Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840
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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
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
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
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 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
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
In the wake of a personal scandal that Horace Walpole dubbed ‘The Gunninghiad’, Susannah Gunning returned to literary writing after some years’ absence from the scene. The two works she published with William Lane’s Minerva Press in 1792, Anecdotes of the Delborough Family and Virginius and Virginia. A Poem, in Six Parts. From the Roman History, demonstrate both Gunning’s artistic range and Lane’s marketing genius. Together, Gunning and Lane capitalised on the Gunninghiad scandal in an attempt to rehabilitate Gunning’s reputation as a writer and fill the coffers of the press. This article re-examines Gunning’s undervalued literary career to argue that publishing with Lane afforded her opportunities to rewrite the scandal of which she’d been a part, experiment with literary genres she had yet to explore, and profit from what she lived and wrote. Continue reading
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
Anna has studied at the University of Liverpool (BA) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil). She is now a second year doctoral candidate in English Literature at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. Anna’s … Continue reading
paLaura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She has … Continue reading
Laura Kremmel is beginning the last year of her PhD at Lehigh University, completing a dissertation that considers the ways in which Romantic-era Gothic literature picks up the theories of late eighteenth century medicine. She … Continue reading
As noted in my previous blogs on Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, the first story read by the Byron-Shelley circle on that stormy night in June 1816, ‘L’Amour muet’, was not as influential and well-known as the … Continue reading
by Manu Samriti Chander When I started graduate school in the early 2000s, I planned to focus on postcolonial literatures, especially poetry, which at the time was relatively under-examined. Part of the reason for this … Continue reading
by Maximiliaan van Woudenberg Happy New Year Everyone! My introductory blog ‘last year’ – actually only a few weeks ago – provided a brief overview of Fantasmagoriana (1812) the text that inspired the famous ghost-storytelling contest at … Continue reading
by Sarah Sharp, University of Edinburgh The tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession of 1714 has provided the stimulus for an exciting and highly visual exhibition at the British Library, which traces the changes in British … Continue reading
by Mark Bennett In my previous blog I talked generally about my PhD and some of the developments that lead it to take its present form. In this blog I’d like to look at two … Continue reading
by Katie Garner On Saturday 7 December, members of the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland gathered at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, just north of Dublin city centre, for the network’s 11th annual symposium. … Continue reading
Gothic and Travel Writing; or How a PhD Student makes the Journey from Victorianism to the Late Eighteenth Century by Mark Bennett Hello all. First up, I’d like to thank the team at Romantic Textualities … Continue reading
