Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring

Edited by Hermione de Almeida - Contributions by Nina Auerbach; John Clubbe; Carl Dawson; William Theodore de Bary; George H. Gilpin; William Carl Gilpin; Jonathan Gross; Regina Hewitt; Steven E. Jones; Marsha Manns; Martin Meisel; Anne K. Mellor; Morton D. Paley; Robert L. Patten; Donald H. Reiman; Ben P. Robertson; Robert M. Ryan; G. Thomas Tanselle; Carol Kyros Walker and Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing influence on several generations of scholars, and their areas of interest, follows. A chapter from Woodring’s unpublished autobiography, on his childhood in small-town America, then concludes the volume with an ironic retrospection on intercultural origins.

Topics addressed among the chapters include portraiture and self-fashioning, landscape art, physiognomy and caricatures, radical print ephemera, illustrated picaresque verse, social and political satire, traditions of the sublime in art and literature, transatlantic influences and aesthetics, chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, the Caribbean slave trade, revolutionary history, Napoleonic wars, the politics of multicultural communities, gender and race, marginalia and textual revelations, Native America, historical interchanges in curating museum shows, and contemporary American sculpture and art. Cultural figures of the nineteenth century that are featured in the discussions include Henry Adams, Beethoven, Blake, Byron, Willa Cather, Thomas Cole, Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, George Cruikshank, Ugo Foscolo, Washington Irving, Keats, Willibrord Mähler, George Romney, Rowlandson, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

Chapter essays, commentaries, and Carl Woodring’s unpublished writings function together in Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring—with a depth of original perspectives and a multi-voiced and intercultural coherence. The book as a whole testifies to Woodring’s living and intellectually potent legacy for future students of nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and twenty-first century scholarship on literature and art.

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 350 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61149-540-9 • Hardback • March 2015 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-61149-541-6 • eBook • March 2015 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance, Art / History / European / Romanticism, Literary Criticism / General

Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring

Hardback

eBook

Summary

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing influence on several generations of scholars, and their areas of interest, follows. A chapter from Woodring’s unpublished autobiography, on his childhood in small-town America, then concludes the volume with an ironic retrospection on intercultural origins.

Topics addressed among the chapters include portraiture and self-fashioning, landscape art, physiognomy and caricatures, radical print ephemera, illustrated picaresque verse, social and political satire, traditions of the sublime in art and literature, transatlantic influences and aesthetics, chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, the Caribbean slave trade, revolutionary history, Napoleonic wars, the politics of multicultural communities, gender and race, marginalia and textual revelations, Native America, historical interchanges in curating museum shows, and contemporary American sculpture and art. Cultural figures of the nineteenth century that are featured in the discussions include Henry Adams, Beethoven, Blake, Byron, Willa Cather, Thomas Cole, Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, George Cruikshank, Ugo Foscolo, Washington Irving, Keats, Willibrord Mähler, George Romney, Rowlandson, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

Chapter essays, commentaries, and Carl Woodring’s unpublished writings function together in Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring—with a depth of original perspectives and a multi-voiced and intercultural coherence. The book as a whole testifies to Woodring’s living and intellectually potent legacy for future students of nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and twenty-first century scholarship on literature and art.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 350 • Trim: 6½ x 9½

978-1-61149-540-9 • Hardback • March 2015 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-61149-541-6 • eBook • March 2015 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Gothic & Romance, Art / History / European / Romanticism, Literary Criticism / General

Author

Hermione de Almeida is Walter Professor Emerita of English and comparative literature at the University of Tulsa.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Eroica in Its Artistic Context: Willibrord Joseph Mähler's Portrait of Beethoven
John Clubbe
Chapter 2: Thomas Cole and the Wild American Sublime
George H. Gilpin
Chapter 3: “To go down, bound”: William Hone and the Materiality of Print Culture
Steven E. Jones
Chapter 4: Dark Humor, Cartoon Strips, and Other Raw Material for Don Juan
Hermione de Almeida
Chapter 5: Prying into the Melon: The Marriage of Private with Public in the Regency Era
Robert L. Patten
Chapter 6: Did Tom Jones Ever Go to Xanadu?: Two Meditations on A Life and Practice as a Historical Critic
Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
Chapter 7: American Wilderness
Carl Woodring
Chapter 8: Exhibition of Five English Romantic Poets in a Museum in Florence
Carol Kyros Walker
Chapter 9: George Romney’s Shipwrecks
Morton D. Paley
Chapter 10: “My distressful pilgrimage”: Byron’s marginalia to Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Jonathan Gross
Chapter 11: Between Two Fires: Henry Adams and the Temperature of History
Martin Meisel
Chapter 12: Afterwords for Carl Woodring
Nina Auerbach, G. Thomas Tanselle, William Theodore de Bary, Donald H. Reiman, Anne K. Mellor, Carl Dawson, Marsha Manns, Regina Hewitt, Robert M. Ryan, William Carl Gilpin
Chapter 13: Almost Nobody: A Chronicle
Carl Woodring
Selected Bibliography: Carl R. Woodring
Ben P. Robertson
Contributors

Reviews

In addition to ten fine essays by scholars who were students and colleagues of Woodring’s, we find here an unpublished essay by Woodring on American art and the first chapter of his projected autobiography, a gathering of tributes, and a selected bibliography of Woodring’s impressive and influential writings....This volume offers a worthy tribute to a great scholar that makes one long for a return of the festschrift.
— Recent Studies In The Nineteenth Century

Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring

Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring

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