained that all Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) wished for ‘was the free and dispassionate discussion of the great principles relating to human happiness, trusting in the power of Reason to make itself heard and … that the result would be favourable to freedom and virtue’ (Holcroft & Hazlitt 1925, vol. 2:12). Almost all of Holcroft's writing promoted rational enlightenment and thus seems the antithesis of Romanticism. Friend and collaborator of rational philosopher William Godwin, arguing atheism with Coleridge, he was arraigned as a traitor for supporting the French Revolution and pilloried in the Tory press.
Hymn
Authors: Watson J.R.
Published: July 2017

There are two kinds of hymn to be discussed here. The first is the congregational hymn, described by Stuart Curran as ‘a series of like stanzas suited by their uniformity to a repeated musical setting and addressed to a divine, and immortal being, in whose efficacy, on both cosmic and personal planes, one has the certainty of belief (Curran 1986: 56–57). He calls this a'popular generic conception’ of the hymn, and adds another kind of hymn, the second that will be discussed, that he denotes as ‘learned and retrospective hymnody’. He characterizes the hymns of British Romanticism as ‘literary, often dramatic in conception, self‐conscious, self‐reflective’.
Improvisational Modes
Authors: Esterhammer Angela
Published: July 2017

Today, the term ‘improvisation’ brings to mind a range of performance genres and musical styles that include ‘improv’ comedy, jazz, rap, and poetry slams; it can also refer to forms of dramatic training and therapy that became prominent during the twentieth century. But improvisation has a long history reaching back to the origins of Western culture; Aristotle even suggests in his
Poetics
that all poetry began with the improvisations generated by people's natural instincts for rhythm and mimicry. In England, improvisation was a significant element in the performance of medieval mystery plays, and in Italian literary culture it came to the fore in the
commedia dell'arte
that originated during the fourteenth century and remained popular until the mid‐eighteenth century. Even as this genre of improvised drama waned in Italy, it exerted significant influence abroad and influenced Romantic theatre in different ways in France, Germany, and England. Tracing these influences, like studying any form of improvised performance, inevitably presents methodological challenges because each performance is by definition unique and unrecoverable; there is no script or textual record that can be studied apart from sketchy outlines and partial, subjective, haphazard reports written by eyewitnesses. This methodological difficulty no doubt accounts in part for the comparative neglect of improvisational modes, even during the recent surge of interest in Romantic theatre. Nevertheless, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries improvisation found its way on to English and European stages in a number of different forms: as an acting technique, a thematic aspect of dramatic composition, a way of relating individual performances to current events and socio‐political contexts, and a component of innovative, hybrid performance genres.
J
acobin and Anti‐
J
acobin Novels
Authors: Wallace Miriam L.
Published: July 2017

The ‘English Jacobin novel’ was identified as a specific literary genre for contemporary scholars by Marilyn Butler in 1975 and Gary Kelly in 1976. Since then ‘Jacobin’ and ‘anti‐Jacobin’ (for their ideological opponents) have become well‐established terms referring to a range of explicitly political works beginning about 1790 and continuing into the early nineteenth century. Dismissed for many years as work of little literary merit (although of some political or historical interest), the English Jacobin and anti‐Jacobin fictions have gained standing and critical attention in the last two decades. Categorizing these works remains contentious, and their relation to Romanticism and the Romantic‐era novel is complex.
J
ordan,
D
orothy
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

Dorothy Jordan (1761–1816) was an actor who is remembered as much for her long affair with the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV) as she is for her acting abilities. Her name was actually Dorothy (‘Dora’) Phillips, or Dorothea Phillips, since she had taken her mother's name rather than her father's name of Bland. On the stage, she became known as ‘Mrs Jordan’, a respectable‐sounding moniker that helped to cloak the fact that, although she had children, Jordan was not married. Her life is an object lesson in hybridity, for she played hybrid roles both on the stage and in her own personal life. Moreover, Jordan's several affairs point to the difficulty women actors had in supporting themselves in the theatre, especially since female actors often were cast stereotypically as little better than prostitutes.
K
eats,
J
ohn, Prose
Authors: Scott Grant F.
Published: July 2017

Had John Keats (1795–1821) not written a single line of verse he would still be known today for the brilliance and imaginative vitality of his letters. In slightly over four years, during his early twenties, Keats produced some of the most remarkable letters in literary history that not only sharpen the contexts of his poetry but also show the rapid evolution of his thought over a very short time. The letters yield the spontaneous and frank observations of a young man: his insecurities, doubts, fears, enthusiasms, ambitions, prejudices, and opinions. But they also represent the mature reflections of a writer who thought deeply about art, poetry and philosophy, beauty and truth, and about suffering and the human condition. Their uniqueness arises from the surprising mixture of profound ideas that have become touchstones of aesthetic theory with witty patches of quotidian conversation and gossip. Many of the letters have become so influential in critical circles that they are now recognized by shorthand phrases. Contemporary editors typically excerpt from and give individual letters their own titles: ‘Adam's Dream’, ‘The Camelion Poet’, ‘The Vale of Soul‐Making’, ‘Negative Capability’. The last phrase in particular has become a mantra in English Studies as well as part of the vocabulary of every good aesthetician. Powerfully evocative and widely applicable, it has migrated into fields as diverse as art, architecture, business, music, political science, philosophy, rhetoric and composition, theatre, and even gourmet cooking.
Labouring‐Class Poetry
Authors: McEathron Scott
Published: July 2017

Beginning with the appearance of the ‘Thresher Poet’ Stephen Duck in the 1730s and continuing for decades thereafter, a series of aspiring poets with labouring‐class origins gained a foothold in Britain's literary marketplace. Described variously as ‘humble poets’, ‘uneducated poets’, ‘peasant poets’, and ‘natural geniuses’, these writers often attracted substantial patronage and became short‐term objects of public fascination. By the early nineteenth century, dozens of such poets were publishing in Great Britain, some of whom – such as Robert Burns, Robert Bloomfield, James Hogg, and John Clare – are now recognized as important figures in the literary and cultural development of Romanticism (McEathron 1999). Many others, including Ann Yearsley, Janet Little, James Woodhouse, and Isabella Lick‐barrow, to name only a few, are now emerging as important research subjects. Scholarship in the area has increased dramatically in the last 25 years, with scholars engaged in parallel tracks of inquiry. One of these tracks has been primarily editorial, involving the recovery and re‐publication of obscure or forgotten labouring‐class texts. In the cases of important poets including Clare, Hogg, and Mary Leapor, this editorial work has given rise to modern, fully annotated scholarly editions. It has also led to several expansive anthologies which, taken together, provide excellent surveys of the range of poetry produced by these writers (Maidment 1987; Goodridge et al. 2003, 2006; Boos 2008). The other research track has been, broadly speaking, critical, with scholars attempting to assess the lives and literary achievements of these figures (Landry 1990; Waldron 1996; Bold 2007; White 2007), their significance for improved understandings of eighteenth‐century and Romantic‐era print culture (Christmas 2001), and their linkages to radical culture and labouring‐class consciousness (Goodridge 1995; Janowitz 1998). While it was once assumed that labouring‐class poetry was, by definition, a literary endeavour dedicated to portraying the vocational lives of domestic servants, farm labourers, cobblers, and other workers, it has become clear that this definition was far too narrow. It failed to convey the topical richness of the poetry itself, the high‐literary aspirations nurtured by some of its practitioners, and the diversity of biographical circumstances from which these poets arose. In this regard, even as we now know more about labouring‐class poetry than ever, the question of what, in generic terms, constitutes a ‘labouring‐class poem’ has become both a more urgent question and one with more possible answers, involving, for example, considerations of generic categories like ‘river poetry’ and ‘garden poetry’ (Keegan 2008).
L
amb,
L
ady
C
aroline
Authors: Douglass Paul
Published: July 2017

Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828) was a novelist and poet whose notorious 1812 liaison with Lord Byron has fascinated readers since before the publication of her notorious novel
Glenarvon
(1816), which was based upon their affair. Her literary reputation has been a victim of this fascination with her private life, and only in the latter part of the twentieth century has serious attention been paid to her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and satires of Byron's
Don Juan
. Lamb's fiction draws upon the traditions of the Gothic and sentimental novels to which she was exposed, like Samuel Richardson's
Clarissa
(1748), Laurence Sterne's
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
(1768), Frances Burney's
Evelina
(1778), Charlotte Smith's
Emmeline; or The Orphan of the Castle
(1788), Ann Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), Sidney Owenson/Lady Morgan's
The Wild Irish Girl
(1806), Madame de Staël's
Corinne
(1807), and Maria Edgeworth's
Tales of Fashionable Life
(1809). She was also influenced by the realism of Chodorlos de Laclos's
Les Liaisons dangereuses
(1782) and the phantasmagorical and supernatural elements in Jacques Cazotte's
Le Diable Amoreux (1772)
and William Beckford's
Vathek
(1786). Lamb's work is foundational for the literature of Byronism, and it is also a precursor to the ‘silver fork novel’ that emerged in the mid‐1820s.
Melodrama
Authors: Cox Jeffrey N.
Published: July 2017

For some, melodrama, more or less like the poor, has always been with us, providing a sensationalist contrast to the richer strains of tragedy; in this account, writers from Euripides to Thomas Kyd to Tennessee Williams weakened their plays by turning from tragedy to melodrama. For others, melodrama denotes a distinctly modern genre, but it is an impoverished one, repeatedly staging moustachioed villains tying damsels to the tracks or dramatizing the sorrows and redemption of drunks and gamblers. For still other students of melodrama, it constitutes a potentially radical form, arising in working‐class theatres and depicting the miseries of the factory or the evil machinations of absentee landlords.
M
itford,
M
ary
R
ussell, Drama
Authors: Beshero‐Bondar Elisa E.
Published: July 2017

One of the most prolific and versatile women writers of the Romantic era, Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) produced poetry, drama, and prose fiction over a long literary career from the 1810s to the 1840s. As a dramatist, she successfully staged four historical tragedies between 1823 and 1834 at Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Royal Victoria theatres, as well as an opera at the English Opera House in 1835. Mitford earned a respected reputation as a tragedian by 1830 with repeatedly successful stage productions:
Julian
ran for eight performances in 1823,
Foseari
ran for 15 performances in 1826, and
Rienzi
, her greatest success, ran for a remarkable 34 performances in 1828. Her efforts to stage a tragedy on Charles I and Oliver Cromwell met with rejection from the Lord Chamberlain in 1825 as too dangerous to produce, and would not be performed until a decade later at the Royal Victoria. While historical tragedies defined her success in stage production, she also published numerous short dramatic sketches in literary journals and annual anthologies of the 1820s and 1830s.
Mitford,MaryRussell, Prose
Authors: Morrison Kevin A.
Published: July 2017

Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855), was a poet, playwright, and prolific author of highly descriptive, semi‐fictional sketches about English country life and topography. Originally published in periodicals, these loosely related, discontinuous pieces were then assembled by Mitford and published biennially between 1824 and 1832 under the titleOur Village: Sketches of Rural Life and Scenery. Their quotidian subject matter and conversational style served as the prototype of a new genre: the country village sketch. Yet the same descriptive qualities and parochial concerns that madeOur Villagesuch a commercial – and, to some, an aesthetic – achievement in the nineteenth century have also contributed to the dearth of literary analyses of her work in our own time.
M
ore,
H
annah, Poetry
Authors: Andrews Kerri
Published: July 2017

Hannah More (1745–1833), hailed as one of the ‘Nine Living Muses’ of Great Britain as a young woman, was an influential social reformer, evangelist, and poet, who first found fame as a playwright. Born to John More, a schoolmaster, and his wife Mary in Fishponds, just north of Bristol in 1745, Hannah was the fourth of their five daughters. The More sisters would remain close throughout their lives, running a school together in Bristol, first at Trinity Street, and later at Park Street. More and her sisters benefited from an unusually rigorous education, learning French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and mathematics; study of the last subject was considered unfeminine in the eighteenth century and More's rapid progress was stopped short by her father. More never married, though she was engaged in her twenties to William Turner, a man two decades her senior: More broke off their engagement after Turner postponed their wedding for the third time. As amends for failing to marry her, More's former fiance gave her £200 a year for the rest of her life, enabling her to develop the literary talents which were by now becoming apparent.
Opera,
I
talian
Authors: Wood Gillen D'arcy
Published: July 2017

Vocal music is the art form historically adapted to the imperatives of sociability, and the music of the Italian opera was a fashionable and ubiquitous entertainment in the Romantic period in Britain and throughout Europe. Every region had its popular music idioms but Italian opera was the lingua franca of a booming cosmopolitan music industry and print culture, of which London was the commercial capital. The King's Theatre opera house in the Haymarket dominated the socio‐commercial structure of Romantic‐era polite music culture, in which a successful opera song ran the gamut of social venues, both public and private. Beginning on the stage of the Italian (or English) opera house, and performed by a well‐known singer, a favourite air would subsequently be revived at the London pleasure gardens and in genteel concert settings. The ‘delightful airs’ of the Italian opera, Leigh Hunt recalled of his boyhood London, ‘wandered into the streets out of the English operas that borrowed them, and became confounded with English property’ (1928: 61). The destiny of the Italian aria then lay in the music room of the young female amateur musician, where it battled the same tides of fashion to which it owed its own existence for a permanent place in her vocal repertoire. But despite, or because of, its centrality to Romantic‐era music culture, the King's Theatre opera house – the most important in Europe outside Italy – also embodied a multitude of perceived dangers to the British nation: effeminacy, cosmopolitanism, luxury consumption, the tyranny of fashion, and a thriving aristocratic culture of patronage. The result was a constant agitation through the eighteenth century and Romantic period for reform of the Italian opera house.
Performance
Authors: Mulrooney Jonathan
Published: July 2017

Theatre‐going was an immensely popular pastime in late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century Britain, influencing the development of Romantic‐period drama in all its forms. Playhouses in London and throughout the nation offered a wide range of entertainments, including contemporary versions of Renaissance tragedy, domestic comedy, opera, Gothic romance, melodrama, pantomime, and a host of other genres. Actors shared the stage with horses, dogs, with and elephants, with water tanks and moving scene effects, with exploding military ordinance and magical flames, disappearing spectres and invading armies. Critics attended, reviewed, and evaluated performances and pored over theatrical celebrities’ private lives. Spectators vied for seats in the houses, ready to witness old favourites and new pieces, famous actors and upstart imitators, foreign singers and child prodigies. It was a vibrant ever‐changing scene that represented and influenced the sensibilities of a British public experiencing radical historical change in every area of its daily experience. This is to say that theatrical performance – its means, mechanisms, and its textual afterlife – reveals much about how Britons lived, what they thought, and how they created the drama and literature that came to be called ‘Romantic'.
R
adcliffe,
A
nn, Poetry
Authors: Bailey Peggy Dunn
Published: July 2017

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) was England's most popular writer of Gothic fiction and her fame today continues to rest primarily on her novels:
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne
(1789),
A Sicilian Romance
(1790),
The Romance of the Forest
(1791),
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794),
The Italian
(1797), and
Gaston de Blondeville
(published posthumously in 1826). In the Romantic era, however, Ann Radcliffe was also recognized as an accomplished poet by many of her contemporaries, and recently scholars have begun re‐examining the significance of her poetry, both to the novels within which she published it and in its own right. Radcliffe's poetry is, to use her word, ‘interspersed’ throughout her novels and serves to enhance mood (typically, melancholy or fear) and develop character; on occasion, a poem may provide, or become, a clue to the Gothic mystery being presented in the prose narrative. Structurally, Radcliffe preferred rhyming iambic pentameters and tetrameters; thematically, she gravitated towards scenes of twilight and darkness (its beauty as well as its terror), storm and shipwreck. The poems tend to be exceptionally visual and auditory, focused on subtle variations in colour and sound. Painterly descriptions of sunrise and sunset, light reflected on water or falling through leaves, and solitary figures in a sublime natural setting are abundant, as are lines devoted to the song of the nightingale, the sound of the wind, and the evocative power of the human voice or the individual musical instrument (typically, the lute). Radcliffe's poems are also quintessentially Romantic in their close attention to natural detail and to the interior landscape of the individual of ‘sensibility’, the man or woman emotionally and spiritually connected to nature.
Radcliffe, Ann, Prose
Authors: Chaplin Sue
Published: July 2017

Born Ann Ward in 1764, Radcliffe married in 1787 and died in 1823: very little else of consequence is known about her personal history, for she appeared deliberately to eschew public life in spite of the fact that the writer known as ‘Mrs Radcliffe’ was probably the most successful novelist of the 1790s. Her fictions were the ‘best‐sellers’ of their moment, earning Radcliffe a good deal of money and critical acclaim. She was lauded by the critic Nathan Drake as ‘the Shakespeare of Romance writers’ at a time when an understanding of Shakespeare as the first great national poet was beginning significantly to shape the formulation of the English literary canon. Sir Walter Scott was one of her greatest admirers (he termed her ‘the great enchantress’) and her work was known to the early Romantics; indeed, Radcliffe's treatment of landscape and her complex evocations of the aesthetic of the sublime place her work in significant relation to the discourses of early Romanticism. Radcliffe's novels crossed cultural, aesthetic, and generic borders, marrying the literature of sensibility with the emerging Gothic romance and literary Gothicism with Romanticism. Her work is also rooted in some of the most pressing political and historical questions of the period, in spite of what critics have sometimes identified as her quiet conservatism and reluctance to involve herself in public life (see Grant 1951; Durrant 1982). Radcliffe's novels, as is the case with Gothic fiction generally in this period, are caught up in and respond to the turbulent social and political contexts of the 1790s.
Rescue Opera
Authors: Hoeveler Diane Long
Published: July 2017

One of the most popular forms of opera during the Romantic period, little remembered today, was what came to be known as ‘rescue opera’. Very similar in plot to the earliest Gothic novels and, in fact, frequently borrowing the Gothic's settings, characters, and themes, rescue operas can be understood as ‘sung gothic’, or an oral and performative transmission of the Gothic mode. These operas most frequently focused on two themes: the domestic ritual sacrifice of a woman or the unlawful political imprisonment of innocent victims of tyranny (see Charlton 2000). In both cases, the rescue operas staged elaborate releases of these victims only after their heroic efforts allowed them to prove their worth: hence, the operas collaborated in promoting a secularizing bourgeois agenda of earning one's salvation through one's own efforts. Extremely popular throughout Europe from roughly 1780
–
1840, rescue operas deserve to be recognized as important performative ideological markers of the Gothic imaginary.
Satire, Prose
Authors: Jones Steven E.
Published: July 2017

The romantic canon is shot through with prose satire, though it has often been classified under the category of ‘romantic irony’. Take the best‐known satiric poet of the age, Lord Byron, who also wrote various prefaces and notes in a distinctive satiric voice, not to mention his incomparably witty letters. Or consider the importance of a reflexively critical stance, including self‐satire, in major prose works that helped to define the period, from Coleridge's
Biographia. Literaria
(1817) to Carlyle's
Sartor Resartus
(1833–4), both baggy autobiographical treatises that can be seen as Menippean medleys combining abstruse philosophy, personal expression, literary criticism, and Shandean observations. Carlyle's work, in particular, which was first published serially in
Fraser's Magazine
, can be read as a serious satire on the ideal of the romantic autobiography, a parody of German transcendentalism, and of the author's own quest in the persona of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, as filtered through the persona of the editor, who presents his great allegorical‐philosophical work – on clothes. Similarly, William Blake's strange illuminated book,
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
(1790), is a difficult‐to‐classify medley of verbal and visual art, visions, aphoristic proverbs, and parodic tract‐like doctrines, offering a satiric inversion of pious visions like that of Emanuel Swedenborg. Its serious visions (‘Energy is Eternal Delight’) are presented as the subversive counter‐visions of ‘the religious’ as Blake uses parody and corrosive satire to open his readers’ ‘doors of perception’.
Science and Poetry
Authors: Lussier Mark
Published: July 2017

Although Romanticism tends to be associated with aesthetic, political, and social revolutions that swept the Continent generally and England specifically, the period also witnessed advances in virtually every discipline in what is now termed the physical sciences. While the terms ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘natural history’ were most current during the period, ground‐breaking revolutions occurred in astronomy, botany, chemistry, geography, geology, immunology, meteorology, neurology, pneumatics, and zoology, leading to the increasing specialization of scientific disciplines codified during the remainder of the nineteenth century. The writers of the period, as considerable scholarship has demonstrated across the past 20 years, were both well‐versed in the outcomes of exploratory, experimental, technological, and theoretical work emerging from the sciences and sought to incorporate those insights into the poetry of the period, resulting in a form of versified science often associated with the Classical poet/philosopher Lucretius.
S
helley,
P
ercy
B
ysshe, Poetry
Authors: O'Neill Michael
Published: July 2017

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1821) was a poet who possessed, in his own words from
A Defence of Poetry
, ‘the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature’ (Shelley 2003). Yet the greatness of his poetry, this entry will argue, does not essentially reside in his capacity to articulate his strong libertarian beliefs. These beliefs may be the ground of his conscious intellectual being. They show the influence of many thinkers, including that enshrined in the
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793), written by his father‐in‐law, William Godwin. But the supposition that Shelley uses poetry as the vehicle for the endorsement of a system of ideas is fundamentally erroneous, as he himself argues in two important places for understanding his poetics: the Preface to
Prometheus Unbound
, where he asserts that ‘Didactic poetry is my abhorrence’ and
A Defence of Poetry
, where he develops a sophisticated theory of poetry's primary appeal to the imagination and argues that ‘A Poet … would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither’ (Leader & O'Neill 2003: 232, 682).
S
helley,
P
ercy
B
ysshe, Prose
Authors: Hoeveler Diane Long , Tovey Paige
Published: July 2017

Percy B. Shelley's prose can be categorized into three main classifications: the two early Gothic novels, the political essays and philosophical works, and translations. Although not generally thought of as a prose stylist, Shelley did write two short Gothic novels:
Zastrozzi, A Romance
(composed in the spring of 1809; published 1810) and
St
.
Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance
(composed 1810; published Dec. 1810 but dated 1811), both composed when he was between the ages of 18 and 19 and in his final year at Eton.
Zastrozzi
is a Gothic revenge fantasy predicated on a son's consuming need to avenge his soiled mother's sexual honour. This short novel presents its eponymous character as a mysterious and ominous embodiment of fate, so consumed with hatred for Verezzi (Il Conte Verezzi) that he plots Verezzi's ‘destruction’ ‘urged by fiercest revenge’ (Shelley 2002: 61). Zastrozzi intends nothing less than to force Verezzi's suicide so that his eternal soul will be damned. After drugging and kidnapping Verezzi, Zastrozzi has him chained for weeks to the wall of an underground cavern where lizards and ‘large earth‐worms, which twined themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of horror’ (ibid.: 63). One could claim to hear in this work's overwrought dialogue early echoes of the Prometheus–Demogorgon dispute that is so central in Shelley's later major
work Prometheus Unbound
, and certainly there is a hyperbolic quality to the latter drama that may very well have had its origins in the experiments of this early Gothic novel (Rajan 2010).
S
mith,
C
harlotte, Poetry
Authors: Labbe Jacqueline M.
Published: July 2017

Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) was one of the most important poetic innovators of the Romantic period. Over her career she published ten editions of the best‐selling
Elegiac Sonnets
, which broke new ground both in the sonnet form and with the wide variety of other poems the collections contained: two major introspective poems
(The Emigrants
and
Beachy Head)
and a number of scientific, pedagogic, and nature‐based poems. Throughout her poetic career, which began in the early 1780s and ended after her death with a posthumously published collection, Smith actively worked with her poetic materials, inaugurating what was perhaps the major, if unexamined, idiom of the day: experimentation. In 1784, she opens her
Elegiac Sonnets
with a disclaimer: ‘The little Poems which are here called Sonnets, have, I believe, no very just claim to that title; but they consist of fourteen lines, and appear to me no improper vehicle for a single Sentiment.’ Smith invokes the experimental through her gestures towards propriety and legitimacy: ‘the legitimate Sonnet is ill calculated for our language’. For Smith, experimentation and innovation provide an ever‐evolving methodology for her poetry; whether sonnets, elegies, odes, long blank‐verse disquisitions, or short meditative devotions, her work fashions new from old and offers an exemplary case of Romantic artistic fashioning.
Social Criticism
Authors: Hewitt Regina
Published: July 2017

The treatment of ‘social criticism’ as a genre can occur only within a classification system that has moved away from structural definitions of genre and towards functional or a/effectual definitions. Social criticism takes many forms apart from the non‐fiction prose treatise that is its most familiar guise. More attitude or perspective than type of writing, social criticism is the often impassioned motive behind many novels, poems, and plays. To read a work as social criticism is to consider how it protests the limits imposed on human interaction – including, sometimes, the generic limits imposed on writing – and how it arouses resistance.
Surmise
Authors: Mahoney Charles
Published: July 2017

‘Was it for this …?’ ‘Was I deceived …?’ ‘What men or gods are these …?’ ‘May my fears, my filial fears, be vain …’. ‘What if …?’ ‘If this be but a vain belief …’. ‘Do I wake or sleep …?’ ‘How shall I greet thee now …?’ ‘If this be error …’ ‘Will no one tell me …?’ This is the language of the surmise, a peculiar topos of Romantic writing which variously denominates both mode (lyric interrogation, temporal arrest, the adjudication of competing truth claims) and mood (querulousness, conjecture, doubt, melancholy). Never merely one or the other, the romantic surmise stages a moment of choice (however tenuous, between one alternative and another) in a protracted moment of deliberation and (more often than not) consolation. Historically, surmise names a formal charge, an allegation, or an accusation (from Old French
surmettre)
, a matter which can be resolved to be either true or false. More broadly construed, the emphasis lies on the fact of the allegation itself rather than on the truth of the charge – an imputation, probably false or unfounded; in short, a suspicion or conjecture. Understood in this register, it may be little more than an idea formed in the mind without empirical evidence, a vague idea which may or may not be true or, as Samuel Johnson understood, nothing more or less than an imperfect imagining. The surmise may thus be seen to be a peculiarly poetic way of proceeding, of sporting with possibility and multiplying a poem's moods – in the end, a matter more of wit than of judgement according to which the poet indulges in fanciful inference and extravagant contrivance. More figuratively still, surmise may be said to name not merely an isolated imaginative conjecture but more comprehensively the free play of the poetic intelligence itself as it deliberates its options, musing over which ‘perhaps’ to pursue. For the Romantics, surmise may be seen to name the activity of the imaginative mind aware equally of itself and of its creation of the obstacles which it will demonstrate its virtuosity in overcoming – as when Wordsworth effectively begins
The Prelude
with the curiously inspirational doubt, ‘Was it for this …?’ or when Keats chides the silent form of the urn for teasing us out of thought.
S
urrey
T
heatre
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

The Surrey Theatre was the centre of much experimental drama during the Romantic era in Britain. Performances at this facility often blended drama with animal acts and with dances. During the early years of the theatre, performances included equestrian acts supervised by Charles Hughes, and later, under the management of Robert Elliston, each production included at least one ballet.
T
ales
Authors: Jarrells Anthony
Published: July 2017

The tale is a short prose form that flourished in the Romantic period. Its representations of everyday life share much in common with those of its close sibling, the novel. However, its size and its associations with oral tradition and regional history enabled the tale to cater to the demand for fiction that novels inspired but in ways and in venues that went beyond the novel's considerable reach.
T
aylor,
W
illiam
Authors: Chandler David
Published: July 2017

William Taylor (1765–1836), usually known as William Taylor of Norwich, emerged as the most important British book reviewer in the 1790s, developing what Hazlitt would acclaim in
The Spirit of the Age
as ‘philosophical criticism’. He continued to be a prolific contributor to such liberal publications as the
Monthly Review
and the
Monthly Magazine
until the mid‐1820s. Taylor's speciality was German literature, on which he was the leading British authority before Carlyle. Georg Herzfeld, in the major German study, describes Taylor as ‘the man who first emphatically directed the attention of his countrymen to the importance of the German language and literature’ (2007: 10). George Borrow, a protégé, later described Taylor as ‘the founder of the Anglo‐German school in England’ (1923, vol. 6: 219). Taylor is also notable for his provocative and controversial biblical criticism.
T
helwall,
J
ohn, Poetry
Authors: Thompson Judith
Published: July 2017

The poetry of John Thelwall has been slow to emerge from the long shadow of his political notoriety. Valued by historians as the most important, ‘courageous, and judicious’ radical orator and theorist of the revolutionary era in Britain (Poole 2009: 1), Thelwall has been largely overlooked as a poet. His verse has been dismissed as mannered and mediocre, at best a minor precursor or adjunct to the more fully developed work of his major contemporaries. His preference for oral, miscellaneous, and periodical modes of publication, his idiosyncratic poetics emphasizing artful rhetoric and prosody rather than ‘the real language of men’, and public speech acts above transcendent imagination, his vulnerability to aesthetic assessments driven by antagonistic ideological agendas, in his own time and ours, and the disappearance of much of his archive – all these have stood in the way of mere awareness of his oeuvre, far less careful analysis on its own terms. However, the remarkable discovery in Derby, in 2004, of a large and previously unknown manuscript of his complete poems has drawn renewed attention to the quality, range. and originality of his poetry, its place in his long and diverse career, and its relation to the work of his Romantic‐era contemporaries.
T
ighe,
M
ary
Authors: Feldman Paula R.
Published: July 2017

Best known for her six‐canto epic,
Psyche; or, The Legend of Love
(1805), Mary Tighe was an Anglo‐Irish poet who was widely influential during the Romantic era and beyond. She was born in Dublin on 9 October 1772 into privileged circumstances, both materially and intellectually. Her father was the Reverend William Blachford (1730–73), a wealthy Anglican clergyman and librarian of St Patrick's Library and Marsh's Library in Dublin. Her mother, Theodosia Tighe (1744–1817), was the daughter of Lady Mary Bligh (d. 1748) and the sister of the highly respected drama critic Edward Tighe (1740‐?1800). She came from a family with large country estates in County Wicklow (‘Rosanna’) and County Kilkenny (‘Woodstock’), as well as a town house in Dublin. Mary Tighe was never to know her father, who died barely more than half a year after her birth. However, her mother, who did not remarry, saw to it that she had an unusually progressive education in English, French, and Italian literary classics as well as theology, science, history, music, and drawing. John Wesley was a close family friend who sometimes stayed at their home and famously preached a sermon under the oak tree in their yard, for her mother became extremely active in the Irish Methodist movement.
Torture on Stage
Authors: Carlson Julie A.
Published: July 2017

The history of torture has always demonstrated a tight interconnection between torture and spectacle and thus torture and theatre. Justification for the use of torture relies on the ‘seeing is believing’ motif as the chief criterion for establishing truth in the legal arena. Indeed, acknowledging the differential status of what counts as a credible ‘eyewitness’ is at the root of judicial recourse to torture in ancient Greece – the notion being that slaves and other subordinated subjects could not be relied on to speak the truth unless they were threatened with or exposed to torture (Peters 1985). Arguments for the abolition of torture employ the motif to opposite ends in asserting that a body in pain is difficult to view. This difficulty is alleged to register an essential humanity in the inability to bear the sight of a fellow human being subjected to torture, even the imagining of which moves the viewer to experience pity or fellow‐feeling and thus take action to outlaw torture or safeguard fundamental human rights.
Tragedy
Authors: Cox Jeffrey N.
Published: July 2017

The Death of Tragedy
(Steiner 1961),
The Deserted Stage
(Otten 1972),
A Mental Theater
(Richardson 1988): the titles of these three influential books from three different decades suggest the conventional view of Romantic‐period tragedy. In this account, changing philosophical and ideological positions, not to mention social and political action, had destroyed the providential, hierarchical orders necessary for traditional tragedy, leaving a world that could no longer provide authors with the opportunity to rise to the aesthetic heights of the tragic. Instead of imagining the rise and fall of great men pitted against the gods or God, Romantic‐era dramatists are seen turning inwards, to depict an interior and psychological drama, not the stuff of high tragedy. The great writers of the day were understood to be primarily lyric poets who deserted the stage for the page, able, at best, to pen unrealizable lyrical dramas.
Wars and Battles, Drama
Authors: Schneider Matthew
Published: July 2017

Though wars and battles had been one of the most common subjects of dramatic representation since antiquity, British drama of the Romantic era – in response to nearly 22 years of uninterrupted military conflict during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793–1815) ‐offered a wide range of martial‐themed entertainments, from re‐enactments of famous events to plays that indirectly alluded to the geopolitical changes wrought by the French Revolution. Though a few plays staged at the patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, in the summer and autumn of 1789 depicted revolutionary events, such as the storming of the Bastille, for the most part dramatists and theatre managers – prevented by government censors from directly representing revolutionary figures and events – indirectly referred to the tumult on the Continent by setting plays in historical circumstances that paralleled the political situation and ideological conflicts of the age. In the minor theatres, British victories in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were represented in pageants, re‐enactments, mock naval battles, and pantomimes that employed new technology and satisfied a growing public desire for verisimilitude in theatrical entertainment.