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The Calamity Form
On Poetry and Social Life
Anahid Nersessian
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
 
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.
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The Celebrity Monarch
Empress Elisabeth and the Modern Female Portrait
Olivia Gruber Florek
University of Delaware Press, 2023
Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), wife of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph I, was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Glamorous painted portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and widely collected photographs spread news of her beauty, and the twentieth-century German-language film trilogy Sissi (1955-57) cemented this legacy. Despite the enduring fascination with the empress, art historians have never considered Elisabeth’s role in producing her public portraiture or the influence of her creation. The Celebrity Monarch reveals how portraits of Elisabeth transformed monarchs from divinely appointed sovereigns to public personalities whose daily lives were consumed by spectators. With resources ranging from the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Elisabeth’s private collection of celebrity photography to twenty-first century collages and films by T. J. Wilcox, this book positions Elisabeth herself as the primary engineer of her public image and argues for the widespread influence of her construction on both modern art and the emerging phenomenon of celebrity.
 
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Chic Ironic Bitterness
R. Jay Magill, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2009

A brilliant and timely reflection on irony in contemporary American culture

“This book is a powerful and persuasive defense of sophisticated irony and subtle humor that contributes to the possibility of a genuine civic trust and democratic life. R. Jay Magill deserves our congratulations for a superb job!”

—Cornel West, University Professor, Princeton University

“A well-written, well-argued assessment of the importance of irony in contemporary American social life, along with the nature of recent misguided attacks and, happily, a deep conviction that irony is too important in our lives to succumb. The book reflects wide reading, varied experience, and real analytical prowess.”

—Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University

“Somehow, Americans—a pragmatic and colloquial lot, for the most part—are now supposed to speak the Word, without ironic embellishment, in order to rebuild the civic culture. So irony’s critics decide it has become ‘worthy of moral condemnation.’ Magill pushes back against this new conventional wisdom, eloquently defending a much livelier American sensibility than the many apologists for a somber ‘civic culture’ could ever acknowledge."

—William Chaloupka, Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University

The events of 9/11 had many pundits on the left and right scrambling to declare an end to the Age of Irony. But six years on, we're as ironic as ever. From The Simpsons and Borat to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the ironic worldview measures out a certain cosmopolitan distance, keeping hypocrisy and threats to personal integrity at bay.

Chic Ironic Bitterness is a defense of this detachment, an attitude that helps us preserve values such as authenticity, sincerity, and seriousness that might otherwise be lost in a world filled with spin, marketing, and jargon. And it is an effective counterweight to the prevailing conservative view that irony is the first step toward cynicism and the breakdown of Western culture.

R. Jay Magill, Jr., is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in American Prospect, American Interest, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Print, amongother periodicals and books. A former Harvard Teaching Fellow and Executive Editor of DoubleTake, he holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. This is his first book.

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Children of the Mire
Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, First edition
Octavio Paz
Harvard University Press, 1974

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Children of the Mire
Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, New and Enlarged Edition
Octavio Paz
Harvard University Press, 1991
Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the “incestuous and tempestuous” relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Latin American poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word “modern” has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American “modernism” within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis-à-vis French and Spanish poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era’s attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the “twilight of the idea of the future.” He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.
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City of the Soul
Rome and the Romantics
John A. Pinto
University Press of New England, 2016
City of the Soul critically examines how an international cast of visitors fashioned Rome’s image, visual and literary, in the century between 1770 and 1870—from the era of the Grand Tour to the onset of mass tourism. The Eternal City emerges not only as an intensely physical place but also as a romantic idea onto which artists and writers projected their own imaginations and longings. The book will appeal to a wide audience of readers interested in the history of art, architecture, and photography, the Romantic poets, and other writers from Byron to Henry James. It will also attract the interest of historians of urbanism, landscape, and Italy. Nonspecialists and armchair travelers will enjoy the diverse literary and artistic responses to Rome.
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Connected by the Ear
The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture
Sean Franzel
Northwestern University Press, 2013

In this innovative new study, Sean Franzel charts the concurrent emergence of German Romantic pedagogy, the modern research university, and modern visions of the politically engaged scholar. At the heart of the pedagogy of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, K. P. Moritz, A. W. Schlegel, Adam Müller, and others was the lecture, with its ability to attract listeners and to model an ideal discursive community, reflecting an era of revolution, reform, and literary, philosophical, and scientific innovation.

Along with exploring the striking preoccupation of Romantic thinkers with the lecture and with its reverberations in print, Franzel argues that accounts of scholarly speech from this period have had a lasting impact on how the pedagogy, institutions, and medial manifestations of modern scholarship continue to be understood.

"Sean Franzel’s archaeology illuminates both the bourgeois public sphere and discourse network 1800 by showing the romantic lecture to be the key cultural form in a pivotal moment of German intellectual history, a history long obsessed with the mediation of oral discourse and written text."—John Durham Peters, author of Speaking into the Air

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The Creative Imagination
Enlightenment to Romanticism
James Engell
Harvard University Press, 1981

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Creator of Nightmares
Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life
Christopher Baker
Reaktion Books, 2024
A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter.
 
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which channeled a new form of gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus competitive exhibitions. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome, and ultimately London, Creator of Nightmares paints an image of Fuseli as an astute marketer and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.
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Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation
Selected Essays on American Literature
Michael Davitt Bell
University of Chicago Press, 2000
In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright.

Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers.
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