This chapter examines cross-fertilization in the ‘transitional’ period (roughly 1818–37) between the Gothic novel, the French roman noir, and the German Schauer traditions, including the well-known influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the French conte fantastique and Hoffmann’s relation to George Sand and to Sir Walter Scott. It does so by tracing the European peregrinations of the Gothic trope of forbidden space across diverse national and literary borders, from Perrrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ to Tieck, Hoffmann, Radcliffe, Stevenson, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The chapter then focuses on George Sand’s novel Mauprat and its dialogue with Hoffmann and Scott.

A demonstration that Sir Walter Scott was Collins’s favourite novelist and an analysis of what Collins admired about him

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

Considerations of geography and Scottish Romanticism have tended to focus on the function of landscape and setting as vehicles for exploring national and regional identity. This tendency is apparent in many scholarly assessments of post-Enlightenment Scottish literature and culture, but it is especially evident in recent evaluations of the works of Sir Walter Scott. Collectively, these evaluations have enhanced our understanding of Scott’s influence on modern conceptions of Scottish selfhood. Far less attention, however, has been paid to Scott’s personal understanding of geography, and almost no one has considered the relevance of Scott’s writings to latter-day developments in geographical thought and practice. The present chapter takes up these neglected topics, and in doing so it undertakes to examine the relation of Scott’s early poetry and antiquarian research to the emergence of ‘deep mapping’ as a field of performance and inquiry.

This chapter seeks to locate George IV’s fleeting visit to Edinburgh in what cultural historian Peter de Bolla has described as the domain of the scopic. It does so by focusing on the visual culture of the visit as witnessed in the production of images – both official and unofficial – by various artists, including David Wilkie, John Wilson Ewbank and William Home Lizars. This chapter argues that a multiplicity of visual experiences was proffered by the King’s visit to Edinburgh. Not only in the production of traditional art historical media like paintings, engravings and sculpture, but also in the ways in which the city itself in terms of its body politic, its architectural embellishments (‘the Athens of the North’) and its topographical landscape were described as being displayed to the King in a sequence of staged tableaux. He, in turn, is described as being revealed to the gawping gaze of his Scottish subjects.