Romanticism and its Media: Selected Papers from the Leipzig Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (Studien zur englischen Romantik)

In the past decades, Romantic Studies has significantly widened its scope by massively expanding the literary canon as well as investigating a broader range of topics. Today the discipline of Romantic studies is more diverse than it has ever been. The focus on the socio-historical conditions of the Romantic period has led to a renewed interest in the conditions surrounding the production and reception of literature and the changing mediascape between 1780 and 1830. The period’s media revolution also created the mass readership of the 19th century, particularly with regard to the novel, and it profoundly influenced the development and transformation of literary genres. The emergence of the modern scientific system with its disciplines and sub-disciplines created new forms of knowledge, which were disseminated through periodical publications, reviews, and journals, which, in turn, had a decisive influence on literature. The essays collected in this volume investigate a wide range of issues related to Romantic media and Romantic forms of mediation. They shed new light on key topics in Romantic studies such as authorship and genre, and cover important fields like the history of science, new media concepts of the Romantic period, and the materiality of literature.


CONTENTS


Acknowledgements vii


Ralf Haekel & Julia Heinemann
Introduction: Romantic Media and Romantic Mediations 1


PART I: MEDIUM, GENRE, AND FORM


Tim Sommer
Mediated Presence: Romantic Manuscripts and Modern Authorship 11


Angela Esterhammer
Steamboats, Magazines, and Travelling Tales in the 1820s 25


Ian Duncan
Remediations of Lyric in the Romantic Novel 37


Sarah Burdett
“Blown to Pieces by the Delicate Hand”: Women, Explosions, and Early British Melodrama; Or, Theatrical Responses to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 47


PART II: PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE


Andrew Burkett
Romanticism’s Geological Media 63


Tilottama Rajan
The Archival Text: Schelling’s First Outline (1799) and Ages of the World (1815) 93


Marvin Reimann
Romantic Conceptions of Electricity as Medium and Message 105


PART III: MEDIUM AND MATERIALITY


Diego Saglia
Mediating Material Excess: Figurations of Luxury in the Regency Era 123


Pauline Hortolland
“As I lay asleep in Italy”: The Dream of Immediate Communication in The Mask of Anarchy 137


Max Oehmichen
Elegy for a Rock: The Mediation of Place in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head 149


Paul Hamann-Rose
Lord Byron’s Pirates: Mediations of Don Juan 163


PART IV: ROMANTIC AND CONTEMPORARY (RE-)MEDIATIONS


Sebastian Domsch
Through a Mirror Darkly: Romantic Remediations of Landscape 177


John Öwre
Towards a Romantic Transcendental Style: Nature and the Senses in the Films of Lucile Hadžihalilović, Scott Barley, and Kyle Faulkner 189


Jorunn Joiner
Immersive Landscapes: Romantic Nature and Open-World Video Games 203


List of Contributors