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In the seventies, as signs of decay began to show in the capitalist experiment of the newly independent African countries, a “bard of the misrule” emerged on the streets of Lagos. Often shirtless and armed with his trademark saxophone, Fela Anikulapo Kuti tore his way into popular culture with Afrobeat music. Blending ethno-traditional forms with the reigning highlife and jazz rhythms, Afrobeat drew lyrics from the flip side of neo-colonial society and Fela’s London and American experience in the sixties. In the two decades that followed, Fela ruled the nights from Afrika Shrine, his signature night club, and the days from the turntables of the restless city dwellers along the Atlantic coastline. Fela’s Afrobeat became a dynamic mode of expression in the social history of post-independent West Africa and generated a counterculture that bonded through music, drugs, resistance politics—and ultimately, the nascence of an Afrocentric contemporary global culture.

I thought I had finally come to my land of bones When the hellish birds of an eveningDrew out my ears To the sublime pathThat gave demons eternal voices And since then, all eveningGypsies have been making music from bones…—SANYA OSHA There is a definite preference here, as would have become obvious from the preceding chapters, for the use of the term “performance” in describing Fela’s overall artistic oeuvre. The term captures an all-inclusive framework within which Fela’s music is only a par...

And you say God knows about these things? And you say logic connects these things?And you say I shouldn’t learn to mourn well? This is endsong, the cornerstone where they cry—CHIEDU EZEANAHWatch it, irate childYou don’t learn how to fall into a pit All it takes is the first step—MARY OLORUNYOMI As conceived by Fela, Afrobeat is primarily a cultural and political musical practice or—better still—an aesthetics of cultural politics. Its performance is equally characterised by the creation of a l...

My body is a temple Of angry music Flames in my brainItching forms in my blood—REMI RAJIWhoever chose the path of stones Whoever wove the tunes into the clouds, and made the street jumpin the frenzy of a danceor made the heads of the Palm sway In the eternal parable of the wind let them gathera timeless wind crossed our path.—OBI NWAKAMA I shall proceed in this chapter by identifying the stylistic strategies with which Fela consciously canonised indigenous performance modes, against the ‘priv...

Idan pa Ọhi Ọyẹ muA Confounding experience, this;Yet the buffoon hollers—a mere harmattan haze.Ookun-Yorùbá aphorism.That voice sprouted again and Crawled into their skulls and began to howl His voice walked ahead and came behindAnd rocked the earth like storm…They did not return The voice survives…—OLU OGUIBECloud without shade Cumulus without shower Saturday night at the bard’s An overcast of cannabis—SOLA OLORUNYOMI Far beyond the Pepple Street venue of his performance, the bass drum’s dee...

Here, we walk the street where laughter is hidden in deep places and stores cannot shut their doorschoked with hearts that bleed from gathered wounds and you will see nothing can grow here, but agony…—OGAGA IFOWODO The Afrobeat vision as espoused by Fela is largely scattered in his public lectures, media reviews of interviews he granted, his private correspondences, short articles in the few books that have devoted chapters to his life and art, and views expressed by the artist in his YAPNEWS...

The memory of the dead is the memory of the living the monologue of the deadis the monologue of the unborn…—MAIK NWOSU Fela died on August 2, 1997. And though his life was particularly eventful, once the announcement of his exit was made, the events leading to his interment began to bear a symbolic imprint. The airwaves were filled with diverse castings of his ‘second’ death in a fortnight. And to die August 2, on the birthday of his beloved brother, Beko Ran-some-Kuti, who was serving a 15-y...

Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College. I begin this chapter with a personal reminiscence. In the spring of 1973, Trinity College, Cambridge, anxious to find a lecturer in German, took the (for Trinity, at least) unusual step of advertising for suitable candidates and interviewing them, myself included. With time on my hands before the inte...

Fig. 16 Theaterplatz in Dresden. Photo by author, CC BY-SA 4.0. My real subject in this chapter is ‘lieux de mémoire’, ‘Erinnerungsorte’, ‘loci memoriae’ or ‘places of memory’. I shall be looking at three examples in a German context and will be examining them as they affect the national memory and its myths, but also the way the nation viewed its national poets and the emergent canon that served to galvanize national cultural aspirations. If we look at the ‘Urtext’ of this cult of memory, P...

Fig. 10 [Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm], Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1819–22), vol. 1 (1819), frontispiece and title page. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College. My subject is German professors. It may need a word by way of prefatory explanation. For if in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, especially in the nineteenth century, so few men and women of excellence in letters, the arts and learning in general were associated with universities, the old one...

Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain. No movement spoke more of children, their simplicity and innocence, or the symbolic significance of children and youth, than did the German Romantics. Yet by the same token, never was such childlike simple-heartedness expressed with greater sophistication or invested with more subliminal meaning. Romantic iconography, as perhaps the most accessible of the movement’s art forms, bears this out. Ph...

From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously researched, yet highly accessible. As a comprehensive examination of German literary history in the period 1700-1900, the collection not only includes accounts of the lives and work of Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, and Gundolf (amongst others), serving to nuance our understanding of these figures in history, but also considers diverse (and often underexplored) topics, from academic freedom to the rise of travel literature. The essays have been reformulated, corrected, and updated to add references to recent works. However, the core foundations of the originals remain, and just as when they were first published, the value of these essays – to researchers, students, and all those who are interested in German literary history – cannot be overstated.

Fig. 13 WilhelmMüller, engravingbyJohannFriedrichSchröter (c.1830), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilhelm_M%C3%BCller_by_Schr%C3%B6ter.jpg, public domain. To coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of Wilhelm Müller’s birth in l794, the first collected edition of his works since 1830 has been produced. This must be regarded as a literary event that will give pleasure alike to friends and lovers of ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ (‘The Fair Maid of the Mill’) or...

Fig. 4 Laocoon and his Sons, also known as the Laocoon Group. Marble, copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in the Baths of Trajan, 1506, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laocoon_Pio-Clementi no_Inv1059-1064-1067.jpg, public domain. A more precise title for this chapter would be simply ‘Overcoming Tragedy Around 1800. A German View’. To a scholar of German, the idea of overcoming tragedy would have immediate associations. We think of disc...

Fig. 12 Friedrich Gundolf, photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf (1911), University Library Heidelberg, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Gundolf_ (HeidICON_33461).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0. Romantik und Kritizismus (Schriftstellertum). Schlegel. Wackenroder. In der ganzen Romantik ist der Geist, die Ironie die Hauptsache. Sie ist tief literarisch. Tieck. Wackenroder, ein Standard Werk der Romantik, ganz analytisch-schriftstellerisch. Und naiv. Ebenso Lucinde. Die R...

Fig. 15 Engraving by Carl Jäger, Erinnerung an die Schillerfeier 1859, “erfunden und radirt von C. Jaeger.”; erschienen im Nürnberger Künstlervereins-Album; C. H. Zeh’sche Buch & Kunsthandlung in Nürnberg. Wikimedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Karl_J%C3%A4ger_Erinnerung_an_die_Schillerfeier_1859_80 0x1296pixel.jpg, public domain. Occasional poetry has a double focus. It may involve the immediate (or seemingly immediate) reaction to events (victories, celebrations). I...

Fig. 3 Wallenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wallenstein_aus_Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public domain. Critics and commentators are in general agreement that Wallenstein represents the pinnacle of Friedrich Schiller’s achievement as a dramatist. Contemporaries like Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt sensed that this was a new high point in G...

Fig. 25 Johann Joseph Sprick, Portrait of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, 1838. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droste-H%C3%BClshoff_2.jpg, public domain. How typical are German women writers of the age in which they lived? There is Bettina von Arnim, who did not find her way to a public career as a writer until quite late, when the Romantic movement as such might be deemed to be over. With Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, chronologically at least, we find an exac...

Fig. 1 James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations (London: J. Goodwin, 1812). Goethe and the Novel Only superlatives will do for Werther. For Thomas Mann, for instance, it remains ‘ein Meisterwerk’. For this and other modern masters of the theme of death such a reaction might come more from literary mediation than through direct access. For earlier generations, however, it came straight from the experience of the heart. Werther concentrates many of the aspirations and strivings of the Stur...

Fig. 9 Ernest Julian Stern and Heinz Herald, ‘Penthesilea, Reinhardt und seine Bühne, Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen Theaters’, 1919, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penthesilea_ (Kleist)_-_Amazone.jpg, public domain. Gods of the wingèd shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air! Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These were the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Ezra Pound, ‘The Return’ It has never been ...

Fig. 8 [Karl Gottlieb Hofmann], Pantheon der Deutschen, 3 parts (Chemnitz: Karl Gottlieb Hofmann, 1794–1800), part 2 (1795), frontispiece and title page. Despite disavowals in its country of origin, there is such a thing as a great German biographical tradition. Why, then, do we not hear more of it, and what has happened meanwhile to the art of biography in the German-speaking lands? Inevitably, comparisons are made with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of biographical writing and scholarship. Thes...

Fig. 24 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, c. 1760. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Gottlieb_Klopstock-01.jpg, public domain. Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung PrachtAuf die Fluren verstreut, schöner ein froh Gesicht,Das den großen GedankenDeiner Schöpfung noch Einmal denkt. Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her,Oder, flohest du schon wieder zum Himmel auf,Kom in röthendem StraleAuf dem Flügel der Abendluft, Kom, und lehre mein Lied jugendlich heiter s...

Fig. 26 Leonid Pasternak, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, date unknown. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonid_Pasternak_-_Portrait_painting_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke.jpg, public domain. It is a natural reaction to see in Elegy Ten a kind of summation of the ideas and images of the whole cycle. The themes that we have been tracing do of course recur: angels, flowers, lovers, mythologies. And themes and motifs that dominate Rainer Maria Rilke’s whole poetic oeuvre find ...

Fig. 2 View of the Bay of Naples. Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, Reise in Deutschland der Schweiz, Italien und Sicilien in den Jahren 1791 bis 1792, in Gesammelte Werke der Brüder Christian und Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg, 20 vols (Hamburg: Perthes und Besser, 1820–25), VII, plate facing p. 340. The eighteenth century saw travel literature come into its own as a major literary genre. Not only did it give accounts of actual travels: it also contained useful information for the travel...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Etching by W. Unger after G. O. May (1779). Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe._Etching_by_W._Unger_after_G._O._Wellcome_V0002292.jpg John Ruskin, who had read Lucretius’s De rerum natura in his student days as a set book at Oxford, commented in later years: ‘I have ever since held it the most hopeless sign of a man’s mind being made of flint-shingle if he liked Lucretius...

As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, the dawning of the Anthropocene has created not only tangible environmental and political effects, but also has threatened to alter our traditionally anthropocentric sense of time, which (following Quentin Meillassoux) I dub “correlationist time.” Although these alterations feel novel, however, evidence of temporality’s malleability can be traced back at least to the British Romantics, who like us were navigating uncharted waters, politically as well as ecologically. After outlining the modern Western consolidation of “correlationist time” and locating its representational epitome in some early poetry of William Wordsworth, I sketch four alternatives to “correlationist time” limned by other British Romantics poets: deep time (Charlotte Smith, Percy Shelley); slow time (Keats), revolutionary time (Shelley again), and hyper-Chaotic time (Byron).

This short book aims to turn a modest, one might even think trivial, literary labour into something more substantial, going beyond one particular novel into broader questions of novel-writing, character and narrative. My starting point is tracking down those allusions and quotations in Middlemarch that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars. Most of these quotations are located in the chapter epigraphs that George Eliot provides throughout, citing other writers or confecting her own past...

The middleness of Middlemarch is a moral as well as an existential quantity, a matter of ethics as both mediated and medial. The novel’s twinned mirrors situate questions of honesty or mendacity, and Eliot’s characters middle themselves somewhere between moral puritanism on the one hand—Dorothea’s over-identification with St Theresa, or Antigone, we might say—and active malignancy on the other (the melodramatic blackmailing villainy of John Raffles, say). And this brings me to another epigrap...

Darstellung der Urpflanze. Woodcut by Pierre Jean François Turpin based on a concept by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1837), scanned from Anita Albus, Die Kunst der Künste. Erinnerungen an die Malerei (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 1997). Photograph by JuTa (2010), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Urpflanze.png From the scientific revolution of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, the main opposition to science came from religion....

‘Laocoon and his sons’, also known as ‘the Laocoon Group’. Marble, copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in the Baths of Trajan in 1506. Museo Pio Clementino, Octagon, Laocoon Hall, Vatican Museums. Photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen (2009), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Laocoon_Pio-Clementino_Inv1059-1064-1067.jpg The Laocoon group in the Vatican, reputedly the work of the three Rhodian sculptors Hagesandros, Athanodorus, and Po...

Many of the chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch are quoted from specifically attributed sources: ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Old Song’ and so on. Others come without attribution, and in these cases Eliot herself is the author—a snatch of poetry, or an excerpt from an Elizabethan-sounding play, which she is passing-off as a ‘quotation’. Take, for instance, the epigraph to Part 8 Chapter 72, near the end of the novel: Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before, Repeatin...

Critics have extensively analysed Keats’s work from the perspective of historical time, often by considering his integration into the cultural and literary community of his time. Yet his perception of time may also be envisioned through his experience of walking and travelling. Indeed, his summer 1818 walking tour in Scotland, that had social and literary implications and then created a specific relation to time, may be viewed as an opportunity for the poet to better adjust to temporality. In undertaking his tour, and as recorded in his letters, Keats first sought to break away from the constraints of the ordinary measurement of time. But roaming the Highlands also led him to take up the recently established habit of picturesque tourism and to relate both to a literary past and to more contemporary voices: following the tracks of other poets meant revisiting the landscape and experiencing a fictionalised temporality. Finally, Keats’s poems and letters relate the physical act of walking and the experience of immediacy it entails. In several poems, feet and steps stage the contact between the poet’s body and the ground loaded with memory. Thus, walking was for Keats a means to experience the past and to bridge past and present voices, which redefined his inscription in his own time.

Autograph of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ (1785). Photograph by Historiograf (2011), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Schiller_an_die_freude_manuskript_2.jpg Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium, Wir betreten feuertrunken Himmlische, dein Heiligtum. Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was der Mode Schwert geteilt; Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt. Chor Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt! Brüder—überm St...

University This elegant collection of essays ranges across eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, covering philosophy, science, literature and religion in the ‘Age of Goethe.’ A recognised authority in the field, Nisbet grapples with the major voices of the Enlightenment and gives pride of place to the figures of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The book ranges widely in its compass of thought and intellectual discourse, dealing incisively with themes including the philosophical implications of literature and the relationship between religion, science and politics. The result is an accomplished reflection on German thought, but also on its rebirth, as Nisbet argues for the relevance of these Enlightenment thinkers for the readers of today. The first half of this collection focuses predominantly on eighteenth-century thought, where names like Lessing, Goethe and Herder, but also Locke and Voltaire, feature. The second has a wider chronological scope, discussing authors such as Winckelmann and Schiller, while branching out from discussions of religion, philosophy and literature to explore the sciences. Issues of biology, early environmentalism, and natural history also form part of this volume. The collection concludes with an examination of changing atitudes towards art in the atfermath of the ‘Age of Goethe.’ The essays in this volume are brought together in this collection to present Nisbet’s widely-acclaimed perspectives on this fascinating period of German thought. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the intellectual life of Europe during the Enlightenment, while its engaging and lucid style will also appeal to the general reader.

This chapter investigates Fidelio’s relation to the French Revolution by looking at it as the last of a series of revisitings of a revolutionary ‘spot of time’. First laid out by Bouilly and Gaveaux’s 1798 rescue opera, Léonore, ou L’Amour Conjugal (1798), which was supposedly based on a true story of the Jacobin Terror, this ‘spot’ was then returned to, and reworked, by several European composers of the early nineteenth century, who produced operas with the same plot, most notably Beethoven, whose Leonores of 1805 and 1806, and Fidelio of 1814 betray a subtly unstable perspective on recent revolutionary history. Lastly, this chapter looks at the role of melodrama in Beethoven’s opera, not only as a curious technical innovation, but also as a new means of conceiving of, and dramatising, historical action, and argues that one way of seeing the dénouement of 1814 is as an essentially conservative attempt to bury the traumatic vision of history—of history as sforzando—that its earlier incarnations had opened up.

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. In this volume, we have decided to take Blake’s aphorism as an invitation to see Romantic writing as a ‘production of time’; to look for the work of time within Romantic literature. One of the aims of this collection is to understand Romanticism as the product of its own time, in its ability to reflect history and in the emergence of its specific poetics through time. Blake’s words can also be read as a meditation on poetics unfolding ‘in ti...

Middlemarch’s thirty-first chapter opens with a conversation between Lydgate and Rosamond about Dorothea. Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that formal studious man thirty years older than herself.‘Of course she is devoted to her husband, ’ said Rosamond, implying a notion of necessary sequence which the scientific man regarded as the prettiest possible for a woman; but she was thinking at the same ...

It might be thought perverse, in a book explicitly about the use of epigraphs in Middlemarch, to have waited so long to quantify the specific lineaments of Eliot’s epigraphy in the novel. There are, though, reasons why such work belongs at the end rather than the beginning. An epigraph precedes a chapter, of course; it comes at the beginning, or strictly speaking comes before the beginning. But we cannot make sense of the epigraph until we understand its relationship to the chapter it sets up...

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Adele Kreager performed the copy-editing and proofreading. Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the Fontin font. Luca Baffa typeset the book in InDesign and produced the paperback and hardback editions. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella; the heading font is Californian FB. Luca produced the EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML, and XML editions — the conversion is performed with open source software freely available on...

Portrait of Thomas Amory by Joseph Blackburn, photograph by Okita2 (2012), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Amory_1760_Joseph_Blackburn.jpg Apart from his published works—of which The Life of John Buncle, Esq. was easily the most successful—little is known of Thomas Amory, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as an ‘eccentric writer’. The son of one Councillor Amory who accompanied William III to Ireland and acquired extensive prop...

Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Melissa Purkiss performed the copy-editing and proofreading. Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the Fontin font. Luca Baffa typeset the book in InDesign and produced the paperback and hardback editions. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella; the heading font is Californian FB. Luca produced the EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML, and XML editions — the conversion is performed with open source software freely available ...

For the Romantic and Post-Romantic imagination, Venice as both historical place and a-temporal myth, the realised and unrealisable city, is central to a poetics of temporality and selfhood in Byron and Shelley. It is the real and unreal city that commingles its solid architectural structures with watery insubstantiality, myth with history, personal memory with historical monument, and poetic artistry with the writing of history. Byron’s poetic reflections on a former self and ‘Venice, lost and won’ (Childe Harold, IV). Shelley qualifies any Byronic optimistic sense of spiritual or cultural restoration with an abiding infernally nightmarish vision of a corrupted, and corrupting, but not quite fallen Venice. Historically Byron and Shelley acknowledge that Venice is lost, but her presence persists in their a-temporal poetic re-imaginings of her former glory. Venice’s self-preserving and self-destructive myth holds an abiding fascination for the Romantic imagination and it poetics of subjectivity: a city at once darkly illuminative that exists as a utopian ideal and a corrupt reality, as a regal yet usurped power, existing within and outside of history. An impossible architectural city of imaginative possibilities that for Byron and Shelley, as well as Nietzsche and Calvino after them, is a perpetually charmed spot and broken spell.

I would like to talk a little more about middles. Middlemarch is a medium place, and Middlemarch a medium novel. ‘Medium’ means both middle (in a statistical, but also a general sense) and also environment, surround, that inside which we subsist. For biologists a medium is a nutrient solution for the growth of cells in vitro, which growth might of course be observed through a microscope. For plankton, brine is their medium. In a different sense, for human beings, as social creatures, society ...

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that. Roberts considers the epigraph as a mirror that refracts the meaning of a text, and that thus carries important resonances for the way Eliot’s novels generate their meanings. In this lively and provoking study, he tracks down those allusions and quotations that have hitherto gone unidentified by scholars, examining their relationship to the text in which they sit to unfurl a broader argument about the novel - both this novel, and the novel form itself. Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors is both a study of George Eliot and a meditation on the textuality of fiction. It is essential reading for specialists and students of George Eliot, the nineteenth century novel, and intertextuality. It will also richly reward anyone who has ever taken pleasure in Middlemarch.

Taking the format of a closing roundtable discussion—with prepared statements followed by a formal response (Laurent Folliot) and an open-ended debate between the five contributors—this coda explores the issue of literary periodisation in Romanticism, starting from the Romantics’ own efforts at self-periodisation and the emergence of a new critical discourse on the ‘spirit of the age’ (David Duff, ‘Phases of British Romanticism’). It examines the terminology of periodisation, charting the history and shifting meaning of key terms, and the new awareness of historical beginnings and endings prompted by the French Revolution and other world-changing events (Nicholas Halmi, ‘Periodisation and the Epochal Event’). The difficulties of periodising a movement so diffuse in its origins and so differentiated in its national and regional manifestations are addressed, as is the impulse to find unifying characteristics amid the unprecedented cultural diversity of the period (Fiona Stafford, ‘Romanticism and the “Four Nations”: Not Quite in Time’). While the stress is on British Romanticism through its different historical phases and national traditions, the next contribution takes up a more cross-border approach by examining the relationship between British, European, and American Romanticism (Martin Procházka, ‘Periodisation as a Problem: The Case of American Romanticism’). In each case, questions of chronology are set alongside other theoretical and methodological problems, the aim being to arrive at tentative conclusions about the usefulness or otherwise of a concept of the ‘Romantic period’ or of potential subdivisions of it that could reflect the continuities and discontinuities of Romantic literature.

Although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is set in the late eighteenth century, its plot depends to a large extent on Victor’s alchemical pursuits, making him a living anachronism, a notion which the novel draws attention to at several points. It might more generally be argued that the novel’s writing and the effect it produces rest on the superimposition of two or more temporal lines and notably on the blurring of two supposedly antithetical conceptions of time, historical (or linear) time and mythical (or cyclical) time. This blurring and perhaps even co-existence of different timelines is what I explore in this essay by relying on the notion of anachrony, taken in its narratological sense, as a chronological disorder between diegesis and narrative, and in its poetical, creative sense, following Jacques Rancière’s definition of the term: “events, notions, significations that are contrary to time, that make meaning circulate in a way that escapes any contemporaneity, any identity of time with itself.” I here examine the temporal experience presented by the novel through its complex handling of time before focusing on the anachronistic protagonist, broadening the perspective thanks to other examples taken from Shelley’s fiction. Indeed, many of her protagonists are thrust into a time period they do not belong to, either literally, thanks to a process of reanimation, or metaphorically, as they cling to old-fashioned values for instance. From Frankenstein onwards, the impact of Shelley’s work can be accounted for at least partly by her poetical use of anachrony.

Portrait of Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker (1768), oil on canvas, Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Photograph by UpdateNerd (2018), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Kant_gemaelde_3.jpg The relationship between natural history and human history has played a decisive part in the rise of modern science and the modern historical consciousness. On the one hand, the application of historical thought to nature—i.e. it...

La Matrone d’Éphèse, etching and engraving from Contes et nouvelles en vers par Jean de La Fontaine (Paris: de l’imprimerie de P. Didot, 1795), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933, Photograph by Pharos (2017), Wikimedia, CC0 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Matrone_d%27Ephese, _ from_Contes_et_nouvelles_en_vers_par_Jean_de_La_Fontaine._A_Paris, _ de_l % 27imprimerie_de_P._Didot, _l % 27an_III_de_la_R % C3 % A9publique, _1795_ MET_DP813934.jpg Th...

Portrait of Johann Gottfried Herder by Gerhard von Kügelgen (1809), oil on canvas, Tartu University Library, Photograph by Trzęsacz (2018), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herder_by_K%C3%BCgelgen.jpg A perplexing feature of Herder’s Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (The Oldest Document of the Human Race) of 1774–76 is its fundamental ambivalence regarding the legitimacy of natural and supernatural modes of explanation. On the one hand, he deni...

Painting of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by Anton Graff (1771), Kunstsammlung der Universität Leipzig, Photograph by Liberal Freemason (2007), Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gotthold_Ephraim_Lessing_Kunstsammlung_Uni_Leipzig.jpg In his late work The Education of the Human Race, Lessing suggests that the time may now have come in which the New Testament has outlived its usefulness as a guidebook—at least for the more farsighted among his contemporaries. ...