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In Romantic Interactions, Susan J. Wolfson examines how interaction with other authors—whether on the bookshelf, in the embodied company of someone else writing, or in relation to literary celebrity—shaped the work of some of the best-known (and less well-known) writers in the English language. Working across the arc of Long Romanticism, from the 1780s to the 1840s, this lively study involves writing by women and men, in poetry and prose. Combining careful readings with sophisticated literary, historical, and cultural criticism, Wolfson reveals how various writers came to define themselves as \"author.\" The story unfolds not only in deft textual analyses but also by provocatively placing writers in dialogue with what they were reading, with one another, and with the community of readers (and writers) their writings helped bring into being: Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in the Revolution-roiled 1790s; William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth in the society of the Lake District; Lord Byron, a magnet for writers everywhere, inspired, troubled, but always arrested by what he (and his scandal-ridden celebrity) represented. This fresh, informative account of key writers, important texts, and complex cultural currents promises keen interest for students and scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians.

Wolfson's double-syntax title, \"Tempting Eve,\" twins Satan's temptation of Eve to the temptation that Eve's existential plight and restless inner life present to readers of Paradise Lost. This is a great poem, with a great heroine, and undeniably infused with a tradition of misogyny. While no news to professional Miltonists, the ground deserves fresh scanning, given what seems to be settled popular opinion about Eve's happy situation before the Fall. A recent remark by Merve Emre in The New Yorker, delivered as if fixed fact: \"There was inequality in Eden before the fall, but there was no misogyny.\" To her, this but hovers over a distinction without a difference. This remark prompted her essay--also an occasion for her to bring fresh attention to Mary Wollstonecraft, the first strong oppositional female reader of Paradise Lost. She virtually launched A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) on her reading of Milton's unfallen Eve as an insulting construction, praised in terms subversive of her advocacy for rational human capacity.

Of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—as the or (appositive or alternative?) may suggest—origins are in such oversupply, such over-determination, as to make a question of origin itself. Its complex multiples extend to a report from the decade in which Frankenstein is cast, the 1790s: J. M. Itard's De l'éducation d'un homme sauvage (1801), about a feral boy of mysterious origin. Susan Wolfson investigates the several origin-stories for, in, from, and around Mary Shelley's durably dynamic novel, including the question of \"monstrous\" assignments and the riddle for Enlightenment thought about whether primitive existence is ideal innocence, or savagery.

Even though Wordsworth revised this initial “worthy of” to “that aspire to” in the 1850 Prelude, the name-pressure intensifies in its dream-language, because the poet now claims the dream as his own (1850, 5.20).2 Thomas De Quincey was alert to the cannily formative field: “the form of the dream is not arbitrary; but, with exquisite skill in the art of composition, is made to arise out of the situation in which the poet had previous found himself, and is faintly prefigured in the elements of that situation. ” “A Character” is the declarative title in his 1834 Poetical Works.18 The original occasion explains the upgrade: a pained defense against William Hazlitt’s published outrages at the seeming apostasy of Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual (1816) and Lay-Sermon (1817), twin defections to Church and King from the firebrand oratory and publications of the 1790s.19 Stung by the charge, Coleridge parries the word “Character” to ring an ethical core, fortuitously endorsed by the characters of his “no unmeaning Signature”-in sound, syllables, the very letters.20 On all these circuits, he protests, Our bard pursued his old A. B. C. Contented if he could subscribe In fullest sense his name, ’´Εστησε; (’Tis Punic Greek, for ‘he hath stood!’)21 Happy, too, is the way the lettering of Punic Greek subscribes to the translated pun-Greek of Coleridge’s signature. [...]as the accidents accumulate, they begin to precipitate “a figure of reading” that Paul de Man has described as endemic to autobiography.27 Reversing the notion that “life produces autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” de Man reads autobiography as a “specular structure” that generates a “specular model of cognition.” 30 Mary Jacobus emphasizes the death-sentence: by “turning on itself . . . to reflect on the peculiar status of autobiographical inscription,” autobiography exposes “the impossibility of autobiographical self-encounter,” a blockage that “ultimately spells death to the subject.”

Keats's tracks into the nineteenth century angle toward a \"modernism\" often defined at his expense—yet with latent identifications. In relations of past and present, figural identifications may register in nuances different from conscious allusion or the psychodramas of influence, ravages and resistance, hauntings and felt belatedness that issue in self-interested misreadings. \"Latent Keats\" and \"Latent Yeats\" play into an important, underreported current in both Keats studies and Yeats studies: a \"Long Romanticism\" in intimate verbal figures that trouble any \"Modernism\" of definitional difference from \"Romantic.\" Keats's writing harbors figures to which Yeats could respond, even correspond, vexed as he was by \"Keats\" as the name for the puerile outsider's dreamy sensuousness that a proper \"modernist\" needed to spurn. Such complication is one of the variable formations by which a \"modernist\" program manages to conjure the \"Romantic\" precedence it would supersede.

For the Romantic period, lightning was the spirit of the age. Yet it was so in perils no less than in promise, radiating its charges unpredictably. The first channel in this essay tracks the vagaries of domestic science that play a part in boyhoods in the wake of Benjamin Franklin's theater of electric experiment. I then turn to the Byronized Shakespearean stage and the Byronic interplays with which Mary Shelley works the lightning bond of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. I conclude with Percy Bysshe Shelley's devoted idealism in the climate of Byronic theatrics. All these scenes contend with lightning's contradictory shocks and subtly modal powers of destruction and restoration, its agency for dazzling illumination and murkier critical reflections.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture; the relation of his poetry to the visual arts; the critical traditions and theoretical contexts within which Keats's life and achievements have been assessed. These specially commissioned essays examine Keats's specific poetic endeavours, his striking way with language, and his lively letters as well as his engagement with contemporary cultures and literary traditions, his place in criticism, from his day to ours, including the challenge he poses to gender criticism. The contributions are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a descriptive list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source-reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.