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 →
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 →
Jeffrey W. Barbeau’s latest publication, Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought, is the most recent work in a burgeoning field of criticism on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter. Barbeau’s study follows on from Peter Swaab’s collections … Continue reading →
Despite the widespread espousal of print culture during the eighteenth century, manuscript circulation continued to be embraced by many writers as a viable and indeed attractive option. Several participants in literary salons across Britain and … Continue reading →
Anna Seward: A Constructed Life is the first biography of the ‘Swan of Lichfield’ since Margaret Ashmun’s 1931 account of the writer and her famous literary friends. However, this critical biography is more than just … Continue reading →
