Building Romanticism sets the literary culture of Romantic Britain within the context of the period’s architectural productions in order to recover a relationship between these arts that, though deeply valued by writers and architects of the day, has been neglected by modern scholars in both fields. Toward this goal, Nicole Reynolds explores the centrality of architecture and architectural tropes to Romanticism’s dramatic reconceptualization of the individual subject and of the world that subject inhabits.Focusing on the correspondence between the period’s built environments and its literary pursuits, Building Romanticism argues that at this turbulent moment in British history a number of politically charged and aesthetically resonant architectural spaces, both real and imagined, negotiated intense anxieties about shifting notions of gender and sexuality, increased class mobility, the individual’s uncertain place in history, challenges to the British national character and to the project of nation building, and the very form and function of art itself. By tracing the reception of Romantic topoi—rhetorical and literal common places—through the nineteenth century, this book explores how Victorians remodeled Romanticism, its ideological preoccupations and cultural artifacts, according to their own era's social agendas.

Throughout its history, the city of Rome has inspired writers to describe its majesty, to situate themselves within its sweeping landscape, and to comment upon its contribution to their own identity. The Roman elegiac poet Propertius was one such author. This final published collection, issued in 16 BCE, has been traditionally read as an abandonment by Propertius of his earlier flippant love poems for a more mature engagement with Roman public life or else a comical send-up of imperial policies as embodied in Rome’s public buildings. The relationship between poet and city is complicated at every turn with the presence in the background of the emperor Augustus, whose sustained artistic patronage of Roman monuments brought about the most pervasive transformation that the cityscape had yet seen.

The Elegiac Cityscape explores Propertius’ Rome and the various ways his poetry about the city illuminates the dynamic relationship between one individual and his environment. Combining the approaches of archaeology and literary criticism, Tara S. Welch examines how Propertius’ poems on Roman places scrutinize the monumentalization of various ideological positions in Rome, as they poke and prod Rome’s monuments to see what further meanings they might admit. The result is a poetic book rife with different perspectives on the eternal city, perspectives that often call into question any sleepy or complacent adherence to Rome’s traditional values.