The British soldier was feared and respected throughout the world in the period 1750-1850, a time when his victories helped to expand the British Empire to its greatest extent. Strangely, though, his
As theatres expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers. Writers experi
Sexual Outcasts presents a wide range of texts selected to illustrate the diversity of responses to the concealed body and to the secret or forbidden sexual practices of 1750-1850. Each volume follows
This stunning collection of over 170 large-format colour illustrations includes paintings of ships at sea, in action, in convoy, and in siege; architectural drawings; battle diagrams; sea charts and s
This volume addresses how practices and concepts of performance contribute to the production and circulation of knowledge in German-speaking Europe between 1750 and 1850. Building on recent work in th
During the Romantic era, especially in Italy, performers known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici extemporised poetry in public in response to subjects requested by their audiences. This type of performance fascinated Grand Tourists from northern Europe, who reported on poetic improvisers in hundreds of travel accounts, journals, letters, and periodical articles. By uncovering historical data and interpreting literary texts, Professor Esterhammer identifies patterns in the evolving responses of English, German, French, and Russian writers to the experience of improvisation. She explores how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, and emotional expressiveness, and relates to evolving concepts of gender and nation. Esterhammer goes on to interpret the influence that the figure of the poetic improviser had in nineteenth-century English and European fiction. In this context, the improvvisatore casts new light on conflicts between poetic genius and
This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explo
