Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities - cover image

Copyright

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli; Céline Sabiron;

Published On

2021-03-10

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80064-071-9
Hardback978-1-80064-072-6
PDF978-1-80064-073-3
HTML978-1-80064-635-3
XML978-1-80064-076-4
EPUB978-1-80064-074-0
MOBI978-1-80064-075-7

Language

  • English

Print Length

312 pages (xxii+290)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 22 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.85" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 25 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback1312g (46.28oz)
Hardback1704g (60.11oz)

Media

Illustrations12

OCLC Number

1242458997

LCCN

2020447284

BIC

  • D
  • DSBF
  • DS
  • DSC
  • DSK

BISAC

  • LIT000000
  • LIT004120
  • LIT024030
  • LIT024040
  • LIT014000

LCC

  • PN603

Keywords

  • time
  • William Blake
  • British
  • Romantic
  • literature
  • poetry
  • eighteenth century
  • nineteenth century
  • history
  • Percy Shelley
  • John Clare
  • Samuel Rodgers
  • Frankenstein
  • periodisation
  • poetics of time
  • ecology
  • futurity
  • opera
  • atemporality
  • Venice
  • America
  • Europe
  • Beethoven
  • Irving
  • Nietzsche
  • Beckett
  • philosophy

Romanticism and Time

Literary Temporalities

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making.

The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts.

Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett.

Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.

Endorsements

Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the "four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. Crossing many genres of writing and well as artistic media, too, the "Romantic poetics of time,” as editors Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron put it in their introduction, stage "a process in time that displays a form of agency over time”—an agency that variously registers and produces, combines, disorders, and transforms both time and history. The capacious Romanticism on offer in these pages is not limited to the decades straddling the year 1800. Rather, it emerges as a relationship to something prior and as the gestation of a future, by turns restorative and revolutionary. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume produce, as Wordsworth might say, a "timely utterance.”

Kevis Goodman

University of California, Berkeley

Reviews

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron’s collection is a beautifully produced and meticulously edited volume that brings together young, innovative researchers with established, seasoned scholars from various backgrounds (France, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America)—a truly cosmopolitan enterprise, it mirrors, in the diversity of its approaches, the heterogeneity of its material and is, in its own way, a continuation of Romanticism’s engagement with time and its self-questioning, self-positioning in cultural and political history.

Christoph Bode

"Romanticism and Time: Literary Temporalities/ Romantic Cartographies: Mapping, Literature, Culture, 1789–1821". European Romantic Review,, vol. 33, no. 1, doi:10.1080/10509585.2021.2019393

Full Review

Contributors

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli

(editor)
Associate Professor at Université Catholique de Lille

Céline Sabiron

(editor)
Associate Professor at University of Lorraine