Romantic Circles Blog

On 13 September 2009, the Keats-Shelley Association of America hosted a special advance screening of Jane Campion’s new film Bright Star (previously discussed here), about the love between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, at the New York Public Library. Following the screening was a special panel of reactions to the movie, featuring Stuart Curran (distinguished professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania and president of the KSAA), Christopher Ricks (William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University), Timothy Corrigan (professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania) and Susan Wolfson (Professor of English, Princeton University).

Special thanks are due to to several people who helped to facilitate this screening/panel and its recording: Marsha Manns (Director, Keats-Shelley Association of America), Oleg Dubson (Apparition, the film’s distributor), Doucet Devin Fischer (Co-editor, Shelley and his Circle) Cheryl Raymond (Manager, Programs, Special Events, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Mike Diekmann (Manager of Audio Visual Services New York Public Library for the Performing Arts), Sarah Zimmerman (Associate Professor of English, Fordham University), John Bugg (Assistant Professor of English, Fordham University), Zachary Holbrook (Research Associate, Shelley and his Circle), and Elizabeth Denlinger (Curator, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library).

Romantic Circles Audio is now pleased to make the panel discussion available here as a podcast. The lecture is downloadable by clicking on the speaker icon below, or you can subscribe (free of charge) to the panel as a podcast–and then receive future podcasts from Romantic Circles Audio–manually, by using the RSS button below, or (again free of charge) via the iTunes store using the iTunes button.

Though he does not introduce himself on the recording, Stuart Curran introduces the panel.

click here to listen directly, or right click to download

To manually subscribe, simply follow these steps:

1. Copy the link attached to the RSS button below (Mac users ctrl-click, Windows users right-click).

2. Paste this link into any podcast aggregator–for example, iPodder or Apple’s iTunes player (under: Advanced > Subscribe to podcast).

podcast

Note: Romantic Circles also publishes the Poets on Poets Archive as a free quarterly podcast.

A sample letter from Bloomfield's letters. The edition includes annotations; contextual materials, including a chronology, images, reviews, and selected poems by Bloomfield; indexes of the people and places mentioned in the letters; and an Introduction by Tim Fulford.

Romantic Circles is very pleased to announce the publication of a new electronic edition, The Letters of Robert Bloomfield and his Circle, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, with Associate Editor John Goodridge and Technical Editor Laura Mandell.

The Suffolk farmhand turned London shoemaker Robert Bloomfield was the most popular poet of the early nineteenth-century before Byron, admired not just for the authenticity that stemmed from his childhood experience as a rural labourer, but accepted as a master of narrative and versification—the living continuation of the Georgic and ballad traditions epitomised by James Thomson and Robert Burns. This edition of Bloomfield’s correspondence makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in what it was like to be a professional poet in the early nineteenth century.  Intimate, humorous, self-analytical, Bloomfield’s letters show from the inside what it was like to work in the rapidly expanding book market.  They reveal the power of the publisher, and show Bloomfield struggling, as Wordsworth and Clare also did, with gentlemen patrons who resented the independence that sales gave their protègés.   Throughout, they demonstrate Bloomfield’s difficulties in straddling the labouring-class culture from which he came and the polite culture of his readers and supporters.  This is partly a matter of what they discuss—work in garrets, poor relief, popular songs and political protest, for example. Bloomfield meets the radical shoemaker Thomas Hardy and converses with Hardy’s fellow-accused in the 1794 treason trials, John Horne Tooke; he also corresponds with Paine’s admirer Thomas Clio Rickman.

Invaluable resources for the social historian, like the memoirs of Francis Place and the more passing comments of William Blake, Bloomfield’s letters open up a world not recorded in print at the time, and absent from most twentieth-century histories.   With Clare and Rogers among his correspondents, and with Moore and Wordsworth among his admirers, Bloomfield emerges here as a writer who was for a while central to the poetic culture of the Romantic era. Intended as a resource for scholars of Bloomfield and of labouring-class writing, this edition includes an introduction and extensive editorial apparatus and features transcriptions of Bloomfield’s unpublished poems, critical remarks and children’s writings.  It incorporates over forty reproductions of illustrations to his poems (Bloomfield was one of the most heavily illustrated poets of the day).  Also collected are contemporary reviews of his poems and the texts of poems by his brothers George and Nathaniel.

James Heffernan alerted us to New Books on Literature 19, a new book review site he’s editing:

Launching on September 1, 2009,  nbol-19.org is an Online Review of Books on English and American Literature of the Nineteenth Century.  Sponsored by Dartmouth College and edited by James Heffernan with technical help from Thomas Luxon  and editorial advice from thirty-three specialists in nineteenth-century literature,  this site aims to revolutionize academic reviewing by assessing new books within ninety days of their publication, by inviting authors to respond to each review within thirty days of its submission,  and by inviting comments from visitors to the site.  Taking advantage of web resources, its reviews will include pictures from the books it reviews and links to relevant material on other sites.  With reviewers ranging from graduate students to chaired professors and emeriti,  this site has commissioned  just over one hundred reviews of books published in 2009, is already posting more than twenty of them, and aims to have the rest up by next April.  Meanwhile, its Books Announced list for 2009 briefly describes all the  books it will review.