Nature, Politics, and the Arts

Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring

Hermione de Almeida, Editor

University of Delaware Press/Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

“Nature, Politics, and the Arts, honoring the late, great, luminous, and influential Carl Woodring (1919–2009), . . . is a collection of original essays . . ., including unpublished lecture notes and an extract from his unfinished memoir. The range of topics is breathtaking. These include portraiture, landscape art, caricature, the sublime in art and literature, museums and exhibitions, revolution, the Caribbean slave trade, transatlantic interchanges, political revolution and war, and the emergence of scientific trends, such as thermodynamics and chaos theory. Some of the essays offer striking historical reflections on the age through readings of art, literature, and music, while others focus on methodological, political, and philosophical concerns.

George Gilpin shows how American landscape artist and renowned founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, interpreted European and British traditions of the sublime in the spirit of his intellectual counterpart in England, William Blake, breaking the bounds of cultural and artistic convention and producing a distinctly revolutionary and American mode of representing wilderness. Cole, who emigrated from Lancashire in the north of England in his late teens, could serve as an ideal example of the significance of the kind of transatlantic regionalism that cannot be taken into account in the archipelagic paradigm. Cole was deeply influenced by Turner and Wordsworth and his complex and challenging treatment of landscape and history, as well as the figures of the North American Indian and frontiersman in the wilderness, arguably have much to contribute to . . . the study of the destabilizing of transatlanticism in the consolidation of American national identity.”

—Margaret Linley, European Romantic Review, July, 2017.

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Ten chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing influence on several generations of scholars, and their areas of interest, follows. A chapter from Woodring’s unpublished autobiography, on his childhood in small-town America, then concludes the volume with an ironic retrospection on intercultural origins.

Topics addressed among the chapters include portraiture and self-fashioning, landscape art, physiognomy and caricatures, radical print ephemera, illustrated picaresque verse, social and political satire, traditions of the sublime in art and literature, transatlantic influences and aesthetics, chaos theory and the laws of thermodynamics, the Caribbean slave trade, revolutionary history, Napoleonic wars, the politics of multicultural communities, gender and race, marginalia and textual revelations, Native America, historical interchanges in curating museum shows, and contemporary American sculpture and art. Cultural figures of the nineteenth century that are featured in the discussions include Henry Adams, Beethoven, Blake, Byron, Willa Cather, Thomas Cole, Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, George Cruikshank, Ugo Foscolo, Washington Irving, Keats, Willibrord Mähler, George Romney, Rowlandson, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Primary authors in the volume are John Clubbe, George H. Gilpin, Stephen E. Jones, Hermione de Almeida, Robert L. Patten, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Carol Kyros Walker, Morton D. Paley, Jonathan Gross, Martin Meisel, and Carl Woodring. Contributing authors are Nina Auerbach, G. Thomas Tanselle, William Theodore de Bary, Donald H. Reiman, Anne K. Mellor, Carl Dawson, Marsha Manns, Regina Hewitt, Robert M. Ryan, and William Carl Gilpin. Ben P. Robertson provides a select bibliography of Woodring’s publications.

Chapter essays, commentaries, and Carl Woodring’s unpublished writings function together in Nature, Politics, and the Arts: Essays on Romantic Culture for Carl Woodring—with a depth of original perspectives and a multi-voiced and intercultural coherence. The book as a whole testifies to Woodring’s living and intellectually potent legacy for future students of nineteenth-century transatlantic culture and twenty-first century scholarship on literature and art.