Sexual Outcasts presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850. Each volume follows
This stunning collection of over 170 large-format colour illustrations includes paintings of ships at sea, in action, in convoy, and in siege; architectural drawings; battle diagrams; sea charts and s
This volume addresses how practices and concepts of performance contribute to the production and circulation of knowledge in German-speaking Europe between 1750 and 1850. Building on recent work in th
During the Romantic era, especially in Italy, performers known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici extemporised poetry in public in response to subjects requested by their audiences. This type of performance fascinated Grand Tourists from northern Europe, who reported on poetic improvisers in hundreds of travel accounts, journals, letters, and periodical articles. By uncovering historical data and interpreting literary texts, Professor Esterhammer identifies patterns in the evolving responses of English, German, French, and Russian writers to the experience of improvisation. She explores how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, and emotional expressiveness, and relates to evolving concepts of gender and nation. Esterhammer goes on to interpret the influence that the figure of the poetic improviser had in nineteenth-century English and European fiction. In this context, the improvvisatore casts new light on conflicts between poetic genius and
From fine art paintings by such artists as Stubbs and Landseer to zoological illustrations and popular prints, a vast array of animal images was created in Britain during the century from 1750 to 1850
We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, but until recently the history of celebrity has been little discussed. The contributors to this innovative collection locate the origins of a distinctively modern kind of celebrity in the Romantic period. Celebrity was from the beginning a multi-media phenomenon whose cultural pervasiveness - in literature and the theatre, music and visual culture, fashion and boxing - overflows modern disciplinary boundaries and requires attention from scholars with different kinds of expertise. Looking back to the 1720s and forward to the 1890s, this volume identifies the people and institutions that made the Romantic period a pivotal moment in the creation of celebrity. Tracing connections between celebrity and the period's discourses of heroism, genius, nationalism, patronage and gender, these essays map the contours of a cultural apparatus that many of the period's central figures became implicated in, even as they sought to distance themselves from it.
