Chapter Seventeen provides an ambitious synthesis of many of the concepts and authors addressed earlier in the volume in order to argue for two intertwining genealogies of modern fiction: on the one hand, the historical and social novel, and on the other, the Gothic, fantastic tales, and other non-realist literary forms. All these genres and forms encode questions of uneven development and often also express a sense of historical and epistemological disorientation. The chapter opens with examples of crossovers between fiction and other artforms to show the rich variety of forms and their influence on European culture. It then looks at cross-border influences and on individual nations’ different material conditions. Romanticism inherited and transformed a series of existing forms and themes, including travel literature, the epistolary novel, the Gothic, and the picaresque, into new forms, including the Bildungsroman, the fragment, the tale, and novella. These reflect an intense self-consciousness regarding historical time and place, even when they appear most ahistorical.

In 1792, the Belfast Harpers’ Society, an association dedicated to the preservation of traditional harp music, held a three-day festival. One Welsh harper and ten Irish harpers (six of them blind) competed against one another in playing the most beautiful parts of the repertoires (which were simultaneously transcribed by nineteen-year-old Edward Bunting, later to edit an influential, multi-volume anthology of Irish traditional music). Festival organizer Henry Joy McCracken had also helped found the United Irishmen Society the year before – and the Harp Festival was timed to overlap in Belfast with a major political convention that drew 6,000 Irish Volunteers and United Irishmen. Framing the harpers’ performances were debates on Catholic Emancipation, processions, toasts to the Rights of Man and the fall of the Bastille.

Wolfe Tone attended some of the harp performances, but was not impressed: ‘July 11th. All go to the Harpers … poor enough; ten performers; seven execrable … No new musical discovery … July 13th. The Harpers again. Strum, strum and be hanged.’

Yet today the festival is remembered not only as an important ancestor of the modern folk festival, but as a crucial, if transient, conjuncture between cultural and political nationalism. In the festival's wake, indeed, the United Irishmen adopted the harp as their emblem, and the motto ‘It is New Strung and Shall be Heard’.

Musicians, scholars, radicals: some 200 years after the Belfast Festival, academics from across the Anglophone world, antiquaries and practicing musicians from various parts of Britain once again gathered in Belfast to hear both scholarly papers and musical performances. In the intervening centuries, both English and history had become established academic disciplines – and now the academics outnumbered the performers many times over.

The world in images

When adults look back on their lives, Virginia Woolf argues in The Waves (1931), they 'turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picturebook'. Memories of childhood may become indelibly linked to early memories - visual, tactile, spatial - of reading picture books, whose 'picture worlds' may permanently shape readers' worldview. Since the Enlightenment, illustrated books have aimed to teach children how to read, apprehend and make sense of the world. This chapter describes how an emerging picture-book tradition developed particular visual conventions, working both to initiate children into this tradition and to push them into autonomous seeing.

Precisely because of its ambitions to represent the world itself, the picture book frequently understands itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk (a work integrating multiple art forms and appealing to multiple senses), and hence reflecting more general trends in visual, literary and intellectual culture. Unlike other forms of children's literature, the picture book makes meaning largely through its visual format, the way its images relate to one another, to the verbal text, and to the space on (and physical layout of) the page. This chapter, accordingly, traces the history of several influential and enduring picture-book formats.

This Companion offers an introduction to British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s. Across Europe, these seventy years encompass a large number of artistic works conceived in Romantic styles: symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven, picturesque landscape gardens, paintings by Eugène Delacroix, the visionary domestic architecture of Sir John Soane, and the Gothic novel. Yet many novels and tales of these decades are not identifiably Romantic in style or sensibility. On the whole, the era may be characterized less by a unifying artistic sensibility than it is by a spirit of experimentation, and an overall political situation, a civic unrest traceable throughout Europe and North America.

The period was turbulent. The Russians, under Catherine the Great, fought the Ottoman empire (1768-74), while waging a less direct battle against their allies, the Bourbons of France, and fomenting political unrest on a European scale. One country affected was Greece, where Catherine's agents helped start a revolution against Turkish rule; the conflict lasted decades, becoming celebrated for its horrors and heroism. Catherine's domestic troubles included the peasants' revolt led by Pugachev (a Cossack soldier and pretender to the Russian throne, executed in 1775). Meanwhile, as historian Franco Venturi observes, rebellions and insurrections of many different kinds broke out all over Europe, especially “in unexpected and peripheral places.“ Among the countries affected were Corsica, Montenegro, Bohemia, Geneva, Denmark, and Sweden, each in turn seeming to provide another view of a confusing new world in revolt against old forms of social order. The culminating event of these decades of crisis was, of course, the French Revolution (beginning in 1789), with the long, bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, but the French upheaval was not an isolated event; almost everywhere in Europe, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a major realignment seemed to be under way.

No sooner had George Crabbe learned to read than he “devoured without restraint whatever came into his hands, but especially works of fiction - those little stories and ballads about ghosts, witches, and fairies, which were then almost exclusively the literature of youth, and which, whatever else might be thought of them, served, no doubt, to strike out the first sparks of imagination in the mind of many a youthful poet.” The child Samuel Taylor Coleridge became so haunted by chapbook stories that his father burned his chapbooks. John Clare's childhood “stock of learning” was all “gleaned from the Sixpenny Romances of 'Cinderella', 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Jack and the Bean Stalk' . . . etc and great was the pleasure, pain, or supprise [sic] increased by allowing them authenticity, for I firmly believed every page I read and considerd I possesd [sic] in these the chief learning and literature of the country.” Clare spent all his money on such chapbooks. And since “it is common in villages to pass judgment on a lover of books as a sure indication of laziness,” he was forced to “hide in woods and dingles of thorns in the fields on Sunday” to read them.

Around 1800, London schoolboys at Christ's Hospital would offer to exchange the matron's library book, speed-read it on the way back to school, then recount it to each other in bed at night. Such stories and their miscellaneous chapbook reading seemed to them far more interesting than the Greek and Roman classics they spent their schooldays translating. A generation earlier, precocious children just as happily immersed themselves in classical works of drama, poetry, and historiography.