Romanticism roundup
I've finally 'finished' my Romantics project. In the sense that such things are never finished - but the list of stuff I gave myself to read and listen to and look at is complete. Except I've since added more... never mind that. And here is that list.
Kicked off with William Blake. I especially enjoyed getting to see some of his engravings in person!
- William Blake versus the World by John Higgs
- World of Art: William Blake by Kathleen Raine
- Poetry
- William Blake's Universe exhibition
On Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, including a great dual biography.
- Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
- Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818, again
- Henry Fuseli's art
Shifting more broadly to the Regency era:
- The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison
- Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, 1817. My least-read Austen
- The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold
- a themed tour of Covent Garden
As a result of Northanger Abbey, some Gothic (wild):
- The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, 1794
- The Monk by Matthew Lewis, 1796
- The Castle of Otranto by Hugh Walpole, 1764
I said to a friend about reading The Mysteries of Udolpho because everyone's always talking about it and she said "Well, yeah, two hundred years ago."
Bit of Byron, go on then. Also read The Wager, separately but relatedly.
- Fall of the House of Byron: Scandal and Seduction in Georgian England by Emily Brand
- Poetry
Over to Germany and the Jena Set. I really like Andrea Wulf - The Invention of Nature about Alexander Humboldt is great.
- Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, 1774
- Caspar David Friedrich art. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the painting always used regarding Romanticism
A musical interlude at this point for some Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann.
As a frequent Lake District-goer (Wordsworthshire) I've visited Rose Cottage and his grave several times, and did so during the project.
- Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate
- Poetry
Going into this I probably knew the least about John Clare.
- John Clare by Jonathan Bate
- Poetry
There are several good Coleridge biographies but he came up a lot in everything else, particularly Radical Wordsworth, so at this point I just read the poems.
More general Romanticism to finish...
- The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin
- Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen sections in The Western Canon by Harold Bloom
- The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall
- Romantic Art by William Vaughan
- The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb by Stanley Plumly
No Keats, you say? I read enough Keats. And he came up a lot in everything else, especially The Immortal Evening. Also, one of my favourite books I read last year, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt, wasn't for the Romanticism at all, but it had a lot of it.
Still got to read The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. I've got another Richard Holmes book so I'll read them together. There's also my ongoing literature reading and two MIT OpenCourseWare syllabi I'd like to check out: Major English Novels: Reading Romantic Fiction and Romantic Poetry.
Also, Romanticism is having a bit of a comeback. Or had? Is it old already? Some links on new romanticism:
- I Come in Self-Annihilation: On the Romantic Temperament by John Pistelli on Romanticon
- Notes Toward a New Romanticism: Or why it's 1800 all over again by Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker