Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture

Ten essays, presented by Dick (English, U. of British Columbia, Canada) and Esterhammer (English, U. of Zurich, Switzerland), explore the culture of British romanticism in terms of intersections between language and performativity. The contributions are organized into two sections: "Public Speaking," which focuses on language and its interconnections to physical spaces, media, and institutions in which words have their effect, and "Body Language," where interpretations of material performance and bodily action occur within verbal and ideological context. Specific topics include the materiality of the lecture venues of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the performative mode of composition of the lectures; the elegiac style of William Wordsworth as a performative genre that promotes the authority of a subjective voice through the material power of writing and printing; performative aspects of parody in Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci and in contemporary blasphemy trials; the implications of material performance in the "theaters" of the stage, the House of Commons, the salon, and the sporting arena; the ways Romantic drama thematized action and performativity; cross-dressing and the performativity of gender in comic plays by women; and the role of body language in the construction of the foreign and the domestic in Madame de Stael's Corinne and Lord Byron's Don Juan. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)