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Fermanis, Porscha
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Fermanis, Porscha
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Fermanis, Porscha
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- PublicationReview of Robert White's "Keats: A Literary Life"There is little doubt that Keats studies have undergone an intense re-historicisation in the last two and a half decades. Critics from Jerome McGann to Nicholas Roe have shown us just how much was lost by focusing solely on author and genre-centred approaches to Keats‘s poetry, as well as uncovering the relevance of a surprising number of historical, social, and political contexts.
86 - Publication'Some Genuine Chinese Authors': literary appreciation, comparatism, and universalism in the Straits Chinese MagazineThis chapter considers the ways in which Straits Chinese elites in Singapore strategically used discourses of comparatism and universalism both to marginalise ‘native’ Malays and ‘sojourning’ Chinese diasporas, and to point to colonialism’s inherent contradictions. Examining the political stakes of comparatism and its relationship to anticolonial, postcolonial, and ethnic nationalism in the context of Nanyang South Sea and Indian Ocean spaces, it reads the Straits Chinese Magazine (est. 1897) as an anticolonial project. Despite its apparent investment in the logic and rhetoric of imperial liberalism, Straits Chinese contributors to the magazine ultimately turn European comparatism on its head, encouraging a reversal of the comparative gaze and an exposition of the defective use of Enlightenment methodologies by European comparatists. If Straits Chinese authors often fall back on arguments for the universality of human experience, the Straits Chinese Magazine demonstrates the extent to which competing Sinocentric and Islamocentric civilisational accounts could disrupt European modes of seeing, destabilising what is considered natural and self-reflexively exposing the Eurocentric grounds on which comparisons are made.
337 - PublicationThe ultimate romanticMeeting Lord Byron in Athens in 1810, the 35-year-old Lady Hestor Stanhope, a well-known wit and traveller, was one of the few ladies (or gentlemen for that matter) not to fall under his spell. Byron’s effect on women was, by all accounts, extraordinary. Lady Rosebery almost fainted on meeting him; a demented Lady Caroline Lamb dressed up as a page boy in order to gain admission to his rooms and sent him a cutting of her pubic hair; and even his misused wife of only one year, Annabella Milbanke, was distressed by news of his death in 1824.
83 - PublicationThe Enlightenment and HistoryJohn Keats (1795–1821) continues to delight and challenge readers both within and beyond the academic community through his poems and letters. This volume provides frameworks for enhanced analysis and appreciation of Keats and his work, with each chapter supplying a succinct, informed, and accessible account of a particular topic. Leading scholars examine the life and work of Keats against the backdrop of his influences, contemporaries, and reception, and explore the interaction of poet and world. The essays consider his enduring but ever-altering appeal, engage with critical discussion and debate, and offer revisionary close reading of the poems and letters. Students and specialists will find their knowledge of Keats's life and work enriched by chapters that survey subjects ranging from education, relationships, and religion to art, genre, and film.
529 - PublicationIntroductionHistorians and literary scholars tend to agree that British intellectual culture underwent a fundamental transformation between 1770 and 1845. Yet they are unusually divided about the nature of that transformation and whether it is best understood as an epistemic rupture from, or a continuous dialogue with, the long eighteenth century. Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 rethinks the ways in which we understand the historical writing and the historical consciousness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that British historicism developed largely in quasi and para-historical genres such as memoir, biography, verse, fiction, and painting, rather than in works of 'real' history. In a number of inter-related essays on changing generic forms, styles, methods, and standards, the collection demonstrates that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary 'Romanticism' not only intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing, but that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis-a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling and imagination in historical writing-that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. In exploring this theme, the volume also seeks to consider wider questions about the philosophy of history and literature, including questions of truth, evidence, professionalization, disciplinary strategies, and methodology. At its heart is the idea that literary texts and other artistic representations of history can have historical value, and should therefore be taken seriously by practitioners of history in all its forms.
82 - PublicationEarly Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern HemisphereThis introduction outlines the primary arguments and methodologies of the book, including new imperial history models, networked conceptualisations of empire, and comparative and transnational history. It argues both for the existence of transnational institutional connections and reading audiences across the colonial southern hemisphere, and for the importance of local and regional variations in the reproduction of the British public library model. It concludes by outlining the book’s primary sources, as well as introducing its six case study libraries from colonial Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.
710 - PublicationReview of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's 'Peveril of the Peak'Peveril of the Peak has never been regarded as one of Walter Scott’s greatest novels and its relative failure to achieve critical success is often attributed to the ‘over-production and money-spinning’ that many see as characteristic of his writing in the 1820s. In the ‘Historical Note’ to the current edition, Alison Lumsden puts this judgement in context: while 1821–23 marked a period of phenomenal output for Scott, she emphasises the extent to which he was in command of his historical material, despite his denial of any attempt at strict historical veracity in the ‘Prefatory Letter’ to the work. Scott’s novels may have been written quickly and under commercial pressure, but their characters, themes, and contexts usually evolved more slowly over extended periods of time. As Lumsden points out, Scott had long been interested in the seventeenth century, and had already treated the Civil War in a Scottish context in Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), as well as coming across relevant material in his editions of Dryden (1808), Somers’ Tracts (1809–14), and Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count Grammont (1811). It was, or so it seems, only a matter of time before he turned his attention to the period in an English context.
78 - PublicationBook review: Walter Scott, The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, edited by J. H. Alexander, Judy King, and Graham Tulloch (2008)Visiting Sir Walter Scott at J. G. Lockhart’s house in London just before Scott’s final voyage to Malta and Italy in 1831, the Irish poet Thomas Moore reflected sadly in his journal on Scott’s series of debilitating strokes and was more than once ‘painfully struck by the utter vacancy of his look’. Moore claimed that the Lockharts’ ‘great object in sending [Scott] abroad’ was ‘to disengage his mind from the strong wish to write by which he is haunted—continually making efforts to produce something, without being able to bring his mind collectedly to bear upon it’. While the extent of Scott’s vacancy and lack of intellectual consistency is perhaps overstated here—indeed, he is described as being more receptive and convivial during two further visits by Moore—his final two incomplete works written in 1831–32 while convalescing abroad, The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, both bear the imprint of his illness and present a different set of challenges from those facing the editors of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels.
98 - PublicationReview of April London's 'Literary History Writing, 1770-1820'April London aptly begins her book, Literary History Writing, 1770-1820, with a commentary on the elusive nature of literary history. Referencing David Perkins, Lawrence Lipking, and others, she notes the extent to which deconstruction, structuralism, new historicism, and cultural materialism have problematized the naive certainties of previous generations of literary historians.
71 - PublicationCountering the Counter-Factual: Joanne Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and the Paratexts of HistoryThis essay considers Joanna Baillie's intense and ongoing concern about the flexibility of distinctions between history and fiction, focusing in particular on her rejection of counterfactual narratives in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821). It is argued that the dense scholarly apparatus of prefaces, endnotes and appendices attached to the volume represents an attempt to banish romance and contingency from the literary text, while ultimately offering an insight into the complex nature of historiographical practice by undermining the very factual stability and unity of vision that the legends seek to project. The generic, epistemological and methodological ambiguities within Metrical Legends also point to a broader tension in Romantic women's writing between promoting female values and emulating masculine discourses, which itself mirrors the Romantics wider preoccupation with the increasing division between literary and non-literary discourses at the end of the eighteenth century.
Scopus© Citations 2 93
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