Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era

In tracing those deliberate and accidental Romantic echoes that reverberate through the Victorian age into the beginning of the twentieth century, this collection acknowledges that the Victorians decided for themselves how to define what is 'Romantic'. The essays explore the extent to which Victorianism can be distinguished from its Romantic precursors, or whether it is possible to conceive of Romanticism without the influence of these Victorian definitions. Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era reassesses Romantic literature's immediate cultural and literary legacy in the late nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian writings of Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, the Brownings, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, and the Rossettis were instrumental in shaping Romanticism as a cultural phenomenon. Many of these Victorian writers found in the biographical, literary, and historical models of Chatterton, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth touchstones for reappraising their own creative potential and artistic identity. Whether the Victorians affirmed or revolted against the Romanticism of their early years, their attitudes towards Romantic values enriched and intensified the personal, creative, and social dilemmas described in their art. Taken together, the essays in this collection reflect on current critical dialogues about literary periodisation and contribute to our understanding of how these contemporary debates stem from Romanticism's inception in the Victorian age.

Contents: Introduction: romanticism and the Victorians, Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy; A finer tone: Victorian lives of Mrs Barbauld and Mrs Shelley, Lisa Vargo; 'Wandering between 2 worlds': the Victorian afterlife of Thomas Chatterton, Julie Crane; Dead Keats: Joseph Severn, John Keats, and the haunting of Victorian culture, Andrew Bennett; 'The wind blows cold out of the inner shrine of fear': Rossetti's romantic Keats, Sarah Wootton; Rival cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic legacy, Vincent Newey; 'Mr Osborne's secret': Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, and the gender of romanticism, James Najarian; 'Fallen angels': Hardy's Shelleyan critique in the final Wessex novels, Andrew Radford; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian versions of Byron and Wollstonecraft: romantic genealogies, self-defining memories, and the genesis of Aurora Leigh, Marjorie Stone; Wordsworth, Hopkins, and the intercession of angels, J.R. Watson; 'Echoes of that voice': romantic resonances in Victorian poetic birdsong, Mark Sandy; 'Infinite Passion': variations on a romantic topic in Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Swinburne, Hopkins, Wilde and Dowson, Michael O'Neill; Liberating boyhood, Ve-YinTee; Prometheus rebound: the romantic titan in a post-romantic age, John Holmes; Selected bibliography; Index.

Andrew Radford is Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK and Mark Sandy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK.