On Thursday 29th Novemberr 2018 we had a talk by Prof. Angela Esterhammer. She was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside.
A warm welcome everyone to this, the last in the present sequence of talks to the Club, and I can think if nobody better equipped to fill the spot than our present speaker. Angela Esterhammer is Principal of Victoria College and Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto (positions incidentally in which she follows in the wake of the great Scott scholar Professor Jane Millgate). She works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performance, improvisation, and print culture. She is the author of Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (1994), The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000), and Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008). Professor Esterhammer is also the General Editor of The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, an international project to publish a 15-volume critical edition of Galt’s fiction and related non-fictional prose.
Tonight’s talk relates to her new book entitled Print and Performance in the 1820s: The Late-Romantic Information Age, which is forthcoming from Cambridge U.P. in 2019. This book examines interrelations among popular fiction, literary magazines, and innovative forms of theatre during the 1820s, a decade of rapid transformations in media, mobility, consumerism, and reading habits.
Specifically, the present talk will relate Saint Ronan’s Well and Redgauntlet to current events of the mid-1820s, especially the climate of speculation that dominated financial and literary markets.
