Writing Place

Romantic Localities explores the ways in which Romantic-period writers of varying nationalities responded to its languages, landscapes (geographical and metaphorical), and literatures. It addresses the ways in which geographies affected British and European Romantic writers ‘at home’: the South Downs, the Lakes, the Scottish Highlands, the Swiss and Italian Alps, Venice, Rome and Greece; but also Europe's Others: the Orient, the South Seas. The current interest in the ‘transnational’ has focused new attention on the ways in which writers explore region and place in their work. More than simply providing a setting (whether cosily domestic and known, or exotically foreign and unknown), locality embeds within literary texts an exploration of identity and identities; it challenges readers with unexpected contrasts between ‘home’ and ‘away’; it allows authors to formulate a sense of self and subjectivity that both rests on and expands definitions of the known. Europeans were confronted, in the eighteenth century, with an idea of the global that expanded cultural understandings of the constitution of the civilized and the savage, and in the literature of the late eighteenth century poets and novelists create what might be called an aesthetics of exploration as they use locale to investigate ideas of self, other, home, the comprehensible, the incommensurable.

The Romantic Period has long been associated with a special concentration on locale, with poets like Wordsworth and novelists like Scott seemingly singlehandedly recreating British locations as locales: places of interest and importance as places, and subsequently significant for their associations with their champions.