Home » Items tagged with 'eighteenth century'

Items tagged with 'eighteenth century'

Review: Richard de Ritter, Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820 (rev.)

Article: Fugitive Print

The article examines the print history of Robert Southey and S. T. Coleridge’s co-written but anonymously published ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ (1799). Over more than three decades, the ballad was transcribed, reprinted, and imitated. Most notably, an illustrated edition of 1830—erroneously ascribed to the classical scholar Richard Porson—enjoyed much popularity in the market for print, allegedly selling fifteen-thousand copies. The satirical poem aims its barbs at lucrative but immoral professions (lawyers, apothecaries, and booksellers), but government policies on prisons and support for war with France are also criticised. The article aims to discuss the poetical and political reasons why the two poets were reluctant to acknowledge the authorship of the satire. Examining the ballad’s various reproductions provides an illuminating case study of how nineteenth-century print culture could exploit popular texts that were placed in the public domain. The discussion will be divided into three sections. The first section will examine the poem’s genesis and unpack its most significant allusions in the context of contemporary print satire. The second section will document the reproduction trajectory of a Romantic-period poem that was dispossessed for most of its popular lifespan. The final section will critically examine how entrepreneurs in the book market cashed in on the popularity of the illustrated version (1830) by publishing several derivative compositions in hasty succession. Continue reading

Review: Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (rev.)

Begin at the beginning, with the first line of the ‘Introduction’ to Devin Griffiths’s The Age of Analogy: Literature between the Darwins: ‘In the summer of 1857, Charles Darwin unlocked the clasp of a new … Continue reading

Article: ‘The first impression, you, yourself, will buy’

In the wake of a personal scandal that Horace Walpole dubbed ‘The Gunninghiad’, Susannah Gunning returned to literary writing after some years’ absence from the scene. The two works she published with William Lane’s Minerva Press in 1792, Anecdotes of the Delborough Family and Virginius and Virginia. A Poem, in Six Parts. From the Roman History, demonstrate both Gunning’s artistic range and Lane’s marketing genius. Together, Gunning and Lane capitalised on the Gunninghiad scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate Gunning’s reputation as a writer and fill the coffers of the press. This article re-examines Gunning’s undervalued literary career to argue that publishing with Lane afforded her opportunities to rewrite the scandal of which she’d been a part, experiment with literary genres she had yet to explore, and profit from what she lived and wrote. Continue reading

Article: Re-evaluating the Minerva Press

This collection of nine essays, several by well-seasoned scholars of Minerva or its novels, exemplifies how crucial collaboration is and will be for continued understanding of the popular novel in the Romantic literary marketplace. The essays in ‘The Minerva Press and the Literary Marketplace’ converse with each other in multiple and overlapping ways, and have been divided into three sections that illuminate exciting new inroads to scholarship on the Minerva Press. ‘Minerva Genres’ illustrates the generic diversity of Lane’s publications; this is followed by ‘Minerva Readers and Writers’, which nuances the customary profiling of Lane’s authors and his target audience; while ‘Reading Minerva with New Methods’ reassesses Minerva’s reading communities, both contemporary and more modern-day. Continue reading

Post: ‘Your sincere admirer’: the Shelleys’ letters as indicators of collaboration in 1821.

Anna has studied at the University of Liverpool (BA) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil). She is now a second year doctoral candidate in English Literature at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. Anna’s … Continue reading

Post: Bluebooks and Gothic Chapbooks [Part II]: Midnight Horrors

paLaura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She has … Continue reading

Post: Bluebooks and Gothic Chapbooks [Part I]

Laura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She … Continue reading

Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, Story 2: Les Portraits de famille

As noted in my previous blogs on Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, the first story read by the Byron-Shelley circle on that stormy night in June 1816, ‘L’Amour muet’, was not as influential and well-known as the … Continue reading

Post: Global Romanticism: Thoughts on the “Field”

by Manu Samriti Chander When I started graduate school in the early 2000s, I planned to focus on postcolonial literatures, especially poetry, which at the time was relatively under-examined. Part of the reason for this … Continue reading

Post: Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, Story 1: L’Amour muet

by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Happy New Year Everyone!  My introductory blog ‘last year’ – actually only a few weeks ago – provided a brief overview of Fantasmagoriana (1812) the text that inspired the famous ghost-storytelling contest at … Continue reading

Post: Review: Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain, British Library, 8 November 2013–11 March 2014

by Sarah Sharp, University of Edinburgh The tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession of 1714 has provided the stimulus for an exciting and highly visual exhibition at the British Library, which traces the changes in British … Continue reading

Post: More Gothic and Travel Writing: Touring my PhD Aboard a few of its Hobby Horses

by Mark Bennett In my previous blog I talked generally about my PhD and some of the developments that lead it to take its present form. In this blog I’d like to look at two … Continue reading

Post: Conference Report for 11th Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland (ECLRNI) Symposium

by Katie Garner On Saturday 7 December, members of the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland gathered at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, just north of Dublin city centre, for the network’s 11th annual symposium. … Continue reading

Post: Gothic and Travel Writing

Gothic and Travel Writing; or How a PhD Student makes the Journey from Victorianism to the Late Eighteenth Century by Mark Bennett Hello all. First up, I’d like to thank the team at Romantic Textualities … Continue reading

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