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Welcome to RPPAalpha


Welcome to the
Romantic Period Poetry Archive
Alexander Huber, Editor.

The Romantic Period Poetry Archive—or RPPA [Listen] for short—is a new, open access digital platform for global Romantic-period poetry — start your journey (almost) anywhere in the world! To fully participate in RPPA, i.e. to be able to create and attach contexts to texts, you need to be signed in.

RPPA is a rapidly prototyped and openly developed DH project, currently in public alpha. It will run from late 2020 to 2025, when it will have reached beta stage.

The Romantic-period world

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About RPPAalpha

To do full justice to Romanticism as a periodic category [...], one must de facto be a comparatist [...] —Ben Hutchinson1

Introduction

The Romantic Period Poetry Archive, or RPPA [Listen] for short, is a new open access digital platform of global Romantic-period poetry.2 It comprises a full-text poetry database and an open scholarship platform. RPPA embraces both traditional modes of scholarly research and output, such as the creation of scholarly editions, and digital modes of research and publication, such as computationally-augmented analysis, visualizations, network analysis, knowledge modelling, and more.

Approach

Comparative in nature, RPPA conceptualizes Romanticism as a global, deeply interconnected phenomenon. It embraces a Romantic Weltliteratur by bringing well- and lesser-known poets, their poems and contexts from all parts of the world into conversation, and thus encourages the telling of bigger stories. This “zooming out” not only brings texts, authors, languages, and cultures into conversation, but also highlights the (frequently non-linear) modes of transmission, circulation, and reception of literature (understood here in global terms as the expressions of a culture in a variety of forms). These matters will be considered alongside the conversations the texts enter into with each other, directly, or much more frequently, indirectly.

Scope

RPPA participates in movements that aim to address issues of scale in academic Romanticism by expanding the Romantic literary canon. Unrestrained by the limitations of traditional print publications, RPPA comprises various literary and non-literary genres of Romanticism from all nations throughout the long Romantic century.3 As a networked effort, RPPA links the literary practices, interrelations, and contexts of Romantic-period poetry. It connects these nodes reflexively as well as to various internal and external contexts.

Features

  • RPPA will assemble an extensive and open-ended archive of full-text Romantic-period poems (both original and in translation) and their contexts;
  • RPPA is transdisciplinary and intermedial, transcending literature, and embracing wider cultural production;
  • RPPA considers Romanticism in global, transnational contexts and foregrounds its multi-lingualism and -culturalism;
  • RPPA adopts a positive conceptualization of translation as the “closest” form of reading, one that many Romantics considered a vital part of their literary labours;
  • RPPA facilitates and supports comparison as a method by providing tools that situate Romantic-period poetry in its international and interdisciplinary contexts;
  • RPPA fosters collaboration and participation to turn obstacles to the study of global Romantic-period poetry (such as “distant” reading and, unavoidably, limited contextual knowledge) into opportunities for learning;
  • RPPA encourages new research into global Romantic-period poetry and showcases ways to integrate RPPA into the curriculum;
  • RPPA incorporates digital humanities approaches as a form of comparative literary study.

Timeline

RPPA is a 5-year, independently-funded research project. It will run from late 2020-2025. As with other projects conceived as long-term archival endeavours, all research outputs of the project will be preserved and made accessible indefinitely. RPPA is designed to be a networked effort: expressions of interest to connect with and participate in the project are welcome at any time. As of late 2021, RPPA has adopted rapid prototyping and open development methodologies. The project phase remains unchanged and will end in 2025, when the project will have reached beta stage. Regular updates about work packages, milestones, and the overall progress of the project will be posted on this website.

Outcome

The expected outcome of this project is a fuller understanding, appreciation, and engagement with the poetry of the global Romantic period. As a project, RPPA prioritizes the idea of “wholeness” of an archival approach over analytical accounts of established narratives. Wholeness not in the sense of one grand or better narrative or history, but rather in acknowledging, collecting, and aggregating many individual stories in one bigger space. A space for the exploration of new contexts and the construction of new global texts4 that cast a fresh light on the seemingly familiar. This project provides that space.

1 Hutchinson, Ben. Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2018. 22.
2 The term "global" is used here in the sense of Felicity A. Nussbaum's concept of "critical global studies" first introduced in her edited collection The Global Eighteenth Century, Baltimore and London: JHUP, 2003, 1. This research focuses on Romanticism as a period in international literary history, i.e. a global artistic phenomenon.
3 The "Romantic century" was first proposed for the study of British Romanticism by William Galperin and Susan Wolfson in their NASSR 1996 conference paper "'Romanticism' in Crisis: The Romantic Century". For the global context of this project, the qualifier long has been added.
4 The construct of a source text with all of its contexts was termed "global text" by Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann in her book Kontextualität, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2017, 242.

Help

The map

The historical map used in this visualization is John Arrowsmith's The World, on Mercators Projection (London: J. Arrowsmith, 1844). While the original map centres on the Pacific region, it is Western/Northern-centric in other ways, not least with regard to its place of manufacture and its Mercartor projection. For georeferencing purposes the map has been aligned with the Web mercator projection, the de facto standard for maps on the web.

Poets are shown at their place of birth, unless it is unknown or the poet is generally associated with a country other than their birth country, in which case they are shown at the country's geographical centre. Images of the poets have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Mapping global Romantic-period poetry

While little more than a visual access point at the moment, our aim is to use maps and mapping as an analytical tool that facilitates multi-perspectival approaches, mitigates ambiguity and uncertainty, helps to consider and appreciate the evolution of national literatures and literary spaces alongside the world literary space portrayed on the world canvas, and benefits from the participatory nature of RPPA to arrive at more useful representations.

Over time, as the networks of contextuality on the world canvas become more apparent, we envision the emergence of dynamic maps at a higher levels of detail. We expect these to reveal more contexts and the inner- as well as extra-literary structures that underpin and facilitate the construction of global texts and will allow for a more detailed representation and analysis of their components and evolution.

As we map out, literally and figuratively spoken, the poetry of the global Romantic period, we address not only its temporal challenges, but also embrace the geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the various stages of a global artistic phenomenon. We hope that by virtue of the project's historical focus on the Romantic period, its comparative focus on contextuality and the building of global texts, and its collaborative and participatory nature, the map can be useful as an emerging historical canvas for the poetry of the global Romantic period.

Known issues

Despite every effort to include the most relevant figures of the Romantic period, a disclaimer needs to be issued regarding the inclusion or omission of poets. While "Romantic" itself is a notoriously "elastic" label (Michael Ferber's term) that includes "pre"-, "early"-, "proto"-, "high"-, "late"-, and "post"-Romantic incarnations, the scholarship that underlies much of the selection process is largely Western/Northern-centric and may have been superseeded within national contexts. In such cases, the editor would be grateful for any corrections and suggestions for additions and improvements.

Also, regretfully, for navigational purposes, country names and borders used in the map navigation correspond to present-day denominations and historical reality. We apologize for the resulting distortion and historical inaccuracy, and hope to improve this over time with the help of projects like OpenHistoricalMap as they evolve and mature.

Further reading

  • Casanova, Pascale. "Literature as a World". New Left Review 31 (Jan/Feb 2005): 71-90.
  • D'haen, Theo. "Mapping World Literature". The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D'haen, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2011. 413-422.
  • Hewitt, Rachel. "Mapping and Romanticism". The Wordsworth Circle 42(2) (Spring 2011): 157-165.
  • Presner, Todd and David Shepard. "Mapping the Geospatial Turn". A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 199-212.
  • Tanoukhi, Nirvana. "The Scale of World Literature". New Literary History 39(3) (Summer 2008): 599-617.

News/Updates

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Contact

Get in touch

This is an open invitation to academics, research projects, digital archives and repositories, and anyone with an interest in the literature of the Romantic period in any discipline to collaborate on RPPA. The project looks forward to welcoming partners at any stage to discuss collaboration or other forms of participation. Please do not hesitate to reach out:

Romantic Period Poetry Archive (RPPA)
Alexander Huber, Editor

  • E-mail: info@romanticperiodpoetry.org
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  • GitHub: https://github.com/alhuber1502/RPPA
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© 2020 Romantic Period Poetry Archive (RPPA)  ·  RPPA is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0  ·  Website by [Huber Digital]

v0.3.20 (2023-03-31T23:48:47Z)