Home » Category archives: 'Editorial'
Category archive: 'Editorial'
Review: Review of Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District (2022)
Review: Review of Marion Sherwood and Rosalind Boyce, Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women (2023)
Article: Anti-Imperialism and Indigenous Culture in Francis Bond Head’s Argentine Travels
This article 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 travels as a businessman leading the Rio Plata Mining Association’s failed effort to exploit a series of gold and silver mines in South America. Focusing on the text’s critical responses to contemporary racial theory, the Columbian ‘doctrine of discovery’, and the European master narrative of progress, I highlight Head’s anti-colonial critical engagement, including his willingness to consider his own complicities with the oppressive colonial practices he otherwise criticizes. Ultimately, I argue, Head’s Argentine writings demonstrate a self-reflexive critical promise that he failed to enact during his subsequent tenure as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1836–1838). Continue reading
Article: Godwin Reads Wollstonecraft
Immediately after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, William Godwin immersed himself in reading her work and came up with his editorial plan for the Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a repository of his love and sorrow. This essay explores how Godwin’s editorial and mourning work were intertwined, and then goes on to discuss the emotive aspects of critical labour in general. The essay addresses how graduation education, long a hotbed of intellectual and emotional entanglement, is being transformed by digital research technologies. The essay ends with a discussion of how Anna Williams’s My Gothic Dissertation (2019), the first podcast dissertation, foregrounds the emotional dynamics of graduate student mentorship and dissertation creation. Continue reading
Article: ‘We advise her to throw aside her pen’
In the late eighteenth century, the literary marketplace expanded significantly and review culture burgeoned. Mary Wollstonecraft, often perceived as an avant-garde feminist, embarked on a ‘new plan of life’ as a paid, professional reviewer for Joseph Johnson’s and Thomas Christie’s Analytical Review. This article uses Wollstonecraft’s reviews to analyse Wollstonecraft’s reviewer persona and seeks to reveal the value in studying the language of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, illuminating the richness of her language as she negotiates fashioning herself as an authoritative figure while providing, often strongly held and strongly articulated, literary and wider sociopolitical criticism. She employs specific tropes, such as that of parenthood rather than motherhood, and methods, often comparing writers against one another in her reviews, to challenge expectations of women, of writing and of culture and to convey her own standards. However, it is these standards which reveal Wollstonecraft to opine views with classist and hierarchical echoes in reviews of established, popular and neophyte writers alike. Thus, by different means, hierarchies of literary ability come to the fore in Wollstonecraft’s reviews and, as the reviewer but also a writer, Wollstonecraft ensures she stands supreme. Yet, as this essay concludes, she does so in her endeavour to guide readers in whose hands rested future literary, sociopolitical and cultural values. Continue reading
Article: Quite Interesting: Godwin as a Writer of Fables
Writing under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin in the preface to the Fables, Ancient and Modern (1805) the first book for children he wrote for his own bookselling business, William Godwin argued that a major flaw in the books of fables circulating at the time was that their content and style caused them to fail to be ‘interesting to the mind of a child’. In this article, I explain how Godwin sought to tackle this perceived problem in his own book of fables, and for what purpose. To do so, I draw from Sianne Ngai’s recent examination of ‘the interesting’ as an aesthetic category whose genealogy begins in the Romantic period. I show that, although it certainly shares many features identified by Ngai from Schlegel to contemporary art, Godwin’s aesthetic of the interesting does not map on to the formation of a reflexive, detached, ironic modern subject. I rather suggest that a ‘Godwinian’ aesthetic of the interesting relies on what Ngai calls the ‘deeply pedagogical dimension’ of the category in order to subvert the formulaic, moralistic and didactic dimensions of fables while opening space for inquiry into a wide variety of scientific, historical and literary subjects. This, for Godwin, would contribute to the formation of engaged, reflexive readers who would then be likely to grow into individuals capable of contributing to social and political reform and the progress of humanity more generally. Continue reading
Article: ‘Pause, Reader, Pause’
A familiar strategy of elegy, anagnorisis is a form of teaching or guiding readers to a deep understanding of the poem’s subject through gradual, symbolic imagery and allusion. This paper argues that the spatial construction of the printed page became part of a new mode to gradually teach Romantic readers in the midst of a twenty-year conflict how to properly morn. Not only does spatial construction, as I define it, consist of the interplay of topic and genre on the periodical page, but its building blocks include intricate stanza shifts, locative words, and a collective voice. Mary Robinson’s ‘Stanzas supposed to be written near a tree, over the grave of an officer, who was killed at Lincelles, in Flanders, in August 1793’—despite its precise title—locates the act of mourning in the physical space of the poem. Her changing addresses and pronouns repeatedly tell readers and the gravesite itself what to do ‘Here’ so that correct acts are ‘record[ed]’ for future generations. Thus, I argue that the aim of such texts is to teach active mourning instead of effusion or meditation on personal loss. Active mourning typically consists of an obligation to the living, attention to ‘recording’ via the printed page, and close reading which is likened to travel. Such construction is reconsidered at the end of the long conflicts between Britain and France by critically overlooked poet Jane Alice Sargant. Her ‘Monody’ abruptly shifts from a meditation on death to a living, speaking ‘Warrior’ who finds a gravesite despite ‘no sculptur’d marble’ to mark it. Sargant’s text implies that ‘This mournful spot’ can only be found through the act of reading. The paper treats these two poems by Robinson and Sargant, respectively, with brief comparisons to other, anonymous periodical poems and to Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’. Continue reading
Article: Affecting Retreats and Academic Follies
In Jerusalem, William Blake makes it clear that he sees universities as complicit in processes of mechanisation that threaten to destroy creativity and enslave minds: ‘I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe | And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire | Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton’. However, surveying Romantic-period poetry more generally reveals that Blake’s view is an unusual one, breaking from eighteenth-century modes that remained the dominant discourses for addressing university life during the Romantic period. Poems on academic environments – particularly Oxford and Cambridge—commonly combined gentle satire on scholarly characteristics with presenting colleges as tranquil retreats. More pointedly, many university-educated poets sought to inscribe the special value of the elite subjectivities they imagined that their university experiences inculcated: this essay examines poems by William Mason, John Duncombe, Richard Polwhele, Thomas Dermody, Frederick William Faber and Christopher Pearse Cranch that work in this vein. However, such claims did not go unresisted, as shown through verse by Mary Alcock, Joanna Baillie, Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Howard Sigourney, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and George Crabbe and in more active models advanced by John Wilson and John Mayne in their depictions of the University of Glasgow. As higher education was diversified through urban foundations and institutions, spearheaded by the University of London, a project initiated in large part by the Glasgow-educated poet Thomas Campbell, the privileged scenes of eighteenth-century university verse became increasingly atypical. Nevertheless, the powerful ideal of the college-idyll lingered for a considerable time, being both reinscribed and ironised in writings such as Charles Lamb’s ‘Oxford in the Vacation’, which combines a sense of the attractiveness of academic retreat with evocations of its fragility and performativity. Continue reading
Article: Romanticism Goes to University
The introduction to a special issue of Romantic Textualities, ‘Romanticism Goes to University’ (no. 25), guest edited by Andrew McInnes. ‘Romanticism Goes to University’ comes out of a two-day symposium held at Edge Hill University in April 2018. The aim of the special issue and symposium alike is to think about how the university functioned in Romantic writing as a symbol of authority and tradition, with the concept of Higher Education available as an alternative way of thinking about creativity and criticality. The special issue begins with a triptych of papers thinking in and out of the Romantic-period university about issues around education. It ends with a focus on the Wollstonecraft–Godwin circle and its own ideas about learning. All of the essays reflect current concerns about the future of Higher Education today, striking an elegiac note for a lost past at the same time as offering hope for the future. Continue reading
Article: Beddoes Raising Hell in Germany
This article reconsiders the poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) as an international university student of the late Romantic period. With his propensity for ‘hell-raising’ of both occult and alcoholic varieties, Beddoes understood the performative quality of emerging Romantic myths of the student, characterised by recklessness and glamorous abandon. Beddoes also shows awareness of the connections between the study of medical science, with its demand for borderless freedom of ideas, and the climate of oppression, protest, and resistance in post-Napoleonic Germany. The revelling of activist students of the ‘Burschenschaft’ movement in Göttingen in 1826 is a possible model for the revolutionary central scene in Beddoes’ satirical tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (c. 1828). In university cities including Göttingen and Würzburg, Beddoes engaged in radical nationalist politics at a time when the Austrian ‘higher state’ operated oppressive systems to restrict and police expatriate students, who were suspected of promulgating French revolutionary influence. This uneasy climate in 1820s Hanover resonates with some of the contemporary anxieties about the part that university campuses play in debates about radicalisation, state security, and free speech in twenty-first-century Britan. With these contexts in mind, the article re-interprets the neglected narrative poem ‘Alfarabi the World-Maker’ (c. 1827): in this comic tale, the sorcerer Alfarabi is the very image of the student hell-raiser of Romantic lore, with a love of freedom, a burning will to create and discover, and a Byronic intolerance of cant. Beddoes’s image of the scholar is idealistic, disruptive, and ultimately parodic, possessing energies that are not easily contained in an institution of learning. Re-reading Beddoes’s checkered career in academia in relation to Romantic-era European politics shows continuity with contemporary debates about student identities and the function of universities, which are still with us today. Continue reading
Issue: Issue 25 (Summer 2024)
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 … Continue reading
Post: CFP–Romantic Boundaries (Special Issue of Romantic Textualities)
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
Post: Jeremy Corbyn, Romanticism and Vogon Poetry
Last week, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted an advert for Poetry for the Many, his anthology of poetry co-edited with Len McCluskey, with a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy. This post explores the confused response to Corbyn’s use of Shelley and ill-made comparisons to Vogon poetry by various parts of the UK media. Continue reading
Post: Introducing our new Digital Editor: Andrew McInnes
Romantic Textualities is delighted to announce that we have appointed Dr Andrew McInnes (Edge Hill University) as our new Digital Editor, whose role will be to oversee and expand the journal’s offerings beyond the numbered … 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
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
Issue: Issue 24 (Winter 2021)
The latest issue of Romantic Texutalities focuses on ‘Romantic Novels 1817 and 1818’ and is guest edited by Susan Civale and Claire Sheridan This issue will comprise eight essays, an update of the English Novel, 1800–1829 and 1830–1836 bibliographies, and nine book reviews. Continue reading
Post: CFP—In Other Wor(l)ds: Romanticism at the Crossroads (Special issue of Romantic Textualities)
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 XXXVI: Romantic Melodrama
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
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: Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (rev.)
A celebrated spiritual medium known as the ‘human telephone to the spirit world’ is not the sort of character one anticipates being discussed in a book about Jane Austen. Neither is a mid-nineteenth century anti-suffrage … Continue reading
Review: Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (rev.)
Offering a wide-ranging and highly nuanced perspective on the works of Robert Burns, Nigel Leask’s Robert Burns and Pastoral has deservedly endured as a key work within Burns Studies since its original publication in 2010. … Continue reading
Review: Innes M. Keighren, Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell, Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (rev.)
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