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Items tagged with 'novels'

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829 & 1830–1836: Update 8 (April 2000–June 2023)

This report, like its predecessors, relates primarily to the 2nd vol. of The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles (2000) and the online The English Novel 1830–1836. The procedure followed derives generally from the activities of the research team who helped produce British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception, first made publicly available in 2004, though only materials found in Updates 1–4 are incorporated in that database. The present report comes twenty-three years since the release in March 2000 of the printed Bibliography, and some nineteen years after the original launch of British Fiction 1800–1829 database. Its primary aim is to consolidate all the preceding seven Updates into one final composite statement, while at the same time, in assembling these materials, reference has been made to a number of additional sources, incorporating further new information. Continue reading

Article: ‘Start not, gentle reader!’

This article is the first to focus upon Helen Monteagle (1818), a novel written by Alicia LeFanu and the second of six works of fiction she is known to have published between 1816 and 1826. In part an act of recovery, the article explores Helen Monteagle’s significance to understandings of the development of prose fiction in the romantic period, and situates the novel in relation to the traditions and innovations of satirical writing in particular. Tracing the various acts of conformity and resistance displayed by its female protagonists, the article identifies in the novel a corresponding interest in the terms of women’s professional practice as performers and authors in a year which also saw publication of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Austen’s Northanger Abbey. LeFanu’s novel, the article argues, reflects upon the author/creator and her audience, and articulates a commentary upon the adequacy of conventional narrative frameworks in the context of market competition and anxieties about the integrity of contemporary literary culture. The novel’s innovative and allusive approach to plot and character are examined in relation to LeFanu’s third novel of 1819, entitled Leolin Abbey. In its discussion of the various personal, professional and commercial imperatives which informed LeFanu’s career as a writer, the article reflects upon the broader context of women’s writing in this period and aims to enhance an appreciation of its diversity. Continue reading

Article: Florence and the Machine

While the critical establishment baulked at the rapid expansion of the literary marketplace in the early nineteenth century, Lady Morgan’s Florence Macarthy boldly declared its allegiance to the precariously feminised domain of popular romance. Embracing its own synthetic and syncretic modernity, Morgan’s seventh novel revels in the spectacle, sensation and simulation so vociferously denounced by reviewers of her earlier works. Moreover, in its self-reflexive scrutiny of the material processes of Romantic literary production, Morgan’s fiction interrogates its own position within an increasingly commercialised and mechanised publishing industry. In asserting the centrality of such commercial and mechanical modernity to Morgan’s aesthetic, this article departs from previous scholarly discussions of her oeuvre. It argues that Florence Macarthy’s engagement with Irish politics is not anchored in antiquarian retrospection but instead emerges out of an effervescent literary marketplace in direct competition with new arenas of spectacular entertainment. Thus, rather than promote a supposedly atavistic and anachronistic cultural nationalism, the surface narrative’s flirtation with the romance of Irish antiquity is continually disrupted by an underlying acknowledgement of the competing literary, political and historical narratives at play within the national tale. Synchronising and synthesising these competing discourses for the popular reader, Florence Macarthy registers the hybridity of its own romance as a distinctly modern yet sophisticated form of mechanical reproduction that cannot be dismissed as the mere automatism of an antiquarian reflex. Continue reading

Article: Reading Frankenstein in 1818

1818, the year of Frankenstein’s first publication, is a frequently overlooked context for Mary Shelley’s novel, overshadowed as it is both by Frankenstein’s afterlives and by the moment of its first conception in Switzerland, 1816, the ‘Year Without a Summer’. What might it mean for a novel that has transcended literary history and achieved mythic status to be re-situated as one of the novels of 1818? The article considers recent topics of critical interest, including ecocritical readings of the novel in the shadow of Mount Tambora and the topicality of the frame narrative in relation to histories of arctic exploration, before focusing on the politics of Frankenstein. Many critics have read the novel as a belated allegory of the French Revolution, which leads inexorably towards an interpretation of Frankenstein as an anti-revolutionary fiction. For the readers of 1818, however, it is the unfolding events of post-Waterloo Britain, not the French Revolution, that constitutes the primary political context, producing a more open-ended and radical text. The final section of the article reads the novel in dialogue with William Hazlitt’s essay, ‘What Is the People?’, showing how both texts engage with questions agitated by the popular reform movement, including responses to tyranny and the sovereignty of the people. Continue reading

Article: Romantic Novels 1817 and 1818

This special issue comes out of two ‘Romantic Novels’ seminar series, held in 2017 and 2018, inspired by the Romantic Bicentenary and hosted by the University of Greenwich, UK. Each of the twelve seminars focused on a novel published in either 1817 or 1818, which was introduced by an expert and then discussed by the group at large. Reading the twelve novels of 1817 and 1818, in 2017 and 2018, illuminated not only the range of fiction available in the late Romantic period, but also the dialgoues that emerged between these texts. Since many were composed concurrently, this is not so much a matter of direct influence as an effect of the zeitgeist. The five essays collected here represent some of what the editors came to see as the most pressing and persistent topics articulated across the fiction read, and what was discussed in the seminars. Continue reading

Post: The Minerva Press: Challenging its reception as a purveyor of ‘trash’ novels of the ‘common run’

In anticipation of our forthcoming special issue on ‘The Minerva Press and the Literary Marketplace’, this post is the first in a series by Colette Davies reflecting on the role played by the firm during the Romantic era and its somewhat tarnished reputation in the following centuries—a challenge that the essays in our new issue seek to address. Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829 & 1830–1836: Update 7 (August 2009–July 2020)

This report, like its predecessors, relates primarily to the second volume of The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (Oxford: OUP, 2000) [EN2], co-edited by Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling, with the assistance of Christopher Skelton-Foord and Karin Wünsche. It also refers to the online The English Novel, 1830–36: A Bibliographical Survey of Fiction Published in the British Isles [EN3], which effectively serves as a continuation of the printed Bibliography. Continue reading

Article: Isabella Kelly and the Minerva Gothic Challenge

This essay uses Isabella Kelly (c. 1759–1857) to demonstrate the critical and historical value of Minerva novelists for gothic scholarship. Minerva’s fictions have traditionally been dismissed by gothic critics as uninteresting ‘imitations’ of Radcliffe and Lewis. I propose that we need to question this too-simple label: rather than disqualifying them from serious study, Minerva novels’ formulaic gothic elements are an entry point for fertile analysis, exposing a lively dialogue between many novels that is itself an under-examined part of the gothic’s history. I also address the dilemma of scope: should gothic scholars read Minerva novels individually and closely, or as a large mass viewed from afar? Drawing on the insights of recent scholarship, I propose that there are unique benefits to a combined perspective, which recognises the potential richness of individual Minerva gothics while noting the distinctive features that arise from their publication as part of a larger mass. Isabella Kelly’s seven Minerva novels allow me to test both of these methodological assertions. A ‘semi-distant’ overview of Kelly’s career reveals her rapidly changing, diverse and creative use of gothic materials over time, exposing an aspect of gothic authorship not visible in traditional accounts. I then zoom in on a single Kelly novel, The Ruins of Avondale Priory (1796), to show the surprisingly complex, idiosyncratic uses to which she puts familiar tropes. Examined closely, Kelly’s novel proves less an ‘imitation’of canonical gothics than one in a chain of adaptations to which those more famous works also belong. Kelly’s case also shows how Minerva novels challenge critical categories formed on the basis of the canon alone, such as the supposed division of gothic fiction into distinct ‘male’ and ‘female’ strands. Continue reading

Article: Imitation, Intertextuality and the Minerva Novel

Jane Austen’s famous reference to Ann Radcliffe and ‘all her imitators’ in Northanger Abbey can be understood both as a satirical characterisation of popular gothic novels and as a record of a historical mode of describing those same texts. This article provides a new reading of fictional ‘imitation’ in the Romantic period arguing that, as it was practised by Minerva Press novelists, it became a crucial fulcrum in the ongoing Romantic debate over the literary status of the novel. While charges of ‘imitation’ are often understood as derogatory, and were frequently deployed against the Minerva Press’s fiction by critics, looking closely at the novels in question suggests that many novelists used imitation quite deliberately as a literary strategy. This essay suggests that the fiction produced by Minerva’s novelists is deeply entwined with the press’s status as England’s highest-producing novel publisher, in that the form and function of Minerva novels stems from their collective identity: each novel is produced and consumed specifically as one of many—one of many narratives, but also one of many physical, circulating objects, lent, sold and exchanged between readers. Using allusions, parodic inversions, self-referential prefaces and a multitude of other narrative strategies, the novelists exploit the creative potential of their imitative parameters. Continue reading

Article: Transatlantic Terror

This essay examines the cataloguing practices of James Hammond, the proprietor of a large nineteenth-century New England circulating library, and the marginalia in his collection of sixty-five Minerva Press gothic novels, which were later acquired by the New York Society Library in New York City. Hammond’s catalogues, four of which are examined here, arranged and altered Minerva titles and authors and appended reviews. These promotional strategies foregrounded the gothic content of these novels and attested to their quality. In so doing, the catalogues assisted subscribers in selecting books and prepared them for reading those selections. If Hammond’s catalogs prepared patrons for quality gothic reading experiences, the novels’ marginalia reshaped patrons’ expectations and influenced their engagement with the novels. Written by other subscribers or earlier readers, these marginalia evaluated the novels and commented on their gothic and non-gothic elements. In the process, the marginalia sometimes supported, and at other times conflicted with, Hammond’s promotional strategies. For Hammond’s patrons, the catalogues and the marginalia constituted two points of entry into the Minerva gothic novel. Only by examining both the catalogues and the marginalia can scholars assess the degree to which Minerva’s gothic novels terrified and delighted New England readers decades after the press’s London heyday. Continue reading

Article: Historical Gothic and the Minerva Press

Through the exploration of a selection of Minerva titles from across the period of the Press’s dominance (1790–99), focusing on the recurring trope of violence, its varying portrayals by individual authors, and its censure by critics, this essay argues that the Press makes a unique contribution to the Romantic literary marketplace with regard to its output of violent gothic fiction. In particular, it proposes that what some Minerva authors were doing was cleverly combining gothic sensationalism with historical fact, thereby allowing Lane’s press to gain popularity by catering to the fashion for violent gothic novels while simultaneously responding to rhetoric about the corrupting influence of such violence on female readers. In addition to this, at a time when historical writing was not showcasing the horrors of war that women were experiencing, the use of gothic conventions when writing historical conflicts permitted writers to do exactly that—the implication being that Minerva authors’ use of gothic violence was not simply to entertain, but also to portray the horrors of war and its impact on women and the domestic space. Taken together, the use of historical facts alongside gothic tropes in Minerva Press works allows for a confident evaluation of the formation of an historical gothic mode. Continue reading

Article: Four Nations Fiction by Women, 1789–1830

This collection of articles, which results from the ‘Four Nations Fiction’ conference that took place in 2013, is structured around the intersection of place with gender in terms of two vibrant research fields: the archipelagic or four nations turn within literary studies and the still-expanding map of Romantic-period women’s writing. Continue reading

Article: ‘The bounds of female reach’

The Birmingham-based novelist Catherine Hutton (1756–1846) was acknowledged in the Monthly Magazine for 1821 as one of ‘twenty-four ladies of pre-eminent talents as writers in various departments of literature and philosophy’. Her work is little read or discussed these days, but offers some fascinating possibilities for research into women’s writing and narratives of travel. This chapter explores how Hutton’s frequent visits to Wales from the 1780s, recorded in travel journals, provided both material and form for her later novels. Welsh landscapes and Welsh culture are often figured in her fiction as spaces of possibility and freedom for women, and are used, in terms that owe much to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, to critique the constraints of contemporary urban society. Continue reading

Article: The ‘Noble Savage’ in Ann of Swansea’s Welsh Fictions

The writings of Ann Julia Hatton (1764–1838), who from 1810 published under the pen-name ‘Ann of Swansea’, reflect changes in the political spirit of her age as it interwove with episodes in her personal history. Though her 1784 collection of verse is conventional in its politics, The Songs of Tammany (1794), a panegyric in praise of the American-Indian ‘Noble Savage’ written during the years she spent in New York, is heated in its denunciation of European colonialism. After she returned to Britain in 1799 and settled in Swansea, her novels Cambrian Pictures (1810) and Guilty or Not Guilty (1822) showed an equivalent radicalism in their depiction of Welsh characters casting off the yoke of subservience to a corrupt Anglicized gentry and demonstrating that an upbringing in Wales instils all the natural virtues as opposed to the artifices of contemporary civilization. In other fictions, however, such as her satire on the townspeople of Gooselake (i.e. Swansea) in Chronicles of an Illustrious House (1816), Welsh ‘Noble Savages’ have befooled themselves by succumbing to the allure of corrupting sophistications. This paper explores these transitions in Ann of Swansea’s fictional representations of Wales. Continue reading

Article: ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’

This article shifts attention away from the perfections of England to explore the place of Ireland in Jane Austen’s Emma. Intrigued by Jane Fairfax’s refusal to travel with the Dixons in Ireland, Emma conjectures spitefully about an unrequited—or possibly consummated—affair between Jane and Mr Dixon. Obfuscating his actual affair with Jane, Frank Churchill uses Emma’s Irish conjectures to flirt with both women. Ireland becomes a repository of gothic potential over the course of Austen’s novel: a space upon which characters can map their unspoken and unspeakable desires. Austen accesses the Irish gothic to ask questions about national identity, legitimacy and power. Continue reading

Article: Canals, Commerce and the Construction of Nation

The interplay between commerce and sensibility has been well documented: commercial activity is celebrated in eighteenth-century sentimental rhetoric for its ability to incite civility, reform manners and promote virtue. In the same way, the transformative effects of commerce informed discourses of sympathy and national identity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period. This article considers Sydney Owenson’s focus on commercial improvement in post-union Ireland in her 1814 novel O’Donnel: A National Tale. As Owenson developed her formal experimentations with the national tale, she made a series of revisions to the 1812 edition of St Clair (originally published in 1803) in which she echoes contemporary political discussions about Ireland’s potential for trade through the navigation of its waterways, suggesting an emerging interest in Irish commercial progress that would go on to influence her subsequent novels. O’Donnel appraises the value of English schemes for Irish improvement in the form of canals, aqueducts and road building within the context of Enlightenment models of historical progress and sympathy. In doing so, Owenson provides an extended critique of ascendancy schemes of improvement and of the role of geography in the formation of Irish national identity, revealing a profound anxiety about both the ideological ‘mapping’ of the Irish landscape in the post-union period and the formation of international communities based on sympathetic identification. Continue reading

Article: ‘She had recourse to her pen’

This article explores Elizabeth Hamilton’s response to the abuse of Jacobin radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain. It situates Hamilton’s fictional representations of revolutionary principles and her outspoken caricatures of contemporary radicals in her three-volume Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) within the trajectory of the gradual decline of radical voices from the mid-1790s onwards. This article demonstrates how new philosophical principles are presented in the novel as impractical and subversive in nature, as a way for Hamilton to show readers that these principles are dangerous and likely to be falsely adopted to destroy all fair domestic and public values. Ultimately, it argues for the discursive space Hamilton created to challenge and destabilise Jacobin radicalism, and also aims to shed light on the gendered conventions of public participation in the period. Continue reading

Article: Making Space for Wollstonecraft

In 1798, Mary Barker published her only known novel, A Welsh Story, which follows members of two Glamorganshire families through courtships to marriage and parenthood. Largely forgotten today, Barker was good friends with Robert Southey, collaborated with Wordsworth to publish Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord (1815) an attack on Byron and lived amongst the Lake Poets for much of the early nineteenth century. Reading A Welsh Story alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) I argue here that Barker altered the form of Wales-related Romantic novels and utilised the radical potential which the imagined space of Wales offered her in order to create a fictionalised vision of Wollstonecraft’s depictions of, and idealistic hopes for, British society. Continue reading

Article: Domesticating Antiquarianism

The domestic is fundamental to any analysis of Bray’s work, as by domesticating public history and antiquarianism she was able to negotiate a path between maintaining her position as a proper lady and asserting her credentials as a published author/ historian. Historically, Bray’s writing career began at a time when there had been a shift in the basic epistemological structures of history from state politics to social and affective life, family matters. Moreover, Bray’s own family, father, brother and both her husbands were antiquarians, thus her research was presented as an extension of theirs. Finally, in 1822, Bray relocated from London to Devon, a geographical space on the margins of England, and one rich in history, legend and the traditions of ‘Old England’. Yet for Bray, home was a conflicted term representing both family home and homeland, England, which she saw as under threat of losing its identity to the newly created nation of Great Britain and Ireland. In this paper I examine how, through the microcosm of family and region, Bray set about producing an antiquarian record of the English landscape, customs and traditions: an English National Tale. Continue reading

Post: Victorian Legacies: Sir Walter Scott in Context

by Emma Butcher The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered–the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various–the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his … Continue reading

Report: Merely an Imitator?

In this report, I want to float what I consider to be a distinct possibility: that Ann Radcliffe did not cease publication after The Italian (1797), but published two anonymous novels for the circulating library … Continue reading

Article: ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales’ Revisited

I James Henderson’s article ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales (1790–1820)’ provides a useful starting point for a study of Wales-related fiction of the romantic period. [1] Examining the extent to which Wales was used as … Continue reading

Article: High and Low

This paper examines the turn of the eighteenth century, when the dichotomy between books as products and books as artistic outputs emerged and deals with three different components: novels, circulating libraries, and readers. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to some of the underlying factors that conditioned that split between high and low which came about at this time and also to pinpoint some of the actors that were involved in this process, focused in particular on the works of August Lafontaine and the translation of his works into Swedish. Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829: Update 1 (April 2000–May 2001)

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey Published in the British Isles, edd. Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In particular, it offers fresh … Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829: Update 2 (June 2001–May 2002)

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, general editors Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In … Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829: Update 3 (June 2002–May 2003)

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles, general editors Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In … Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829: Update 4 (June 2003–August 2004)

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, general editors Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In … Continue reading

Report: The English Novel, 1800–1829: Update 5 (August 2004–August 2005)

This project report relates to The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles, general editors Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 2000). In … Continue reading

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