On the use and abuse of "Orality" for art : Reflections on Romantic and late twentieth-century poiesis

It is not an overstatement to say that, in the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries, almost every major British literary poet found him- or herself engaging with oral tradition, as well as with the figure of the oral poet, his work, his cultural position, and his method of composition. Oral tradition acquired new status not only as a legitimate fund of cultural authority but also a resource for the making and annotating of "original," literary poetry.Not

“Romantic Realism/Victorian Romance”: An Introduction to Four Provocations

Might we, Romanticists and Victorianists, be or become one people? This cluster of essays, by Ian Duncan, Mary Favret, Catherine Robson, and Herbert Tucker, addresses longstanding and emergent cruxes in our collective scholarship, including questions of periodization, mediality, trans/nationality, genre, and mode. “Romance” and “realism” provide two provoking terms for thought. An introduction, by Elaine Freedgood and N. Maureen McLane, lays out axes of categorization, questions for pedagogy and the profession as well as intellectual and disciplinary genealogies. Duncan notes the insufficiency of such terms as “long nineteenth century” and proposes Walter Scott as one figure who teaches us how to think period as well as realism and romance; Favret addresses the romantic lecture and its current resonance in the age of MOOCs; Robson explores the nature of Victorian reading, and directions for Victorianist readings; Tucker meditates on the status of desire and marriage plots—Romantic and Victorian “conjugalities.