Art et Littérature

Coleridge was writing at a time when the science of man was taken up by a variety of emerging disciplines such as anthropology, chemistry, ethics, psychology, sociology … Coleridge kept pace with the progress of these sciences, and these fuelled his thinking about natural affections and natural sociability.

Stefan Zanović (1751-1786), a native of Budua (Venetian Albania), is most often remembered as an eighteenth-century impostor and adventurer who was at the centre of many a scandal. However, Zanović was also a prolific writer in several languages.

William Blake was never the eccentric loner or outsider that his early biographers made him out to be. Blake had visions but wasn’t mad. He was a Londoner and lived in a thriving metropolis. He went to a drawing school, was apprenticed to an engraver and studied at the Royal Academy.

William Gilpin’s name is commonly associated with the notion of the picturesque. If his search for picturesque beauty was central to most of his life, it was more a solitary activity than a collective one. Gilpin’s experience of sociability was first and foremost epistolary and literary. However, the headmaster tried to prepare his pupils for a sociable life and imagined a sociable life after death.

The literary career of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) spans nearly sixty years, charting not only his evolution from disaffected radical to Victorian sage, but also the events and changes that shaped his generation, and ultimately the British nation. At once a poet of the Lake District and, from 1843 onwards, the Poet Laureate, Wordsworth explored the concept of sociability on both local and national levels.