Editorial

Issue 25 (Summer 2024)

Editor(s)

Mandal, Anthony | van Woudenberg, Maximiliaan

The present issue of Romantic Textualities continues from our last in delivering a very full slate of material. Our two previous issues (23, 24) have been the largest in the journal’s history, and no. 25 represents another full instalment. This issue was originally slated for summer 2024, but has faced collateral challenges in the wake of the sector-wide crisis that has seen many universities, both in the UK and abroad, make massive cuts to their academic staffing, not least in the humanities—which, as ever, remains first in the line of fire. 

It is perhaps timely, then, that this special issue focuses on the theme of ‘Romanticism Goes to University’, at a time when the humanist projects that were given so much energy and momentum during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries finds itself at a moment of critical transformation. The Romantic period saw the transformation of cultural communication through the consolidlation of the literary marketplace that was assisted by the consolidation of print technologies and networks that connected metropolitan, provincial and international agents together in transformative ways. This consolidation of the earlier hand-press system was accelerated, towards the latter portions of the period covered by Romantic Textualities, by the increasing mechanisation that marked the first Industrial Revolution—in particular, the production of stereotyping and papermaking technologies that increased the speed and volume of print production. 

Likewise, amidst the crisis facing the humanities and  higher education, we are moving at full clip into the age of digital automation and artificial intelligence. For every opportunity heralded by these transformations, we also face challenges—and experience an anxiety that echoes those laments made by detractors of the increasingly industrialised print culture of the Romantic age regarding speed, volume and information overload. Those critics feared what they considered a collapse in the quality of literary outputs, which were increasingly difficult to keep in view and make sense of. Likewise, today’s anxieties resolve around the conflict between artistic labour and intellectual property on the one hand and what has been charmingly termed AI ‘slop’ on the other. Amidst this clash of perspectives and such paradigm shifts (to use a well-worn phrase), the role of the humanities has never been more needful, in order to provide the appropriate levels of scrutiny of these radical technological changes and to keep asking the right kinds of questions, derived as they are from ethical and aesthetic imperatives. 

With such topics in mind, Issue 25 focuses on Romanticism Goes to University, which itself derives from a conference with the same title that took place in 2018 and was organised by Andrew McInnes, who is Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University and the Digital Editor of this journal since 2024.  Covering a range of topics,  and a span of authors, the six essays—along with the general introduction by Andrew—trace the various intersections between Romanticism, learning and cultural practice. This fits closely with Andrew’s research interests, which focus on Romantic women’s writing, the gothic and children’s literature, and more recently theories of wit, humour and the comic. He is the author of Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period (2016) and co-author, with Rita J. Dashwood, of Reading the Romantic Ridiculous (2024), which drew on ‘The Romantic Ridiculous’, a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2020 and 2022. Beyonod these and many other academic outputs, Andrew was the organiser of the ‘New Romanticisms’, a conference held at Edge Hill University in summer 2022, and jointly organised by the British Association for Romantic Studies (for which he currently serves as Secretary) and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. For a fuller examination of Romanticism and the university, and the six essays published in Romantic Textualities that  explore this relationship it, see Andrew’s introduction to this special issue.

In addition to these six essays, Issue 25 also includes a standalone article by Kevin Hutchings, which examines Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic representation of Argentine Gauchos and ‘Pampas Indians’ in his bestselling 1826 memoir Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes, an account of the author’s business travels. Focusing on the text’s critical responses to contemporary racial theory, the Columbian ‘doctrine of discovery’ and the European master narrative of progress, Hutchings highlights Head’s anti-colonial critical engagement, including his willingness to consider his own complicities with the oppressive colonial practices he otherwise criticizes.

The second part of this issue consists of reviews of nine books on Romanticism, literary history and print culture, published between 2019 and 2023. Works examined cover various subjects,  including the Lady’s Magazine, realist writing, Welsh history, transmedia adaptations of Frankenstein, digital mapping of the Lake District. Authors discussed in the books reviewed include Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and the women in Lord Tennyson’s life.

We remain grateful to our contributors and readers for their patience while we have prepared the present issue. We would firstly like to extend our thanks to Julie Browne, Alice Percival and the team at Cardiff University Press, which has served as our publisher since 2017. As we move forward in our plans to celebrate thirty years of Romantic Textualities and consider its future presence, we have mutually agreed to decouple the journal from the Press’s stable. We were honoured to assist the Press in its foundational years when it was in search of established titles to build its portfolio, and have benefited from the support it has reciprocated over nearly a decade. As Cardiff University Press moves into its second decade, we wish the Press, its authors and its team the very best in their future endeavours.

As has  been the case in previous years, despite the gaps in our publication schedule, the journal continues to active in other areas, most notably our blog. Our successful ‘Teaching Romanticism’ series, is shortly to be reinvigorated under the stewardship of Sarah Burdett, who was one of the co-editors of the series with its founder, Daniel Cook. In his role as Digital Editor, Andrew is reviewing our wider portfolio of online offerings, including the blog and a future series of podcasts. Our sincere thanks are due also to Barbara Hughes-Moore, who will be stepping down from her role as Reviews Editor, having been in the role since 2020. We will shortly be advertising for her successor, along with an Associate Editor, whose role will be to assist our editorial team in preparing our serial issues and digital content, as well as standardising our archive of back issues. We continue to be grateful to our Platform Developer, Andrew O’Sullivan, for his unhesitating support in maintaining the journal. 

The future presses upon us urgently, as we plan to follow this issue very quickly with a further two instalments. Issue 26 will focus on Romantic Boundaries, edited by Andrew Taylor, Yu-Hung Tien and Li-hsin Hsu. Due for publication in spring 2026, this issue takes as its starting point presentations given in the same-named Postgraduate and Early Career Research Conference hosted by the British Association for Romantic Studies in summer 2023. This will be followed in summer 2026 by Issue 27, edited by Christopher Stampone and Joel Pace, which complements Issue 26’s focus on Romantic boundaries with a collection of essays gathered under the title, In Other Wor(l)ds: Romanticism at the Crossroads. Beyond these scheduled issues for Issues 28 (2027) and 29 (2028), we are planning special issues. The first, based on our successful ‘Teaching Romanticism’ blog series, will consolidate and update the blog posts (36 to date) into essay format, gathered into thematic sections, as well as offering new content. The second planned issue focuses on the theme of The Sounds of Romanticism, for which we will be issuing a Call for Papers shortly. Beyond this planned activity, we continue to welcome submissions for standalone essays or future special issues: please read our Instructions for Authors for more information