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 →
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 Birmingham-based novelist Catherine Hutton (1756–1846) was acknowledged in the Monthly Magazine for 1821 as one of ‘twenty-four ladies of pre-eminent talents as writers in various departments of literature and philosophy’. Her work is little read or discussed these days, but offers some fascinating possibilities for research into women’s writing and narratives of travel. This chapter explores how Hutton’s frequent visits to Wales from the 1780s, recorded in travel journals, provided both material and form for her later novels. Welsh landscapes and Welsh culture are often figured in her fiction as spaces of possibility and freedom for women, and are used, in terms that owe much to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, to critique the constraints of contemporary urban society. Continue reading →
In 1798, Mary Barker published her only known novel, A Welsh Story, which follows members of two Glamorganshire families through courtships to marriage and parenthood. Largely forgotten today, Barker was good friends with Robert Southey, collaborated with Wordsworth to publish Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord (1815) an attack on Byron and lived amongst the Lake Poets for much of the early nineteenth century. Reading A Welsh Story alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) I argue here that Barker altered the form of Wales-related Romantic novels and utilised the radical potential which the imagined space of Wales offered her in order to create a fictionalised vision of Wollstonecraft’s depictions of, and idealistic hopes for, British society. Continue reading →
In her excellent essay on the dramatist Joanna Baillie, Louise Duckling quotes Lord Byron reflecting on Voltaire’s assertion that ‘“the composition of a tragedy required testicles”—If this be true’, Byron writes, ‘Lord knows what Joanna … Continue reading →
I began reading Reinventing Liberty in the weeks leading up Britain’s Brexit vote in June 2016; the timing was uncanny. Price’s impressive monograph focuses on the concept of national identity as it relates to commerce … Continue reading →
Amy E. Weldon discusses the emerging animal rights movement of the long eighteenth century and the benefits of didacticism in the emerging genre of children’s literature. Examining the moral tenor of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and ‘The Caterpillar’ with respect to writing on children and morality by her contemporaries, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander Pope, the article charts the dissenting underpinnings of both the anti-slavery and anti-animal cruelty movements. It argues that both the language of sensibility and Christian moral education (which calls for love and mercy) could be effected through literature and taught through the presence of animal characters in Barbauld’s writing. Barbauld’s construction of clemency in the domestic war against animals, whether mice or caterpillars, speaks to the empathy possible on an international scale where widespread clemency could lead to the reconfiguration of existing political orders. Signposting the real problem of animal cruelty in eighteenth-century Britain in entertainments such as horse and bull-baiting, Barbauld’s writing can be seen as a point of intersection between Christian ideology and middle-class moral education. Ultimately, this article argues that the Dissenters’ moral and philosophical beliefs harmonise with the animal rights movement. Continue reading →
Didactic writing seldom sets the modern pulse racing, and it is a brave critic who sets out to concentrate on literature which explicitly aims to improve the morals of its readers. From a historical distance, … Continue reading →
