Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
The verses on The Progress of Liberty display richness of imagination, but in some places they are too wild and in others too diffuse.
The Monthly Review (Dec. 1801)The last decade of the eighteenth century was characterized by the anticipation of an imminent apocalypse, provoked by the political events that were taking place in France. Writers and philosophers viewed the French Revolution as the onset of sweeping events leading to fundamental reform and a clean slate in human history. Robert Southey's recollection of the early 1790s succinctly describes the spirit of “that tempestuous age” as promising a new beginning: “Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”
In an essay on women's writing, Anne K. Mellor suggests that Romantic women writers did not actively participate in the apocalyptic imagination because of the difference in women's perception of time as “continuous, even progressive” and their peculiarly “feminine mode of thought,” which was “inter-relational and communitarian,” refusing to imagine an eschatological ending to human history. Mellor's point sheds light on how women's understanding of the socio-political context influenced their vision of the historical moment. Despite the alleged dearth of а marked female apocalyptic discourse, women poets of the century incorporated apocalyptic imagery in their poems to portray the cultural and historical crisis that had seized Europe.
Mary Robinson's poem The Progress of Liberty is a case in point. Robinson employs the imagery of popular modes of the time, namely, the natural sublime and the gothic, to lend the historical situation apocalyptic and millenarian overtones. Robinson's poem presents the terrors of the French Revolution as apocalyptic in nature, using graphic imagery to portray the violence and the aberrant turn of the revolutionary events. The poem then continues with a vision of a regenerated state of society, operating on natural laws. In drawing upon popular means of representation and discourses, Robinson engages with the complex network of symbolic configurations, which characterized the last decade of the century and its political ideologies.
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- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 69 - 86Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021