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Items tagged with 'Romanticism'

Post: CFP–Romantic Boundaries (Special Issue of Romantic Textualities)

Venice - The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1834, oil on canvas, view 2 - National Gallery of Art, Washington

This June, the BARS Early Career and Postgraduate Conference gathered researchers from around the globe to celebrate and to appreciate Romanticism and its legacies at the University of Edinburgh by exploring the theme of ‘boundaries’ … Continue reading

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

Review: Angela Wright, Mary Shelley (rev.)

Review: Kathryn Sutherland (ed.), Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters (rev.)

Review: Anna Mercer, The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (rev.)

Review: Daisy Hay, The Making of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (rev.)

Review: Hrileena Ghosh, John Keats’ Medical Notebook (rev.)

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

Review: Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen (rev.)

Review: Manu Samriti Chander, Brown Romantics (rev.)

Review: Vincent Carretta (ed.), The Writings of Phillis Wheatley (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

Article: Shadow and Substance

Late in life in in his Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (1851) R. P. Gillies reflected on a career fraught with difficulties owing to debt and other obstacles, though in it earlier stages it might be said to have paralleled in some respects the path of Walter Scott, while reaching a highpoint in the 1820s through Gillies’s significant input as a Germanist into Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. One deep regret as expressed in the Memoirs was his eventual incapacity to piece together his own literary record owing to the loss of materials at significant points in his life. The present article attempts to ameliorate this situation by providing a fuller record than was then available to Gillies himself, through means such as the recovery of rare editions, identification of periodical contributions, and information provided by the archives of the Royal Literary Fund. More particularly it offers an improved account of Gillies’s output as a novelist and translator of fiction, with some newly identified titles being added to the list, while others are removed. 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: Mandeville, Mourning and National Myths

Mandeville (1817) is the second of William Godwin’s historical novels, and is set during the period of the English Commonwealth (1649–60). Readers at the time of its publication made comparisons with the ‘German school’ of novel writing, linking it with both the gothic and sturm-und-drang fictional modes. Modern critics have recognised it as a work exploring psychological and cultural trauma, the aftereffects of war on the generation that came after. Godwin cited Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Joanna Bailie’s De Monfort (1798) as major influences on the novel, and this essay will attempt to use these texts as a vector to explore the direction of Godwin’s ideas. Continue reading

Article: The Romance of Commerce

Scott’s Waverley novels often turn on an opposition between romance—the realm of the unexpected, marvellous and heroic—and real life—the often disappointing realm of the mundane and factual. However, Rob Roy, offers readers no alternative to romance. Instead it is made up of different kinds of romance—namely the gothic and the adventure story or imperial romance. Scott maps the genre of the gothic onto Northumberland, where the remnants of feudalism still prevail, and wealth consists in landed property transmitted across generations. The adventure story, by contrast, links the Scottish Highlands with southern metropolitan Britain through a system of speculation and credit. Rob Roy reflects on Scott’s imbrication in these two systems at the time of the novel’s writing—a period of economic depression and rural depopulation—as he sold metropolitan readers another romanticised image of the Highlands in order to shore up his own landed property. 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: CFP—In Other Wor(l)ds: Romanticism at the Crossroads (Special issue of Romantic Textualities)

The first manned hot-air balloon, designed by the Montgolfier brothers, takes tethered off at the garden of the Reveillon workshop, Paris, on 19 October 1783.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Altre Parole / In Other Words (2015) describes switching from one language to another as crossing from one side of a body of water to its opposite shore. Inspired by this metaphor, … Continue reading

Post: Teaching Romanticism XXXV: Teaching Social Justice

As part of this ongoing series on Teaching Romanticism we will consider the ways in which we lecture on and discuss individual authors, whether during author-specific modules or broader period surveys. We thought it would … 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

Review: Saeko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, 1820–1900 (rev.)

At the conclusion of his speech unveiling the Memorial Fountain at Cockermouth, H. J. Palmer declaimed ‘Poets are born, not made’, but, as Saeko Yoshikawa demonstrates throughout William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, national figures … Continue reading

Review: Andrew O. Winckles and Angela Rehbein (eds), Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: ‘A Tribe of Authoresses’ (rev.)

Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: ‘A Tribe of Authoresses’ is the first book to appear in a new series, ‘Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850’, edited by Tim Fulford and Alan Vardy. This … Continue reading

Review: Ross Wilson, Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (rev.)

There’s an infinitive verb that scholars have been using with increasing relish over the last decade or so: ‘to problematise’. I am a fan neither of the term nor of the practice, believing that for … Continue reading

Review: Maximiliaan van Woudenberg, Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University and Philip Aherne, The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America, 1834–1934 (rev.)

‘Would that the criterion of a scholar’s utility were the number and moral values of the truths, which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge exclaimed in 1817. … Continue reading

Review: E. Wyn James (ed.), Flame in the Mountains: Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths and the Welsh Hymn (rev.)

Perhaps the first question many students, and indeed scholars, of long nineteenth-century Britain will ask upon reading the title of Flame in the Mountains: Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths and the Welsh Hymn is: just how … Continue reading

Review: Paul Hamilton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (rev.)

Beginning in Germany in the 1770s with the Sturm und Drang movement, by the 1820s Romanticism had swept through Europe conquering the French, Italian and Spanish literary worlds, and then from the West to Eastern … 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

Review: Kevin Gilmartin, William Hazlitt: Political Essayist (rev.)

Those seeking some light reading on one of the early nineteenth-century’s foremost commentators on British literature and culture, or a gentle introduction to Hazlitt’s radical political writing, will not be reaching for this book. Gilmartin’s … Continue reading

Review: Talissa J. Ford, Radical Romantics: Prophets, Pirates and the Space beyond Nation (rev.)

Treading new paths over familiar ground, Talissa J. Ford’s Radical Romantics: Prophets, Pirates and the Space Beyond Nation explores the notion of nation through those who bend and break its ‘literal or figurative boundaries’ (p. 2). … Continue reading

Review: Julia S. Carlson, Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (rev.)

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

Review: Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (rev.)

It is not often that a piece of scholarship is able to achieve both delightful complexity and remarkable clarity, but Siobhan Carroll’s An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 … Continue reading

Review: Mark J. Bruhn, Wordsworth before Coleridge: The Growth of the Poet’s Philosophical Mind, 1785–1797 (rev.)

A number of profound intellectual contexts—Burkean politics, Lockean empiricism, Wartonian historicism and Hartleyan psychology, among them—have long proven indispensable to the study of Wordsworth’s poetry. Many of these contexts seem to be incompatible with the … 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: Political Animals

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

Article: The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Nineteenth Century

This article is a textual analysis that compares features of the 1807 edition of The Book of the Duchess with its predecessors. The Book of the Duchess features, has been chosen for this analysis because, in a practical sense, it is limited enough to be manageable, but more importantly, it is a significant poem in Chaucer’s oeuvre and its authority has never been questioned. Thus, it has appeared in every printed edition of the works of Chaucer, providing this study with extensive points for comparison. The editor of the 1807 edition claims that his work is newly edited—a claim that many editors of Chaucer’s works made, without much effort to see through. In reality, the editor appears to have taken Thomas Tywhitt’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales, and used this as the basis for editing the non-Canterbury Tales texts. It is something of an homage to Tyrwhitt’s editing. Continue reading

Article: Sad Realities

Charles Harpur (1813–68) is recognised in his native Australia as a pioneering Romantic poet, but his achievements are little recognised elsewhere. This essay considers his contribution to the development of Romantic tragedy. He wrote two tragedies, The Bushrangers (1853, orig. 1835), a gothic bandit drama in the tradition of Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), and King Saul (c. 1838), an incomplete Biblical drama apparently inspired by Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Like many European playwrights of the period, Harpur was deeply influenced by the new kinds of melodrama that were sweeping the stage, but also sought to distinguish his literary productions from more popular fare. His alienation from the popular theatre was exacerbated by his colonial context, where strict censorship, rising snobbery and plentiful cultural imports from Britain stifled the early efforts of nationalist, convict-born writers like himself. These contexts help to explain three distinctive aspects of Harpur’s Romantic tragedies: they were direct in an age when drama was often evasive, radical even in an age of revolution, and mystical in an age of increasing religious scepticism. Whatever his theatrical merits, Harpur was a bold playwright who worked through controversial political and aesthetic problems in a remarkably explicit way. Continue reading

Article: The ‘Dying-Tale’ as Epistemic Strategy in Hemans’s Records of Woman

The personal writings of popular nineteenth-century poet Felicia Hemans indicate her desire to alleviate social constraints on women to improve their education, yet her poetry’s female figures often seem overly attached to domesticity or lacking in emotional fortitude. This paper addresses ways in which a study of early modern female writers of history can inform Hemans scholarship, particularly by drawing on Megan Matchinske’s work on the ‘dying-tale’ in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613). Similarly, Hemans promotes the necessity of women acting to ensure successful political and personal endurance in ‘The Switzer’s Tale’. Furthermore, in the pedagogy of Records of Woman (1828), Hemans responds to the problem of visual dominance in art by adopting a multi-sensory approach to communication that relies especially on the auditory. This strategy takes part in a broader epistemic approach to history that criticises the reliability of memory and the transience of human bodies. Ultimately, Hemans suggests that transcendence occurs through the exercise of the human will, the ultimate representation of which is martyrdom. 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: Minerva in the Review Periodical

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

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: Radcliffe Incorporated

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

Article: UnRomantic Authorship

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

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: William Lane, the Ramble Novel and the Genres of Romantic Irish Fiction

This article concerns the early career of William Lane as a fiction publisher, before his adoption of the Minerva brand in 1792. It reveals that Lane played an active role in promoting Irish-authored fiction to London readers, and contributed to the endurance of a popular yet neglected form of mid-eighteenth-century comic fiction. In the 1780s, Lane published many Irish novelists; also notable among his novels were several ‘ramble novels’, or bluff comedies of masculine travel in the style of Fielding and Smollett. It was only later that his press became known for Gothic and historical fiction and associated with the female reader. The article charts the popularity of ramble fiction in the 1780s and its treatment by reviewers and anthologists. It then closely examines one Irish ramble novel published by Lane in order to demonstrate the significance of the form to the history of Irish fiction and its capacity to accommodate serious political themes. The Minor, or the History of George O’Nial (1786) engages with the campaigns against the Penal Laws, which restricted the freedoms of Catholics and Dissenters. It was written in the midst of the first repeals of certain of these laws, and calls for more far-reaching reforms. Through a narrative centred on Irish characters, the novel advocates for Ireland’s disempowered Catholic inhabitants. 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: 5 Things to Read About… Romantic Periodical Studies

Over the past two years, the three researchers on the recently concluded Leverhulme Trust research project on the Lady’s Magazine at the University of Kent have studied and uncovered a previously inaccessible periodical archive of … Continue reading

Post: Teaching Romanticism XVII: Romanticism and the City, Part 2

As part of this ongoing series on Teaching Romanticism we will consider the ways in which we lecture on and discuss individual authors, whether during author-specific modules or broader period surveys. I thought it would … Continue reading

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