Megan Peiser (Choctaw Nation) is Assistant Professor of 18th-Century Literature at Oakland University, just north of Detroit, MI. She is currently completing her monograph, The Review Periodical and British Women Novelists, 1790–1820 with accompanying database, The Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820. Peiser and her collaborator, Emily Spunaugle, are the principal investigators on The Marguerite Hicks Project. Peiser’s research and teaching focus on women writers, periodicals, book history and bibliography, Indigenous sovereignty, and digital humanities. She is President of the Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts 1660–1830, and an executive board member for the Modern Language Association’s Bibliography and Scholarly Editing forum.
As the most infamous novel publisher of the Romantic period, William Lane’s Minerva Press garnered significant attention in the book review periodicals of the day. This article uses the Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820 and quantitative methodologies to track the ways that Lane, his press and the novels it published, were presented to England’s reading public while the press flourished. The Reviews critique the novels’ subject matter, originality, the material makeup of the printed books and gendered authorship. Taking up that data, this article provides a qualitative analysis of the long reaching implications of the rhetoric deployed by the Reviews in their scathing criticisms, and traces how it continues to pervade modern scholarship on the press today. Continue reading →
