Samantha Matthews – författare

'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.

What happens to poets' genius when they die? The peculiar affinity which was felt to exist between their physical and literary 'remains' - their bodies and books - is the subject of this original cultural study, which concentrates on poets and poetry from the Romantic to late Victorian period. Poetical Remains deals with issues such as the place of burial, the kind of monument deemed appropriate, the poet's 'last words' and last poems, the creation of memorial volumes, and the commercial boost given to a poet's reputation by 'celebrity death', focussing in each case on the powerful, complex, often unstated but ever-present connections between the poet's body and their poetic 'corpus'. As well as the works of the poets themselves, Matthews draws on contemporary biography and memoirs, family correspondence, newspaper reports, and tribute verse among other texts, and places the literature of poetic death in its social, material, and affective context: the conflict between the idealized 'country churchyard' and the secular urban cemetery, the ideal of private, familial burial as against the pressure for public ceremony, the recuperation of death-in-exile as an extension of national pride, transactions between spiritual and material, poetic and pragmatic, in a secularizing age.Some of the most poignant and darkly comic moments in nineteenth-century literary history arose around the deathbeds of poets and the events which followed their deaths. What happened to Shelley's heart, and to Thomas Hood's monument; the different fates which dictated that the first Poet Laureate appointed by Queen Victoria, Wordsworth, was buried in his family plot in Grasmere, while her second, Tennyson, was wrested from his family's grasp and interred in Westminster Abbey - these are some of the stories which Matthews tells, and which are bound up in a sustained and powerful argument about the way in which our culture deals with artists and their work on the boundary between life and death.