Abstract
This co-written chapter draws on its authors’ individual research as well as their collaboration on the Creative Communities, 1750–1830 research network. This time period has traditionally been associated with a psychological and individualised paradigm of the relationship between creativity and culture, and therefore offers a particularly rich terrain for thinking about the relationship in much more communal and contextual ways. We discuss some of the key findings to emerge from the network: most importantly, the value of a critical focus on creativity as embodied in process and interaction rather than individual product. This does not mean that the literary text itself is neglected in our case studies, but rather that we are concerned with how texts encode their own productive processes. Thus, John Whale shows how the account of Michelangelo in Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici reflects on the communicative properties of genius to suggest a parallel between Renaissance France and Romantic-period Liverpool; Cassandra Ulph examines how Piozzi’s Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson simultaneously acknowledges and undercuts its subject’s tendency to monologue; and David Higgins discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein draws on her Alpine collaboration with Percy Bysshe Shelley while self-consciously offering an alternative to the anthropocentric sublimity of his work.
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Notes
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“How bold the Streatham Muse has grown/to Flash when all her sparks are flown/Will nothing then abash her?” (Piozzi 1951, i. 375).
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Higgins, D., Ulph, C., Whale, J. (2016). A Literary Studies Perspective: Creative Communities, 1750–1830. In: Glăveanu, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_33
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