Angela Esterhammer

Introduction: Romantic Prospects

This special issue brings together thirteen papers presented at the twentieth annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism that was held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland from 15–19 August, 2012, co-hosted by the University of Neuchâtel and the University of Zurich. Located in the heart of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lake District, Neuchâtel was one of the most popular gateways to the Alps in the Romantic period. The conference theme, “Romantic Prospects,” was chosen most obviously to highlight the sublime and picturesque views that attracted so many Romantic travellers to Switzerland and the Alps. In his essay “On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway” (1844), William Wordsworth quotes a Keswick woman he knew in his youth who was dumbfounded by the new taste for the picturesque. Her reaction suggests the sheer strangeness of the concept and the novelty of the terminology: “Bless me! Folk are always talking about prospects: when I was young there was never sic a thing neamed” (342). The modernity of the term ‘prospect’ is confirmed by its historical usage, which coincides almost exactly with the frequency of the term ‘romantic,’ both words peaking between about 1780 and 1820. Twenty years ago, John Barrell published an influential essay linking eighteenth-century prospect-viewing with the ruling class’s desire to master both labor and nature: according to Barrell, the craze for prospects and the picturesque clearly belonged to the ideological work of the Enlightenment. Although aesthetic ideology remains central to academic discussions of natural prospects, the term ‘prospect’ was employed in a panoply of other senses at NASSR 2012. Referring not only to physical but also to mental and metaphorical actions of looking or facing outward or forward, prospects went hand in hand with the revolutionary changes in philosophy, science, media, and society that characterize the period 1750–1850. The papers presented at NASSR 2012 represent diverse interpretations of “Romantic prospects” and diverse prospects for Romantic studies. Three plenary speakers – John Barrell, Robert Darnton, and Kate Flint – contributed stimulating, brilliantly illustrated presentations. In his plenary lecture, John Barrell contextualized picturesque prospects within discourses of aesthetics, labor, politics, and geography by calling attention to the work of the Welsh artist Edward Pugh of Ruthin. Relying on the thick description that is characteristic of Barrell’s cultural materialism and that made works such as The Dark Side of the Landscape so influential, Barrell’s lecture, “‘Unmechanized by

Coleridge, Sgricci, and the Shows of London: Improvising in Print and Performance

Recent research on Romantic literature and performance has shown that the improvisation of oral poetry was one of the features of Italian culture that elicited strong reactions from nineteenth-century British writers.1 In Italy, improvising poets had long been displaying their talents in venues ranging from courts and salons to theaters and marketplaces; the male improvvisaitore had a history going back at least to the Renaissance, and by the eighteenth century female improvisers or improvvisatrici were not uncommon. During the Romantic period, especially when the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought about an increase in international mobility, the influence of this performance genre became surprisingly widespread across Europe, with eyewitness accounts, commentaries, and literary representations appearing in hundreds of English, French, German, Scandinavian, and Russian texts.

The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon

‘Sincerity’, as a critical concept, did not do very well in the twentieth century. The New Critics, in particular, were unimpressed with an interpretative criterion that seemed to emphasize authorial intention; to them, ‘Is the poet sincere?’ was ‘always an impertinent and illegitimate question’.1 In philosophical terms, too, sincerity has been displaced and overshadowed since Heidegger and Sartre by the notion of authenticity, which can be applied to objects, works of art or human subjects, in the context of ontology, epistemology or aesthetics. Although elusive, authenticity has proved an effective and adaptable notion for what we recognize, in the mode of nostalgia or desire, as a free and truthful relation to the world.

The Improviser’s Disorder: Spontaneity, Sickness, and Social Deviance in Late Romanticism

Poetic improvisation––the spontaneous composition of verses in a performative context–– is usually associated with wit, sociability, and playful interaction between poet and audience. However, during the first half of the nineteenth century there is a tendency to represent the improviser as a social deviant, who may be ill or insane; at best, he is regarded as unstable, unreliable, manipulative, and intent on personal profit. Suggesting that the rhapsode in Plato’s Ion may be a Classical forerunner of these negative portrayals of Romantic improvvisatori, this paper examines autobiographical and fictional representations of improvising poets in English, German, and Russian nineteenth‐century texts.

John Galt’s The Omen: Interpretation and its Discontents

ABSTRACT As critical engagement with Galt’s writing grows, it is becoming possible to read his work in new contexts using new approaches, and to develop a better understanding of themes and practices that he returned to repeatedly while experimenting with a wide range of literary forms. Galt’s short novel The Omen (1825) can be contextualized within contemporary discourses such as Gothic tales, medical treatises, and periodical literature (especially Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), but it is also open to modern interpretative approaches including Freudian psychology, trauma theory, and narratology. The Omen evokes interpretation on many levels, as the narrator’s attempt to interpret his traumatic memories, dreams, and omens finds a parallel in the reader’s attempt to make sense of a narrative full of ambiguities and paradoxes. Like many of Galt’s other fictional and pedagogical works, The Omen illustrates his habit of testing and challenging readers. While it reflects trends in late-Romantic print culture, the tale also has a strangely modern and even postmodern inflection.

The Transnational Reception of Improvised Drama: Tommaso Sgricci in Paris and in the Periodicals

The Italian improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836), known for his ability to improvise tragic dramas on themes requested by audience members, made international tours to Paris in 1824 and 1826. This article examines the impact of his performances in Parisian theatres by way of the reviews that appeared in European periodicals. Differences among national tastes and aesthetic values inform the reception of Sgriccis performances by French, German, and English reviewers, and these differences become further defined as reviewers respond to one another and write for different markets. The transnational reception of Sgricci and other improvvisatori also reveals how nineteenth-century journalists are themselves improvising as they adapt rapidly to new readerships and innovative types of performance.

Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy

Calling attention to the strange absence of Italian authors from anthologies of European Romanticism and works of comparatist criticism, this erudite book sets out to mediate between Romanticism and Italy. The provocative title of chapter 1, ‘Did Italian Romanticism Exist?’, leads Joseph Luzzi to delineate the contours of an Italian Romantic movement that ‘was far more cosmopolitan in scope than its foreign critics have acknowledged’ (27), but also to explore the reasons for its neglect. On the one hand, Luzzi argues, the blindness of modern critics is inherited from nineteenth-century writers who failed to understand their Italian contemporaries: ‘The modern habit of thinking about Italy as an eminently premodern corpus of cultural traditions, a habit that emerged in the Romantic literary movements of Europe in the early nineteenth century, has made it difficult for foreigners to import the innovations and eccentricities of the Italian Romantics’ (52). However, Luzzi also identifies characteristics inherent in Italian Romanticism that pose challenges to understanding – namely, ‘the Italian capacity to feel antiquity in the blood, exploit the popular and political valence of high-cultural expression, maintain a spiritual connection to culture in a secular age, and resist innovation that fails to reconcile itself with tradition’ (219). Luzzi claims that the European Romantic notion of literature nevertheless found its ‘physical home’ in Italy (16). He explores the centuries-long evolution of these paradoxical relationships through readings of Italian and non-Italian texts that focus on the interwoven themes of the nation, the body, and death. While Luzzi is sensitive to the controversial history of the term ‘Romantic’, for the purposes of this project he defines a Romanticism whose contours seem somewhat limited in light of recent scholarship on Romantic sociability, cosmopolitanism, and diversity. In Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, Romanticism is located in opposition to Enlightenment as a movement that values ‘the qualities of iconoclasm, originality, and specialization’, produces (as in the representative case of Wordsworth) poetry that is ‘local, dialect-based, and self-reflective’ (15), and regards the poet as isolated and spiritually if not literally exiled. Within these parameters, Luzzi shows that the Romantics’ attraction to Italy both reflected and generated misunderstanding. Their Italy was in one way or another ghostly: because they sought a classical or medieval Italy rather than a contemporary one, because they venerated the country but ignored its inhabitants, because they regarded Italy as museum or mausoleum. The book’s major touchstones for English, German, and

The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism

Preface A note on translations and abbreviations Introduction: locating the romantic performative 1. Of promises, contracts, and constitutions: speech-act philosophies and practices in Britain, 1775-1800 2. Kant, German idealism, and philosophies of language in action 3. The performative Humboldt 4. The performative Coleridge 5. Subjective and intersubjective speech acts in Holderlins work 6. Kleist and the fragile performative order of the world 7. Godwins philosophy and fiction: the resistance to performatives Conclusion Bibliography Index.