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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Travels into Print, co-written by three researchers interested in travel books yet specialising in different disciplines, promises to be, to say the least, impressively broad in its scope. Indeed, as the authors themselves point out … Continue reading →
In the 1805 version of The Prelude, William Wordsworth emphatically addresses Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘Friend!’ several times (Carlson, p. 226). As Julia S. Carlson notes in Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of … Continue reading →
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 →
This article argues that that during the political upheaval of the 1790s, the discourse of rights was mobilised to discuss the social, legal and political status of animals and humans. Notions of animal rights were just beginning to take shape towards the end of the eighteenth century. Changing beliefs about animal sentience, rationality and feelings, and social and moral concerns about animal cruelty, slowly brought the issue of animal welfare before the public. Historians have been inclined to view animal rights as the logical conclusion of the extension of the ‘rights of man’ down the social scale. This article contends that in print culture, animals were used as cyphers for their human owners. By giving voices to animals and characterising them as politically active and informed, a variety of literary productions demonstrated the methods of social, legal and political resistance available to their readers. Continue reading →
This essay examines the false and dubious attributions of select Minerva novels to both Ann Radcliffe and her lesser known contemporary Mary Ann Radcliffe, arguing that the constellations of texts and authors that signified under the Radcliffe aegis point to the existence of a corporate Radcliffe whose influence on Romantic print culture has yet to be fully documented. In sales catalogues and later scholarly studies and encyclopedias, this corporate Radcliffe blended work initially published anonymously by the Minerva Press with the known output of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Ann Radcliffe. These texts include the Minerva novels The Fate of Velina de Guidova (1790), Radzivil, a Romance (1790), Mary Ann Radcliffe’s The Memoirs of Mrs Mary Ann Radcliffe (1810) and The Female Advocate; or an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (1799), in addition to the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe. A composite created by the print market-place and later scholars’ own compulsion to fix or challenge questionable attributions, this corporate Radcliffe elevates the popular Romantic practices of imitation and translation and provides an alternative to narratives of Romantic authorship that rely on singular genius and originality. Continue reading →
This essay examines the rich and hitherto unexplored rivalries and connections between the Romantic periodical and the Minerva Press through the lens of the hugely popular Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1700–1832). Close attention to the points of contact outlined in this essay is multiply illuminating, I argue, not least because it forces us to challenge enduring but misleading associations about popular literary forms, professional authorship and women’s writing in the Romantic era. The Lady’s Magazine and the Minerva Press presented aspiring authors with competing, but complementary, mass-media outlets that were eagerly exploited by hundreds of Romantic-era writers, many of whom published energetically with both. These writers’ negotiations of the literary culture of the day—their movements between publishers at key moments in their lives and turn to different modes of publication as and when it suited them—were signs of their precarity, but also of their professionalism and persistence. Uncovering these writers’ stories enables us to uncover alternative, yet ubiquitous, stories of authorship in the Romantic period that merit the telling precisely because they recalibrate our sense of how Romantic authorship was experienced by some of the most popular writers of the era. Continue reading →
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 →
Papers will be published in a special issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 (Spring 2019), guest edited by Elizabeth Neiman and Tina Morin. This special issue of Romantic Textualities focuses on a … Continue reading →
In April 2016, a research network dedicated to Authorship and Appropriation was inaugurated during an international conference on the subject at the University of Dundee, where not coincidentally this present volume was also launched. Cook … Continue reading →
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 →
This paper resituates Samuel Rogers’s influential work Italy within the wider context of Britain’s post-Waterloo visual–verbal culture. Rogers’s illustrated multi-generic travel book made the Italian peninsula accessible to its upwardly mobile middle-class audience through its miscellaneous nature, its poems, tales, travelogues, treatment of art, antiquarian asides and translation of key Italian authors. It was one of the nineteenth century’s best-selling texts, but it did not start out that way. Indeed, it would take Rogers over a decade in order to produce a profitable object. This article examines this process and the ways in which Rogers responded to key developments in the commercial print market, especially the growing popularity for keepsakes and annuals, in order to register the publishing market’s dependency on word-image constellations, Britain’s changing relationship with Italy, and, ultimately, the growing purchasing power of a middle-class, female audience. Continue reading →
Since his rise to fame in the early nineteenth century, Byron and his work have been significant subjects for visual art, from book illustration to oil painting. This essay explores Byronic art across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking as a case study the treatment of his late narrative poem, Don Juan. Byron’s wide-ranging appeal was a result of both the popularity of his poetry and the public fascination with his life, but it was also determined by the multiple, fluid qualities of his work which facilitated a huge variety of readings across the centuries. Here, the visual implications of these ways of reading are considered, and the essay argues that pictorial Byronism played an important role in presenting evolving perceptions of the broader Romantic movement. Continue reading →
This essay contends that Skene, Scott’s amateur-artist friend, was often used as a visual research assistant for many scenes contained within the Waverley novels. Skene became an advisor to some of the earliest illustrations of Scott’s novels that were produced beyond Scotland. In the introduction to the fourth canto of Marmion, dedicated to Skene, Scott writes: ‘The shepherd, who in summer sun, | Had something of our envy won, | As thou with pencil, I with pen, | The features traced of hill and glen’. This glimpse of Skene sketching next to Scott reveals a significant aspect to their friendship: Skene’s sketches were used as aides-memoire, visual references or even inspirations to Scott’s literary imagination for many descriptive topographical or architectural passages within his novels. Through close readings of the novels, Scott’s correspondence and Skene’s own memoir, Hill establishes that Skene contributed signgiicant visual stimuli for a number of Scott’s works. Continue reading →
Proposals are invited for the 2015 British Association for Romantic Studies international conference which will be held at Cardiff University, Wales (UK) on 16–19 July 2015. The theme of the interdisciplinary conference is Romantic Imprints, … Continue reading →
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 →
Angie Dunstan (University of Kent) will be presenting her paper, ‘Romantic Literary Societies and their Victorian Afterlives’, at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 25 February 2014. The talk will take place in Cardiff University’s John Percival Building, Room 2.48. Abstract In … Continue reading →
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 →
The list of living poets below is taken from the Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry for 1801, pp. 487–91; the original can be viewed here. The version below is reformatted for the web and annotated … Continue reading →
by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Greetings Fellow Romanticists and Print Culturists, I am excited about my first blog-posting for Romantic Textualities. Thanks to the editors for the opportunity and their assistance. Like many of us, ever … Continue reading →
This essay offers a historical and generic account of the inter-cultural British and Irish nexus of imitation surrounding Thomas Moore’s first published volume of verse, his remarkably successful Odes of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse, with Notes (1800). I situate Moore’s volume, imitative of the sixth-century BC poet Anacreon’s lyrics of wine, women and song, within the dual Irish and British contexts of Anacreontic verse published in Ireland in the eighteenth century, in the contemporary cultural milieu of glee clubs, bodies such as the Hibernian Catch Club, the Beefsteak Club, the Humbug Club and the tellingly named Anacreontic Society, whose members frequently performed Anacreontic sentimental and drinking songs, and in the Cockney School Romanticism of Leigh Hunt and John Keats. In doing so, the paper repositions Moore, in his role of Anacreontic versifier as a formative presence at the genesis of British Romanticism as the turn of the nineteenth century, in ways that allow a deeper understanding of the culturally complex formation of Four Nations Romanticism. Continue reading →
The House of John Murray was well known as one of the principal British publishers in the field of travel and exploratory literature throughout much of the nineteenth century. The titles that were published under the proprietorship of John Murray II (1778–1843) and John Murray III (1808–92) read like a who’s who of nineteenth-century travel writing. The John Murray Archive offers one of the richest archival sources for publishing history, providing unequalled insight into the way that a prominent London publisher dealt with its authors in the age of colonial expansion. This article examines the processes through which Murray’s works came to make their way from manuscript to publication over several decades. It will conclude with a discussion of authorial self-presentation, examining ways in which some of Murray’s travel writers fashioned themselves, through various discursive strategies, in accordance with their position within this new literary economy. Continue reading →
It’s not often that you get the chance to go to a conference which will involve a trip to the pier, a day spent at one of Wales’ national treasures, and introductions to several undeservedly-forgotten … Continue reading →
In July, I travelled to Sydney to take part in the second biannual conference of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia. Founded in 2010, the RSAA aims ‘to promote the study of the literary, artistic, … Continue reading →
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 →
With the recent publication of the RCUK revised guidelines on Open Access publication of publicly funded research, set amidst the broader (and often polemical) debates surrounding open access in general, I thought it would be … Continue reading →
Did Ireland experience Romanticism? Certainly not in the uncomplicated way that scholarship assumes England, Germany and other countries did. In Romanticism in National Context (1988), Tom Dunne’s contribution eschews the standard chapter title form—‘Romanticism in … Continue reading →
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 →
This essay provides an overview of patterns of reception and production of Irish fiction published between 1800 and 1829, with particular discussion of the fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). The essay is followed by a bibliographical checklist of 114 works of fiction published during the survey period. Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
I In 1826, Mary Shelley recalled the Summer of 1814 as ‘incarnate romance’, when ‘a new generation’ of youthful travellers with ‘time and money at command’, yet heedless of ‘dirty packets and wretched inns’, ‘poured, … Continue reading →
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 →
Richard Hill looks into the gift-books and annual culture of the 1820s and ’30s, noting a ‘power-struggle in the publishing arena’ that emerged as a result of ‘production practices and technological developments that challenged traditional modes of book production’. By focusing on the interactions between two major Edinburgh authors, James Hogg and Walter Scott, Hill argues that in the late 1820s a fundamental shift was precipitated in the role of the author in the production of popular literature. Continue reading →
Let’s begin with an irritated Elizabeth Inchbald. At the bidding of prolific and insistent publisher Thomas Norton Longman, she undertook the task of collecting and critiquing a series of plays spanning the two centuries between … Continue reading →
