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Tracing the North in British Literature of the 1820s: Translation, Appropriation, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Ancestress

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Abstract

Diego Saglia’s essay aims to delineate a methodological framework within which to address Romantic-period conceptions of ‘the North’ and ‘northernness’ in light of appropriation and cultural translation. Saglia concentrates on the 1820s as a particularly fertile moment of cross- and transcultural exchanges, and on periodicals as major sites for the consolidation of a discourse and lexicon of the north. Extending the geographical range of his European Literatures in Britain, Saglia’s essay shows how ‘the North’ constituted a significant (but far from stable or predictable) locus of cultural translation within the wider process of the expansion of Britain’s geo-cultural imagination during the Romantic period.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Leslie A. Marchand, ed. Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–94), VII: 42–3.

  2. 2.

    On Byron’s mobilité, see Jerome McGann, ‘Byron, Mobility, and the Poetics of Historical Ventriloquism’, in Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–52. See also Jonathan Gross, ‘From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish Identity in Italy’, in Byron and Italy, ed. Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 61–76.

  3. 3.

    Lord Byron’s Letters and Journals, VII: 76.

  4. 4.

    Will Bowers, The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815-1823 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), xii, xiv. Daryl S. Ogden stresses the derisory undertone in Byron’s apostrophe in ‘Byron, Italy and the Poetics of Liberal Imperialism’, in Keats-Shelley Journal 49 (2000): 114–37.

  5. 5.

    Madame de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. Simone Balayé, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), I: 41, 43, 45.

  6. 6.

    Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 165.

  7. 7.

    Staël, De l’Allemagne, I: 48.

  8. 8.

    Hendriette Kliemann-Geisinger, ‘Mapping the North—Spatial Dimensions and Geographical Conceptions of Northern Europe’, in Northbound: Travels, Encounters, and Constructions 1700-1830, ed. Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), 69.

  9. 9.

    Sylvain Briens, ‘Boréalisme: Le Nord comme espace discursif’, in Etudes Germaniques 71 (2016): 182; Daniel Chartier, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’imaginaire du Nord?’, in Etudes Germaniques 71 (2018): 191.

  10. 10.

    Briens, ‘Boréalisme’, 182.

  11. 11.

    Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 58.

  12. 12.

    James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 58.

  13. 13.

    Barthes writes: ‘La propriété est une valeur négative … mais l’appropriation, elle, passe du côté des valeurs chéries … En somme, propriété et appropriation suivent le paradigme de la Bonne et la Mauvaise Valeur, celui du produit et de la production, de la structure et de la structuration.’ [Property is a negative value … but appropriation shifts to the side of cherished values … In short, property and appropriation follow the paradigm of Good and Bad Value, that of product and production, structure and structuring.] Roland Barthes, Le Lexique de l’auteur: séminaire à l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, suivi de Fragments inédits du Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, avant-propos d’Eric Marty, présentation et édition d’Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris: Seuil, 2010), 266.

  14. 14.

    Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, introd. Umbero Eco (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), 125.

  15. 15.

    On the 1820s and cross-cultural exchanges in British literary culture, see Diego Saglia, European Literatures in Britain, 1815-1832: Romantic Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

  16. 16.

    David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 154; Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 113–38.

  17. 17.

    Butler, Romantics, 121.

  18. 18.

    James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 6, 5, 7. See also Jeffrey N. Cox, Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  19. 19.

    Saree Makdisi, ‘Introduction: Worldly Romanticism’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (2011): 429–32.

  20. 20.

    On the popularity of ancient Scandinavian themes, see Robert W. Rix, ‘Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature 1760–1830: Introduction’, in Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830, ed. Robert W. Rix (Vol. 51), University Press of Maryland, Romantic Circles Praxis Series http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/norse/.

  21. 21.

    Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 173–4.

  22. 22.

    See Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Saglia, European Literatures, 1–2, 48–54, 93–8.

  23. 23.

    Peter France, ‘Looking Abroad: Two Edinburgh Journals in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 46 (2009): 3.

  24. 24.

    See Alan Lang Strout, ‘Writers on German Literature in Blackwood’s Magazine. With a Footnote on Thomas Carlyle’, in The Library 9 (1954): 37–8.

  25. 25.

    See ‘Danish Literature &c’, Literary Gazette 2 (3 January 1818): 8; the Monthly Magazine series of essays on ‘Danish Traditions and Superstitions’ (from August 1824 to November 1825); the three essays on ‘Danish Popular Stories’ published in The Mirror of Literature from 1 to 15 January 1825; and ‘Danish Literature’, in Literary Gazette 432 (30 April 1825): 282–3.

  26. 26.

    ‘On German Criticism’, New Monthly Magazine 1 (April 1821): 395–99.

  27. 27.

    See Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: University Press, 2010), 13–6; Saglia, European Literatures, 65–7.

  28. 28.

    Mrs Lawrence, The Last Autumn at a Favourite Residence, with Other Poems and Recollections of Mrs Hemans (Liverpool: G. and J. Robinson; London: Murray, 1836), 238.

  29. 29.

    In addition, Hemans mentions the Minnesingers in the poem and its notes. On the Freischütz phenomenon, see Michael Burden, ‘The Staging and Writing of Georgian Romantic Opera’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832, eds. Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 434–9. On knowledge of the Minnesingers in 1820s Britain, see Saglia, European Literatures, 93–8.

  30. 30.

    See Rix, ‘Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature 1760–1830: Introduction’.

  31. 31.

    ‘Review of Axel og Valborg, Veringerne i Miklagord, and Samlade Digte’, in Foreign Review 2 (September 1828): 343–4, citation on 343.

  32. 32.

    ‘Review of Axel og Valborg’, 343–4.

  33. 33.

    L.E.L., The Venetian Bracelet, The Lost Pleiad, A History of The Lyre, and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Brown, and Green, 1829), 171–2.

  34. 34.

    ‘Horæ Germanicæ. No. XIV. Müllner’s “Albaneserin”’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 12 (August 1822): 218–25, citation on 218.

  35. 35.

    Literary Chronicle 172 (31 August 1822): 552–3.

  36. 36.

    Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 18 (September 1825): 286–97, citation on 291.

  37. 37.

    ‘Horæ Germanicæ. No. XXI. Sappho; by Franz Grillparzer’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (April 1826): 404–15, citation on 404.

  38. 38.

    ‘Ottmar, A Tale’, in New Monthly Magazine 13 (April 1820): 459–64. The point under attack—taken verbatim from Blackwood’s ‘Horæ Germanicæ’ essay on Ahnfrau (December 1819)—is in ‘On Ghosts in Tragedies’, in New Monthly Magazine 13 (March 1820): 282–3, citation on 282.

  39. 39.

    ‘Ottmar’, 459.

  40. 40.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, eds. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008), 177.

  41. 41.

    The Venetian Bracelet, 146, 148 (Further references, by page number, appear in brackets after the text).

  42. 42.

    See Lucasta Miller, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’ (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), 27–8.

  43. 43.

    See Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28, 98–106; and Michael Gamer, ‘“And the Explosion Immediately Takes Place”: Romantic Tragedy and the End(s) of Melodrama’, in Romantic Dialectics: Culture, Gender, Theater, eds. Serena Baiesi and Stuart Curran (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018), 185–201.

  44. 44.

    Miller, L.E.L., 140.

  45. 45.

    Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 212.

  46. 46.

    Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works (1851) (Hildesheim, New York: Georg Olms, 1976), 236 (Further references, by page number, appear in brackets after the text).

  47. 47.

    [William Preston,] ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the late German Writers, whose Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency of their Productions’, Edinburgh Magazine 20 (November 1802): 353–61, citation on 353. On Preston’s ‘Reflections’, see Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences, 33–42.

  48. 48.

    Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 212.

  49. 49.

    Lieven D’hulst, ‘Cultural Translation’, in Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, eds. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Daniel Simeoni (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), 222, 225. See also my essay ‘Modes of Transit: Cultural Translation, Appropriation, and Intercultural Transfers’ in Bridging Cultures: Intercultural Mediation in Literature, Linguistics and the Arts, eds. Ciara Hogan, Nadine Rentel and Stephanie Schwerter (Stuttgart: idem Verlag, 2012), 93–112.

  50. 50.

    Nanora Sweet, ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist and Materialist Criticism, eds. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 171, 173.

  51. 51.

    Bowers, Italian Idea, 3.

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  1. University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Diego Saglia

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  1. Centre for Languages & Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Cian Duffy

  2. English, Germanic & Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert W. Rix

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Saglia, D. (2022). Tracing the North in British Literature of the 1820s: Translation, Appropriation, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Ancestress. In: Duffy, C., Rix, R.W. (eds) Nordic Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99127-2_5

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