romanticism – Arts of Place

‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano

Niamh Lawlor on 12/02/2025

With guest speaker Professor Simon Bainbridge

Seminar

Wednesday 19th March, Arts Building, University of Birmingham, Arts Room 201, 3-5pm

Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Professor Simon Bainbridge expert in Romanticism, the politics of place and mountaineering in this seminar hosted in collaboration with the Nineteenth Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. Simon will give his talk during the first hour; followed by refreshments and conversation.

Simon Bainbridge is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Simon’s extensive work in the field of Romanticism has involved close research into the relationship between the movement and the historic contexts that surround it. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). In this seminar we will hear about Simon’s recent research exploring global mountaineering in the Romantic-period, focusing on accounts of ascending Hawaii’s highest volcanoes.

Simon introduces his subject here:

‘This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.’

Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Frankenstein (1818)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Mary Shelley ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1993)

Recommended by Jimmy Packham

Mary Shelley’s ubiquitous novel might seem like an obvious choice: “not this one again!” But I want to use this novel to gesture towards what I think is one of the most exciting – and what I believe is currently one of the most urgent – strands of landscape and environmental thinking: the ecogothic. Frankenstein straddles the Romantic and gothic traditions, and nowhere more so than in its portrait of the various (the myriad!) landscapes through which Victor and his creation travel. As a representative ecogothic text, the novel departs from the vision of nature generally associated with conventional Romanticism, and asks us to see nature as strange and estranging, unfamiliar and disquieting. More than this, however, this is a book that wants us to think ethically about our engagement with the natural world: the creature (himself a horrifying amalgam of nature and culture) works hard to establish a compassionate ethics, rooted in his experiences of nature and animal life. Frankenstein also reminds us how natural the apparently unnatural monsters that haunt our horror stories truly are: from The Odyssey and Beowulf, through Frankenstein, to more recent fare like Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014) and the Godzilla franchise (1954-present). Indeed, in Godzilla I think we have a contemporary creature that rivals Frankenstein’s monster as the most compelling modern myth to illuminate humanity’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world: Godzilla returns to us at moments of ecological and global crisis, to restore a kind of harmony to the natural world, but does so while wreaking terrible destruction on human civilisation.

The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric Individualism

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Andrew Hodgson (Basingstoke, 2020)

Recommended by Jessica Fay

This book will be of interest to anyone who enjoys attending closely to the intricate methods poets use to express what they perceive and how they perceive it. We all see the world in different ways, observing different things, and our sense of identity and sense of home is channelled through those unique experiences. Subjective encounters with specific places, local events, and minute aspects of nature are at the centre of Romantic poetics. But while the aim of Wordsworth’s self-consciousness, for example, is to discover and communicate universal truths, this book shows—through a series of close readings—how four poets struggled with and against language, syntax, and form to achieve extreme lyric integrity, communicating the singularity of their embodied perception of the world for its own sake. Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney emerge as proponents of a newly isolated and intricately defined poetic style that will nuance thinking about the spectrum of approaches to lyric subjectivity traceable within the Romantic tradition.

The White Doe of Rylstone: Or, The Fate of the Nortons (1815)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

William Wordsworth ed. Kristine Dugas (Ithaca and London, 1988)

Recommended by Jessica Fay

This narrative poem was written by Wordsworth in 1807 but withheld from the press until 1815 because of fears it wouldn’t be well received. And it wasn’t. It’s an austere poem that tricks the reader into expecting an exciting romance narrative of the kind at which Walter Scott excelled, only to disappoint those expectations when nothing much happens. It tells the story of the Norton family during the Rising of the North, a Roman Catholic rebellion aimed at dethroning Elizabeth I, but Wordsworth refuses to describe combat scenes and the most violent act performed by the rebels comprises treading on a Bible and saying Mass. Instead, the emphasis is on Norton’s Protestant daughter, Emily, who waits in the medieval garden at Rylstone Hall to hear news that her father and brothers have been killed. In her grief, Emily is comforted by the companionship of a milk-white doe, which continues to visit her grave in the churchyard at Bolton Abbey for many years afterwards. The garden and the churchyard are presented by Wordsworth as places enriched by the fact that they have witnessed centuries of human pain—from the medieval period through to the early nineteenth century—but for that reason, these are also places enriched by hope. This little-read Wordsworth poem gets to the root of his thinking about the consolation that can be gained from quietude, openness to lessons of sympathy from the animal world, and deep connections between people and the places in which they suffer and overcome that suffering.

Andrew Hodgson

Alexandra Harris on 03/09/2020

Andrew Hodgson

Lecturer in Romanticism at the University of Birmingham

My research focuses on poets and poetry, largely from the Romantic period onwards. I have written a book, Lyric Individualism (Palgrave, 2020), about four lyric poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – each of whom finds subtle and affecting ways of conveying a sense of place and the significance of home in their writing. My next project is a new edition of the correspondence of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s letters breathe an imaginative apprehension of the natural spirit and cultural inheritance of the places across Europe from which they were written.

Local Attachments

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Fiona Stafford (Oxford, 2010)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

One of the many remarkable things that happened towards the end of the eighteenth century was that local feeling and the life of particular places became great literary subjects. You wouldn’t expect to find a Jacobean poet writing about the River Duddon (unless perhaps it was a symbol of national prosperity), but of Wordsworth you would expect nothing less. Paying close attention to the changing cultural status of local particularity, Stafford asks how and why this came about, and how Romantic writers, poem by poem, made places matter.

Read the introduction on the OUP website