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This post relates to the background to Issue 25 (2024) of Romantic Textualities, which has just been published (belatedly) and was guest edited by Andrew McInnes, our Digital Editor and author of this blog post. … Continue reading
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
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
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
The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times aims to recover the poetry and poetics of Erasmus Darwin from behind the rock of Wordsworthian Romanticism by challenging anew its assumptions about poetic diction and … Continue reading
