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Fuseli’s Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton’s Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli’s project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other ‘classics’ in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformed into repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national ‘grand style’ to fit the needs of a consumer society. Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To ‘turn readers into spectators’ meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli’s Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses, let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli’s embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This book analyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.

This book examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and Protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and, in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing that are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries), the author offers a re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.

What was the relationship between woman and politics in seventeenth century England? Responding to this question, Conspiracy and Virtue argues that theoretical exclusion of women from the political sphere shaped their relation to it. Rather than producing silence, this exclusion generated rich, complex, and oblique political involvements which this study traces through the writings of both men and women. Pursuing this argument, Conspiracy and Virtue engages the main writings on women's relationship to the political sphere including debates on the public sphere and on contract theory. Writers and figures discussed include many authors who are not often studied together, such as Elizabeth Avery, Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Maragret Cavendish, Queen Christina of Sweden, Anne Halkett, Brilliana Harley, Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, Elizabeth Poole, Sara Wight, and Henry Jessey.

The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empi.

Drawing upon myriad literary and political texts, this book charts how some of the Stuart period’s major challenges to governance—the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one’s civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament—evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, the book investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the ways in which early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, the book examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with close readings of religious and political affairs that return our attention to how early Stuart writers understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how—or even if—one can freely think.

This book begins from the premise that when Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, published her first printed work in 1653, she ushered in a new, more openly assertive and generically diverse model of Englishwomen's authorship. Investigating the historical and literary conditions which enabled such a development, it argues for the vital role played by royalism in fostering the emergence of Cavendish along with that of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn, the two other female authors who most visibly achieved similarly prominent literary profiles around the time of the Restoration. The book offers a detailed account of these women's engagements with the different aspects of royalist culture salient to their literary production, each in their particular historical moment. New political sub-texts are revealed in their work and used to refine notions of their gender representations. In this way, both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.

The translation of the images of poetry from the ear to the eye, is an undertaking at all times regarded with general favour. Those delightful and instructive ideas, which long and laborious diligence alone can otherwise unfold to the solitary and the studious, are thus rendered the easy objects of intuitive attainment, amidst the chambers of gaiety and in the cheerful hours of converse and recreation.

Chapter 2 used Iser’s reader response to analyse the role and trans- formation of texts at exhibitions. That analysis is here pushed further as we move from the catalogue to the pictures. Much as gallery catalogues exemplify the ways in which texts construct their implied readers, so do literary galleries construct their implied spectators. This chapter sets the visual narrative explored by theorists alongside dictionary entries, developments in museum layouts as well as the visual spectacles of the day: magic lanterns, panoramas, and the Eidophusikon. In The Shows of London (1978), R. D. Altick offered a ground-breaking inventory of London’s spectacles. Eighteenth-century spectacles and viewing practices went across the barriers preserving high art and literature from what now falls in the precincts of popular culture. In order to reconstruct how language and painting turned readers into spectators in late eighteenth-century London, we need to explore the ways in which aesthetic experience was shaped by visual technologies as a series of integrated cultural practices. This chapter focuses on how reading shaped the experience of exhibitions and ends with an analysis of literary gallery narratives, culminating in a montage reading of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery.

IN one of his many forays into the archaeology of film, the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein tried to recover ‘the montage culture that so many have lost’. Where other film directors explored the coordination of music and action in opera or ballet, Eisenstein turned to literature and found a school of montage in Paradise Lost.1 In an essay on the Soviet historical film Milton’s battle scenes are singled out as a model which Eisenstein wished he had known when he shot Alexander Nevsky.

IN 1737, picture dealers were flooding the country with ‘Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona’s, and other dismal Dark Subjects’. Eight years later, after making this complaint under the name of ‘Britophil’, William Hogarth painted his self-portrait and chose to rest his bust, and therefore his fame, on volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift. Associating with the poets, Hogarth gave visual shape to what was a recurrent reply to Dubos and later Montesquieu and Winckelmann. While these foreigners claimed that art was alien to the British national character due to a climate hampering the imagination, British responses indicated in Shakespeare and Milton the counter- proof and promise of British genius.