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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
A number of profound intellectual contexts—Burkean politics, Lockean empiricism, Wartonian historicism and Hartleyan psychology, among them—have long proven indispensable to the study of Wordsworth’s poetry. Many of these contexts seem to be incompatible with the … 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 →
