About this Volume
Opera and Romanticism
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, essays by Christina Fuhrmann, Diane Long Hoeveler, J. Jennifer Jones, Jessica K. Quillin, and Anne Williams.
Demonstrating the widescale influence of opera upon the cultural field of the Romantic period, the essays collected in "Opera and Romanticism" aim to redress the critical neglect to which this form has been previously subjected. A lush interchange between opera and both literature and drama is examined in the essays of Christina Fuhrmann, Diane Hoeveler, and Anne Williams. Further, in the essays of J. Jennifer Jones and Jessica Quillin, we see that Romantic opera did not leave behind its Italian roots, but rather remained complexly connected to its predecessor in ways that can be seen in some of the most canonical writers of the time. By reclaiming the suppressed history of opera in this period, Gillen D'Arcy Wood's volume illustrates that opera is what he calls "a vital flashpoint of aesthetic and political interests in the long Romantic age."
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About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Gillen D'Arcy Wood is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of "The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860" (Palgrave, 2001), and an historical novel, "Hosack's Folly" (Other Press, 2005). His current book project, on romanticism and music, includes published articles on Mozart and the Hunt Circle (Studies in Romanticism) and Wordsworth's operatic translations (ELH).
Christina Fuhrmann received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation titled "'Adapted and Arranged for the English Stage': Continental Operas Transformed for the London Theater, 1814-33." She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and in Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music and has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences. Her current work focuses on theater music and imported opera in early nineteenth-century London .
Diane Long Hoeveler is author of "Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within" (1990) and "Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes" (1998) and some 35 articles on a variety of literary topics. In addition, she has coauthored a critical study of Charlotte Bronte, and coedited the MLA volumes on "Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre" and "Approaches to teaching the gothic." With Larry Peer, she coedited "Comparative Romanticisms" and another forthcoming volume, "Romanticism and Its Other Discourses." She has also coedited a volume of essays, "Women of Color," and another edited collection of essays, "Written on the Bodily Text: Women Writers Across Cultures." With Jeffrey Cass she coedited "Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogic Practices" and with Janet Boles, she coauthored the "Historical Dictionary of Feminism." More recently, she has edited the Houghton Mifflin volume of "Wuthering Heights." She is currently writing a book on gothic operas.
J. Jennifer Jones has been a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In the Fall of 2005 she will begin teaching in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. She is currently writing a book entitled Virtual Romanticism: Sublime Aesthetics and the Materiality of Experience.
Jessica K. Quillin is Communications Coordinator for Washington National Opera, where she is editor of all print and electronic publications. Ms. Quillin is in the final stages of completing a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge (UK). Her dissertation is entitled "Lyrical Harmony: Studies in Percy Bysshe Shelley and Music." Recent publications include an article on Shelley's late love lyrics for "The Keats-Shelley Journal" (forthcoming).
Anne Williams has published books on the lyric and the Gothic and numerous essays about Romantic literature. She is at work on a book-length manuscript called "'Monstrous Pleasures': Gothic Operas from Horrace Walpole to Horror Movies."
