Felicia Hemans

British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation makes an original contribution to the field of British Romantic Hellenism (and Romanticism more broadly) by emphasizing the diversity of Romantic-era writers’ attitudes towards, and portrayals of, Modern Greece. Whereas, traditionally, studies of British Romantic Hellenism have predominantly focused on Europe’s preoccupation with an idealized Ancient Greece, this study emphasizes the nuanced and complex nature of British Romantic writers’ engagements with Modern Greece. Specifically, the book emphasizes the ways that early nineteenth-century British literature about contemporary Greece helped to strengthen British-Greek intercultural relations and, ultimately, to situate Greece within a European sphere of influence.

"The affections lead us on," Wordsworth writes in "Tintern Abbey." While English is an impoverished language when it comes to love, Reno's focus is on the Spinozan notion of intellectual love. In this philosophy, emotions lead us to the higher feelings that can improve us. The person who experiences intellectual love interprets life as interconnected, a perspective that "generates critical thought" because it mediates a range of discourses, including science and politics (7). With focus on Romantic poetry, Reno's book interrogates quests for transcendental love in relation to the seemingly contrary pull of human bonds.

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.

Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.

This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.

Thou shalt have fame! Oh, mockery! give the reed From storms a shelter,-give the drooping vine Something round which its tendrils may entwine,-Give the parch'd flower a rain-drop, and the meed Of love's kind words to woman! Worthless fame! ("Properzia Rossi" 77-81)

Encapsulating a wide variety of approaches, Romanticism was triggered by such invaluable poets as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a harsh protest and revolt against the mechanical representation of life owing to the outcomes of the Age of Enlightenment. Though human experience was one of the core points of the Romantic Tradition, omission of female experience as well as the obstacles related to the patriarchal societies remained unsolved. Shedding light on female issues, Felicia Dorothea Hemans stands out among other poets and poetesses as a challenging one, for she both abuses the principles of Romanticism and subverts them in the best way, especially in her poem, Indian Woman's Death Song. Before analysing the poem, some traits of Romanticism, especially according to Wordsworth, will be elaborated on so as to get a better understanding of Hemans's argument about the feminine issues of the period. After the Wordsworthian definition of the Romantic Tradition, Hemans's poem will be analysed as a product of Romanticism so as to resist against the accustomed way of representing the female issues. The study, thus, aims to evince Hemans's success in benefiting from Romanticism in order to challenge it. Öz Kendi içinde oldukça çeşitli yaklaşımlar barındıran Romantizm akımı, William Wordsworth ve Samuel Taylor Coleridge gibi oldukça kıymetli şairler tarafından Aydınlanma Çağının sonuçları sebebiyle hayatın mekanik bir şekilde tasvir edilmesine karşı şiddetli bir başkaldırı olarak ortaya atılmıştır. Bireysel deneyimleme Romantik geleneğin özünü oluşturan elementlerden birisi olmasına rağmen, hem dişil deneyimleme bir tarafa atılmış hem de ataerkil toplumlarca üretilen ve kadınlar için ciddi boyutlara ulaşan sorunlar çözümsüz bırakılmıştır. Kadın meseleleri üzerine ışık tutan Felicia Dorothea Hemans, özellikle Indian

Victorian poets were well aware of the modern condition, the impossibility of returning to the traditions of the past. However, this did not prevent these poets from looking critically at history and weaving the past into poems; in fact, many Victorian poets used historical events as the framework for their poems. By creating historical vignettes, Victorians enter moments in history to create their own versions of epic-style poetry. Bishop terms these "spots of time" as "single events" in personal or national history, but this paper argues that Wordsworth's contemporaries and the poets that came after him refer to singular events in history. The importance of such spots of time allow readers to, in a sense, insert themselves into a moment in time that has been preserved in poems that mythologize spots of time, that create epics from the authors' own time. These mini-epics represent an attempted return to Homeric poetry that tells a story about a momentous event in time, very often a war or postwar scene from the distant past or the more recent past. Felicia Hemans's "The Wife of Asdrubal," Emily Pfeiffer's "The Fight at Rorke's Drift," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" are three such mini-epics; Hemans shows a glimpse of the aftermath of the fall of Carthage to the Roman Empire while Pfeiffer and Tennyson provide insights into two hard-fought British battles against the Zulu and in the Crimea, respectively. Though the poems are remarkably different moments, their authors' use of history and the mini-epic show a distinctly Victorian preoccupation with the history and culture of war and the forms used to express such preoccupation.

This is the first chapter of my PhD dissertation, "Recasting Women's Stories in the Poetry of Felcia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti". It explores the origin of the three British poets' self-referential works featuring the woman poet "in distress": Madame de Stael's Corinne, or Italy.

What is Sappho, except a name? Although the Greek archaic lyrics attributed to Sappho of Lesbos survive only in fragments, she has been invoked for many centuries as the original woman poet, singing at the origins of a Western lyric tradition. Victorian Sappho traces the emergence of this idealized feminine figure through reconstructions of the Sapphic fragments in late-nineteenth-century England. Yopie Prins argues that the Victorian period is a critical turning point in the history of Sappho’s reception; what we now call “Sappho” is in many ways an artifact of Victorian poetics.

Prins reads the Sapphic fragments in Greek alongside various English translations and imitations, considering a wide range of Victorian poets — male and female, famous and forgotten — who signed their poetry in the name of Sappho. By “declining” the name in each chapter, the book presents a theoretical argument about the Sapphic signature, as well as a historical account of its implications in Victorian England. Prins explores the relations between classical philology and Victorian poetics, the tropes of lesbian writing, the aesthetics of meter, and nineteenth-century personifications of the “Poetess.” as current scholarship on Sappho and her afterlife. Offering a history and theory of lyric as a gendered literary form, the book is an exciting and original contribution to Victorian studies, classical studies, comparative literature, and women’s studies.

REVIEWS

"VICTORIAN SAPPHO is one of the most scholarly and imaginative books on Victorian poetry to emerge in the past decade. It places Sappho within the context of Victorian poetics with an assurance arising from a fine grasp of ancient Greek texts, a subtle historical understanding, and above all a capacity to read the formal patterns of Victorian verse and metrics with a virtuosic combination of aesthetic insight and ideological understanding. An altogether innovative book."
--Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London

"Yopie Prins elegantly unravels the complex Victorian reception of Sappho. Notable above all for what it reveals about the theory and practice of translation, her book offers brilliant close readings of the translation, interpretation, imitation, or adaptation of Sappho's notoriously ambiguous and fragmentary poetry."
--Helene Foley, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Few readers of Victorian poetry display Yopie Prins's remarkable erudition, theoretical subtlety, and interpretive acuity. Her brilliant discussion illuminates how and why Sappho took many distinctive lyric shapes in Victorian culture. Further, Prins reveals how a searching, deconstructive critique of lyric can produce an innovative literary history."
--Joseph Bristow, University of California, Los Angeles

"An arresting book . . . . Prins's immersion in the Victorian art and literature of Sappho is deep; the sophistication of her approach formidable. The topic of Sappho's 19th-century reception is multifaceted enough to allow for intense meditation on a host of crucial literary-historical issues: the evolution and ideology of women's writing, the problem of translation, the uses of Hellenism, the history of English metrics, the nature of lyric. By any measure this book (Prins's first) is a debut of major ambition and considerable achievement."
--Terry Castle, London Review of Books

Over fifteen years have passed since Paul Gilroy advocated an approach to "the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis" in order "to produce an explicitly transactional and intercultural perspective". 1 In that time, the emergent field of transatlantic studies has sought to highlight the ways in which European-American textual exchanges reflect back upon nationalist paradigms, complicate national literatures and unsettle the often isolated accounts of British and American print-circulations in the nineteenth century. Little of this scholarship, however, has sought to address the ways in which narratives that cross the Atlantic frequently involve crossings over and blurrings of the borderlines between genders and sexualities. This paper examines, through what I wish to term a "queer Atlantic" lens, two distinct moments in nineteenth-century transatlanticism: Felicia Hemans"s long narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first published in 1825, and Herman Melville"s two-part short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", first published in 1855. While these two authorsthe first only recently canonized though rarely read as queer, the second deeply canonical and more recently queeredhave seldom been placed alongside each other, a parallel reading of Hemans"s and Melville"s works can offer important windows onto the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary.

Summary This essay studies Felicia Hemans’ The Indian City as embodying an aesthetic view of India. The essay argues that the poem deploys the aesthetic of the picturesque in order to produce a cultural fable about the collapse of an Indian city. The first section maps Hemans’ “Indian picturesque” and its pastoral Concordia discors in which diverse elements exist in harmony, and with a definite feminisation of the landscape. In the second section, it shows how this picturesque is subverted through an emphasis on the moral geography of the city; the feminisation of the land continuing in a different fashion. In the final section the essay argues that the civic picturesque of the poem retreats behind the natural picturesque, a process again initiated by the woman's presence, even as the landscape itself serves as a space of gendered memorialisation. It argues that, ultimately, Hemans presents the Oriental woman as politically ineffectual because although Maimuna is initially a point of political coalition she slides into the role of a sentimental mother blunting her political role and ambitions.

During the first half of the 1820s, Britain experienced a veritable craze for speculation in the newly independent states of Spanish America. Then, in December of 1825, the bubble burst, to the ruin of thousands of banks, companies, and individual investors. The purpose of this essay is to examine the conflicting ways in which British literature, periodicals, and popular entertainments fomented, critiqued, and ultimately repudiated the investment mania. From 1822-1825, an entire cultural industry was carved out to exploit Britain's infatuation with Spanish America. James Robinson Planché's musical drama Cortez, or The Conquest of Mexico (1823) delighted audiences at Covent Garden, William Bullock's Mexican Exhibition (1824-25) offered spectators tantalizing specimens of everything from contemporary Mexico's gold and silver to its ancient Aztec relics, and entrepreneurs flooded the press with Spanish American stock and bond prospectuses. Against a prospect of such dazzling spectacles, Robert Southey's A Tale of Paraguay and Felicia Hemans's The Forest Sanctuary (both 1825) stand out for their striking lack of exoticism, their avoidance of the subject of commerce, and their overarching morbidity. By placing these poems in the historical context of the boom and cataclysmic bust of the British economy, I argue that their absence of natural and cultural description and their association of Spanish America with fatality metaphorize the dangerously little that investors knew about Spanish American and the destruction that would soon result from their ignorance.

Periodico storico tecnico scientifico sulle origini, le evoluzioni del territorio e le strutture in esso contenute NON RICEVE ALCUN FINANZIAMENTO PUBBLICO XVIII Anno N° 210 Dicembre 2016 Redazione di Montemerano (Gr) Questo numero costa Euro 2,50 ISSN 2283-2963 Le Antiche Dogane Redazione, vicolo della Piazzetta del Campanile, 4 -Cap 58014 Montemerano (Gr) tel. 0564/602010 -339/4078035 -E-mail:[email protected] -www.leantichedogane.com CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) -ISSN 2283-2963 -Sede legale -Direzione amministrativa -Aldo Sara Editore -Via Nomentana, 574 -Cap 00141 Roma tel. 06/822576 Poste Italiane S.p.A. -Spedizione in abbonamento postale -Tassa pagata stampe periodiche -45% art.2 comma 20/b 662/96-DC/DCI-210 del 02/10/2001 -Grosseto

_Romantic Compositions: Genre, Authority and Sincerity in Women’s Writing, 1790-1836_ examines how six Romantic women writers negotiated a male-dominated literary marketplace by deploying hybrid generic forms in their works to claim authority as writers. The juxtaposition of different genres also interrogated moments of sincerity and identity in new ways. Traveling alone and abroad, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft parley a creditable ethos as sympathetic female reporters and tourists. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley both present characters who significantly misread texts and identity, ultimately questioning the possibility of either one ever being more than a palimpsest. Playing with dramatic and poetic paratexts, Felicia Hemans and Joanna Baillie destabilize how sanctuary, family history, and religious faith are performed. As composite works, all of these women’s texts problematize the idea of an urtext or an authoritative identity. Through parody, mimicry, and the forging together of disparate genres, these women’s texts belie the idea of an authentic text or identity. While establishing their writings as authoritative Romantic writings, their neoteric uses of genre unsettle the usual gendered binaries of genre of masculine/poetry and feminine/prose.

Autrice precoce e proli!ca, deve la sua fama all'abilità con cui seppe accogliere alcuni aspetti salienti del Romanticismo, come la riscoperta dell'infanzia, l'incanto del racconto di viaggio, la fascinazione nei confronti della natura. Dopo la !ne del suo matrimonio con il capitano Alfred Hemans, riuscì a trasformare l'attività di scrittrice in una fonte di sostentamento per sé e per i suoi cinque !gli, andando ad allargare le !la della nutrita schiera di professioniste delle lettere inglesi. Fu punta di diamante del Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (dove pubblicò centinaia di poesie tra il 1826 e il 1835) Dislocations è un progetto di ricerca dell'Ateneo di Pisa.

Le schede bio-bibliografiche della banca dati Dante in Inghilterra sulla piattaforma Dislocazioni Transnazionali nascono dal lavoro congiunto di un gruppo di ricerca che in occasione di un Progetto di Ricerca di Ateneo finanziato dal Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica dell'Università di Pisa (2015), ha indagato le influenze della produzione dantesca sugli scrittori romantici inglesi.
Nate come ausilio sintetico per orientarsi in un mondo fitto di dati, date e personaggi talvolta poco noti, le schede mettono in luce i rapporti che singoli autori ebbero con la Commedia, e in senso lato con la tradizione letteraria italiana.

This paper is an analysis of a poem by Felicia Hemans, a 19th century Romantic woman writer. Focusing on “The Bride of the Greek isle”, the study argues that Hemans death poems explore death as a means of freedom from the patriarchal society. It is not as some critics said that Hemans had morbid passion with death, or that her domesticity in her poems is unbearable. The paper, therefore, explores the journey of the bride, in the poem, as a journey towards freedom not death, using Freud’s psychoanalytical division of human’s mind into Id, Ego and Superego. Meanwhile, the study analyzes the images that Hemans used, and their significance to the study of women’s freedom through death. This paper shows that the three divisions of the narrative poem parallel in the structure the division of Freud’s human mind into Id, Ego, and Superego.

This paper is an analysis of a poem by Felicia Hemans, a 19th century Romantic woman writer. Focusing on  “The  Bride of  the  Greek  isle”,  the  study  argues  that  Hemans  death poems explore death as a means of freedom from  the  patriarchal  society.  It  is  not  as  some  critics  said  that  Hemans  had  morbid  passion  with  death,  or  that her  domesticity  in  her  poems  is  unbearable.  The  paper,  therefore,  explores  the  journey  of  the  bride,  in  the poem,  as  a  journey  towards  freedom  not  death,  using  Freud’s  psychoanalytical  division  of  human’s  mind  into Id,  Ego  and  Superego.  Meanwhile,  the  study  analyzes  the  images  that  Hemans  used,  and  their  significance  to the  study  of  women’s  freedom  through  death.  This  paper  shows  that  the  three  divisions  of  the  narrative  poem parallel in the structure the division of Freud’s human mind into Id, Ego, and Superego.

Throughout _Records of Woman, with Other Poems_ (1828), Felicia Hemans repurposes biographies of female saints, prosopographies of exemplary women, and sacred art to interrogate women’s domestic roles across cultures. By merging secular and religious emotions, Hemans constructs a distinctly Romantic brand of hagiography that venerates exemplary women who embrace suffering and death for a noble cause. Hemans’s critics imposed a more traditional model of hagiography onto her biography after her death, thereby shaping the Romantic poet’s posthumous reputation into that of a saintly Victorian poetess.

"In 1795 an anonymous author from North Wales wrote a poem about a “Lew’d madam” of his acquaintance. This woman was Eliza Price, the widowed mistress of the failing Rhiwlas estate. Thinly disguised as an expression of concern for her, this poem is an articulation of anxiety regarding changes which the author – “A Cosmopolite” – observed in his local area, largely as a result of Anglicisation. This unpublished poem is found in the archive of the Griffiths of Garn, in the National Library of Wales. Also in this collection is a manuscript poem, The Charms of Llewesog (1811), written by a teenage Felicia Hemans. Like “A Cosmopolite”, Hemans addresses a Welsh gentry woman who is not named but who I believe to be Jane Wynne, mistress of the Llewesog estate.

I argue that these authors align depictions of domesticity with perceptions of Wales, past, present and future. “A Cosmopolite” bemoans the destruction of an old Welsh way of life and uses Mrs Price and her neglected estate as symbols of decline. Hemans portrays Llewesog and its mistress as models of perfection, respectively providing and confined to a private, domestic sphere. Arguing that The Charms of Llewesog largely accepts and participates in the subsuming of Wales into Britain, I suggest that this poem represents a problematic illustration of what Tricia Lootens describes as “Hemans’s conception of the home as both separate empire and prerequisite for empire”, the locus of female authority and a foundation of the political and economic success which Britain would enjoy throughout a century of imperial expansion."

Romance poetry, drama, and theatrical productions shared common elements in the early nineteenth century, reflecting a hybridization of genres characteristic of Romanticism. In both published and performed work, the verse romances, dramatic poems, and staged historical tragedies of Mary Russell Mitford and Felicia Hemans bear comparison in featuring silence and withdrawal in the parts of lead characters. Mitford’s and Hemans’s use of antitype characters to represent large-scale national crises reflects their mutual grounding in German theatre and drama, particularly that of Friedrich Schiller. Each poet has been associated with liberal idealism in representing corruptions of language as a sign of tyranny, and each poet develops characters who resist and evade the dictums of authority through silence. Nevertheless, Mitford’s approach differs from Hemans’s in the deployment of silent resistance to test problems with liberal idealism. Hemans emphasizes futility to alter a patriarchal script of destiny so that her resisting characters can only connect with audiences in a future time and cannot affect their own moment, while Mitford brings alternate possibilities within reach of her resisting characters in their time, leaving them to face a tentative future yet to be defined.