![romantic period essay question romantic period essay question](https://cdn.prowritingaid.com/website/2.5.60499/images/cms/blog/grammar.png) Be confident about grammarCheck every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send. Hannah YangHannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates. Get started with ProWritingAidDrop us a line or let's stay in touch via : Home â Essay Samples â Philosophy â Individualism â Themes Of The Romantic Period ![romantic period essay question test_template](https://htracer.gradesfixer.com/wp-content/themes/essay/assets/img/1px.png) Themes of The Romantic Period- Categories: Individualism
About this sample ![romantic period essay question close](https://htracer.gradesfixer.com/wp-content/themes/essay/assets/img/close-banner.png) Words: 766 | Published: Mar 25, 2024 Words: 766 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read ![romantic period essay question Image of Dr. Charlotte Jacobson](https://gradesfixer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Vector-2-1.png) Cite this EssayLet us write you an essay from scratch - 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
- Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours
Get high-quality help ![romantic period essay question author](https://htracer.gradesfixer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Top_Prof.jpg) Dr. Karlyna PhD Verified writer ![romantic period essay question writer](https://htracer.gradesfixer.com/wp-content/themes/essay/assets/img/2022/07/wr-6-150x150.jpg) + 120 experts online By clicking âCheck Writersâ Offersâ, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . Weâll occasionally send you promo and account related email No need to pay just yet! Related Essays4 pages / 1936 words 2 pages / 868 words 2 pages / 1067 words 1 pages / 514 words Remember! This is just a sample. You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers. 121 writers online Still canât find what you need?Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled Related Essays on IndividualismThe concept of morality is a central theme in Ayn Rand's novella, Anthem. The protagonist, Equality 7-2521, struggles to reconcile his own individual values with the rigid collectivist ideology of his society. Through Equality's [...] In the realm of philosophy and literature, Transcendentalism stands as a beacon of individualism and self-reliance. Rooted in the belief that individuals possess an inherent goodness and connection to nature, this movement [...] Individualism is a social theory that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. It posits that each person is distinct and possesses their own set of rights and responsibilities. This concept stands in contrast to [...] The story of Chris McCandless, the young adventurer who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness and ultimately met his demise, has sparked a polarizing debate. Was he a heroic figure, bravely turning his back on societal [...] With the speed of time and as per the norms of 21ST century, the world is exponentially moving forward in terms of development, science and technology, creating a competitive market for youngsters to showcase their creative [...] Joe Rogan is one of the most popular comedians and social commentators of our time. Rogan is known for currently known for his stand-up comedy, including his popular feature âTriggered,â as well as his widely listened to podcast [...] Related TopicsBy clicking âSendâ, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails. Where do you want us to send this sample? By clicking âContinueâ, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy. Be careful. This essay is not unique This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before Download this Sample Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper. Please check your inbox. We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together! Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing weâll assume you board with our cookie policy . - Instructions Followed To The Letter
- Deadlines Met At Every Stage
- Unique And Plagiarism Free
![romantic period essay question romantic period essay question](https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2748559685368304&ev=PageView&noscript=1) - Search Menu
- Sign in through your institution
- Advance articles
- Author Guidelines
- Open Access Options
- About The Year's Work in English Studies
- About the English Association
- Editorial Board
- Advertising and Corporate Services
- Journals Career Network
- Self-Archiving Policy
- Dispatch Dates
- Terms and Conditions
- Journals on Oxford Academic
- Books on Oxford Academic
Article Contents4. the novel, books reviewed. XII Literature 1780â1830: The Romantic Period- Article contents
- Figures & tables
- Supplementary Data
Oriane Smith, Gavin Budge, David Stewart, Ana Alicia Garza, Jason Whittaker, Felicity James, Amy Muse, XII Literature 1780â1830: The Romantic Period , The Year's Work in English Studies , Volume 87, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 668â760, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywes/man003 - Permissions Icon Permissions
This chapter has five sections. 1. General, 2. Prose, 3. Poetry, 4. Fiction, 5. Drama. Section 1 is by Orianne Smith, section 2 is by Gavin Budge, section 3 is by David Stewart, Ana Alicia Garza (Romantic women poets) and Jason Whittaker (Blake), section 4 is by Felicity James and section 5 is by Amy Muse. One of the most significant contributions to the area of general Romanticism this year is Susan J. Wolfson's Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism . Until the last decade of the twentieth century, most undergraduates enrolled in a Romantic-period literature class would be unable to name a text authored by a woman in this era other than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . What scholars wrote about and teachers taught were the Big Six: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron and Percy Shelley. Since then the Romantic canon has gone through a necessary adjustment, expanding to include women writers and other genres of writing besides poetry in order to provide a more historically accurate representation of the literary and cultural productions of the Romantic period. Early studies on Romanticism and gender tended to read women's writing in the period as a response to, or against, a âmasculineâ tradition of writing that was essentially political, egotistical and comfortably grounded in a patriarchal culture. Scholars such as Anne Mellor and Marlon Ross posited a âfeminineâ mode of writing which was apolitical and subjective. Wolfson argues in Borderlines that a rigid binary or an overly schematic approach to genderâalthough initially useful as a point of departure for the first wave of scholarship on this topicâlimits our understanding of the complex negotiations of the gender divide engaged in by both male and female writers during this period. Through an exploration of the works of Felicia Hemans, M.J. Jewsbury, Lord Byron and John Keats, Wolfson reveals how the âsenses (and sensations) of gender shape and are shaped by sign systems that prove to be arbitrary, fluid, susceptible of transformationâ (p. xviii). The first chapter traces the trajectory of gender criticism during this era, emphasizing the importance of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of gender in the wake of the French Revolution as a radical challenge to the cultural assumptions of sex distinction by Rousseau, Milton and Burke. The remainder of the book is organized as a chiasmusââTwo Womenâ and âTwo Menââin order to investigate the shifting borders of âfeminineâ and âmasculineâ identity. âTwo Womenâ opens with an investigation of the tensions between the cultural status of Hemans as a âfeminineâ icon and her âmasculineâ ambition as a poet. As Wolfson points out, Hemans was hailed as an exemplar of the female poetess in the first few decades after Waterloo, when Britain was hammering out its national identity on an international stage. Women, or more specifically, representations of female patriotism and femininity, played an important role in the formative years of British nationalism in the early nineteenth century. Yet even as Hemans was touted as a model of feminine decorum and propriety, male critics such as Francis Jeffrey and male poets like Wordsworth remained suspicious of her determination to participate in the commercial, and therefore âmasculineâ, vocation of poetry. According to Wolfson, these suspicions were not entirely groundless: throughout her work, Hemans consistently articulates a resistance to the culturally limited roles for women. As Wolfson persuasively argues, Hemans's representations of women warriors and female fortitude in the midst of suffering reveal her own interest in disrupting the gender economy even as she herself was being marketed as the pattern for a âfeminineâ writer. At a time in which even a decidedly âfeminineâ poetess like Hemans found herself embroiled in a gendered debate about the limits of genius, Maria Jane Jewsbury was subjected to an even more pointed critique by her contemporaries. Jewsbury, an unabashed âmasculineâ writer along the lines of Wollstonecraft, is not as well known to Romanticists today as Hemans. Wolfson's choice to include her here is therefore particularly felicitous, serving as an introduction to Jewsbury's work and underscoring her significance in the increasingly acrimonious border wars between male and female identity. Jewsbury's The History of an Enthusiast [1830] reveals her interest in exploring the fate of female genius in the first half of the nineteenth centuryâan interest that Wolfson suggests was fuelled by her own frustrations as she attempted to seek fame as a woman of letters. As Wolfson points out, it is significant that Jewsbury does not attempt to rehabilitate her heroine, the âenthusiastâ Julia, through marriage or subjecting her to the fate of StaĂ«l's Corinne. The end of the story is deliberately unresolved, positing what Wolfson describes as a âfemale negative capabilityâ (p. 130) by allowing Julia to exit the text with both her ambitions and uncertain future intact. The second half of Borderlines focuses on Byron and Keats. In her readings of Byron's Sardanapalus and Don Juan , Wolfson investigates Byron's fascination with the shifting borders of gender, specifically with his engagement in the cultural critique of effeminacy and the imaginative possibilities of literal and metaphorical cross-dressing. As Wolfson notes, Sardanapalus is a self-conscious staging of the âeffeminate characterâ that was epitomized by the French and castigated by Hazlitt, among others, as a threat to the manly character of British national identity. Don Juan continues Byron's playful questioning of the arbitrary signs of gender difference by placing Don Juan in drag and reworking Wollstonecraft's âthe wrongs of womanâ into âthe wrongs of the feminized manâ (p. 190). In contrast to Byron's extended play, personally and professionally, with transvestite forms of representation, as Wolfson demonstrates, Keats took gender demarcation seriously. In his poetic theory and practice, Keats struggled with the question of what it meant to achieve success as a man writing poetry. Written at a time in which the notion of masculinity was being hammered out, his poetry repeatedly rehearses a gendered crisis in which female power threatens to eclipse male authority or a man glories in asserting his dominion over a woman. Wolfson's incisive close readings, her thorough knowledge of the field, and the clarity with which she describes the gender debate in the Romantic period and in Romantic studies itself make Borderlines an exceptional book, and essential reading for anyone interested in the study of Romanticism. The connections between gender and Romanticism are explored in another book published this year. Clare Brock argues in The Feminization of Fame, 1750â1830 that â[f]ame is fickle, flirtatious and eternally femaleâ (p. 1). Brock's study investigates the feminization of the concept of fame during this period, which enabled women writers actively to seek and embrace celebrity. As Brock notes, the classical notion of fame as male heroism in the military or politics was transformed during the eighteenth century into a more democratic model of celebrity by a society increasingly obsessed with multi-media forms of representation. In this celebrity-driven culture, women like Mary Robinson, Fanny Burney and Germaine de StaĂ«l became adept at marketing themselves and taking advantage of the new opportunities available through an expanding print culture. Brock's inclusion of Burney here alongside a more obvious publicity seeker like Robinson, for instance, may surprise many readers who tend to think of Burney as a shrinking violet who shunned the spotlight. This was Catherine Gallagher's argument in Nobody's Story : The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670â1820 , and Brock's study is one of the first to challenge what has become a commonplace in Burney studies. The first chapter of The Feminization of Fame traces the origin of the feminization of fame in this period to the life and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Brock argues that Rousseau's extreme popularity and near-cult status throughout Europe was the result of his willingness to submit his personal narrative to public scrutiny and to position himself as a modern deity to his adoring fans. In the chapters that follow, on Catherine Macaulay and Mary Robinson, Brock demonstrates how both of these women, undeterred by their colourful personal lives, followed in Rousseau's footsteps by aggressively pursuing success in their respective careers. As Brock notes, Robinson was unique in that she was both a celebrity and an astute commentator on celebrity culture, who actively promoted the feminization of fame as a journalist. The chapters on Burney and StaĂ«l investigate the ways in which these two very different writers pursued and wrote about fame. Brock reveals the businesslike way in which Burney consciously and deliberately set out to achieve the status of a famous writer, whilst maintaining her image as the exemplar of female modesty and virtue. Theorizing and exploring the notion of fame in her own works, Germaine de StaĂ«l was a significant contributor to the feminization of fame who was obsessed in both life and art with the figure of the famous female. The Feminization of Fame concludes with William Hazlitt, who wrote extensively on the topic of fame in his essays. In spite of his largely negative stance towards women, Brock argues that Hazlitt's belief that brilliance was one of the âspirits of the ageââto be seized in the moment and not deferred to the futureâwas in keeping with the sustained, unwavering self-promotion of the brilliant women of the age. Another very good book published this year approaches the subject of gender and poetics from a somewhat different perspective. Jeffrey C. Robinson's Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism is an ambitious and wide-ranging book that analyses the emergence of the Fancy in the Romantic period as an experimental and progressive poetics reflecting the radical energies unleashed by the French Revolution. Robinson's book provides a history of the Fancy, defined by Robinson as a Romantic-era theory of poetry, an embodiment of that poetics in Romantic poetry, and the precursor of modern experimental poetry. What sets the poetry of Fancy apart from the âgreater Romantic lyricâ as defined by M.H. Abrams is its stress on the juxtaposition of referents and images and a lively communal exchange between the self and the world rather than the âIâ of the lyric subject and disengaged, solitary contemplation. In Romantic-era criticism and, Robinson argues, in our own time, poetry of the Fancy is gendered âfeminineâ and childlike, described as an immature, unstable form of poetry that a (male) poet might experiment with in his formative years but would inevitably reject in favour of a more serious and socially conservative mode of poetic expression. Robinson suggests that the subordination of the Fancy to the Imagination by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria , for instance, has blinded scholars to the significance of the Fancy as the most exciting, and characteristic, poetry to come out of the turbulent decades of the Romantic era. Not surprisingly, given the association of the Fancy with the âfeminineâ, Robinson's focus on the poetry of the Fancy underscores the important contributions of women writers such as Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans to this new, radicalized genre of poetry. Unfettering Poetry argues that Mary Robinson's involvement with the Della Cruscans as a young poet was a driving force throughout her career. The influence of the Della Cruscansâa poetic movement led by Robert Merry in the 1780sâon Romantic sensibility has been established by Jerome McGann amongst others in recent years. Yet, as Jeffrey Robinson notes, the notion that Della Cruscanism was somehow channelled or transformed by the Romantics hints at the validity of the claim that the poetry of the Fancy was an immature, seductive poetryâan early stage in the growth of a poet. As Jeffrey Robinson candidly admits, this was his unacknowledged view as he began the process of thinking through Mary Robinson's relationship to the Della Cruscans. Deeper into the project, however, Robinson realized that he had to abandon the language of origin and source in order to do justice to the richness and depth of Mary Robinson's poetic engagement with the world in which she lived. Another example of Jeffrey Robinson's reassessment of the narrative of Romantic origins is his refusal to accept the too easy characterization of Wordsworth as what Robinson describes as âfanciphobicâ or the exemplar par excellence of the egotistical lyrical subject. As Robinson reminds us, much of Wordsworth's poetry shared âthe sense of a subject flowing into the world that it describes, celebrates, transformsâa sense precisely that of the Fancyâ that underwrote the works of writers during this period from the Della Cruscans to Mary Robinson (p. 80). This careful thinking through of our understanding of the Romantics (even if, as in the case of Mary Robinson, his findings go against his original assumptions) is what makes Robinson's Unfettering Poetry such a pleasure to read. Robinson's willingness to share with his readers the process, as well as the product, of his research is a refreshing change from the traditional authoritative stance adopted by most scholars. Scholarly conventions, including a seamless argument and a linear structure, are called into question by another very interesting book published this year in the area of general Romanticism: Judith Pascoe's The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors . The Hummingbird Cabinet explores the popularization of collecting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and argues that the obsession for collecting birds, books, Napoleonic relics, Egyptiana and fossils by collectors from all walks of life originated in a Romantic longing for permanence and immortality. As Pascoe demonstrates in lively and idiosyncratic language, the literary movement of Romanticism was intimately connected to the craze for collecting in this period. The introduction, âThe Last Guitar That Shelley Ever Playedâ, explores the fetishizing of Romantic poets in the late Victorian period, using the example of Captain Edward Silsbee, a Shelley enthusiast who purchased a guitar in 1898 that was owned by Shelley. The case of Silsbee, who was the inspiration for the obsessed scholar-collector in Henry James's The Aspern Papers , reveals that the urge for collecting goes beyond any facile Freudian interpretation. According to Pascoe, Silsbee's desire to own a relic of Shelley runs deeper than a sexual perversion: it is the manifestation of a quasi-mystical belief in the ability of objects to retain something of the powers of their owners as well as a deep longing to partake in a portion of Shelley's fame and immortality. The first chapter, âHummingbird Collectors and Romantic Poetryâ, argues that William Bullock, the Barnumesque curator of the London Museum and an avid collector, was the materialistic alter ego of the Romantic poets. In chapter 2, âQueen Charlotte: Collector and Collectibleâ, Pascoe focuses on the queen's penchant for collecting as a means of relieving royal ennui. The discussion of Queen Charlotte's happy immersion in her duties as a botanizer and bibliophile complicates the argument that links the urge to collect with an imperialistic drive. This argument, one that has been made by several scholars, does not take into account the gendered and class implications of the queen's collections or the entrepreneurial spirit of collectors like Bullock. Chapter 3, âTravels with Napoleon's Carriageâ, is a tale of two carriages, describing Bullock's exhibition of Napoleon's carriage at the same time as Byron is travelling on the Continent in a replica of the same vehicle. In this chapter filled with larger-than-life characters such as Napoleon, Byron and Bullock, interestingly enough, the carriages take on a life of their own as Pascoe traces their transformation from functional objects into relics. Chapter 4, âBelzoni in Ruinsâ, describes the colourful career of Giovanni Belzoni, a performing giant on the London circuit, who travelled to Egypt in 1815 as a hydraulics expert and returned as a scholar-collector of Egyptiana. The final chapter, âMary Anning Recollectedâ, reads the commonplace book of the fossil collector Mary Anning (with excerpts from the self-mythologizing Byron and feminist passages from Anna Seward) as a reflection of Anning's ambition and desire to break through the gendered constraints of her profession. Readers who enjoyed Paul Hamilton's Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory [2003] will be similarly engaged by Leon Chai's Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era . Like Hamilton's book, Romantic Theory explores the fate of theory in the aftermath of New Historicism. Chai argues that the current impasse in theoretical models of interpretation can be traced back to the Romantic period when a significant movement emerged, cutting across a broad range of disciplines, that attempted not only to theorize recent developments in literature, politics, science and mathematics but also to trace their origins. Chai suggests that this movement brought with it a spatial treatment of concepts, and an emphasis on the development of concepts rather than the concepts themselves, which created the self-reflexive, formal analysis of theory itself. The first chapter explores Percy Shelley's reference to Rousseau as a problematic tutelary figure in âA Triumph of Lifeâ as Shelley's acknowledgement of the need for reflexivity or a perspective informed by an awareness of itself. Chapter 2 traces the influence of F.A. Wolf's Prologemena to Homer on German Romanticism, and in particular on Friedrich Schlegel, who believed that contemporary classical scholarship manifested a self-reflexive nostalgia that moved beyond history into the realm of theory. This section concludes with an exploration of Napoleon's innovative battle plan at Jena that incorporated an awareness of the permutations of development itself, which Chai reads, along with Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit , within the context of a movement from Substance to otherness, followed by a return to itself as Subject. The second section of Romantic Theory turns to the reverberations of reflexivity in Romantic science, beginning with an investigation of the work of the French physiologist Xavier Bichat on vital theory and how the experiences of death in post-revolutionary Paris hospitals led Bichat to conceive of vitality as a process in which the non-vital is transformed to the vital. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Humphry Davy's work on the isolation of chemical elements led him to believe in a theoretical economy, which could be extended to a universal explanation applicable to all the sciencesâa move that Chai suggests places Davy as an active participant in the origin of metatheory. The mathematician Ăvariste Galois is the subject of the last chapter of this section: here Chai argues that Galois's theory on the solvability of equations by radicals demonstrated that any equation (up to the ratio of 5) was solvable without actually solving it. The third section of Romantic Theory opens on somewhat more familiar ground (for Romanticists interested in English studies) with an exploration of Coleridge's radical approach to theory not as knowledge or explanation, but as thought or activity. The next chapter interprets Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a critique of the tyranny of subjectivity: Victor Frankenstein seeks to impose his subjectivity on his creation and the creature, in turn, desperately tries to get Victor to recognize and acknowledge his subjectivity. This demonstrates, according to Chai, Shelley's belief that the impulse to conceptualize the external is natural, although Shelley points to the necessity of abandoning the attempt to conceptualize the external in favour of intersubjectivity or sympathy. The final chapter, on Friedrich Hölderin, interprets a late poem, âPatmosâ, as a meditation on the limits of theoryârevealing the capacity of Romantic theory to look beyond itself. Romantic Theory is a difficult and challenging book, but well worth the effort even for readers who will be convinced that Chai's project amounts to nothing more than a reinvestment in Hegelian idealism. Students and scholars interested in the intersection of Romantic studies, art history, and cultural studies will be particularly excited by several publications this year. Exhibition culture and the cultural significance of portraiture are the subject of two important books: Luisa CalĂš's Fuseli's Milton Gallery: âTurning Readers into Spectatorsâ and Christopher Rovee's Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism . Between 1791 and 1799 the Swiss painter Henri Fuseli interpreted Milton's Paradise Lost in a series of forty pictures. CalĂš's Fuseli's Milton Gallery takes Fuseli's project as a case study within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used for reading literary texts in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. This book explores how the new exhibition culture at the end of the eighteenth century redefined visual and verbal interactions, and ways of reading and viewing. As CalĂš notes, the repackaging of British literature in the form of galleries enabled literary galleries like Fuseli's Milton Gallery to introduce a new narrative form of high art that also served as a marketing tool, providing readers and spectators with visual entertainment that encouraged them to buy the illustrated books and prints available at the gallery. Illustrating British literature enabled artists and entrepreneurs like Fuseli to invent a national âgrand styleâ that addressed the needs of an emergent consumer culture. Taking Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste as a point of departure, chapter 1, âThe Literary Galleries and the Field of Artâ, places Fuseli's Milton Gallery within the general context of the phenomenon of literary galleries at the end of the eighteenth century. CalĂš discusses John Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery, Thomas Macklin's Poets Gallery and Robert Bowyer's Historic Gallery, and describes their marketing strategies for selling illustrated editions and prints. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the acts of reading and viewing at exhibitions. Chapter 2, âThe Spectator Turned Reader: Printed Texts at the Galleriesâ, builds upon and historicizes Wolfgang Iser's assertion of an âimplied readerâ constructed by literary texts. Here CalĂš compares Fuseli's Milton Gallery to Richard Bentley's edition of Paradise Lost and John Wesley's Extract of Paradise Lost , and argues that Fuseli's project is an event in textual transmission, somewhere between an abridgement like those of Bentley and Wesley and an anthology. Chapter 3, âThe Reader Turned Spectator: Visual Narrativesâ, focuses on how reading shaped the experience of exhibitions and concludes with a montage reading of Fuseli's Milton Gallery that emphasizes the dynamic and interactive aspects of eighteenth-century viewing practices. After this survey of late eighteenth-century exhibition culture, chapters 4 and 5 provide close readings of Fuseli's paintings of Milton's epic. In chapter 4, âSATAN encountrâing DEATH, SIN interposing : Milton's Allegory and the Politics of Seeingâ, CalĂš reads Fuseli's pictures of Hell in the context of dissenting debates about supernatural form and the politics of representing Milton in the 1790s, exploring Fuseli's Milton Gallery as a negotiation between the interpretative communities of Joseph Johnson's circle and the Royal Academy. The final chapter, âThe Plot of Adam and Eveâ, provides a particularly fine reading of Fuseli's paintings as an intellectual dialogue between Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft about the gendered implications of the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. CalĂš's revaluation of Romantic visual culture challenges the separation of Romantic reading and viewing as two autonomous aesthetic practices assumed by Harold Bloom and other critics. As CalĂš demonstrates in the conclusion to Fuseli's Milton Gallery , this anti-pictorial account of Romanticism as a solitary mental experience began in the period as a strategy enacted by Coleridge (amongst others) to guard against the dangers of promiscuous reading, after the copyright laws of the 1770s enabled a more widespread circulation of cheap editions, anthologies and abridgements. The circulation of inexpensive texts at the literary galleries realized Coleridge's fears about the promiscuity of reading and the emerging power of a new, urban public energized by an emergent exhibition culture. Christopher Rovee's Imagining the Gallery also investigates the politics of Romantic visual culture, focusing in particular on how the portrait served as a metaphor and a subgenre of Romantic literary culture. In this well-researched and consistently insightful study, Rovee interprets the rise of portraiture as indicative of a large-scale reimagining of the social body in this period. Rovee argues that the art of portraiture helped Britain imagine itself as a nation comprised of a diverse set of particulars. From the elitist aesthetics of the Royal Academy to the unabashedly entrepreneurial spirit of Boydell's gallery, Romantic-era exhibition culture was both conservative and progressive, demonstrating a political versatility and tolerance that were strikingly inconsistent with political reality. From 1785 to 1820, while galleries endorsed a trend towards social inclusionâand portraiture enabled the middle classes to represent their wealth and statusâthe aristocracy was becoming an increasingly more powerful political entity. Rovee suggests that the gallery culture was neither an oppositional political space nor the unquestioned bastion of conservative values: it was both. Thus Imagining the Gallery explores exhibition culture in general, and Romantic portraiture in particular, from a variety of ideological perspectives. The first chapter reads Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in dialogue with Reynold's Discourses on Art , pointing to Burke's verbal iconography of Marie Antoinette, for instance, as an index of a larger cultural shift from sublime patriarchal authority to participatory sentimental ideologies. Chapter 2 demonstrates how the commercial project of Boydell's gallery transformed the insular family gallery into a public space. The last three chapters explore the influence of this new exhibition culture and the art of portraiture on literary culture. In chapter 3, Rovee traces the cult of the miniature in the poetics of the lyric, arguing that Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets evokes portraits as public metaphors of social exclusion. Chapter 4 reads Frankenstein against contemporary debates regarding the Elgin Marbles, positioning the Creature as a composite of social bodies that reflects what was perceived as the democratic aesthetic of the marbles. The final chapter reads Wordsworth's portrait poems of the 1830s as a rejection of the political freight of portraiture and a deliberate move to market his poetry to middle-class readers and consumers. Wordsworth's contradictory stance on the meanings of portraiture is a fitting conclusion for Imagining the Gallery , revealing the persistence of an ongoing debate between a conservative aesthetics that endorsed a universalizing humanism and a radical populism expressed in the aesthetics of the particular. Christopher R. Miller's The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry , also reviewed in section 3 below, opens with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: âat twilight nature ⊠is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poetsâ (p. 1). The Invention of Evening is a sustained meditation on the reasons why this is the case. This elegantly written and illuminating monograph explores the poetry of evening as a genre with a historical tradition and a distinct set of formal effects. Miller argues that the evening had a special resonance and meaning for canonical Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Keats, who use the liminal time of twilight in their poetry to explore a transitional period in aural perceptionâthe moment suspended between diurnal and nocturnal activityâin which time itself is intensely felt and recorded. Published this year, Simon Swift's Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory is recommended reading for those interested in the links between philosophy, literary theory and cultural history in Romantic studies. Swift's study explores the ways in which philosophical and political debates in the early Romantic period empowered literature to express philosophical problems and political paradoxes which these discourses increasingly found themselves incapable of expressing on their own terms. Engaging with new criticism on Kant, Swift challenges recent attacks on philosophical reason and New Historicist readings of Romanticism, arguing that they both fundamentally misinterpret reason in strikingly similar ways. The first two chapters reveal the influence of Rousseau's theory of the imagination on what Swift describes as Kant's âtranscendental anthropologyâ (p. 18). Chapters 3 and 4 juxtapose Kant's formulation of a philosophical anthropology in response to Herder's lyricism with recent attacks on Kantian anthropology by Gayatri Spivak and Paul de Man. The last chapter calls into question the accusations levelled at Mary Wollstonecraft regarding her excessive rationalism and anthropological formalism. Analysing the philosophical, political and literary works of Kant, Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as the deconstruction of de Man and Spivak, Swift argues that postmodernism's condemnation of Enlightenment universalism and aesthetic autonomy underestimates the power of reason to orient itself towards forms of anthropological and literary difference. Another book published this year that engages directly with recent theory is Markus Poetzsch's âVisionary Drearinessâ: Readings in Romanticism's Quotidian Sublime . âVisionary Drearinessâ analyses the ways in which everyday life functioned as the locus of poetic inspiration for a wide range of Romantic writers. Building upon Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life , Poetzsch suggests that, rather than simply reconnecting with domestic spaces, Romantic writers create the spaces they inhabit through the act of recollecting and transcribing their movements within these everyday settings. The first chapter describes the turn from the grandeur of sublime vistas to an engagement with local and rural life in works by Wordsworth, Robert Burns and Joanna Baillie. The second chapter focuses on the descriptions of everyday objects in poetry by John Clare, Mary Russell Mitford, Barbauld and others in the context of the emerging nineteenth-century aesthetic of smallness and particularity. In the third chapter Poetzsch reveals the relationship between everyday âtacticsâ such as digging, washing and walking and what he, along with de Certeau, describes as everyday creativity in Romantic literature (pp. 112â13). Chapter 4 explores the notion of âfamiliar soilâ in works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Anne Grant and Felicia Hemans, and argues that this concept goes beyond the physical space of home to include recollected or dreamed space. Written in honour of Marilyn Butler, Repossessing the Romantic Past , edited by Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, includes contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of Romanticism working today, including Jon Mee, James Chandler and Jerome McGann. Part 1, âDissent and Oppositionâ, expands upon Butler's work on Radical Dissent in the long eighteenth century. In chapter 1, ââSevere Contentions of Friendshipâ: Barbauld, Conversation and Disputeâ (pp. 21â39), Jon Mee explores how the Dissenting ideal of âconversationâ as a transforming dialectic informed Barbauld's conflicted relationship with the Bluestocking circle. Chapter 2, Kevin Gilmartin's âHazlitt's Visionary Londonâ (pp. 40â62), focuses on William Hazlitt's treatment of life in London, both good and bad, as an alternative to Romantic utopianism, aligning him with the apocalyptic politics of William Blake and contemporary radicalism. In chapter 3, âShelley's Republicsâ (pp. 63â79), Michael Rossington discusses Percy Shelley's republicanism as a limitless vision of ârepublicsâ in which history and past writing can be reactivated in the service of new causes. Chapter 4, Anne Janowitz's âMemoirs of a Dutiful Niece: Lucy Aikin and Literary Reputationâ (pp. 80â97) reveals the Aikin family's unusual ability to manipulate their ongoing literary reception. In the final chapter of this section, âHolding Proteus: William Godwin in his Lettersâ (pp. 98â115), Pamela Clemit places the private, epistolary tempering of Godwin's notorious intellectualism within a general movement of ideas in the Romantic period from revolutionary rationalism to radical sympathy. Marilyn Butler's Pickering & Chatto edition of Maria Edgeworth established the Anglo-Irish novelist as an important Romantic-period writer whose writerly identity continues to be hotly disputed amongst Romanticists today. Part 2 of Repossessing the Romantic Past , âReopening the Case of Edgeworthâ, provides readers with two very different and promising interpretations of Edgeworth's thematic concerns. In chapter 6, âEdgeworth and Scott: The Literature of Reterritorializationâ (pp. 118â39), James Chandler argues that the category of historical place in the fiction of Edgeworth and Walter Scott is displaced at key moments in these works by a heightened emphasis on the expressive qualities of the sentimentalized face . Chapter 7, Susan Manly's âMaria Edgeworth and âthe Light of Natureâ: Artifice, Autonomy and Anti-Sectarianism in Practical Education (1798)â (pp. 140â59), suggests that although Edgeworth's critics have often described her early work on education as narrowly rationalist, it was precisely its reasoned opposition to conservative mystification that encouraged more freedom of thinking and originality in its pupils than its competitors. The last section of Repossessing the Romantic Past , âDifferent Directionsâ, points to the ways in which Butler's scholarship has directly influenced and challenged our thinking on a variety of Romantic figures. Chapter 8, Paul Hamilton's âColeridge's Staminaâ (pp. 163â82), argues that Coleridge's engagement with the German theoretical idiom of his day demonstrates his participation in a contemporary philosophical conversation that belies the accusations of plagiarism in his later works. In chapter 9, âElizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Romantic Orientalismâ (pp. 183â202), Nigel Leask calls into question the assertion by Butler and others that Hindoo Rajah was an anti-Jacobin novel. On the contrary, as Leask points out, this novel underscores Hamilton's indebtedness to the liberal Scottish Whig philosophers and the Dissenting tradition rather than a conservative Burkean school of thinking. Chapter 10, Janet Todd's âJane Austen and the Professional Wifeâ (pp. 203â25), follows Butler's lead in Jane Austen and the World of Ideas [1975] by reading Austen in the context of contemporary writing about the professions. Todd suggests that Austen promotes the professional ethos as conducive to a necessary reconception of civic behaviour. In the concluding chapter, âHigh Instincts and Real Presences: Two Romantic Responses to the Death of Beautyâ (pp. 226â43), Jerome McGann argues that beauty and not the sublime is the source of our aesthetic pleasure in poetry. McGann's rejection of Kant's privileging of the sublime as the determining category of morality and aesthetics redeems beauty as a means of democratizing aesthetics and articulating our pleasurable connection, or âcontractâ with the world in which we live. An increasing interest in Maria Edgeworth is demonstrated by two collections of essays published this year in the area of general Romanticism: An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts , edited by Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, and New Essays on Maria Edgeworth , edited by Julie Nash. An Uncomfortable Authority builds and develops scholarship that has helped canonize Edgeworth's writing and raises new questions about her place in English and Irish history, literary history, and women's history. The first section, âHistory, Mythology, and Edgeworth's Irelandâ, explores Edgeworth's subject position as a writer in Ireland. Marilyn Butler's âEdgeworth, the United Kingdom, and âMore Intelligent Treasonâ (pp. 33â61) demonstrates the multiple uses that Edgeworth and her father made of the various contemporary tropes of Irish âhistoryâ. In âHistory and Utopia in Ormond â (pp. 62â83), Peter Cosgrove discusses Edgeworth's decision to set her novels in the past, and argues that this was a strategy to challenge the nationalist myths that were being formulated and circulated by all of the political parties in Ireland during this period. Frances R. Botkin's essay, âThe Keener's Cry in Castle Rackrent : The Death of the Irish Culture?â (pp. 84â101), argues that âthe depiction of Irish funerary customs in Castle Rackrent brings into sharp relief issues of cultural loss and rebirthâ (p. 84). The ways in which people outside Ireland characterized the Irish is the focus of the second section of An Uncomfortable Authority , âRepresenting Ireland: Fiction, Realism, and Authorityâ. Jacqueline Belanger's ââLe vrai nâest pas toujours vraisemblableâ: The Evaluation of Realism in Edgeworth's Irish Talesâ (pp. 105â26) examines acts of seeing and representing Ireland by Edgeworth as well as her reviewers and readers, and reveals the political implications of these readings (and misreadings) of Irish culture. In ââDistorted nature in a feverâ: Irish Bulls , Irish Novels, the 1798 Rebellion, and their Gothic Contextsâ (pp. 127â45), Darryl Jones argues that Irish Gothic was an essentially conservative genre produced by writers like Edgeworth who were invested in the authority of the colonizing classes. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan's essay, âNational Character and Foreclosed Irishness: A Reconsideration of Ennui â (pp. 146â61), argues that Edgeworth's representation of educational reform in Ennui suggests that the reformation of the Irish national character can only be accomplished, according to Edgeworth, by full transformation and not simply through behaviour modification. The third section of An Uncomfortable Authority , âEducation, Empire, and the Anglo-Irish Dilemmaâ, explores the significance of education in Edgeworth's writing. Heidi Thomson's ââThe fashion not to be an absenteeâ: Fashion and Moral Authority in Edgeworth's Tales (pp. 165â91) points to Edgeworth's use of the language of fashion in her works to express the fluidity between classes and social aspirations. In ââGames of Chanceâ: Belinda , Education, and Empireâ (pp. 192â211), Jessica Richard reveals how Edgeworth's ambivalence towards gambling registered in Belinda betrays her fear that British society was not rationally ordered but was itself a game of chance. Catherine Toal's essay, âControl Equipment: Edgeworth's Critique of Rousseau's Educational Theoryâ (pp. 212â31), argues that reading Edgeworth's Practical Education against Rousseau's Ămile helps to clarify the terms of the ongoing debate about the relative levels of conservatism and âsubversiveness in Edgeworth's fiction. The final section, âEdgeworth's Influencesâ, points to two very specific ways in which Edgeworth was influenced by her contemporaries and influenced others. In â Harrington and Anti-Semitism: Mendelssohn's Invisible Agencyâ (pp. 235â49), Susan Manly reveals how Edgeworth allies herself in Harrington with European, non-Protestant opponents of the idea of state religion, and demonstrates the influence of one of the most prominent of these opponentsâMoses Mendelssohn. The final essay, Kit Kincade's âA Whillaluh for Ireland: Castle Rackrent and Edgeworth's Influence on Sir Walter Scottâ (pp. 250â69), argues that Edgeworth's use of a narrator with a limited and narrow perspective underscores the increasing gap between those who have the ability to promote themselves and those who do notâa strategy that Scott subsequently borrowed and reworked in his own historical fiction. As Julie Nash, the editor of New Essays on Maria Edgeworth , notes, Edgeworth resists an easy categorization: she was âa feminist who parodied Wollstonecraftian radicalism, an abolitionist who idealized the loyal slave, a paternalist who undermined patriarchal power, a realist who never lost sight of the idealâ (p. xvii). New Essays explores Edgeworth's varying and often contradictory perspectives on these and other issues without attempting to reconcile the inherent tensions within her work. The result is a collection of essays that deepen our understanding of this important literary figure. The first essay, Alison Harvey's âWest Indian Obeah and English âObeeâ: Race, Femininity, and Questions of Colonial Consolidation in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda â (pp. 1â29), reads Belinda as a colonial novel that examines the West Indian Obeah woman and British upper-class radical feminists as threats to English colonial and social order. In âMaria and Rachel: Transatlantic Identities and the Epistolary Assimilation of Differenceâ (pp. 31â56), Eve Tavor Bannet examines the figure of the outsider in Edgeworth's correspondence with the Jewish American woman Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. Mona Narain's âNot the Angel in the House: Intersections of the Public and Private in Maria Edgeworth's Moral Tales and Practical Education â (pp. 57â71) argues that these short stories and essays reveal Edgeworth's early interest in exploring the public performance of private subjectivity. In âMaria Edgeworth and the âTrue Use of Booksâ for Eighteenth-Century Girlsâ (pp. 73â91), Kathleen B. Grathwol suggests that Edgeworth's seemingly contradictory views on the education of women represent a radical revisioning of women's place in society. Frances R. Botkin's âFinding her own Voice or âBeing on her own bottomâ: A Community of Women in Maria Edgeworth's Helen â (pp. 93â108) complicates the assumption that Edgeworth was an uncritical proponent of patriarchy through a discussion of Edgeworth's final novel and its representation of the importance of a strong community of women. Irene Basey Beesmyer's essay, ââI thought I never set my eyes on a finer figure of a manâ: Maria Edgeworth Scrutinizes Masculinity in Castle Rackrent, Ennui , and The Absentee â (pp. 109â29), discusses Edgeworth's representation of a male hero who does not need to define himself as a man through the subjection of women. In âRevising Stereotypes of Nationality and Gender: Why Maria Edgeworth Did Not Write Castle Belinda â (pp. 131â60), Joanne Cordon probes the ways in which Edgeworth resists and subverts stereotypical assumptions regarding women and the Irish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Julie Nash argues a similar point in ââStanding in distress between tragedy and comedyâ: Servants in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda â (pp. 161â74), which explores Edgeworth's exploitation of cultural assumptions about servants in this period as a challenge to Burkean paternalism. Edgeworth's engagement with Burke is the subject of Kara M. Ryan's âJustice, Citizenship, and the Question of Feminine Subjectivity: Reading The Absentee as a Historical Novelâ (pp. 175â92) as well. Here Ryan discusses Edgeworth's articulation of the gendered implications of Burke's notions of justice and virtue in The Absentee . The final essay in this collection, Laura Dabundo's âMaria Edgeworth and the Irish âThin Placesââ (pp. 193â8), suggests that Edgeworth's work was influenced by earlier Celtic traditions and superstitions, including the belief in the sacredness of the land and pagan magic. Arthur Bradley argues, in Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens , that âreligion is ⊠the repressed or excluded other of contemporary Romantic studiesâ (p. 204). As Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, the editors of this superb collection of essays, point out, the scholarship on religion and Romanticism in recent years by critics such as Mark Canuel, Jon Mee, Martin Priestman, Robert Ryan and others has tended to approach this line of study from a materialist perspective. Although Ian Balfour's work on the rhetoric of prophecy and Stephen Prickett's analysis of the influence of the Bible on Romantic poetry and prose, for example, have demonstrated specific ways in which our understanding of the Romantic period can be enriched by placing it within a religious context, the link between religious belief and Romanticism has been largely ignored since M.H. Abrams's religious reading of canonical Romantic poetry in the 1950s. One reason for this is the tremendous influence of secular criticism such as Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology [1983], which continues to reverberate in Romantic studies today. Romanticism and Religion reveals how the theological turn of recent postmodern thinking can enrich our understanding of the importance and function of religious belief in Romantic literature. The introduction to Romanticism and Religion is highly recommended for anyone interested in a general survey of the relationship between Romantic literature, religion and postmodern theory. As the editors point out, it is not surprising that, given postmodernism's inherent distrust of metanarratives, the proclamation of the death of God provides a beginning, and an opportunity, for philosophers such as Derrida, Irigaray, and postmodern theologians like Jean-Luc Marion. While the essays that follow do not always make explicit connections between postmodern theory and Romanticism, they all share what Allan Rawes calls the âresponsive openness to possibilitiesâ (p. 131) that characterizes postmodern thinking. In âApproaching the Unapproached Light: Milton and the Romantic Visionaryâ (pp. 25â40), John Shears argues that Romantic poetry inherits a language of unapproachable light from the seventeenth century. Vincent Newey's âCowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Societyâ (pp. 41â56) emphasizes Cowper's influence on Romanticism and makes the connection between Cowper's project and the environmental movement in our own time. Gavin Hopps explores the religious logic of Wordsworth's poetry in ââJe sais bien, mais quand mĂȘme âŠâ: Wordsworth's Faithful Skepticismâ (pp. 57â73). In âCatholic Contagion: Southey, Coleridge and English Romantic Anxietiesâ (pp. 75â92), Timothy Webb reveals that, despite their differences, Southey and Coleridge shared the same anxieties regarding the invasive and destructive nature of Irish Catholicism and its threat to the British nation. Peter Cochran's ââSacrifice and offering thou didst not desireâ: Byron and Atonementâ (pp. 93â105) investigates Byron's use of the genre of comedy as an antidote to the ethos of tragic sacrifice and philosophical closure. Christine Kenyon Jones probes the link between religion and scientific language in the influences of Byron's Presbyterian upbringing in ââI was bred a moderate Presbyterianâ: Byron, Thomas Chalmers and the Scottish Religious Heritageâ (pp. 107â19). âByron's Confessional Pilgrimageâ (pp. 121â6) by Alan Rawes argues that Childe Harold represents the struggle to hold on to religious values in an increasingly secular world. Richard Cronin's âWords and the Word: The Diction of Don Juan â (pp. 137â53) builds upon Stephen Prickett's study of the overlap between the characteristics of biblical and poetic language as he traces a linguistic texture of scepticism in Don Juan and the issues underlying it. In ââWhy should I speak?â: Scepticism and the Voice of Poetry in Byron's Cain â (pp. 155â66), Tony Howe argues that Byron uses the figure of Cain to investigate the moral nature of poetic language. Edward Burns's âByron's Monk-y Business: Ghostly Closure and Comic Continuityâ (pp. 167â79) suggests that, for Byron, the ghostly provides âa space between belief and non-belief, within which he explores the possibilities that are both comically physical and sometimes a shocking challenge to the bases of the sense of his own worldâ (p. 179). In ââA Fine Excessâ: Hopkins, Keats and the Gratuity of Graceâ (pp. 181â90), Corinna Russell explores Gerard Manley Hopkins's response to the poetry of Keats, and his studies in the theological debate concerning the gratuity of divine grace. Arthur Bradley's ââUntil death tramples it to fragmentsâ: Percy Bysshe Shelley after Postmodern Theologyâ (pp. 191â206) probes the theological significance of Shelley's fragments. In âSacred Art and Profane Poetsâ (pp. 207â21), Jane Stabler investigates the ways in which writers in the Shelley circle responded to religious art in the Renaissance and how these responses shaped their understanding and representation of the Promethean hero. The final essay of the collection, Michael OâNeill's ââThe Death of Satanâ: Stevens's âEsthĂ©tique du malâ, Evil and the Romantic Imaginationâ (pp. 223â36), discusses the ways in which Stevens's poem meditates upon and reconfigures Keats's anguish about the role of the âdreamerâ in the world, and the appeal of âmalâ to Stevens and his precursors in the Romantic period. Pickering & Chatto published several very important collections that will interest many students of Romanticism this year, including Blackwood's Magazine, 1817â1825: Selections from Maga's Infancy with Nicholas Mason as the general editor. This collection is the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the early years of Blackwood's Magazine . This six-volume set provides a selection of the most influential, scandalous and entertaining texts which appeared in Blackwood's from 1815 to 1825. Volume 1, Selected Verse , edited by Nicholas Mason, contains poems by well-known Romantic figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hemans and James Hogg as well as lesser-known figures such as William Maginn and David Macbeth Moir. As Mason notes, two genres of poems dominated the pages of Blackwood's: sentimental lyrics such as Caroline Bowles's âTo a Dying Infantâ and satires on Whiggish persons and causes such as John Gibson Lockhart's âNotices to Correspondentsâ. This representative sampling includes examples of the former, but concentrates mostly on the witty parodies and satires published by Blackwood's in these early years. Volume 2, Selected Prose , edited by Anthony Jarrells, is the most definitively Scottish offering in this collection. Interestingly, although the magazine tended to favour the King's English as the dialect of choice for its poetry and criticism, its prose fiction tended towards the Scottish vernacular. Jarrells suggests in his introduction that the Scottish tales published by Blackwood's reveal a nation struggling to assert its identity after the Enlightenment and the Union with England. Volumes 3 and 4, Noctes Ambrosianae, 1822â3 and Noctes Ambrosianae 1824â5 , edited by Mark Parker, provide the first twenty-three instalments of the Noctes , one of the most innovative literary experiments of the Romantic period. Unlike the other volumes in this series, volumes 3 and 4 are reproduced as digitally enhanced facsimiles in order to preserve the idiosyncratic layout of the dialogues. The final two volumes bring together the most significant critical essays and reviews from these years. Volume 5, edited by Tom Mole, covers the years 1817â19, when the magazine was intent on stirring controversy throughout England. Volume 6, edited by John Strachan, includes a sampling from the years 1820â5, when Blackwood's softened its earlier acerbic style and adopted a new tone of seriousness. Students of Byron will particularly enjoy this volume, with the excerpts from the increasingly heated debate surrounding Don Juan . John Barrell and Jon Mee are the editors of another excellent collection published by Pickering & Chatto: Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792â1794 . These years witnessed the emergence of the first genuinely popular radical movement in Britainâa movement that prompted the government to initiate a series of trials for seditious libel, often against booksellers in London who were selling copies of Paine's Rights of Man . This period of increasing governmental pressure on perceived seditious activity culminated in the arrest and trial of three radical leaders in May 1794: Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall. This facsimile edition reproduces the collected, unabridged literature relating to all of the treason trials. The first five volumes published this year include the trials of Thomas Paine and Thomas Hardy; the last three volumes on the trials of Tooke and Thelwall will be published in 2007. Women Writing Home, 1700â1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire , also published by Pickering & Chatto, assembles a wide range of women's letters from the former British empire. With the exception of the first volume of the six-volume seriesâa collection of letters written from Africa by Victorian womenâeach of these volumes, organized by geographical region, contains a generous sampling of letters written by Romantic women writers from a wide range of classes and backgrounds. Volume 2, Australia , edited by Deirdre Coleman, includes letters from women who came to the Australian colonies as convicts and as wives of free settlers or army officers. Volume 3, Canada , edited by Cecily Devereux and Kathleen Venema, covers the period of the conquest of New France (1759â63) to the end of the nineteenth century. The correspondents here consist of colonial wives, travellers, and settlers who provide a unique perspective on, among other things, the fur-trade empire on the local culture. Although Volume 4, India , edited by Klaus Stierstorfer, is largely devoted to Victorian and early twentieth-century letters, the first correspondence included in this volume is by Sophia Plowden, who was married to a captain in the Bengal Civil Service. Plowden's letter provides an early example of the perspective of a higher civil servant on her life in India. Volume 5, New Zealand , edited by Charlotte J. Macdonald, focuses on the experiences of women who participated in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's colonization project. Many Romanticists will find the letters concerning the anti-slavery movement and debates over the education of and suffrage for slaves in the final volume, USA , edited by Susan Imbarrato, to be particularly useful. Given the marked interest in gender and Romanticism this year, it is not surprising that Routledge has published a collection of materials on and by women in this period. Edited by Roxanne Eberle, Women and Romanticism, 1790â1830 brings together a generous sampling of periodical material in addition to the republication of several significant works by Romantic women writers. Volumes 1 and 2, Education and Employment in the Early Romantic Period , present a broad array of writings on the subject of women's education and employment in this era. Although Eberle includes brief excerpts from more well-known writers such as Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Mary Hays and Hannah More, these two volumes largely comprise selections from popular Romantic periodicals such as the Monthly Review , the Monthly Magazine and The Lady's Monthly Museum as well as works by lesser-known authors such as S. Hatfield and Mary Lamb. Volume 3, Poetics, the Novel and Authorship , emphasizes the scope and variety of writing by women by including material on drama and the novel, as well as on poetry and the powers of the imagination. Many of the excerpts in this volume focus on the debate about the moral, political and aesthetic issues concerning novels and novel-writing in this periodâa debate in which many Romantic women writers such as Clara Reeve, Anna Barbauld, Hays and Wollstonecraft actively and vigorously participated. Volumes 4 and 5 provide readers with two examples of literary texts by Romantic women writers that directly engage with the issues raised in the first three volumes concerning female education, employment and women's writing. Volume 4 offers a facsimile edition of Amelia Opie's The Only Child; or Portia Bellenden . This epistolary novel tells the story of a young heroine who is classically educated by her father only to discover that her âmasculineâ education is a deterrent to her reluctant suitor, who initially rejects her because of her lack of feminine virtues and accomplishments, and marries a more conventionally acceptable woman. Letitia Landon's The Golden Violet, with its tales of romance and chivalry , is reproduced in its entirety in volume 5, along with two memoirs of Landon. The Golden Violet , the long poem that opens this volume, takes as its subject the fourteenth-century prize of a âgolden violetâ bestowed on the best poets working in the Provençal tradition. In Landon's account, an Italian noblewoman, Countess Clemenza, announces a poetry contest in which male and female bards compete as the countess and others listen and discuss the merits of each recital. Focusing on an exchange of narrative rather than solipsistic lyricism, this poem subverts our expectations by concluding not with the award but with Clemenza holding the prize before her. Here Landon deliberately places her readers in the position of the other competitors, stretching their hands out to receive the prize. Blurring the line between readers and writers, The Golden Violet opens up the possibility of literary endeavour as an activity in which many people, and not just the privileged few, can engage. Over the past few years, Broadview Press has done more than any other publishing company to provide affordable teaching editions of works by women authors in this period. Readers will be delighted with their latest publication: The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader , expertly edited by Gina Luria Walker. Hays, who is primarily remembered for her early revolutionary novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice , was also an astute political commentator and essayist who weighed in on topics ranging from the religious controversies of her day to the gendered implications of Enlightenment thinking. The selections of Hay's work in The Idea of Being Free are taken mostly from her non-fiction writings and interwoven with texts from other contemporary writers. This innovative approach encourages readers to read Hays's work in dialogue with the works of others and reveals Hays as a significant participant in contemporary debates on a myriad of subjects. This edition, which includes a critical introduction and full annotation, is an excellent resource for those who teach gender and Romanticism. With the development of increasingly powerful research databases, scholars of the Romantic period have begun to rely less and less on published bibliographies. Some bibliographies, however, continue to be an invaluable resource. Romanticists will be pleased to know that Pierre Conlon has completed Le SiĂšcle des LumiĂšres: Bibliographie chronologique , his impressive bibliography of the publications of the ancien rĂ©gime , with a two-volume account of the publications that appeared in the months leading up to the revolution and its immediate aftermath in 1789. Not surprisingly, 1789 is the only year that spans two volumes in Conlon's bibliography. On the brink of revolution, the last few years of the monarchy witnessed an explosion of publications, from a total of 1,944 in 1786, to 2,882 in 1787, to 4,190 in 1788 and, finally, to 6,941 in 1789. While most of the pamphlets published in 1789 were political, Conlon has also included works of literature such as poetry and drama, as well as letters and other documents. Before concluding this section, two books published this year, while not dedicated exclusively to the Romantic era, deserve to be mentioned. J.M. Van der Laan's Seeking Meaning for Goethe's Faust explores Goethe's interpretation of the Faust figure and its influence on subsequent works. Van der Laan argues that of the many variations on the Faust theme, Goethe's in particular has remained the most important and resonant conduit for the Faust tradition, and the work most responsible for determining the subsequent character of the Faust archetype. Cynthia Sundberg Wall's The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century historicizes modern habits of perception through an examination of the ways in which description was transformed and revalued throughout the eighteenth century. In the final chapter, âThe Foundling as Heirâ, Wall argues that the Romantic period ushered in a wider cultural interest in interiors and in the relations between objects and persons. This chapter suggests that, unlike earlier writers in the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott represent a fully visualized setting in which events occur, investing domestic detail with psychological significance. Traditionally, Romanticism has been viewed as opposed to the information explosion of the early nineteenth century, a critical characterization that has been accompanied by a tendency to ignore prose writers, whose reliance on publication in periodicals does not fit neatly into this schema. Recent interest in late eighteenth-century print culture, however, offers the possibility of a new approach to Romanticism which emphasizes its continuity with the material conditions of publishing, and Daniel E. White's accomplished monograph Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent represents an important addition to this trend. Although its title may seem to locate the study firmly in the field of âliterature and religionâ, White's focus is in fact not on âreligious ideasâ but on âpublic religious communities, institutions, discourses, and practicesâ (p. 2), so that, as is made clear by the list of his theoretical reference points as âJĂŒrgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci, and Mikhail Bakhtinâ (p. 11), the phenomenon of late eighteenth-century rational dissent is understood in terms of the formation of a counter public sphere. White productively extends the category of Romanticism back into the eighteenth century, so that Anna Barbauld and the Aikin family become central to his account of the relationship to the dissenting tradition of what he dubs âearly Romanticismâ, with its emphasis on the âfamily circleâ (p. 3). White sees the careers of the writers who are more conventionally classed as Romantic, such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Coleridge and Southey, as fundamentally shaped by the disintegration of this Dissenting public sphere in the 1790s (p. 12), a persuasive integration of the fields of romantic religion and print culture which is sure to shape accounts of the Romanticsâ relationship to the Unitarian intellectual milieu for some time to come. Two related articles by Duncan Wu, âWilliam Hazlitt (1737â1820) and the Monthly Repository : New Attributionsâ ( ChLB 136[2006] 133â43) and âThe Lamb Circle and the Monthly Repository â ( Romanticism 12:ii[2006] 143â9) explore in more detail the kinds of connections between rational dissent and Romanticism surveyed by White, identifying the Revd William Hazlitt, father of the Romantic essayist, as an important contributor to the Unitarian periodical The Monthly Repository from 1806 to 1822, and as possibly responsible for its publication of a dramatic prologue by Charles Lamb, although Henry Crabb Robinson, also a Unitarian, emerges as a more likely candidate. The function of Romantic periodicals in defining a counter public sphere is also central to Maria Schoina's âLeigh Hunt's âLetters from Abroadâ and the âAnglo-Italianâ Discourse of The Liberal â ( Romanticism 12:ii[2006] 115â25), which examines the âidentity politicsâ of Shelley and Byron's Pisan circle and the way in which their âappropriation of Italy's cultural systemsâ reflected âthe contradictions, discursive shifts and ambivalences which beset the political vision of post-Waterloo liberalism and Cockney cultural politicsâ (p. 116), something Schoina argues is particularly evident in the emphasis on âEnglish omniscience and superiorityâ (p. 117) in Hunt's writings about his Italian travels. From a contrasting political perspective, Philip Flynn, in âBlackwood's Maga , Lockhart's Peter's Letters , and the Politics of Publishingâ ( SiR 45:i[2006] 117â31), uses unpublished letters to give an account of the circumstances surrounding Lockhart's Peter's Letters to his Kinfolk , which he argues represented an exercise in âdamage controlâ (p. 122) after the large number of enemies early numbers of Blackwood's had made in the publishing world. The influence of postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity is evident in Tim Fulford's highly original monograph Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture 1756â1830 , also discussed elsewhere in this chapter, which suggests that Romanticism manifests this hybridity in that it âwould not have taken the form it did without the complex and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readersâ (p. 12). Fulford argues that the figure of the Indian is a particularly resonant one for British writers in this period, because Britain's military involvement in North America was often highly reliant on alliances with Native American tribes (p. 23), something which allowed for nuanced forms of criticism of âthe policies and attitudes that drove British imperialismâ (p. 21) to be put into the mouths of Indian speakers. The political shifts and ambiguities found characteristic of Romanticism by New Historicist critics are identified by Fulford as integral to the Romantic portrayal of Indians, which after 1805 undergoes a change related to the fact that âone-time radical opponents of the government ⊠no longer sought to discredit British ruleâat home or in the empireâthrough rhetorical figures who voiced their suffering at British handsâ (p. 24), so that Indians become âimaginary willing recipients of ⊠[Britain's] civilizing missionâ (p. 24) for writers such as Hemans and Southey. A distinctive feature of Fulford's study is the attention it pays not only to representations of Indians by British Romantic writers, but also to the use made of those representations by Native Americans themselves in order to construct âimagined communitiesâ (p. 38) capable of meeting the exigencies of the postcolonial situation. Fulford's transatlantic focus is shared by Joselyn Almeida's âBlanco White and the Making of Anglo-Hispanic Romanticismâ ( ERR 17[2006] 437â56), which examines Blanco White's work as a contributor to the South American periodical Variedades . A postcolonial context also informs Ian Haywood's monograph Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776â1832 , which seeks to revise Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish that the early nineteenth century saw the discontinuance of exemplary and theatrical modes of punishment, which Haywood suggests is âinadequate when the global violence of imperial Europe is taken into accountâ (p. 7), by drawing attention to the prominent role played by the âbloody vignetteâ (p. 2) in Romantic writing. Haywood questions New Historicist claims that âRomanticism was essentially a displacement of violent historical realityâ (p. 61), drawing on the theoretical model offered by Adam Smith's account of the âimpartial spectatorâ (p. 6) to argue that the focus on âspectacular violenceâ (p. 2) initially made prominent by opponents of the slave trade (p. 21) and then reinforced by the excesses of the French Revolution (p. 9) not only âreleased into Romantic culture a new repertoire of tropes of violation but ⊠also equipped the reader with the means to contextualize and critique that violenceâ (p. 2). Haywood links Romantic fascination with violence to the categories of âsensibility and the sublimeâ (p. 2), and draws attention to some overlooked sources of this preoccupation with âhyperbolic violenceâ (p. 104) in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and the Gordon Riots, which he argues were even more influential than the French Revolution in shaping representations of mob violence in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century (pp. 181â2). A more conventional kind of intellectual history of Romanticism is represented in the Festschrift for Frederick Burwick edited by Walter Pape, A View in the Rear-Mirror: Romantic Aesthetics, Culture and Science Seen from Today , which, as well as Elinor Shaffer's strongly worded attack, in âBiblical Criticism and âDarwinismâ in Coleridge's Opus Maximum â (pp. 161â74), on what she sees as the neoconservative agenda underlying Thomas McFarland's editorial practice in the Bollingen edition, also contains interesting commentaries on the relationship between Romantic ideas and present-day neuroscience by Matthew Schneider, in â Cutis anserina : Spine Tingles, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the New Science of Literary Responseâ (pp. 175â88), and K. Ludwig-Pfeiffer, in âRomantic Science Then and Now: Coleridge and Modern Neurobiologyâ (pp. 189â200). The relationship between Romantic ideas and medical thought is also addressed by George C Grinnell in âThomas Beddoes and the Physiology of Romantic Medicineâ ( SiR 45:ii[2006] 223â50), which links Romantic-period medical ideas about hypochondria with the issue of reflexivity in Romantic poetics. Daniel Fried provides an impressively fresh approach to a fairly tired question in his article âThe Politics of the Coleridgean Symbolâ ( SEL 46[2006] 763â79), which locates the opposition between symbol and allegory in the Stateman's Manual âFried notes that it is never stated in such clear-cut terms anywhere else in Coleridge's oeuvre (p. 764)âin the historical context of Coleridge's disgust at the Corn Laws which had been enacted the previous year (p. 765), and in particular in his attempt to identify middle ground between the biblical literalism of Methodists and Evangelicals and the rationalizing interpretations of the Unitarians (pp. 770â1), concluding that for Coleridge âthe symbolic mode ⊠is ⊠[a] hermeneutic privilege ⊠that separates ⊠[the upper and middle classes] from the lower classes who are only capable of appreciating literal reading and allegoriesâ (p. 776). A number of essays this year addressed the relationship between Romanticism and gender, with Simon Swift's âMary Wollstonecraft and the âReserve of Reasonââ ( SiR 45:i[2006] 3â24) providing the most sustained theoretical interrogation of Romantic categories from this perspective, through its argument that Wollstonecraft's gender inversion of Kant's emphasis on âthe transcendentalizing effect of desire through the withdrawal of the desired object from the sensesâ (p. 15) so that it is no longer confined to âthe male gazeâ (p. 15) has the potential to convert the conventional metaphor of intellectual âmodestyâ into a strategy which âincludes women in the communal imagining of a version of reason that is cleansed of its erotic biasâ (p. 20). Deborah Weiss's âSuffering, Sentiment and Civilization: Pain and Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's Short Residence â ( SiR 45:ii[2006] 199â221) offers a similar line of argument, suggesting that by transgendering conventional narrative roles (p. 203) Wollstonecraft manages âto critique and revise the exploitative economic and political relationships embedded within the tradition of sentimental literatureâ (p. 202). Paul Douglass's useful edition of selected letters by Lady Caroline Lamb, The Whole Disgraceful Truth , offers fresh perspectives on an important Romantic woman writer, while Samantha Webb's article âOne Man's Trash is Another Man's Dinner: Food and the Poetics of Scarcity in the Cheap Repository Tracts â ( ERR 17[2006] 419â34) continues recent critical emphasis on the tactical nature of Hannah More's engagement with her intellectual and social milieu, arguing, on the basis of views expressed in her letters which âare decidedly close to those of radical critics of the scarcityâ (p. 423), that More's emphasis in her 1790s tracts on coping with food scarcity can be seen to contain coded criticism of the upper classes (p. 429). The ongoing revision of the Romantic canon is particularly significant for Romantic prose writers, and in this context Virgil Nemoianu's idiosyncratic comparative literary study The Triumph of Imperfection: the Silver Age of Sociocultural Moderation in Europe, 1815â1848 offers a useful theoretical framework through its focus on âdiscourses at the margins of literature proper: travel literature, historiography, religious writings, education, political topics, multicultural concernsâ (p. ix). Nemoianu contrasts âhigh Romanticismâ with the âlowâ or âbiedermeierâ Romanticism prevalent after 1815 (p. ix), suggesting that the latter's âtremendous proliferation of moderating discourses and dialectics of consensusâ (p. ix) and rejection of âdeconstruction, relativism or a total break with the past, in favour of a creative continuityâ (p. ix) has the potential to offer âintellectual solutions to our own contemporary problemsâ (p. xi). In keeping with his emphasis on Romantic conservatism Nemoianu accords an important role to Robert Southey, whose writing, he suggests, âmore than that of Coleridge or Shelley, became a paradigm for many key aspects of nineteenth-century British aesthetic, intellectual, and even political behaviorsâ (p. 214), a claim for Southey's significance forming the premise of Lynda Pratt's edited collection Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism . Among essays on Southey's poetry, this collection includes Lynda Pratt's useful survey of the fragmentation of Southey's literary legacy through quarrels among family editors, in âFamily Misfortunes? The Posthumous Editing of Robert Southeyâ (pp. 219â38), Daniel Sanjiv Roberts's account of changes in De Quincey's attitude to Southey from his early days to later in his career, in âBeneath High Romanticism: âSoutheianâ Orientations in De Quinceyâ (pp. 37â48), David M. Craig's survey of the reception of Southey's historical writings, bringing out just how much his reputation was tainted by the pirated republication of the early radical poem âWat Tylerâ, in âSubservient Talents? Robert Southey as a Public Moralistâ (pp. 101â14), and W.A. Speck's strikingly original exploration of Southey's preoccupation with death in ââHis nights among the dead were passedâ: Robert Southey's Dreamsâ (pp. 203â17). Joseph Riehl's translation of Mario Praz's âIntroduction to the Essays of Elia â ( ChLB 133[2006] 2â17) locates Lamb squarely within Nemoianu's category of âbiedermeierâ Romanticism, describing Lamb's humour as ârepresentative of that phase of Romanticism that we call post-heroicâ (p. 7) in a way that contrasts interestingly with Praz's later dismissal of Lamb as a pathetic figure. Gerald Monsman's âSatiric Models for Charles Lamb's âA Dissertation upon Roast Pigââ ( NCP 33:i[2006] 1â27) suggests a range of sources for Lamb's essay of which the most significant is Swift's âA Modest Proposalâ (p. 10), and J.R. Watson's short biographical study âLamb and Some Religious People: To Mary Weddâ ( ChLB 136[2006] 107â11) reviews Lamb's responses to religious figures, suggesting that they could be viewed as âtypes of religious belief and practiceâ (p. 108). Finally, Oskar Wellens's âCharles Lamb in Dutch Translationâ ( ChLB 133[2006] 18â26) offers an illuminating survey of Lamb's reception in Holland. (a) GeneralIf Jerome McGann has been the most influential critic of Romantic poetry over the last twenty-five years, Marilyn Butler runs him a close second. Published in 2006 was an important collection of essays in her honour ( Repossessing the Romantic Past , edited by Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton), and the year's work on Romantic poetry as a whole shows just how pervasive her influence has been. Butler's careful juxtaposition of âmajorâ canonical pieces within a wider matrix of the âminorâ, marginal, or non-literary, is well continued in a year which includes a massive increase in Southey studies, an important collection of essays on Robert Bloomfield, and work which opens up a series of contexts to poetry on forgery, plagiarism, visual art and encounters with Native Americans. Inevitably, the scope of a tribute to Butler exceeds the scope of a section covering only poetry, and this study is further discussed in other sections of this chapter. There are essays on everything from Maria Edgeworth to Mizra Abu Taleb Khan, but Shelley and Coleridge also feature. Michael Rossington skilfully reconstructs Shelley's Marlow coterie and the contours of the debate over the meaning of English republicanism. Shelley's Charles the First , Rossington argues, was composed in a spirit of republicanism which moved beyond the religious debates of the seventeenth century towards a âEuropeanizingâ, analytically detached republic. Paul Hamilton reopens the case of Coleridge's philosophy, arguing that his Christianity strongly affected his approach to Continental philosophy. Coleridge offers a conception of discourse that, for Hamilton, troubles current divisions of writing into political, aesthetic, and scientific categories. Hamilton's discussion of Coleridgean discourse is echoed in criticism of Romantic poetry, which has tended recently to place poetry amidst other categories of writing. Marilyn Butler has been instrumental in re-establishing the study of Robert Southey, and the work produced on the figure that Byron, half-mocking, half-awed, described as the âthe only existing entire man of lettersâ is symptomatic of this wider shift. W.A. Speck helps the process with an important new biography, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters . Southey's voluminous manuscripts and letters are scattered across the globe, and Speck has greatly aided Southey scholars by collecting much of this information in one book. Speck's research in archives and musty periodicals produces a kind of awe, not simply for the researcher, but for the man who produced so much writing. It was the speed with which Southey wrote and the volume of writing that he produced as much as his political tergiversation that allowed Peacock to designate him âMr Feathernestâ. Yet Southey's political switch from extreme left to extreme right cannot be ignored, and Speck is generous, but not to a fault. He suggests a much more careful thinker than Peacock's caricature allows, without failing to recognize Southey's faults of temperament. One might wish for more information on the poetry (it is surprising to read about a trip to Portugal and find that a major work like Madoc has come out, with little discussion of Southey's thoughts on its composition), but this is a thorough, generous biography, and ought to help stimulate research into an unjustly neglected writer. Southey studies took a further boost with the publication of Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism , a major collection of essays edited by Lynda Pratt. Southey, along with other male Romantic-period poets, has been harder to rehabilitate than his female contemporaries. Loathed by Hazlitt as chief apostate, mocked by Byron for his limp bombast, denounced by Jeffrey for his affected simplicity, Southey remained confident that âposterityâ would honour him where his contemporaries failed. It is posterity's very failure to give canonical space to the Poet Laureate that many of the contributors find interesting. Pratt's comment that âSouthey's works are, then, marked by paradox and contradiction, by their scale and their indeterminacyâ (p. xxii) is borne out by much of the work in this collection. Nicola Trott argues that the concept of the âminor poemâ (shorter, lesser or juvenile pieces) undercuts any attempt to coalesce and define the Southeyan corpus. For Trott, even Southey's epics read like a collection of short poems, attempts at grandeur broken into an incoherent collection of fragments. Mark Storey argues that Southey combines private and public lives in a mixture that is ultimately bewildering: Southey wants to write poetry, but mingles this with historical research, his public duties as Poet Laureate, and his own private grief at the loss of his son. Southey's colonial and oriental interests are well served here, with excellent chapters on Madoc by Carol Bolton, Nigel Leask and Joselyn M. Almeida (for further criticism of Madoc , see Rebecca Cole Heinowitz, âThe Allure of the Same: Robert Southey's Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialismâ ( RCPS [2006] 27 paras.)), and Southey's construction of and confrontation with the Orient by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Diego Saglia and Tim Fulford, alongside chapters on dreams, calendar verse and biography. Southey's political thought has often been considered in terms of two wholly distinct extremes: the radical of the 1790s and the Tory of the nineteenth century. These chapters do much to challenge this conception, suggesting the complexity not only of Southey's politics, but also of the culture of the age. The book is riddled with revealing contradictions: Southey is rarely one thing if that thing's apparent opposite is not to be found inherent in the original. He is not poet or historian, Tory or Radical, but always, uncertainly, both. Southey's extraordinary breadth of reading and writing is what makes him a difficult figure to approach: he offers no unqualified truths, no definite manifesto. Pratt's title is well chosen: it is through the study of Southey and his ilk that we begin to understand the âcontextsâ of Romanticism. Another collection of essays on a Romantic-period poet who has slipped from the canon addresses similar questions. Robert Bloomfield, labouring-class author of The Farmer's Boy , was a Romantic-period poetic celebrity, but he has singularly failed to become a âRomanticâ poet. The contributors to Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon , edited by Simon White, John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, directly question the cultural mechanics of canonization. Bloomfield was a publishing sensation, and one of the questions addressed is an obvious one: why? The nature of political or poetic intention is difficult to assess in a poet whose most famous work was wholly overhauled by an âeditorâ (Capel Lofft), and such issues are addressed in chapters by Bruce Graver and Simon White. What makes this volume significant well beyond the narrow bounds of Bloomfield studies is the fact that the contributors do not shy away from the significance of such questions, or attempt a canonizing defence of Bloomfield. Rather, the mechanics and machinations of the contemporary publishing market that produced Bloomfield as a saleable concern are treated as objects of interest in their own right. Bloomfield's poetry does seem to suffer under the weight of more traditional poetic scholarship at times (Bridget Keegan's chapter, though interesting, finds difficulty in locating any underlying thematic unity in his religious allusions) but the volume marks a significant return to scholarship for a poet who, for reasons that are themselves interesting, has disappeared from critical view. Bloomfield's successors in the field of labouring-class poetry are well represented in the first volume of Pickering & Chatto's anthology, Nineteenth-Century English Labouring Class Poets , discussed in Chapter XIII, section 3 , below. Southey is an important figure in another study published in 2006 that expands the âcontextsâ of Romantic poetry. While Romantic poetry has been well supplied with criticism of colonial encounters in the East, the importance of American âIndiansâ to Romantic poetry has been less well documented. Tim Fulford has rectified the situation in a superb study. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756â1830 (a topic Fulford returns to in âRomantic Indians and their Inventorsâ ( ERR 17[2006] 139â50) is a rich, broad book, incorporating important original research into travel books, political debates and accounts (from both sides of the relationship) between Britons and Native Americans. While work on Britain's colonies in the East has (quite properly) considered the effects of cultural colonialism, Fulford proposes that the relationship with Native Americans was never one-sided. Romanticism emerges, in Fulford's account, as a body of work that was âexploited, modified, challengedâ (p. 14) by encounter with Indians. Southey exemplifies the shifts in the representation of Indians that occurred in this period. In a nuanced reading of the many versions of Madoc , Fulford shows how Southey uses his WelshâIndian encounter initially to attack British imperialism. By 1807, however, the poem argues for shipping fanatical, priest-ridden Irish Catholics to the backwoods of America. Amid the wilds of an Edenic America, fanaticism will fade, replaced through encounter with Indiansâ purer connection with the soil. Southey's is clearly a construction of Indian purity, but, as Fulford demonstrates, it is a construction based on an (admittedly uneasy) regard for a way of life that he (like Wordsworth and Coleridge) saw as positively different from British culture. In another excellent, persuasive reading, Fulford takes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as the product of Coleridge's extensive reading in travel accounts of Native American shamans. This poem, like others in Lyrical Ballads , continues the pattern set by Southey: a mixed poetics of colonialism and cultural exchange. The tipping point in the construction of the Romantic Indian is Thomas Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming [1809]. Campbell's poem deserves much more attention than it has had, and here Fulford offers a reading of it as an uneven, uncertain poem, combining domestic and imported traditions in a way that fails wholly to dovetail. Campbell's is the last poem featuring a Romantic Indian which allowed the figure its own power, however attenuated. After the war of 1812â14, Native American tribes began to lose their military power. As their power decreased, so they became figures of a sublime pity in poetry. Indians became another example of an inevitably dying culture, and poetry by Southey and Wordsworth became more interested in supporting a âcivilizingâ colonialist mission. The East received its own attention in Romantic Representations of British India , edited by Michael J. Franklin, a collection which is as interested in the discourses of orientalism as it is with âliteraryâ writers. Franklin suggests, as Fulford argues of Britain's encounter with American Indians, that the relationship between Britain and India should be considered as a complex cross-cultural exchange, not simply an act of colonial dominance. Britons may have offered (mis)representations of India, but India was quite capable of misrepresenting itself, and of modifying British culture in return. This is an important collection of essays, and poetry is well covered in chapters by Tim Fulford, Lynda Pratt and Tilar J. Mazzeo. Fulford considers William Jones's introduction of Indian poetry into Britain as an example of the poised colonial give and take that Franklin identifies, before moving on to look at the influence this had on âKubla Khanâ. Mazzeo traces Shelley's interest in Indian music, while Pratt gives yet more attention to Southey, following the complex compositional process of Southey's magnificently unstable Curse of Kehama . Southey was the subject of another piece in 2006: Christine Kenyon-Jones considered the importance of food and digestion to his poetry in ââNor in my conscience, nor my stomach riseâ: Food and Eating in Southey's Verseâ ( Romanticism 12[2006] 15â25). The âRomantic authorâ was placed under scrutiny in two excellent studies this year. Margaret Russett's Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760â1845 places poetry and the nature of Romanticism at its centre, but her discussions are never confined to one category of printed matter. From the confusing series of hoaxes and counter-hoaxes in Scotland's literary culture surrounding Walter Scott, James Hogg and Blackwood's Magazine by way of familiar scandals such as Ossian and Princess Caraboo, Russett uncovers a fascinating culture of imposture at the heart of Romanticism. One of the strengths of Russett's study lies in her nimble balancing of contemporary theory with a massive body of research into imposture, fiction and forgery. A fine example is her reading of the Chatterton myth. While Chatterton has long been recognized as a major influence on Coleridge, Keats and De Quincey, less attention has been paid to the way in which the myth itself was constructed. Russett ably draws out how both Chatterton himself and the readers and writers who propagated the myth produced a take on authenticity and the authorial self which was at once foundationally Romantic and, simultaneously, deeply unstable. Drawing on poststructuralist theory and Freudian Family Romance, but never neglecting the relevance of contemporary popular and âhighâ culture, Russett suggests that this unstable amalgam acts as an appropriate foundational moment for Romantic authenticity. Placing a popular story such as that of the Beauty of Buttermere amidst discussions of Byron and Clare's versions of Don Juan and Coleridge's anxious relationship with what is âColeridgeanâ in his style allows Russett to draw out the way in which literary (Romantic) culture develops as part of popular (Romance) culture. Imposture, Russett suggests, is the prime trope of Romantic-period culture: indeed, âauthenticity-effects evolve as a subdivision of the fakeâ (p. 113). Authorship, authenticity, and the category of âliteratureâ, all normative aspects of Romanticism, are simply the more daring impostures. Russett's rich, nuanced study uncovers the complexities and fissures in âthe cultural project that forgedâfrom a welter of transgressive texts and self-inventionsâthe fiction of authenticity we father on Romanticismâ (p. 191). A related, but distinct, study is Tilar J. Mazzeo's Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period . Mazzeo argues that our contemporary conception of plagiarism has been ahistorically misapplied to writers in the Romantic period. Constructing an argument based on research into the legal definition of literary property, Mazzeo rereads notorious instances of âplagiarismâ, questioning as she does so Romantic critical commonplaces such as originality and autonomous authorship. Mazzeo shows how what to modern eyes is culpable plagiarism would have been considered quite legitimate in the Romantic period, and vice versa. Coleridge may have lifted passages verbatim from other sources, but his lifts can be justified by one of the âget-out clausesâ that contemporary law and critical judgement provided: they are improvements on an original or can be judged to be unconscious. Interestingly, satire was the most commonly prosecuted form, even when satirists did not directly copy their victims. As satire mimics voice, tone and style, it could be judged to have taken the property of another author, the feature of his writing which is unique. Mazzeo must overcome a substantial presumption against such a definition of plagiarism, so normative have our ideas become, but she does so elegantly in a series of case studies. Importantly, Mazzeo extends her studies beyond the canon. The question of property became interestingly confused at the margins of print culture. Coleridge's newspaper poetry, judged to be a non-literary form, could adopt a different relationship with voice, echo and allusion, allowing a more open sense of authorship between Coleridge and Mary Robinson at the Morning Post . A darker side emerges too: as âimprovementâ on an original removed the charge of plagiarism, male writers could frequently borrow from female writers with impunity. Mazzeo considers Byron, Wordsworth, Clare and De Quincey, but the best chapter is on Shelley. Considering the complex literary cross-fertilization between Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Peacock, Mazzeo unearths a mode of poetic creation dependent on assimilation and intertextual reference. As this work on Shelley suggests, the significance of the book is twofold. First, Mazzeo corrects an erroneous assumption about the nature of plagiarism in the period. Second, she uses this evidence to offer an alternative model of poetic creativity. Building a rich picture of Romantic-period culture, drawing on travel books, periodicals and minor poetry, Mazzeo cogently challenges the myth of the autonomous Romantic genius. Romantic creativity, she argues, can be positively understood as a process of assimilation, an incorporation of literary materials including travel writing and other poets. The myth of the Romantic genius, she argues, may have begun in the Romantic period, but it has little or no basis in poetic practice in that period itself. This is an elegantly argued study, and a book that all Romanticists (and indeed all scholars who make reference to the âRomantic authorâ) should read. The sublime has a remarkable currency in discussions of Romantic poetry, and Markus Poetzsch provides an important reimagining of the topic in âVisionary Drearinessâ: Readings in Romanticism's Quotidian Sublime . Poetzsch convincingly argues that critics of the Romantic sublime, both those who value it and those who view its effects as pernicious, have got things wrong. The traditional view is that male Romantic poets search for and achieve moments of sublime transcendence, allowing them to move beyond temporal cares and access a grandeur that is reflected in the poet himself. For Poetzsch, however, what he calls this âmountaintop paradigmâ is only half the story. Just as important, he argues, are moments of âquotidian sublimity centred on the things of everyday lifeâ (p. 11). A poet like John Clare, focusing so intently on the minutiae of ephemeral nature, seems to resist the will to transcend, but Poetzsch suggests that it is precisely this intent focus that produces an alternative mode of sublimity. It is a compelling repositioning of the debate, though one does wonder quite how sublime the âquotidian sublimeâ can be without subjecting the term to abuse. Poetzsch traces these moments of everyday wonder in two chapters on home life, domesticity and the individual objects upon which writers focus, and two chapters which interrogate the âcognitive and experiential dimensionsâ of this alternative sublime. Poetzsch takes issue with Anne Mellor's binary opposition of masculine and feminine sublimes, offering the quotidian sublime as a category of experience which transcends gender and class boundaries. Accordingly, the writers covered represent a wide selection of the period's poets, including Anna Letitia Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Russell Mitford, but also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Leigh Hunt, Keats and De Quincey. The quotidian sublime, for Poetzsch, reinvests familiar objects with wonder and novelty, and Poetzsch's elegant criticism performs much the same function with a topic that seemed to have grown stale. One of the most stimulating books in 2006 was Susan Wolfson's Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism , also discussed in section 1 above. Wolfson's broad-ranging, intelligent study moves beyond a conception of gender in which âthe âfeminineâ is still the reflex of the masculineâ. Wolfson asks us to imagine âwhat if the notion of border is reconfigured from an outward limit of a concentric structure into a borderline, a differential across which both men and women face each other and continually negotiate, and across which occur more than a few strange shifts and transactions?â (p. xviii). Gender studies in Romanticism have typically been associated with female poets, but Wolfson's study invites us to recognize that gender had a formative influence on all writers in the period. Indeed, Wolfson is strongly resistant to the critical tendency, best exemplified in the work of Anne Mellor, to identify and oppose masculine and feminine canons. In a series of careful, richly contextualized readings of a wide variety of texts, Wolfson reinvigorates the gender debate in Romantic studies. Women poets, quite properly, occupy one half of Wolfson's study, but the work of Byron and Keats is not read simply as the work of male writers. Instead, in two chapters on Byron and two on Keats, Wolfson places these poets on both sides of the gender divide. Her reading of Byron and the spectre of effeminacy is exemplary. Writing with a flair worthy of her subject, Wolfson draws out the complex âshiftingsâ of language at play in the creation of a âgender logicâ. This is a rich field of contradiction and confusion, not least because, as Wolfson recognizes, âthe very culture that made Byron famous also struck him as symptomatic of a rampant disease: effeminacyâ (p. 135). Sardanapalus emerges as a key text, as Wolfson shows how the character's effeminacy played out as a political, poetic and cultural issue. Wolfson devotes a chapter to gender crossings and cross-dressing in Don Juan before moving on to Keats. Building on the work of Marjorie Levinson, Wolfson considers the ways in which gender affects Keats's poetic theory and practice. The problem, as with Byron, is one of audience. Keats's gender trouble is in fact one part of his troubled relationship with the cultural phenomenon called Byron: âByron is a constant shadow in the configuring of Keats, for better or worse, as a âfeminineâ poet; and female readers played an important part in the gender shiftâ (p. 242). In an increasingly feminized print market, Keats could attempt to reassert the manliness of feminine forms, but could only do so in a way that was already anxious. Keats's gender indeterminacy is followed up in a chapter which focuses on the construction of Keats, shedding new light on important critical judgements, from Blackwood's to Virginia Woolf. The study as a whole depends on well-developed close readings which build on a strong awareness of the operation of poetic form alongside political and cultural contexts. Wolfson's work has garnered a great deal of praise in recent years for its development of theoretically astute, historically informed arguments which nonetheless place language and poetic form at their centre. Borderlines is another book that will influence Romanticists from all critical perspectives: a refreshing, vivid, confident study. Another book which expands the canonical bounds of Romantic poetry is Jeffrey C. Robinson's Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism . It is a sprightly study of what Robinson takes to be an unduly neglected aspect of Romantic poetry, the Fancy. A culture of âfanciphobiaâ has ensured that the poetic faculty most often thought of as the younger, less significant sister of the imagination has remained under-explored and undervalued. Robinson constructs, through a series of often impressively ambitious readings, the contours of an alternative poetics of fanciful poetry, which he opposes to the more familiar poetics of the lyric and the imagination. The poetics of the Fancy, for Robinson, privileges an expansive, discontinuous, playful, even capricious form of writing, concerned with external objects rather than the internal life of the lyric subject. Where poetry of the imagination is often characterized by a turn from society and the external world inwards, the Fancy is intimately connected to the life of things. It is this connection with externalities that, for Robinson, allows the Fancy a politically progressive power unavailable to the isolated imagination. Robinson's insistence on the Fancy as a potent political challenge to the institutions of power can, unfortunately, become a little strained and even simplistic, but his readings are often well developed. Robinson takes J.H. Reynolds's pugilistic poem The Fancy as an anti-aristocratic response to the politics of Don Juan , building on a strong reading of the formal subtlety of Reynolds's vivid engagement with Regency culture to produce a contrast with Byron's rather more cynical view from the class above. Robinson's evident enthusiasm for a neglected poem is combined with a vivid rendering of Regency culture, producing an important argument about Reynolds before returning to a familiar poem with renewed vigour. Although Robinson rereads poems by Keats and Wordsworth as poems of Fancy rather than imagination, his concern is not to provide a monumental thesis of the age's poetics but to aid in the multiplication of âRomanticismsâ (p. 216). Accordingly, while Robinson makes frequent reference to the canonical six, his concern is with a much wider culture of writing, including excellent readings of the Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, Anna Barbauld, Leigh Hunt and John Clare. Robinson's argument is particularly significant in opening out the literary culture of the period to include much more writing than the traditional, imagination-based canon allows. This study is also briefly reviewed in section 1 above. Another fine study of Romantic-period poetics is Christopher R. Miller's The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry . Miller's thesis is that a particular form of evening poetry became possible in the Romantic period, one that in some senses came to define the nature of the poetic itself. Central to the way Miller understands this âchronotopeâ is the importance of poetic influence. Miller traces a history of writing about evening through Virgil's pastorals and georgics, Milton's Paradise Lost and âIl Penserosoâ, Gray's âElegyâ, Smith's Elegiac Sonnets , Collins's âOde to Eveningâ and Cowper's The Task , setting up a complex system of influences which he draws upon in chapters on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. The centrality of evening can seem a little forced at times, but Miller's close readings are often astonishingly fresh. There are avenues that Miller has neglected to wander down: some account of the mode's existence in the culture of the period beyond his chosen four poets would have been interesting, particularly given how many poets (Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Felicia Hemans, John Wilson, Leigh Hunt, indeed many addressed in Robinson's Unfettering Poetry ) at that time seemed to retain the influence of eighteenth-century sensibility more readily. This is an elegant, thoughtful study, and it packs an important theoretical challenge. To understand poetry, for Miller, is to be conscious that poems are, in Wallace Stevens's phrase, âmade out of other poemsâ, and that poems depend for their meanings on their relationship with genre and form. Miller is by no means hostile to or ignorant of historical or theoretical frameworks, but his book offers an âimplicit polemic: a claim that questions of form, genre, literary tradition, and aesthetic ambition continue to be worth asking; an assertion of the continuing vitality of ⊠close reading ⊠a reminder that not all interpretive questions can be helpfully answered with reference to historical events or contextsâ (p. 10). The âreturn to formalismâ suggested by the work of Stuart Curran and Susan Wolfson has begun to gather pace, and Miller's book is an important step in the wider debate of Romantic studies. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth , a collection of fifteen essays across five decades of scholarship by Jack Stillinger, also shows a commitment to poetic form. The scholarship has dated somewhat, but the work contained here is by no means anachronistic. Stillinger shows an acute awareness of the way poetry functions, both in its formal features and in its effects on readers. Stillinger speaks with an authority which few Romantic scholars can lay claim to, and with a candour which is refreshing. Yet for all that the criticism seems rather traditional, Stillinger is never complacent. His work on textual multiplicity vigorously challenges the concept of the unified text, the unified author, or a single poetic truth. The guiding concept behind this collection is âcomplexityâ, and discussion of Keats in particular provides a mode of reading in which multiplicity forms a necessary part of reader response, lines which provoke âresponses [which] have to be multiple and contradictoryâ (p. 207). For Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, editors of Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens , multiplicity is an important theoretical principle. In a theoretically astute introduction, Hopps and Stabler take aim at the secular criticism of which Romantic New Historicism is a prime example. The kind of ideological critique favoured by Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology [1983] suggests that the numinous and the spiritual are part of the âfalse consciousnessâ of Romanticism. Yet this has simply served, they argue, to replace one hegemonic order with another. In seeking to return religion to Romanticism, they do not wish to reverse the process, but to suggest that Romanticism is characterized by a âboth/andâ structure, a questioning âifâ. Building on the recent theological turn in postmodern thought, the editors make a persuasive case for the central significance of religion to Romantic criticism. It is a brilliant, engaging, ambitious introduction, constituting a significant challenge to Romantic critical norms. But it is not quite followed up by the essays contained, which maintain a rather traditional character. Timothy Webb's chapter on Coleridge and Southey's fear of Catholicism is well argued, but shows little evidence of the âtheological turn in postmodern thoughtâ. Yet if the essays do not follow the letter of the introduction, the collection as a whole maintains something of the spirit. Michael OâNeill closes the book with a fine chapter which considers Wallace Stevens's refusal of poetic certainty with reference to his influence by the Romantics, suggesting ultimately a much broader lack of closure in Romantic verse. Uncertainty comes to the fore in Hopps's elegant take on Wordsworth's linguistic uncertainty in The Prelude , which Hopps maintains is a sign of faith, not scepticism. Arthur Bradley's excellent chapter on Shelley's theology places the postmodern at the heart of religion. Taking Shelley's theology seriously requires recognizing the implication of the transcendent alongside scepticism about monumentalizing gestures. The best Romantic doubter is Byron, and he receives the lion's share of attention, the subject of six of fourteen chapters. Alan Rawes argues for a rereading of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage which considers and incorporates faith and confession, but Richard Cronin's chapter moves, seemingly, in another direction, arguing that Byron offers a worldly, even democratic contrast to Wordsworth's sense of the vatic, visionary poet. Yet although Cronin seems to offer a contrast, his chapter is an appropriate inclusion in a collection characterized by critical openness and a significant scepticism about absolutist interpretation. An excellent volume of essays published this year took literary influence as its topic: The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature , edited by Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley. âRomantic influenceâ inevitably suggests the work of Harold Bloom, but the contributors to this volume owe as much of a debt to New Historicist cultural materialism and Christopher Ricks's work on allusion in poetry as they do to Bloom's master-narrative of poetic creation. Indeed, Ricks's decidedly un-Bloomian sense of positive influence, of a âconvivial fraternityâ between poets, informs much of the work contained in this volume. The editors identify a âhealthy pluralityâ of critical and theoretical standpoints in Romantic studies, suggesting that this plurality (the combination of insights from materialist, psychoanalytic, atheoretical and other perspectives) can aid the study of influence. In work on influence canons are clearly relevant, and accordingly much of the work here is on major Romantic poets. Hugh Haughton traces Seamus Heaney's responses to his Irish contemporaries, who are all, for Heaney, measured against a standard of Wordsworthianism. In a sensitive piece that avoids ideological finger-wagging, Haughton shows how Heaney's decision to âdigâ into childhood memories is based on a Wordsworthian turn away from modernity. Lisa M. Steinman considers âcreative rereadingsâ of Wordsworth's âThe Solitary Reaperâ by Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. Steinman argues, intriguingly, that our understanding of Wordsworth's poem is now bound up with these twentieth-century interpretations. Michael OâNeill also looks at American poets, identifying an interesting reinterpretation of Romantic metaphor, while John Beer looks at Ted Hughes's interest in Coleridge's poetry, suggesting a parallel between the HughesâPlath relationship and that between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Three essays look at how Keats enters twentieth-century writing. John Whale shows how Tony Harrison approaches Keats's concept of history, arguing that Harrison's sense of historical consciousness is shaped by a sense of Keats's historical inadequacy. Richard Maggraf Turley unearths more Keatsian allusions in Bob Dylan's songs, while John Bayley considers Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman's responses to Keats, arguing that their awareness of Keats's Cockneyism allows poetic reinvigoration. On quite a different theoretical tack, but well worth mentioning, is Leon Chai's Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (also covered above). This extraordinarily ambitious book has a scope that, while it begins in the works of Romantic poets, goes well beyond the limits of this section. Chai's method is impressively interdisciplinary, including Humphry Davy's elemental theory and algebra alongside the Triumph of Life and Aids to Reflection . Chai argues that modern theory has reached an impasse, an impasse that has yet to be fully comprehended. To understand it, he argues, we must go back to the first theorists, the Romantics. Chai reads the Triumph of Life as an exemplar of Romantic theory. Searching for an origin produces only the story of a search for that origin, and Coleridge, likewise, produces in Aids to Reflection not a theory but a book about theory. Coleridge recognizes what Chai takes to be the fundamental insight of these Romantic theorists: that a meaningful account of theory requires precisely the kind of meditation on theory in a multiplicity of discursive fields that Chai presents here. It is an important book that ought to challenge much Romantic criticism and theory. John MacKay's Inscription and Modernity: From Wordsworth to Mandelstam presents an ambitious argument that extends across three centuries and four languages. The objection might well be made that such breadth loses in persuasive power what it gains in scale, but this would be unfair. MacKay makes no claims to map a historical continuum, but offers his materials as a series of âsnapshotsâ (p. 35) illustrative of a wider cultural shift. The book focuses on one poetic mode (the inscription, similar to the epitaph) to establish an argument about the development of âmodernityâ. Schiller's âaesthetic educationâ, he argues, is predicated upon a search for an appropriate audience, a process that constitutes this incipient modernity, only becoming inconceivable following the Second World War. Romanticism, he argues, can be seen as the beginning of modernity, and modernity results in the loss of certainty, both religious and epistemological. His studies of Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare are of particular significance for this section. MacKay is less interested in actual, physical inscriptions than in poems which invoke this mode. Such a poem importantly enacts a relationship between reader and speaker, and a sense of place and person are often foregrounded. The intense focus of Clare's poems on birdsâ nests (his âThe Pettichaps Nestâ is particularly well analysed) suggests a corporeality which has important bearings on Clare's acknowledgement of his public status as a âpeasant poetâ. MacKay also considers Wordsworth's âEssay upon Epitaphsâ, âMichaelâ and âTintern Abbeyâ alongside Shelley's âMont Blancâ and âOzymandiasâ. The wider frame is a consideration of the changing nature of the visual in the period. Taking the camera obscura as his central metaphor, MacKay gestures towards a series of larger contexts, from German aesthetics to Proust. The thesis is frequently compelling, if the expression can become rather prolix and unfocused. MacKay's understanding of the poetics of the inscription is an important one, and the poetry he discusses benefits from placement in the wider scope of his argument. Epitaphs were also considered by Richard Gravil in ââThe Sunless Landâ: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Virgil and Ossianâ ( ChLB 136[2006] 113â30). Gravil pursues Wordsworth's shifting conception of the afterlife, before concluding with an importantly ambivalent take on the Intimations ode which recognizes that âimmortality was never more than impliedâ. Stabler and Hopps make Jerome McGann's oft-referenced The Romantic Ideology a focus of their dismay, but another collection of essays shows evidence of his continuing influence. Romanticism: Comparative Discourses , edited by Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler, takes as its premise the idea that Romanticism has become, borrowing a term from Foucault, a âdiscourse systemâ. Consequently, the question of power is at the centre of the editorsâ conception of Romanticism. The collection thus has two focuses: Romantic texts and Romantic criticism. Such a critical perspective is hardly original, repeating the central theoretical prop of McGann's Romantic Ideology . Romantic studies has been historicizing for more than two decades, and ideological issues in both Romantic texts and Romantic criticism have become a frequent, even hackneyed, focus of debate. The chapters contain some fine work, however. Of those essays devoted to poetry, Richard A. Nanian's consideration of language as a climb towards inevitable inarticulacy is provocative, while Onita Vaz considers Coleridge's theory of imagination in relation to âFears in Solitudeâ. An excellent discussion of the connection between Byron's travel letters from Switzerland and Manfred by D.L. Macdonald makes for a persuasive reading that moves beyond Faustian drama. This is a compelling, if uneven, volume with contributors who are keen to question the political and theoretical underpinnings of Romantic criticism and culture. McGann returned in 2006 with The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World , which proposes that the response to a contemporary cultural crisis lies in the hands of literary critics. Scholars have a responsibility, for McGann, to pass on a cultural heritage and save poetry from âthe bad eminence [it] has gained in the last half centuryâ (p. x). Beginning with the Romantic poets, McGann traces a history of responses to culture, before offering his own mode of cultural criticism based on digital technology. The broad range of this book allows McGann to move swiftly from Swinburne to the Oulipo poets, but his initial critical opposition is between Byron (modern, sceptical) and Wordsworth (sadly lacking). His discussion of these poets is, unsurprisingly, well informed, but it repeats much that he has argued in more detail elsewhere. It is an entertaining polemic, likely to provoke a lively debate. McGann's ideological critique has been his most influential book, but he has also been a significant figure in theorizing the impact of the internet on literary study. Romanticism on the Net celebrated ten years of online publishing this year with a sparkling issue, featuring excellent essays by editors of Romantic sites, Morris Eaves (âCrafting Editorial Sentimentsâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 33 paras.) and Joseph Viscomi (âBlake's Virtual Designs and Reconstructions of The Song of Los â, RoN 41:ii[2006] 19 paras.), both of the Blake Archive, Steven E. Jones (âDigital Romanticism in an Age of Neo-Luddism: the Romantic Circles Experimentâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 35 paras.), of Romantic Circles and Jerome McGann (âFrom Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Textâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 41 paras.), of the Rossetti Archive, alongside articles which consider the ways in which Romanticism âprefigures and informsâ digital technology, including contributions by Christopher Keep (âGrowing Intimate with Monsters: Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and the Gothic Nature of Hypertextâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 12 paras.), Celeste Langan (âTelepathos: Medium Cool Romanticismâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 35 paras.) and Andrew Stauffer (âRomanticism's Scattered Leavesâ, RoN 41:ii[2006] 17 paras.). Dino Franco Felluga guest-edits a superb collection which reminds one how far digital technology has pushed Romantic studies in the past ten years, but also, particularly with Paul Youngquist's hypertext challenge to Romantic scholars (âTechno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurismâ, RoN 41:ii[2006]) in mind, a bracing hint at what is to come. Monika Lee, in ââHappy Copulationâ: Revolutionary Sexuality in Blake and Shelleyâ (in C.C. Barfoot, ed. âAnd Never Know the Joyâ: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry pp. 189â206), wonders âWhy in Romantic poetry is sexuality so often unnoticed or disregarded? (p. 189). The lack is a striking one, but the subject received some overdue attention this year. Lee considers the sexual in Blake and Shelley as a political issue. For both poets, cultural tyranny is expressed in laws, taboos and artificial hierarchies which keep the sexes separate, and both poets, for Lee, offer a sexualized poetry which breaks those bonds. Daniel Brass, in ââBursting Joy's Grapeâ in Keats's Odesâ (in Barfoot, ed., pp. 207â21), looks at Keats's odes, arguing that their movement from melancholic detachment through a heightened sense of fullness followed by a gentle decline is structured orgasmically. Brass's biographical explanations are a little weak, but the sexual in Keats is a topic worth reappraisal. Sexuality is also considered in a collection of essays edited by Richard C. Sha as part of Romantic Circles Praxis Series . Taking as its basis David M. Halperin's point that Foucault never intended a discontinuity between sexual acts and sexual identities, sexuality is re-examined across a wide range of Romantic texts. Two in particular are relevant to this section. Sha compares Shelley's and Halperin's conceptions of ancient Greek sex, exploring their differing conceptions of alterity in âThe Uses and Abuses of Historicism: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexualityâ ( RCPS [2006] 48 paras.), while Susan S. Lanser places Christabel alongside poems by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Shelley's âRosalind and Helenâ as part of a long-running debate in poetry about the nature and validity of female same-sex desire in ââPut to the Blushâ: Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropesâ ( RCPS [2006] 39 paras.). Literary relationships were considered from a less sexual perspective in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship , edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson. Two chapters are of relevance to this section. Anne D. Wallace, in âHome at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottageâ (pp. 100â23), contrasts William Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere with Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals , examining their respective reflections on domestic economy. Home at Grasmere concludes with the poet achieving the status of a solitary genius away from the domestic household, but Wallace does not argue for a neat gender divide. Rather, both Dorothy and William combine authority and collectivity in their writing, suggestive, for Wallace, of the changing nature of the literary marketplace. Alison Hickey, in ââThe body of my father's writingsâ: Sara Coleridge's Genial Labourâ (pp. 124â47), describes Sara Coleridge's collaboration with her husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge, on the posthumous editions of her father's work. Importantly, Hickey's essay draws attention to the way that Coleridge's âidentityâ is largely a posthumous invention. Perhaps the most telling paradox is that Sara herself âcollaboratedâ with her father's corpus to produce him as an individualized genius. Napoleon's place in Romantic culture was addressed in an excellent article by Paul Stock, âImposing on Napoleon: The Romantic Appropriation of Bonaparteâ ( JES 36[2006] 363â88). Romantic writers continually oscillate in their opinions of Napoleon, Stock argues, because their response to him is primarily philosophical and aesthetic, not political. Surveying poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron and Shelley, Stock ably draws out the difficulties inherent in assessments of the âgreatnessâ of a man who âdefines, and is defined byâ (p. 385) Romanticism. The Wordsworth Circle continued its re-evaluation of the shaping texts of the Romantic critical tradition, with essays on E.P. Thompson by Michael Scrivener (âE.P. Thompson and Radical Romanticismâ, WC 37[2006] 52â5), Raymond Williams by Eric C. Walker (âThe Long Revolution of Raymond Williams: Culture and Society Fifty Years onâ, WC 37[2006] 60â3), Earl Wasserman by Stuart Peterfreund (âEarl Wasserman: A Critical (Re-)Readingâ, WC 37[2006] 64â7), M.H. Abrams by Robert Koelzer (âAbrams among the Nightingales: Revisiting the Greater Romantic Lyricâ, WC 37[2006] 67â71) and Carl Woodring by Marilyn Gaull (âRevisiting 1970: Carl Woodring and Politics in English Romantic Poetryâ, WC 37[2006] 71â2). This is a timely series of articles, showing a respect for these formidable forebears but also reflecting helpfully on the changes wrought in Romantic studies since their seminal publications (and often, indeed, as a result of their publications). Also published in this journal was a âdeviant homageâ to another great Romanticist, Geoffrey Hartman. Hartman himself contributes a fine essay, âThe Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth's Profane Illuminationâ ( WC 37[2006] 8â14) in which he reconsiders âStrange fits of passionâ, compellingly reminding readers of the shocking, quiet strangeness of the Lyrical Ballads . This essay is then responded to by Ian Balfour (âResponding to the Call: Hartman between Wordsworth and Hegelâ, WC 37[2006] 15â16), Kevis Goodman (âOn Geoffrey Hartman's Psycho-Aestheticsâ, WC 37[2006] 17â19), Anne-Lise Francois (ââHum-menâ: In Place of Further Developmentâ, WC 37[2006] 19â22), Paul Fry (âProgresses of Poetryâ, WC 37[2006] 22â7), Joshua Wilner (ââSelf-displacing Visionâ: Snowdon and the Dialectic of the Sensesâ, WC 37[2006] 27â30) and Laura Quinney (âSwerving Neo-Platonistsâ, WC 37[2006] 31â8). The breadth of response and the serious and careful attention paid to the philosophical and poetic intricacies of Wordsworth's verse are a fitting tribute to the work of Hartman, a critic who has done so much to develop understandings of Romantic verse in general, and Wordsworth more than any other poet. I will turn now to those studies which have considered individual poets, beginning with Wordsworth. There were no books exclusively on Wordsworth in 2006, but he forms a significant part of two important studies. Wordsworth's inaction, particularly in his political life, has been the subject of some controversy in recent years, but for Stefanie Markovits in The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature this inaction is a central part of the development of literature in the nineteenth century. Markovits's focus on the âturn inwardsâ is predicated on the important observation that the Victorian novel developed out of Romantic poetry. Aristotle lies behind much of her argument, but Markovits is keen to point out that, where Aristotle places action at the centre of drama, writers in the nineteenth century tend, in revealing ways, towards feeling rather than plot. Markovits extends her discussion to include Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot and Henry James, but she begins with Wordsworth's The Borderers and The White Doe of Rylstone . In an elegantly argued chapter, Markovits reads The Borderers as expressive of Wordsworth's sense of guilt for his own inaction in France in the 1790s. But her focus is ultimately much larger, and her historicization much richer, than this suggests. Markovits shows that âWordsworth is unsure ⊠whether action or inaction is the best route toward self-consciousnessâ (p. 29), placing this literary shift in the context of political/literary acts such as The Convention of Cintra and A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff . Markovits argues of The White Doe that the division between the active Francis and the wisely passive Emily represents the division between the early and late Wordsworths. Wordsworth moves from dramatic action towards society, social intercourse, and self-consciousness, paving the way for the novel. Yet the âturn inwardsâ, Markovits warns, should not be simply aligned with an apolitical âRomantic Ideologyâ; rather, Wordsworth posits a mode of moral action dependent on passive stillness. Another book to feature Wordsworth has aims that extend not only beyond this section, but beyond English studies too. It has been a good year for religion and Romanticism, and in Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth , Lori Branch places Wordsworth as part of a long eighteenth-century history of spontaneity. Branch elegantly rereads Wordsworth's âspontaneous overflowâ, challenging the conventional division between early and late Wordsworths. Branch takes Wordsworth's religious thought seriously, arguing that his conception of spontaneity was moral before it was aesthetic. Rather than opposing the spontaneous Lyrical Ballads with the formal liturgy of Ecclesiastical Sonnets , Branch suggests that âritualâ and âspontaneityâ are combined in both. Wordsworth only seems âescapistâ when his most insistently historical and religious poems are removed from trajectories of his career arc. Wordsworth's religion was also covered in Jonathan Roberts's âWordsworth's Apocalypseâ ( L&T 20 [2006] 361â78), which concentrates on the Simplon Pass episode in The Prelude , offering a reading of âapocalypseâ as non-violent and non-eschatological. In an excellent reading, Roberts shows how the âdarkness and duplicity of language itselfâ (p. 374) produces in Wordsworth a personal apocalypse that fuses word and feeling. Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth's âThe Preludeâ: A Casebook , an instalment in the Oxford Casebooks in Criticism series, will prove a helpful guide for undergraduates approaching what is perhaps the most frequently discussed poem in Romantic studies. Gill's excellent introduction displays a real reverence for the poem, but he combines this critical generosity with a clear-sighted scepticism about the process of canonization. Gill surveys the critical recovery of the many texts of The Prelude that has occurred over the last century, and clearly lays out the problems that this process of textual recovery and reconstitution has posed. The publishing history of The Prelude , Gill argues, means that criticism pre-1957, unable to compare the various texts, lacks a vital element. Gill's selection of essays reflects this perception, covering only the last fifty years. These come from a number of critical and theoretical perspectives, including essays by M.H. Abrams, Anne Mellor, Alan Liu and Susan Wolfson, and ably recreate the breadth of debate that has surrounded the poem. As usual, The Prelude received a great deal of attention in Wordsworth studies this year. Lorne Mook's âThe Everyday and the Teleological: Time-Conflict, Progression, and Affect in Books 1 and 2 of The Prelude â ( ERR 17[2006] 593â605) provides a detailed reading of Books I and II, showing how Wordsworth alternates between the demands of the everyday and the movement forward that characterizes the poem as a whole, while Alan G. Hill's âThe Triumphs of Memory: Petrarch, Augustine, and Wordsworth's Ascent of Snowdonâ ( RES 57[2006] 247â58) considers the influence of Petrarch and Augustine on Wordsworth's development of a poetics of single selfhood. Nancy Yousef places the âdischarged soldierâ episode from Book IV of The Prelude in the context of eighteenth-century debates about moral sentiment, in âWordsworth, Sentimentalism, and the Defiance of Sympathyâ ( ERR 17[2006] 205â13). In a sensitive, well-argued piece, Yousef shows how Wordsworth accommodates, but moves beyond, the theories of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and others. The Prelude and âTintern Abbeyâ were the subjects of two elegant tributes to Richard Clancey published in the Charles Lamb Bulletin , Frederick Burwick's âDeath and Revisitation in The Prelude : Cartmel Priory and Furness Abbeyâ ( ChLB 134[2006] 37â49) and âDisturbed with Joyâ ( ChLB 134[2006] 50â5) by Bruce Graver. The multiplicity of contexts that has marked Romantic studies as a whole has benefited Wordsworth as much as any poet in 2006. Rachel Hewitt considers Wordsworth's 1827 trip to Ireland as an important foundation of his focus on map, mapping and geometric images in his later poetry, in âWordsworth and the Ordnance Survey in Ireland: âDreaming oâer the map of thingsââ ( WC 37[2006] 80â5), while the canonical and the non-canonical collide in Nikki Hessell's âThe Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and the Mass Mediaâ ( SiR 45[2006] 331â55). Hessell's excellent article contests the apparently normative opposition between poetry and journalism, reading Wordsworth's Preface as informed by the emergent debate over the respective roles of poetry and news. In a provocative piece, âHow Wordsworth Invented Picnicking and Saved British Cultureâ ( Romanticism 12[2006] 44â51), Andrew Hubbell argues that food should be considered an ideological issue. Eating outdoors in places of natural and national significance connects small groups together, allowing them to âperform Britishnessâ. While interesting, its applicability to Wordsworth's poetry is limited. Wordsworth's relationship with popular culture gains further attention in J. Jennifer Jones's thoughtfully argued âAbsorbing Hesitation: Wordsworth and the Theory of the Panoramaâ ( SiR 45[2006] 357â75), while G. Kim Blank's âThe âDegrading thirst after outrageous stimulationâ: Wordsworth as Cultural Criticâ ( JPC 39[2006] 365â82) is an intriguing if questionable attempt to place the Preface to Lyrical Ballads as a prefiguration of contemporary critique of popular culture. The Preface was considered in a philosophical context by William Hatherell in ââWords and Thingsâ: Locke, Hartley and the Associationist Context for the Preface to Lyrical Ballads â ( Romanticism 12[2006] 221â35), and James Mulvihill returned to the Preface in âGeorge Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric and Wordsworth's âPrefaceâ to Lyrical Ballads â ( N&Q 53[2006] 315â6), arguing that Wordsworth's idea that the poet can be influenced by âabsent thingsâ may have a source in George Campbell's widely read 1776 rhetorical adaptation of empirical psychology. Other contexts emerged: Alexander Regier's excellent âA Brotherhood is Broken: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and the Fragmentation of Languageâ ( ERR 17[2006] 607â28) considers The Ruined Cottage in Benjaminian context, dextrously arguing that Wordsworth approaches and negotiates a divide between the human and an ideal, non-fragmentary language, while Arnd Bohm provides an important rereading of the economy of âNuttingâ, placing the poem alongside an unacknowledged Ovidian source, in âWordsworth's âNuttingâ and the Ovidian âNuxââ ( SiR 45[2006] 25â48). Wordsworth's relationship with literary figures both past and present was a frequent topic of debate in 2006. Jo-Anne Cappeluti's rather disappointing âCaliban to the Audience: Auden's Revision of Wordsworth's Sublimeâ ( SiR 45[2006] 563â83) argues that Auden does not become anti-Romantic at mid-career. Rather, Cappeluti considers Auden's engagement with Romanticism, and with Wordsworth in particular, as a central point of negotiation in Auden's conception of audience. Malcolm Woodland also considered the âbelatednessâ of twentieth-century writers confronted with the influence of Wordsworth, focusing on Mark Strand's attempted âtranslationsâ of the poet in âWordsworth Stranded: The Prelude and Mark Strand's âThe Untellingââ ( TCL 52[2006] 367â90). In an ambitious piece entitled âCognition and Representation in Wordsworth's Londonâ ( SiR 45[2006] 157â80), Mark J. Bruhn places Book VII of The Prelude alongside Stephen Levinson's Space in Language and Cognition . The results are remarkably instructive, as Bruhn traces the function of mimesis in Wordsworth's extraordinary evocation of the ever-moving scene of urban life, as well as in his poetry more generally. Chetan Deshmane has recourse to Lacan to explain the nature of the speaker's âslumberâ in âWordsworth's âA slumberââ ( Expl 64[2006] 214â8). âSlumberâ should be considered a kind of swoon, with âdeathâ as a âmaster signifierâ which comes to reside in the unconscious, hence the change in tense between the two stanzas. Paul Betz draws attention to three unlikely comic portraits of Wordsworth, painted at the time of his highest cultural standing, in âIrreverent Glimpses of the Poet Laureate: Three Informal Portraits of William Wordsworthâ ( ChLB 134[2006] 32â6). Portraiture in the Romantic period was also considered this year by Christopher Rovee in Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism . Rovee takes as his topic the way in which portraits acted as contested areas of social and cultural identification in the Romantic period. Rovee's topic lies outwith the bounds of this section and his work is considered fully in section 1 above, but it is worth drawing attention to his final chapter on Benjamin Robert Haydon's 1842 portrait of Wordsworth. Neglected parts of the Wordsworthian oeuvre received welcome attention in three of the best articles to appear on Romantic poetry this year. Benjamin Kim's âGenerating a National Sublime: Wordsworth's The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes â ( SiR 45[2006] 49â75) takes oft-neglected mid-period Wordsworth seriously as a complicated response to contemporary political events, while John Axcelson's âThe âDial's Moral Roundâ: Charting Wordsworth's Evening Walk â ( ELH 73[2006] 651â71) is a superb reconsideration of a poem that has often stood outside the Wordsworthian corpus. Axcelson takes issue with both traditional and historicist readings of the poem, arguing that the poem has a particular significance for contemporary criticism as âan intriguing and now timely suggestion that consciousness of the historical moment ⊠is itself a product of timeâ. Wordsworth's late poetry is also discussed by Peter Manning in âThe Persian Wordsworthâ ( ERR 17[2006] 189â96). Manning, like Axcelson, considers Wordsworth's âPoems, Composed During a Tour in Scotland, and on the English Border, in the Autumn of 1831â as an instance of Wordsworth's engagement with, and resistance of, history, particularly as regards the importance of Persepolis to contemporary debates. Work on Coleridge's poetry was rather limited this year, though Nicholas Reid's excellent Coleridge, Form and Symbol is an important addition. Reid takes Coleridge's critical thought as its primary focus, but he places Coleridgean metaphysics alongside his early poetry. For Reid, it is âonly by examining the early poetry and later metaphysics together [that] the true dimensions of Coleridge's thought can be appreciatedâ (p. 2). Reid argues that Coleridge's conception of form and symbol is a broadly consistent aspect of his post-1818 thought which continues to be of relevance to contemporary theory. His first section lays the ground for his claim that Coleridge's conception of form should be taken seriously, before moving on to consider the significance of this view in his poetry. Reid argues that the Ancient Mariner is a self-referential meditation on the symbolic. The poem âestablishes its own mythic or fictional consciousnessâ, yet Reid is clear that this should not be read as a kind of deconstruction. Rather, âthe poem directs attention to its own function as myth, and to the function of the reader in participating in the interpretation of divine symbolsâ (p. 53). It is a critical move characteristic of the book. Reid is clearly aware of and influenced by contemporary critical theory, and indeed he is keen to show how an understanding of Coleridgean thought can aid that debate. Yet his primary preoccupation is to elucidate the complexities of Coleridge's thinking. His arguments may not convince all, but this is a generous, thoughtful book, and of significant importance to students of Coleridge's poetry and philosophy. Symbol in Coleridge's thought is also considered in an excellent piece, Daniel Fried's âThe Politics of the Coleridgean Symbolâ ( SEL 46[2006] 763â79). The Statesman's Manual , Fried argues, has for too long been considered as a rarefied, ahistorical text. Taking Coleridge's famous contrast between symbol and allegory seriously, Fried shows how this is a deeply political distinction, if one that bears the marks of Coleridge's later political philosophy. An interesting book, if one that marks a real departure from the rest of the year's work, is Reuven Tsur's âKubla Khanâ: Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality and Cognitive Style . The cumulative product of more than twenty years of research, Tsur takes seriously Coleridge's claim that his poetry functions beyond consciousness. Tsur suggests that those contemporaries like Byron and Scott who professed themselves transported by the effect of hearing Coleridge recite the poem may have been responding to the âhypnotic-ecstaticâ linguistic qualities of the poem. The book's detailed empirical studies are important to the field of cognitive linguistics, but the primary interest for literary scholars lies in the challenge it offers to âspeculativeâ conceptions of reader response. Tsur is perhaps a little hasty in dismissing âthe zeitgeistâ as an influence on responses to the poem. As most scholars published this year would protest, Coleridge's political beliefs were more important than simply a âfactorâ to be accounted for. But Tsur is clearly offering a quite different kind of book. Tsur analyses a number of readersâ readings of the text (which are available online), including those of celebrities. What a pity that he could not have performed the same analysis with the voice of the greatest talker of the Romantic age, Coleridge himself. Also published this year was Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life by William Christie. As part of Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series, this book faces an unusual difficulty with Coleridge, in that its subject has already performed the task in his important, if importantly odd, Biographia Literaria . Christie clearly has a great admiration for Coleridge in general and the Biographia in particular, and this is a generous, careful exploration of his life and work. The nature of the series requires Christie to use the life to understand the work, but this balancing can become a little strained. While supported by some recent scholarship, the readings Christie supplies lack the sophistication or depth of recent Coleridge studies. Reading the Ancient Mariner as âan account of what it means to be humanâ (p. 107) is not wholly unreasonable, but seems a little naive after more than thirty years of deconstructive and ideological critique of Romantic mores. The account of the life, meanwhile, while well developed, will clearly not match the depth provided by Richard Holmes's two-volume biography. Thomas R. Simmons's âColeridge Beyond Kant and Hegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentadâ ( SiR 45[2006] 465â81) reconsiders Coleridge's debt to German metaphysics, arguing that Coleridge moves beyond Kantian transcendentalism, prefiguring and extending Hegelian aesthetics. In another fine piece on Coleridge's conflicted relationship with his philosophical forebears, Richard Berkeley argues that previous critics have misunderstood his relationship with Spinoza, in âThe Providential Wreck: Coleridge and Spinoza's Metaphysicsâ ( ERR 17[2006] 457â75). Coleridge, for Berkeley, is faced with a multiplicity of interpretations of Spinoza, an irresolvable conflict that underpins the contrast between the âone lifeâ of âThe Eolian Harpâ and âDejection: an Odeâ. William A. Ulmer reads Religious Musings and âPreternatural Agencyâ as responses to Joseph Priestley's Unitarian teachings, foreshadowing Coleridge's subsequent turn away from necessitarian optimism towards nature and religious orthodoxy in âThe Alienation of the Elect in Coleridge's Unitarian Propheciesâ ( RES 57[2006] 526â44). Animal Magnetism's importance to nineteenth-century literature has been well covered in recent years, but Eric G. Wilson offers a new take on the debate, placing Coleridge's response to Anton Mesmer as a significant moment in the history of ideas in âMatter and Spirit in the Age of Animal Magnetismâ ( P&L 30[2006] 329â45). Aside from his philosophical interests, Coleridge's work was considered in other lights. James Mulvihill reconsiders John Wilson and Alexander Blair's letter to The Friend , and Wordsworth's printed response, as central to Coleridge's philosophical and educational concerns in âRomantic Mentoring and Mathetesâ Letter to The Friend â ( SiR 45[2006] 503â21). Coleridge's newspaper poetry at the Morning Post had further light shed on it (see also Mazzeo's Plagiarism and Literary Property , discussed above) by Timothy Whelan in âColeridge, the Morning Post , and Female âIllustrissimaeâ: An Unpublished Autographâ ( ERR 17[2006] 21â38), which considers a recently discovered unpublished letter from Coleridge to Samuel Purkis. Felicity James also looks at Coleridge's periodical verse in âWriting in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazineâ ( 19 3[2006] 1â21). James mobilizes a thorough understanding of Romantic periodicals to question Jon Klancher's conception of a periodical's âtransauthorial discourseâ, arguing instead that Coleridge, in a complex fashion, constructed an individual voice. Samantha Webb shows that Coleridge and Southey's pantisocracy scheme unfolded at a time of intense food scarcity in England, and Webb posits this background as a possible impulse behind their desire to move to America in ââNot so pleasant to the tasteâ: Coleridge in Bristol during the Mixed Bread Campaign of 1795â ( Romanticism 12[2006] 5â14). John Ower considers the reference to a âhot and copper skyâ in the Ancient Mariner (l. 111), suggesting that it has a variety of referents, from alchemy to the âship's copperâ (used for cooking and boiling clothes), in âColeridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner â ( Expl 65[2006] 19â21). The Coleridge Bulletin provided some important new work on Coleridge in 2006. Coleridge's relationship with influence has been considered elsewhere this year, and Kiran Toor's ââO yes! but I can!ââColeridge's Chemical Othersâ ( ColB 27[2006] 17â26) looked at Coleridge's literary relationship with contemporary science, suggesting that his âchemical vocabularyâ brought his conception of authorial subjectivity into question. Chine Sonoi looks at the subtle changes in Coleridge's attitudes to the slave trade, suggesting that he provides a key to understanding the wider shift in attitudes to abolition, in âColeridge and the British Slave Tradeâ ( ColB 27[2006] 27â37). Ross Wilson examines Coleridge's philosophy of language, suggesting that, for Coleridge, the âlifeâ of language is ultimately mechanistic, in âColeridge and the Life of Languageâ ( ColB 27[2006] 38â44). Alexander J.B. Hampton considers Coleridge's oft-deferred Opus Maximum in âThe Struggle for Reason: Early Development of Triadic Self-Consciousness in the Opus Maximumâ ( ColB 27[2006] 45â55), while Katy Beavers's pleasant âPoetical, Political and Personal Epistolary Thoughts of Charles Lamb and Coleridgeâ ( ColB 27[2006] 56â64) describes the correspondence between Lamb and Coleridge. Richard Cronin takes the âgarrulous, egotistical, imitative, muddledâ (p. 12) Joseph Cottle as his subject, arguing that Cottle's influence on the Lake school is due reappraisal, in âJoseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticismâ ( ColB 28[2006] 1â12), while in a tribute to John Beer, Marilyn Gaull considers the importance of âthingsâ to Wordsworth and Coleridge, in âThe Speaking Face of Things and the Bride of Quietnessâ ( ColB 28[2006] 13â21). Felicity James treats Coleridge's relationship with Unitarianism, in particular his relationship with Elizabeth Evans and Anna Letitia Barbauld, in âColeridge and the Unitarian Ladiesâ ( ColB 28[2006] 46â53), and Patty OâBoyle returns to politics, wondering what resonance Coleridge and Wordsworth would have discovered in John Thelwall's play The Fairy of the Lake [1801], in âColeridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall's Fairy of the Lake â ( ColB 28[2006] 63â71). Michael Raiger suggests that there may have been more to Coleridge's religious message in The Ancient Mariner than is commonly thought by placing the poem in historical context in âI Shot the Albatrossâ ( ColB 28[2006] 72â82). Veronika Ruttkay's intelligent, refreshing article, âPassion's Rhetoric: Coleridge on King Lear and the New Rhetorical Traditionâ ( ColB 28[2006] 83â91), treats Coleridge's frequent invocation of King Lear in order to interrogate his conception of feeling and imagination. Byron has been well served in books with more general aims published this year (notably Wolfson's Borderlines and Hopps and Stabler's Romanticism and Religion ), but he forms a major part of three others. Christopher Strathman's Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative is an account of the work of Byron and Joyce that puts their work (particularly Don Juan and Ulysses ) in the context of Schlegel's Romantische Poesie . The book is confidently argued and ambitious in its theoretical scope, mapping out a theory of genre with important applications to literary writing from Homer to Beckett. There is an admirable clarity to Strathman's style, despite the complexity of the ideas he approaches. Strathman aims to chart a progress: Schlegel theorizes an aesthetics of the fragmentary that had been given expression earlier (notably by Plato in the Dialogues , and by Sterne in Tristram Shandy ), which is picked up on and developed first by Byron, then by Joyce, and reaches its apotheosis in the theory of Blanchot. Strathman skirts quickly over Byron's early âfragmentaryâ works ( The Giaour , Manfred , and the four cantos of Childe Harold ), but the poem that he devotes most attention to is Don Juan . The relevance of Schlegelian âtranscendental buffooneryâ to Don Juan has been addressed before, notably by Anne Mellor, and Strathman's aim is to further radicalize the destabilizing nature of Byron's masterpiece. The argument benefits from a close engagement with the grammar of the poem to produce a broadly persuasive if occasionally limited reading of Byron's brilliant, complex, and often profoundly unsettling use of language. Strathman's emphasis on literature's ability to express âwhat remains unthought in thinkingâ (p. 106) and his defence of a genre of writing that allows the expression of a conception of âunderstandingâ that is not dependent on monolithic truth, but defined as âa conversation vulnerable to interruptions from the outsideâ (p. 39), allows for an important questioning of the assurances of much Romantic literary criticism. Of similar scope was Deborah Lutz's entertaining if rather sweeping The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative . Lutz considers Byron as the cultural instigator of âthe dangerous loverâ, a trope which continues to have relevance to a genre Lutz displays a real reverence for, the popular romance. Using Heidegger and Hegel to help unlock Mills and Boon is not, for Lutz, to afford an unlikely seriousness to pop culture, but properly to use popular culture alongside philosophy to help elucidate, in a phrase typical of the book, âthe mystery of existenceâ (p. xii). Lutz traces the development of these dangerous lovers back through the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and an important insight is the significance of Walter Scott's novels on the development of this eroticized trope. Much more could be said about this, pinpointing the ways in which Scott and Byron manipulate the sense of homelessness, history and the erotic (the barely subdued homoeroticism and deliberate Byronism of Redgauntlet is an interesting avenue that Lutz bypasses). Lutz, indeed, moves a little too quickly between texts at times, sacrificing the development of a fuller, more convincing argument for the rattling pace of the narrative she tells. This is a lively study, and it throws up a number of interesting parallels and suggestions that are worth following up. It is the breadth and theoretical ambition of this study which make it so compelling: unfortunately, they may also mean that its influence is relatively limited. Byron's nineteenth-century legacy is also covered by Colette Colligan in The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture , discussed further in several sections in Chapter XIII in this volume. Colligan focuses on print culture, the mechanisms and techniques which underpin the distribution of texts, a subject that is beginning to receive the attention it deserves in the Romantic period and in literary scholarship more broadly. Colligan's study is cultural: her focus is not on Byron or Beardsley per se , but how their works were disseminated, and how this affected the way that they were read. Obscenity, she argues, like any other critical construction, is unstable and culturally contested. Reading Byron alongside Southey's attacks on him in the Quarterly Review , Colligan shows how the publications of these authors share a cultural space with obscenity, and that their published acknowledgement of obscenity's existence makes the cultural boundaries they seek to draw all the more difficult to maintain. Of primary interest to Romanticists is her chapter on Byron, which reads his invocation of orientalist tropes as culturally bound up with a sensuality associated with obscene publications. As William St Clair and others have shown recently, Byron's audience became hugely diversified after Don Juan was pirated by radical publishers. The conservative backlash to his apparent obscenity, Colligan shows, is rooted in precisely this issue. Writers like Southey were afraid not of Byron, but of the effect he might have in the wrong (labouring-class) hands. This is a study which will interest many Byronists, but it is also an important addition to studies of print culture. Of related interest is Tom Mole's excellent ââNourished by that abstinenceâ: Consumption and Control in The Corsair â ( Romanticism 12[2006] 26â34), in which Mole considers Byron's poetic representations of eating in terms of his response to the âapparatusâ of celebrity culture. Popular culture forms a part of Stuart Peterfreund's âJuan the Memorious: The Feinaiglian Narrative Dynamics of Don Juan â ( ERR 17[2006] 403â18). Peterfreund places the mnemonicist Feinaigle's New Art of Memory as an important context for Don Juan in which Byron's sense of the difficulty of descending to posterity is accommodated by becoming memorable in surprising ways. Byron's relationship with religion has been well discussed this year, and Fred Parker adds to the debate in âBetween Satan and Mephistopheles: Byron and the Devilâ ( CQ 35[2006] 1â29). Parker takes seriously Southey's suggestion that Byron is of the Devil's party to read Byron through the lens of Satanic opposition. Religion is considered from a more positive perspective by Harold Ray Stevens in ââI am more fit to die than people thinkâ: Byron on Immortalityâ ( C&L 55[2006] 333â67), in which Stevens somewhat polemically suggests that Byron may have been less Calvinistically pessimistic in his thoughts of the afterlife than generally assumed. An important special issue of Romanticism on the Net , guest-edited by Jeffrey Vail, considered âLord Byron's Canonsâ. Paul Douglass considered the reciprocal influence between Byron and female writers such as Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Dacre, Madame de StaĂ«l and Harriet Lee in âLord Byron's Feminist Canon: Notes Toward its Conclusionâ ( RoN 43[2006] 47 paras.). Susan Wolfson has discussed the importance of the feminine to Byron elsewhere this year, and here Douglass suggests that Byron's style was shaped by the âgravitational pullâ of femininity. Wolfson considered the effects of teaching Byron and Felicia Hemans alongside each other this year in âTeaching Hemans with Byronâ ( ERR 17[2006] 93â9, also discussed below), and Sharifah Aishah Osman, in ââMightier than death, untamable by fateâ: Felicia Hemans's Byronic Heroines and the Sorority of the Domestic Affectionsâ ( RoN 43[2006] 41 paras.), argues that Byron's Oriental romances proved a decisive influence on Hemans, whose Byronic heroines consider empire from a quite different perspective than Byron's heroes. Byron's femininity is also a concern for Joshua D. Gonsalves in âByronâin-between Sade, LautrĂ©ament, and Foucault: Situating the Canon of Evil in the Nineteenth Centuryâ ( RoN 43[2006] 32 paras.), which traces the influence of the Marquis de Sade on Byron, arguing in an ambitious if intriguing piece for a repositioning of evil in Byron's work. Peter Cochran suggests a mutually self-destructive relationship between Byron and Shelley in âByron and Shelley: Radical Incompatiblesâ ( RoN 43[2006] 100 paras.), while Angela Esterhammer looks at the relationship between the famous improvisatore Tommaso Sgricci and Byron's aesthetics, particularly in Don Juan , in âImprovisational Aesthetics: Byron, the Shelley Circle, and Tommaso Sgricciâ ( RoN 43[2006] 23 paras.). Maria Shoina looks at Byron and Mary Shelley's contrasting approach to Italian culture and, more broadly, the politics of national identity in ââTo engraft ourselves on foreign stocksâ: Byron's Poetics of Acculturationâ ( RoN 43[2006] 16 paras.) and Emily A. Bernhard Jackson argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold should be considered as the first philosophical step down the road towards Don Juan in âThe Harold of a New Age: Childe Harold I and II and Byron's Rejection of Canonical Knowledgeâ ( RoN 43[2006] 52 paras.). The Byron Journal produced a number of articles of interest this year. Michael OâNeill, with characteristic sensitivity to the resonance of words and form, provides an account, in ââA Magic Voice and Verseâ: Byron's Approaches to the Ode, 1814â1816â ( ByronJ 34[2006] 101â14), of Byron's odes and ode-like poems between 1814 and 1816, a period in which, through the influence of Shelley, Byron was reappraising Wordsworth's poetry. Gordon Potter focuses on Byron's deployment of specific images at the central points of his poems. The digressive and potentially endless Don Juan seems to resist such planning, but Potter shows how Byron incorporates this technique to comic effect in âByron's Numerology Revisited: Don Juan â ( ByronJ 34[2006] 115â25). Gillian Hughes traces the relationship between Byron and James Hogg in ââNative Energyâ: Byron and Hogg as Scottish Poetsâ ( ByronJ 34[2006] 133â42), while Andrew M. Stauffer insists on the importance of recognizing the private and public means of transmission in the reproduction of Byron's poems, âByronic Transmission and the First Poem for Caroâ ( ByronJ 34[2006] 143â5). Elsewhere this year Paul Douglass, in âAn Unpublished Letter from Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lambâ ( N&Q 53[2006] 322â3), drew attention to a letter from Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb (or âCaroâ) that Lamb had transcribed in full for Lady Melbourne as recriminations between the lovers set in. Douglass also contributed an article on Byron's relationship with architectural ruins and Wordsworthian nature in âParadise Decomposed: Byron's Decadence and Wordsworthian Nature in Childe Harold III and IVâ ( ByronJ 34[2006] 9â19). Jonathon Shears, in ââA Tale Untoldâ: The Search for a Story in Byron's Lara â ( ByronJ 34[2006] 1â8), unearths a fascinating paradox in Lara . Shears suggests that the poem's fragmentary nature holds out to the reader the possibility of ethical judgement of the poem's action which, because of its unfinished state, must always remain unfulfilled. Simon Bainbridge also looks at Byron's relationship with his readers, focusing on his devoted female reading audience. âLord Ruthven's Power: Polidori's âThe Vampyreâ, Doubles and the Byronic Imaginationâ ( ByronJ 34[2006] 21â34) identifies and describes the cultural phenomenon which allowed Byron, like Dr John Polidori, to exploit commercially the rhetorical power of the Byronic. Also published on Byron this year was Jie-Ae Yu's âHeredity and Free Choice in Byron's Werner â ( KSR 20[2006] 119â32), which considers the possibility of Byron's awareness of psychological traits being passed down in families as an integral part of the tragedy of Werner , while Seyed Mohammed Marandi's âByron's Infidel and the Muslim Fishermanâ ( KSR 20[2006] 133â55) follows Said in asking scholars to be aware that Byron's representations of the Orient may have been influenced not by empirical truth, but by ideology. Anne Fleming presented a new biography of Byron, Byron the Maker: Truth or MasqueradeâAn Exploration , the first volume of which ( Byron in England , covering his life from Aberdeen in 1788 to departure for the Continent in 1816) was published in 2006. This claimed, like most biographies of the poet, to present the true Byron, shorn of the biased calumny of earlier commentators. It is a pleasant read, and incorporates a consistent focus on Byron's letters, journals and poetry. Fleming is quick to defend Byron from those who would question his moral integrity, but any thoroughgoing analysis of Byron's cultural importance or of the relationship between the life and work is thin on the ground. It is a generous biography by a writer with an evident passion for her subject, but not a book that is likely to have much influence on scholarly readers. The year 2005 was something of a bumper one for Shelley studies, and he has been an important part of this year's work, particularly in books by Mazzeo and Miller. But after such an outpouring, it is unsurprising to find that there was somewhat less published in 2006. Timothy Morton edits The Cambridge Companion to Shelley , a useful introduction for undergraduates and graduates. The chapters here are notably strong, and contain work that stands in its own right as important criticism on Shelley. Chapters by William Keach (on poetry and politics), Jeffrey Robinson (on translation) and Jerrold Hogle (on language and linguistics) stand out. These critics have done much in recent years to assist in the multiplication of âShelleysâ, and in the establishment of historical and theoretical context to the major poems. Morton clearly favours the radical Shelley (as opposed to the Arnoldian angel) amongst these versions of the poet, and his introduction is lively and well informed. Morton has himself been an important influence on Shelley studies, and his enthusiasm for his topic is more than apparent. His attempts to place Shelley as the hippest of the Romantics can become rather silly, unfortunately: his remark that âShelley would have loved the Internetâ (p. 2) is one thing, but placing Shelley as âa class traitor with attitudeâ (p. 3) or remarking that âRadical working-class literature during Shelley's time was often coruscatingly psychedelicâ (p. 8) begins to suggest a geography teacher rapping about weather systems. All this is all the more unnecessary given that Shelley studies, as this collection ably demonstrates, is in a state of rude health, benefiting as well as any of the canonical six from the current direction of Romantic studies. Indeed, Morton adds to this, with a fine if similarly idiosyncratic article on Shelley's eating habits, âJoseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianismâ ( Romanticism 12[2006] 52â61). There were a number of other articles of note on Shelley, beyond those mentioned already in this section. Jonathan Sachs's excellent essay ââYet the Capital of the Worldâ: Rome, Repetition, and History in Shelley's Later Writingsâ ( NCC 28[2006] 105â26) considers Shelley's classicism. While Greece remained a major focus for the philhellenic poet, Sachs argues that Rome provides a crucial function in the often deeply political structuring of Shelley's historical thought. Patriotism in Shelley's writing is a welcome, and almost wholly ignored topic, but Matthew C. Borushko provides a timely glance at the topic in ââA Nation or a Worldâ: Patriotism in Shelleyâ ( RCPS [2006] 20 paras.). Shelley's political thought, as Borushko recognizes, is always poetical, and here Borushko shows how patriotism, if patriotism of a distinctly cosmopolitan and radical nature, occasions a âgoing out of oneselfâ similar to the effect of Shelleyan poetry. The influence of William Herschel's astronomy on Shelley's understanding of cosmology, particularly relevant to Prometheus Unbound , was convincingly established by Christopher Goulding in âShelley's Cosmological Sublime: William Herschel, James Lind, and The Multitudinous Orb â ( RES 57[2006] 783â92). Herschel's relationship with Romanticism was considered in one other article this year, Dometa Wiegand's âColeridge's âWeb of Timeâ: The Herschels, the Darwins, and âPsalm 19ââ ( ColB 28[2006] 91â100). Also published was Alan Weinberg's ââAll things are soldâ: The Degrading Intrusiveness of Commerce, with Reference to Shelley's Queen Mab Vâ ( KSR 20[2006] 102â18), not so much a consideration of Shelley as a polemic against modern capitalism, and Sandro Jung's âOvercoming Tyranny: Love, Truth and Meaning in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound â ( KSR 20[2006] 89â101). One of the more unlikely topics, but nonetheless interesting for it, was Lisbeth Chapin's consideration of the importance of worms to Shelley's writing in âShelley's Great Chain of Being: From âBlind Wormsâ to âNew-Fledged Eaglesââ (in Frank Palmeri, ed., Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics pp. 153â68). The worm is, surprisingly, the animal Shelley referred to most in his poetry, and its lowly position in the animal kingdom allowed Shelley to reconsider the place of humanity in the chain of being. The importance of Shelley's conception of âfree loveâ in Epipsychidion for Emily BrontĂ«'s Wuthering Heights was the topic of Patsy Stoneman's ââAddresses from the Land of the Deadâ: Emily BrontĂ« and Shelleyâ ( BS 31[2006] 121â31). Susan Wolfson has offered one way of reading Keats's critical reception in Borderlines , and Sarah Wootton returns to the topic in Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature . Wootton considers Keats through literary and artistic representations of images from his poems from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. She makes an eloquent argument for the multiplication of critical Keatses. âKeats's statusâ, she argues, âhas not been attained in spite of the translations that consolidate his originality, but as a direct result of multiple acts of representationâ (p. 145). Beginning with Shelley's Adonais , Wootton shows how Keats became the object of posthumous consumption and regeneration. In elegies of Keats by Browning and Shelley, Keats becomes at first diminished, and later wholly obliterated. With female poets like Rossetti and Barrett Browning, however, Keats's voice is not simply subsumed into that of the elegist, but is recuperated and celebrated. In a series of excellent readings of paintings of scenes from Keats's poems by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and others, Wootton shows how word and image combine to produce distinct versions of Keats. In a discussion of John Melhuish Strudwick's Isabella , Wootton argues that Keats's sensuality had become a commercial speculation. Rather than a productive relationship with Keats's work, High Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painting produces a parasitic, repetitive regression. The central figure in the book is Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Borrowing from Girard and LĂ©vi-Strauss, Wootton argues for a homoerotic love triangle involving Keats, Rossetti and Thomas Hall Caine. Wootton investigates how âKeats is utilised as a sign for the Rossettian personaâ (p. 97). Wootton's use of gender theory can become a little clunky at times, particularly in an otherwise interesting mapping of interpretations of âLa Belle Dame sans Merciâ. The book is also marred by an unfortunately high density of typographical errors, but this is a fine addition not only to Keats studies, but to studies of poetic influence more broadly. This was the only book on Keats this year, but he was well served by a number of articles. Porscha Fermain's elegant â Isabella , Lamia , and âMerry Old Englandââ ( EIC 56[2006] 139â62) reads Keats alongside important articles in Hunt's Examiner , arguing that the poems share with Hunt an antagonistic response to a spirit of money-getting. Politics underpin Joshua David Gonsalves's entertainingly allusive âProblematic Figurations of the Nation as I-Land: A Phenomenological Report on Half-Knowledge from âAny Isle of Lethe Dullââ ( SiR 45[2006] 425â64), which takes Keats's âOde on Melancholyâ as its starting point, questioning the connection between nation and Romantic self. The potentially charged political significance of particular words in âTo Autumnâ has been a frequent topic of debate of late, and in a short piece, âKeats's âTo Autumnââ ( Expl 65[2006] 26â8), Thomas Dilworth wonders whether the negative connotations of âbarredâ, âcellsâ and âconspiringâ might in fact focus attention, by means of contrast, on the possibility of âinner freedomâ. Polly Robinson pursues the topic of Keats's medical training, suggesting in a fine piece that it underpinned his sense of the âusefulnessâ of his own vocation as a poet in ââPhysician to All Menâ? The Influence of Keats's Medical Trainingâ ( KSR 20[2006] 32â43). John Barnard presents new research to suggest that Keats may have met the costs of his 1817 Poems in âFirst Fruits or âFirst Blightsâ: A New Account of the Publishing History of Keats's Poems (1817)â ( Romanticism 12[2006] 71â101), while Richard Marggraf Turley sheds further light on Keats's relationship with his public, comparing his reception with that of his more successful contemporary âBarry Cornwallâ in âKeats, Cornwall and the âScent of Strong-Smelling Phrasesââ ( Romanticism 12[2006] 102â14). Keats's poetics and his literary relationships have not slipped wholly from critical view, however. Klaus Hofmann surveys criticism of Keats's relationship with his urn in âKeats's Ode to a Grecian Urnâ ( SiR 45[2006] 251â84), and J. Robert Barth, SJ, proposes a reading of Keats's religious views in his poetry and letters of 1819 that plots a middle course between scepticism and Christian orthodoxy in âKeats's Way of Salvationâ ( SiR 45[2006] 285â97). Jacques Khalip's âVirtual Conduct: Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keatsâ ( ELH 73[2006] 885â912) returns to the relationship between Hazlitt's 1805 Essay and Keatsian poetics. Hazlitt's âdisinterestednessâ is, for Khalip, a major influence on Keats's conception of the ethical limits of the aesthetic. In a somewhat less successful essay, Beth Lau considers another influence, offering Austen and Keats as birds of a literary feather in âJane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Realityâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 81â110). Matthew Scott, in a fine article, places Keats alongside Coleridge wrestling with the mind/body problem in âJohn Keats and the Aesthetics of Topsy-Turvyâ ( ERR 17[2006] 245â54). Scott considers Romantic responses to culture, both âhigh-mindedâ and otherwise, suggesting that emotion, mind and body can combine productively. Michaela Bronstein suggests that Keats's poetics are fundamentally indeterminate, comprising a vivid mix of fragmentation and wholeness in âThe Half-Unravelled Web: Keats's Intermediate Truthsâ ( KSR 20[2006] 44â51). Cedric Watts draws attention to the remarkable irony inherent in the fact that the copy of Keats's âBright Starâ sonnet in the poet's own hand is written opposite Shakespeare's âA Lover's Complaintâ in âKeats's âBright Starâ and âA Lover's Complaintââ ( N&Q 53[2006] 320â2). The seemingly deliberate juxtaposition of the two, Watts shows, âextends, complements and enrichesâ âBright Starâ, suggesting a self-referential irony on Keats's part. In another short note, Juan Christian Pellicer, ââThe food of my delighted fancyâ: Another Echo of Lucrece in Keatsâ ( ANQ 19:iii[2006] 13â14), picks up on an allusion to Shakespeare in âHow many bards gild the lapses of time!â and argues that the allusion itself is a correlative for the wonder of poetic influence. Also published on Keats this year was Katharine Stimson's pleasant if limited tracing of robin imagery in Keats's verse, ââWhere robins hop, and fallen leaves are sereâ: Keats's Robin and the Social Imaginationâ ( KSR 20[2006] 58â68). John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar was presented in an elegant edition by Tim Chilcott, which usefully places manuscript and published versions in a parallel text. Clare also made an appearance in six articles of note. Sarah Houghton's âThe âCommunityâ of John Clare's Helpstoneâ ( SEL 46[2006] 781â802) compares the community Clare used as a yardstick with which to measure modern society with Wordsworth's sense of community. Clare's late poetry, a focus of Margaret Russett's work this year, is further considered by Jason N. Goldsmith in âThe Promiscuity of Print: John Clare's âDon Juanâ and the Culture of Romantic Celebrityâ ( SEL 46[2006] 803â32). Goldsmith's fine article places Clare's sexual punning as a response to a rising celebrity culture dominated by Byron. âDon Juanâ is a poem also considered by Eric Robinson in ââMarried at Lastâ: A New Source for Clare's âDon Juanââ ( WC 37[2006] 92), which proposes Roy Palmer's âMarried at Lastâ as a source for references to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and Sarah M. Zimmerman, in an excellent article, consider not the biographical Clare, but his published existence, noting in particular the way that his work is a collaborative production involving poet, publisher and editor, in âJohn Clare's Career, âKeats's Publisherâ, and the Early Nineteenth-Century Book Tradeâ ( SiR 45[2006] 377â96), and Clare's relationship with Charles Lamb was recast by Simon Kövesi in âJohn Clare, Charles Lamb and the London Magazine : â Sylvanus et Urban ââ ( ChLB 135[2006] 82â93). Kövesi places the two writers in the context of the literary game-playing of 1820s magazine culture, suggesting that Lamb's influence on Clare (particularly with reference to Lamb's fondness for seventeenth-century writers such as Robert Burton) may have been greater than previously thought. P.M.S. Dawson adds an important work of archival scholarship in âJohn Clare's Village Job: The Making of The Village Minstrel (1821)â ( Romanticism 12[2006] 236â71). Work on Thomas Lovell Beddoes was limited to an article on his late drama this year, covered in Chapter XIII. Of interest to Shelley scholars, but also to those interested in Thomas Hood, is Bryan Rivers's ââTenderlyâ and âWith Careââ: Thomas Hood's âThe Bridge of Sighsâ and the Suicide of Harriet Shelleyâ ( N&Q 53[2006] 327â9) which explains an allusion to Hood by a Victorian historian who provided the source material for information on Harriet Shelley's drowning. Given the allusion, Rivers suggests, locals were clearly under the impression that Harriet had recourse to prostitution. Thomas Hood's poetry is addressed this year by Peter Simonsen in ââWould that its tone could reach the rich!â: Thomas Hood's Periodical Poetry Bridging Romantic and Victorianâ ( RomText 16[2006] 41â64), arguing that Hood's magazine verse of the 1820s and 1830s provides an important insight into the neglected literary culture of this period. Elsewhere in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780â1840 (formerly Cardiff Corvey ), Gavin Edwards takes George Crabbe's poetry as a case study, exploring the development of typographical conventions concerning the capitalization of initial letters, a convention that Dickens usefully exploited later in the century, in âGeorge Crabbe: A Case Studyâ ( RomText 16[2006] 7â20). (b) Women's PoetryThe year's work in this category was particularly interested in engaging with the national and transnational concerns of the poets, and an excellent essay by Anne Mellor serves as a good introduction to some of the major themes addressed in the critical work in this field. âEmbodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Writerâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 289â300) argues that, whereas trans-racial love plots written by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century men tend to end badly for those involved, as Mary Pratt shows in Imperial Eyes , the response by women writers was more complicated. Mellor offers examples from Romantic-era women's novels in which these relationships are portrayed as egalitarian ideals, for instance Felix de Lacey and Sophie in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Elizabeth Inchbald's Such Things Are and Hannah Cowley's A Day in Turkey, or, The Russian Slaves . The success of these relationships, however, is problematized in plays such as Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia and Marianne Starke's The Widow of Malabar , which, Mellor suggests, despite its violence, evokes a sense of âinternational peace sealed by inter-racial romanceâ secured by the young Brahmin priest's call for enlightened reason and universal human rights. There is an important discussion of Felicia Hemans in Susan J. Wolfson's major work Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism , discussed at length in the section 1 above. Hemans's The Siege of Valencia was the subject of three essays this year, all of which are also further discussed in section 5 below. John David Lopez's compelling essay âRecovered Voices: The Sources of The Siege of Valencia â ( ERR 17:i[2006] 69â72) suggests that Hemans's play responds to and ultimately challenges two earlier plays, John Home's Siege of Aquileia [1760] and Edward Jerningham's Siege of Berwick [1793]. Through a comparison of the three plays in which Hemans's addition of the character Ximena to the borrowed plot is highlighted, Lopez complicates earlier readings of The Siege of Valencia to argue that Hemans simultaneously presents a woman's resistance to masculine codes of nationalism and her ability to subscribe ardently to them. Another essay on The Siege of Valencia , Jeffrey Cass's ââThe Race of the Cidâ: Blood, Darkness, and the Captivity Narrative in Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 315â26), interprets the play, and its original subtitle, âThe Race of the Cidâ, as a captivity narrative in which blood becomes a weapon and a mother's body becomes the scene of a battle either to maintain racial purity or to propagate an enemy army. For an already hybridized people, sacrificing maternal feeling to secure the myth of racial purity and national identity and pride becomes a crucial tactic of war. The third essay, Aileen Forbes's âBesieged Vision: The Siege of Valencia and Felicia Hemans's Theater of Sacrificeâ, appeared in a special issue of KSJ on women's writing ( KSJ 55[2006] 158â78). Two short essays by Susan Wolfson ( ERR 17:i[2006] 88â99), âIntroduction: Representing Felicia Hemansâ and âTeaching Hemans with Byronâ, underline the importance of constantly reassessing the ways in which Hemans is presented to new audiences. The first essay traces some of the recent developments in scholarly editions of Hemans's poems and her inclusion in anthologies which facilitate teaching. In the second essay Wolfson begins by sharing some of her own experiences of teaching Hemans and the success she has had with undergraduates in reading Hemans after Byron. As an example, Wolfson provides a reading of The Giaour and The Bride of the Greek Isle to draw attention to the Byronic tropes which Hemans adopts in her poetry. Sharifah Aishah Osman also addresses the relationship between Hemans and Byron in ââMightier than death, untamable by fateâ: Felicia Hemans's Byronic Heroines and the Sorority of the Domestic Affectionsâ ( RoN 43[2006]). In this article Osman focuses on the Byronic heroines in Hemans's orientalist poems and argues persuasively that through the plight of these figures who take their destinies into their own hands, the morality of military action is questioned while a sense of commonality is established which transcends racial difference among women in their suffering at the hands of patriarchy. In a thought-provoking and insightful essay, âNew Criticism and New Classrooms: Teaching Felicia Hemansâ ( ERR 17:i[2006] 101â9), Tricia Lootens traces the trajectory of twentieth-century claims that bad poetry and sentimental poetry are synonymous and discusses the impact this has had, until recently, on Hemans criticism and on students who feel that too much is being read into these poems. Lootens argues that studies on Hemans should stop privatizing the poet and should instead expand the field of enquiry to cover the ways in which Hemans's writings interact with the Victorians and their idea of national identity and to ask whether she can, within the current climate, continue to be associated with American patriotism. Jason Rudy's âHemansâ Passionâ ( SiR 45:iv[2006] 543â63) observes that while Hemans was praised by her contemporaries as a poet of feeling, she was specifically represented as a writer who could restrain passion rather than give way to it. In a series of excellent readings of Hemans's poems, Rudy demonstrates that her poetry is a vital contribution to discourses of expression and restraint in this period and that the act of restraining emotion is frequently carried out through her poetic form. Two excellent, and related, contributions by Emma Mason round off this year's work on Hemans: ââLove's the burning boyâ: Hemans's Critical Legacyâ (in Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley, eds., The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature , pp. 205â24) and the chapter on Hemans in her study of three women poets in Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century , which is also covered in Chapter XIII, section 3 . In the first essay, Mason explores T.S. Eliot's exclusion of women poets in general, and Hemans in particular, in his prose, explaining that, for Eliot, feeling is made noble and saved from common sentimentality only through rational thought. It is this balance between thinking and feeling which he believed women poets failed to achieve. Mason then moves to an enlightening discussion of Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and Bishop's Casabianca . For Mason, reading Hemans from Liu's âpost-coolâ perspective, which acknowledges the importance of unrestrained feeling for the enhancement of the intellectual experience of reading, offers a therapeutic alternative to the detachment of our technologically driven times. As an example of this, Bishop's Casabianca serves to show how the emotions which Hemans evokes in her poetry are long-lasting, and transcend subjective readings which seek political or nationalistic agendas. Next, in Women Poets , Hemans is described as a poet of âaffectionâ who saw emotion and reason as being inextricably linked. In an engaging study of the poet, Mason considers the ways in which Hemans's contemporaries responded to her writings on various themes, which make up subject headings in the chapter: home and hearth, radical poetry, nation and patriotism, femininity, and finally, religion, which Mason argues is fundamental to all of Hemans's writings. Letitia Landon was the subject of two articles. Noah Comet produced a thoughtful exploration of her engagement with Romantic Hellenism in âLetitia Landon and Romantic Hellenismâ ( WC 37:ii[2006] 76â80) and Vanessa Warne discussed Landon and India in ââWhat foreign scenes can beâ: The Ruin of India in Letitia Landon's Scrapbook Poems â ( VR 32:ii[2006] 40â63): the latter is reviewed at more length in Chapter XIII. Most notably, a new edition of Landon's The Golden Violet , plus memoirs on her life, appeared as volume 5 of Routledge's collection Women and Romanticism, 1790â1830 , edited by Roxanne Eberle. This collection is discussed in section 1 above. Mary Robinson also received much critical attention this year. Robinson's final Drury Lane play, Nobody [1794] is the subject of William Brewer's âMary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastropheâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 265â73), which aims to contextualize the play's negative response within the moral climate of the time, which was openly critical of upper-class gambling practices. These gamblers, many of whom Robinson knew personally, took offence at what appeared to be yet another public attack. Moreover, the implied marriage at the end of the play, Brewer argues, is not only suggestive of an upper-class woman's fall into a form of prostitution but also suggests that âEnglish society should be directed by enlightened plutocrats rather than fashionable aristocratsâ. A second essay by Brewer, âThe French Revolution as a Romance: Mary Robinson's Hubert de Sevrac â ( PLL 42:ii[2006] 115â47), argues that Hubert de Sevrac is âan historically updated and overtly politicized Radcliffean romanceâ and offers a detailed analysis of the relationship between Robinson's novel and Radcliffe's romance novels along with a contextualization of the texts within the social and political thought of the time and the ways in which they were influenced by thinkers such as Burke, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Daniel Hall's âFictionalizing History and Historicizing Fiction: EmigrĂ©s, Politics and Literatureâ ( NFS 145:i[2006] 89â103) explains that the novel has a purpose: to expose the ways in which the noble quest for liberty is obscured by the irrationalities of a violent revolution. In âMary Robinson: On Trial in Public Courtâ ( SiR 45:iii[2006] 397â423), Elizabeth Fay considers Robinson's Sappho and Phaon [1796â7], Letter to the Women of England [1799] and her posthumously published memoirs, in which her personal emotions are put on display, as responses to divorce case narratives, which Fay calls criminal conversations or âcrim consâ, in which a woman's body becomes the site of a legal duel between men and the details of domestic life are flaunted. This articulate and well-informed essay compares the language of the crim con pamphlets to that of Robinson's writings to show how Robinson responded to her public representations of her in a nuanced way. Morgan Rooney also considers Robinson's memoirs, Sappho and Phaon and Letter to the Women of England in ââBelonging to No/bodyâ: Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter , and Rewriting Feminine Identityâ ( ECF 18:iii[2006] 355â72) to argue that Robinson wrote the first two to counter her sexually promiscuous public persona and that in Letter she argues against the accepted roles given to women in the eighteenth century and creates a new female authorial identity with which to counter these restrictive roles. Rooney then moves on to The Natural Daughter [1799] to consider Robinson's âmoderate feminismâ in which, through writing, women break free from the confines of eighteenth-century definitions of femininity. However, despite their new freedom, these women do not stray far from these traditional roles. Robinson is further discussed in Jeffrey C. Robinson's Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism and Clare Brock's The Feminization of Fame, 1750â1830 , both of which are covered in section 1 above. Next, two essays on Hannah More: Samantha Webb's âOne Man's Trash Is Another Man's Dinner: Food and the Poetics of Scarcity in the Cheap Repository Tractsâ ( ERR 17:iv[2006] 419â36) and Nicholas D. Smith's âUnpublished Poems by Hannah More in Osbourne Shelves C.341 and Folger MS M.A. 179â ( RES 57[2006] 581â602). The first essay reconsiders More's intent in her Cheap Repository Tracts which, Webb argues, have been read as genuine survival guides for the poor but, upon closer consideration, actually reveal a more critical and subversive agenda. Focusing on The Way to Plenty and The Cottage Cook , Webb provides an interesting social history of scarcity tracts in order to highlight the particular tone of More's texts. Smith's essay begins with a general discussion on the difficulties of attributing poems found in manuscript books to specific authors. In this case, the manuscript books in question belonged to Anne Blandford. One of these commonplace books is anonymous and Smith offers a convincing argument in favour of it also belonging to Blandford before explaining the relationship between Blandford and More. A bio-critical reading of More's published poems and the recently discovered unpublished poems sheds further light on More's career as a poet. Julie Carnie's essay âThe Ambivalence of Ann Yearsley: Laboring and Writing, Submission and Resistanceâ ( NCC 4[2005] 353â64) argues against polarized readings of Yearsley's class politics. Through examples from three poems, On Mrs Montagu [1785], Narrative [1786] and A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade [1788], Carnie argues that Yearsley demonstrates a complicated ambivalence towards class that should not be simplified. Writing on Charlotte Smith, Cheryl Nixon, in an engaging and enlightening essay, âLegal and Familial Recordkeeping: Chancery Court Records and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House â ( LitComp 2[2005] 1â24), looks at late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century family legal case reports as well as guardian account journals and ledgers held in the Chancery Court archives to shed more light on the extent to which the neglect of family structure is portrayed in Smith's novel. Next, also from 2005, Janina Nordius's ââA kind of living deathâ: Gothicizing the Colonial Encounter in Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House â ( JEngS 86:i[2005] 40â50) focuses on the American episode in the novel which fits into what Nordius calls the âcolonial gothicâ. The essay suggests that this episode serves to broaden the possibilities for possible Gothic settings and offers examples of a ârhetoric of horrorâ which focuses on the conflict between an enlightened sense of human rights and colonialism's racial and cultural aggression. Luca Manini's essay, âCharlotte Smith and the Voice of Petrarchâ (in Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia, eds., British Romanticism and Italian Literature : Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting , pp. 97â108), shows how Smith imitates and modifies the themes and language of Petrarch's Canzoniere in her Elegiac Sonnets . Manini argues that Smith distances herself from Petrarch (and Milton) in that death, a male personification, is the only means of escape. Smith's sonnets are also the subject of a chapter in Christopher Rovee, Imagining the Gallery , discussed in section 1 above. Michael Wiley's âThe Geography of Displacement and Replacement in Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants â ( ERR 17:i[2006] 55â68) considers Smith's metaphorical map in The Emigrants [1793] and the ways in which maps have the power to displace and re-place people, and turns to nature for examples of more egalitarian ways of representing space. Finally, in âCharlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin: Five Holograph Lettersâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 29â40), Pamela Clemit provides recently discovered letters in the Abinger Papers in the Bodleian Library which help shed light on the true extent of the friendship between Wollstonecraft, Godwin and his second wife Mary Jane. There are two essays on Anna Seward in this category: Gillen DâArcy Wood's âThe Female Penseroso: Anna Seward, Sociable Poetry, and the Handelian Consensusâ ( MLQ 67:iv[2005] 451â77) and Adeline Johns-Putra's âGendering Telemachus: Anna Seward and the Epic Rewriting of FĂ©nelon's TĂ©lĂ©maque â (in Shweizer, Bernard, ed., Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic , 1621â1982 85â98). The first essay discusses Seward's love of Handel and William Cowper's voice of dissent in response to the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1784 (the same year as Seward's popular Louisa : A Poetical Novel ) in The Task , which Seward attacked the following year in âRemonstranceâ, but did not publish until Cowper's death. Wood considers the possible reasons for Seward's impassioned and arguably disproportionate response and suggests that Seward saw Handel as a cultural model out of which a unified national culture could emerge. Meanwhile Johns-Putra writes on Lady Sophia Burrells and Seward's rewritings of François de FĂ©nĂ©lon's Les Aventures de TĂ©lĂ©maque , arguing that Seward was more concerned with a poetics of sensibility, which can be interpreted as being feminine, and the conveyance of emotion rather than with plot. Burrell's rewriting, however, is concerned with a masculine drive for action and war which overlooks FĂ©nĂ©lon's original pacifist message. This essay provides a detailed and insightful comparison of these three texts. Mary Tighe's epic is the subject of Debnita Chakravarti's âThe Female Epic and the Journey Toward Self-Definition in Mary Tighe's Psyche â (in Sweizer, ed., pp. 100â16), which, through a close reading of the text, discusses the ways in which the epic, traditionally seen as a masculine genre, was used by Tighe to write about female erotic love and to fulfil a feminist agenda. Chakravarti also addresses the ways in which Tighe sought to counterbalance possible charges of impropriety. Joanna Baillie and Anna Barbauld continue to attract much critical attention in this category. In a fine essay by Barbara Judson, ââSympathetic Curiosityâ: The Theatre of Joanna Baillieâ ( TSWL 25:i[2006] 49â70), she focuses on the âIntroductory Discourseâ and De Monfort in Plays on the Passions to show how Baillie understood moral sympathy as resulting from what she termed âsympathetic curiosityâ, a passion for witnessing suffering in others which must be disciplined by theatre rather than the church. An awareness of the psychological struggle to reach a balance between a moralizing sympathy and a craving for excitement and voyeurism led Baillie to the Gothic as a means by which to explore this relationship between duty and pleasure. Whereas Judson suggests that Baillie's approach to sympathy was rooted in Protestant thought, Judith Bailey Slagle, in âJoanna Baillie's Religious Ideology: The Dichotomy of Fundamentalism and Liberalism in The Martyr and A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 301â14), argues that Baillie's later work âreveals her fundamental Christian ideologyâ and considers why a Unitarian intellectual would turn to religion and enter into the debate on the doctrine of the Trinity. She explains that because Baillie was such a methodical thinker, she would naturally wish to enter into a debate which, at its root, questioned the individual's ability to interpret his own religion. Next, Kathryn Tucker's essay âJoanna Baillie's and Elizabeth Inchbald's Moral Aesthetics: Humanizing Actors and Madmenâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 335â49) also considers the importance of theatre as a moralizing and humanizing force. For Elizabeth Inchbald, Tucker argues, mimesis on the stage was a source of pleasure for the audience because sympathy with the play's characters required a sense of familiarity and kinship. In âDesires and History: Historical Representation in Frances Burney's Edwy and Elgiva and Joanna Baillie's Ethwald â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 327â34), Elizabeth Deirdre Gilbert aims to fill the gap in Stephen Bann's study Romanticism and the Rise of History by discussing playwrights who used historical representations in order to treat subversive topics which could not have been dealt with in the present time such as homoeroticism, female sexuality and incest, and argues that âeach playwright conjured up the past to camouflage a present needâ. Lastly, Baillie as dramatist is discussed at length in Regina Hewitt's Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor . For a review of this and other works on Baillie's plays, see section 5 below. The treatment of history is also discussed in Emily Rohrbach's âAnna Barbauld's History of the Future: A Deviant Way to Poetic Agencyâ ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 179â89) but in this essay the focus is on the effects of time in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven , in which the present is seen as the future's history. This, Rohrbach argues, enables readers to distance themselves from present events. This makes a critique of present events possible because, unlike events in the fixed past, the future is not a given, making positive change seem possible and therefore worth striving for. In ââThy world Columbus, shall be freeâ: British Romantic Deviance and the Spanish American Revolutionâ ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 151â9), Rebecca Cole Heinowitz argues that whilst Barbauld's support for Spanish American independence was in keeping with the popular political mood of the time, by not distinguishing England from France in the poem and referring instead to a Europe which included England, Barbauld exposed herself to attack. This essay outlines the historical context in which Barbauld wrote to show that while the subject of the poem was uncontroversial, the implied connection between England and France as imperial aggressors disrupted the popular association between South America and Napoleon-wary England. Michelle Levy's essay âThe Radical Education of Evenings at Home â ( ECF 19:iâii[2006â7] 124â50) argues that Evenings at Home , which Barbauld compiled with her brother, John Aikin, appealed to their readersâ sense of fellowship with humankind to instruct them to question and criticize wars which cause the destruction of lives and happiness and to be wary of campaigns to elicit patriotism and nationalistic support for these wars. Barbauld and Aikin believed that the instruction of children had a direct effect on the nation and they strove to inculcate in their readers new models of masculinity which stressed the important role of fathers in family life. In so doing, they suggested that wars abroad had a direct impact on the happiness of domestic family life. Levy makes clear her position that Barbauld and Aikins were not pacifists and understood the necessity of self-defence but that they wished to instil in children the critical skills with which to question the legitimacy of each call for military action. Finally for this section, Caroline Franklin's ââThe Colour of a Ribandâ: Patriotism, History and the Role of Women in Helen Maria Williams's Sketches of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic (1801)â ( WC 37:ii[2006] 76â80) discusses another text in which the underlying assumptions inherent in patriotism are put into question. Like Anne Mellor, Franklin cites Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas in which she writes, âas a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman my country is my whole worldâ to explain that Williams could not see women remaining loyal to a patriarchal system which offered them few rights and little power. Probably the most substantial publication on Blake in 2006, certainly in terms of volume but also the range of materials and scholarship that it presents for researchers into Blake, was Marsha Keith Schuchard's Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision . Keith Schuchard's work on the Moravian background of Blake's mother, Catherine (who was married to Thomas Armitage before she married James Blake, the artist's father) has already contributed greatly to Blake studies, and this extended text provides a detailed study of Blake's engagement in the esoteric world of the eighteenth century. That Blake was involved in this world cannot be deniedânot least through his various connections to the Swedenborgiansâand his writings are full of references to hidden lore that has long attracted writers such as DĂ©sirĂ©e Hirst and Kathleen Raine. What is less convincing is the evidence that Blake moved from a general understanding of some rituals to specific practices of the type outlined in parts of the bookâor, indeed how truly detailed his knowledge was of such things as Tantra. A similar problem arose with Sheila Spector's marvellous two-volume study of Blake and kabbalism, Wonders Divine [2001] and Glorious Incomprehensible [2001]. Blake certainly knew of kabbalism, but the amount of time he devoted to its study was almost certainly less than that given by Madonna, even if the results were considerably richer for British art and literature. Where Schuchard's book excelsâand what marks it out from the often more impressionistic texts of Hirst and Raineâis in terms of the historical context for this fascinating and half-submerged occult world of the late eighteenth century, as well as the marvellous details of the Armitage family that make this essential reading for anyone interested in Blake. The relation between Blake's ideas and those of Moravians such as Count Zinzendorf have recently begun, rightly, to attract a great deal of attention, and the view that emerges is of a humane and ecumenical spirituality that would have appealed to Blake, as well as an emphasis on sexuality that clearly could be one of the various influences in his prophetic books. What is less convincing is the sometimes too-easy transition to Hindu and other Eastern traditions about a third of the way into Why Mrs Blake Cried . Statements such as âLeonard Dober, leader of the [Moravian] Judenmission , must have noticed the similarities between Jewish and Hindu mysticismâ (p. 103) cannot always be backed up with factual evidence. To the Moravians, there has always undoubtedly been a recognition of fundamental sympathies between religions beyond simple monotheism; but while this is to their (and Blake's) credit, Western understanding of such things as Tantra in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was superficial at best. Blake was interested in the Eastâand in more than the orientalizing fashion that rendered it fashionably other; some claims made by Keith Schuchard, however, appear difficult to substantiate. Nonetheless, this remains an important book and one that will have a much longer (and more widely deserved) impact than E.P. Thompson's theory regarding Blake's Muggletonian connections. Blake has been one of the most influential writers and artists in British history; until recently, however, full-length studies of the reception of his work were rare. Edward Larrissy's Blake and Modern Literature is the first comprehensive review of Blake's influence on literary writers from the late nineteenth century onwards, with the occasional foray into popular culture, such as Michael Dibdin's 1995 novel, Dark Spectre . Larrissy begins with a general overview of Blake as part of the reception of Romanticism, which âas we have known it until recently comes into being barely before modernism doesâ (p. 15), before moving on to specific considerations of how later writers made use of the Romantic poet. The dominant figure in the opening four chapters is Yeatsâpartly reflecting Larrissy's own previous critical interests and also a recognition of the importance of Yeats's work in bringing Blake to a wider audience through the collection he edited with Edwin Ellis. Much of this material is fairly familiar, and it is when Larrissy turns to other writers, such as Auden, Joyce, David Jones and Eliot that Blake and Modern Literature becomes more illuminating. The section on T.S. Eliot in particular is notable, drawing attention to the fact that while Eliot could be unsympathetic to a writer whom he saw as âconstituting an esoteric tradition all of his ownâ (p. 32), works such as The Waste Land and East Croker displayed âan influence that is far more than superficialâ (p. 33). The second part of the book deals with texts from the later part of the twentieth century, beginning with an essay on postmodernity that develops some themes from the introductory chapter regarding literary reception more generally and Blake in particular. Larrissy then moves on to discuss a number of writers indebted to Blake, beginning with Joyce Cary, whose The Horse's Mouth he describes as âpossibly the most Blakean literary work in the languageâ (p. 100). The explosion of interest in Blake in the post-war period means that there are plenty of omissions here (a section on Allen Ginsberg, for example, has little to say about Aldous Huxley, who was more importantâif also more superficialâin terms of the widespread popular appropriation of Blake as part of a counter-culture, and nothing on the Blakean mythographies of William Burroughs), but Larrissy is always thoughtful in his analyses of different writers. Although I would not agree with all of his conclusionsâin particular, Angela Carter's relationship to Blake could be seen as more antagonistic than presented here, and Larrissy has less to say on the later works of Iain Sinclair where, admittedly, Blake's influence is not so clearly marked but is often more profoundâthis is the best and most comprehensive book so far to deal with Blake's literary legacy. Blake's literary and artistic reception was also central to the first of three important collections published in 2006. There has always been considerable interest in Blake in Japan, with a significant number of publications listed each year in Bentley's review of publications. However, with notable exceptions (such as the work of Suzuki Masashi), publication in English by Japanese scholars has been relatively rare, with the result that the influence of Blake in Japan has been a neglected subject. Nonetheless, outside Britain and North America it is hard to think of any other country where Blake is so thoroughly appreciated, which makes The Reception of Blake in the Orient , edited by Masashi and Steve Clark as part of the Continuum Reception Studies series, all the more important as a collection which provides an insight into both a postcolonial Blake and Blake in Japan. After a summary introduction in which the editors return attention to the importance of Blake as a subject for reception studies in a wide range of contexts and media, as well as seeking a âless bleakly dystopian modelâ (p. 2) for discussion of Blake in a postcolonial context, The Reception of Blake in the Orient is divided into three sections dealing with Blake's use of oriental and postcolonial themes and tropes, the reception of Blake in early twentieth-century Japan, and the wider influence of Blake (both in Japan and elsewhere) in the later part of the century. Regarding the âOrient in Blakeâ as part of a global eighteenth century, the essays here deal with Blake's use of imagery associated with Africa and Asia, for example in chapters by Susan Matthews on âAfrica and Utopiaâ, Hikari Sato on âBlake, Hayley and Indiaâ, and Kazuya Okada on âBlake and Egypt as the Orientâ. Some chapters deal with cross-cultural innovations and trends in printing and book collecting, with notable work by Keri Davies and Mei-Ying Sung, while the collection begins with a carefully researched piece by David Worrall on âThel in Africaâ, arguing for a revisionist reading of the early illuminated book as a ârejection of the entire colonization projectâ that was projected by Swedenborgians at the time the Blakes joined that community (p. 17). Central to the reception of Blake in the early twentieth century is Soetsu Yanagi, the subject to a lesser or greater degree of all six chapters in this section which represents a marvellous introduction to Blake's effect on Japanese culture. Ayako Wada, Hatsuko Nimii, Kazuyoshi Oishi and Shunsuke Tsurumi all concentrate on different aspects of the relationship between Blake and Yanagi (who wrote the first substantial Japanese treatise on Blake in 1914, a decade before the groundbreaking work by S. Foster Damon), while Yoko Ima-Izumi and Yumiko Goto provide different but related perspectives on the impact of Blake on Japanese feminist and visual culture. The final section, then offers a series of essays on later responses that deal with Blake's reception in Taiwan (Jeremy Tambling) and in the work of Arthur Boyd (Peter Otto), as well as Japanese writers such as Tanizaki and Oe Kenazburo (in essays by Jeremy Tambling and Barnard Turner). The year 2006 also saw publication of another important collection of Blake studies. Blake, Nation and Empire , edited by David Worrall and Steve Clark, had its origins in the 2000 Blake exhibition and conference at Tate Britain, and continues and complements the contextual approaches outlined by these authors in Historicizing Blake [1994] and Blake in the Nineties [1999]. More than either of these two previous studies, Blake, Nation and Empire places particular emphasis on Blake's later work, offering a perspective on the production of later texts such as Jerusalem and Milton that sometimes offer a surprisingly ambiguous relationship to emerging British imperialism, frequently echoing as well as opposing the potentially more chauvinistic elements of nationalism that would emerge more clearly during the Victorian period. As the editors remark, Erdman's emphasis on Blake as ââProphet against Empireâ, always and unequivocally soâ, which still dominates a great deal of Blake studies, is âbased primarily on his assumed support for American independence and the eschatological doom-saying recurrent in the 1790s outputâ (p. 4). Even during this period, they suggest, there is evidence to contradict such assumptions, and Erdman displays insufficient interest in Blake's work after 1809 to account for this ambivalence. With this caveat noted, the collection begins with a resounding assertion of Blake's anti -imperialism in Saree Makdisi's âImmortal Joy: William Blake and the Cultural Politics of Empireâ, which also marks out Blake as one of the few English writers of the 1790s who was able to imagine âforeignness in terms other than exoticismâ (p. 21). Of the other chapters dealing with the 1790s, David Worrall provides more information on the Swedenborgian conference that led to the projected Sierra Leone colony that, he argues persuasively, fed into Blake's thoughts on conjugal love in The Book of Thel . Jon Mee's chapter on âBloody Blake: Nation and Circulationâ, takes John Brown's theories of circulationâwhich denied conventional physical and mental (or spiritual) dualismsâas a basis for Blake's âcardiovascularâ discussions of nationalism. One of the most interesting essays in the collection is Susan Matthews's analysis of the use of rape in Blake's works against the context of a transition from crime against property to a sexual crime in the modern sense, while chapters by James Chandler and Morris Eaves consider the context of Blake's writing and art in terms of sentimental literature of the eighteenth century and the art market of the 1790s. The final six chapters concentrate much more on Blake's work after 1809: Christopher Z. Hobson discusses the sexual commonwealth of Milton and Jerusalem as a continuation of ideas proposed in Blake and Homosexuality [2001], while it is in the following two chapters by Andrew Lincoln and Steve Clarke that the necessity of considering Blake's later works becomes clearest. For Lincoln, after 1804 Blake begins to reproduce counter-revolutionary arguments, particularly those of evangelical Christianity, while remaining committed to a radical agenda; Clarke's more contrarian essay finds much similarity between Blake's anti-papal polemic and denunciations against Catholic emancipation by Tory Ultras and Irvingites. Of the final pieces, Jason Whittaker's contribution focuses on the relation between Milton and Milton's History of Britain [1670], while Robert N. Essick takes brief references to Erin as a means to discuss differences between Erdman's approach and those of the New Historicists working in Blake studies. The collection ends with Joseph Viscomi's very interesting account of the reception and âdiscoveryâ of Blake in the nineteenth century. The third significant collection from this year was Nicholas M. Williams's William Blake Studies , published as part of the Palgrave Advances series. Intended to orientate graduate students in a field of study, the volume is divided into two sections, on textual and cultural approaches to Blake. Williams's introduction provides a decent outline of critical responses to Blake in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century as a background to the material that is discussed in more detail elsewhere in the book. A difficulty of such a textâa necessary one considering its intended audienceâis that some complexities of contemporary scholarship may be glossed over: there is a sense of this in the chapter on Blake's production methods, which deals with Michael Phillips's account of the printing process fairly cursorily (although John Jones does an excellent job in explaining complex technical procedures in a lucid manner), although this is in other ways a very thoughtful and extremely useful introduction to the subject. Of the three remaining textual approaches to Blake, Peter Otto offers a sophisticated reading of âBlake's composite artâ, while Angela Esterhammer offers an account of Blake's language that concentrates on the performative functions she has outlined elsewhere, but also deals with poststructuralist theories of his work. Blake's textuality is the subject of a closely argued chapter by Nelson Hilton that, drawing on developments since the Santa Cruz reading group in the 1960s, draws attention to the minute particulars of Blake's illuminated books. The longer second part of William Blake Studies provides a series of cultural and historical contextual chapters, including biblical studies (Stephen Prickett and Christopher Strathman), gender (Helen Bruder), psychology (David Punter), science (Mark Lussier), radicalism (Andrew Lincoln), and communism (Saree Makdisi), as well as Edward Larrissy's chapter on postmodernism. The discussion of radicalism could have incorporated that on communism, perhaps to allow more space for other topics such as Blake and the esoteric tradition, or stronger elements on Blake within various artistic contexts which is a weakness of the book as a whole. Despite this criticism, with a separate bibliography for each chapter this is one of the best introductions around, and will become essential reading for those needing to familiarize themselves with current trends in Blake studies. Of the articles included in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly for 2006, Robert N. Essick's round-up of sales in 2005 ( Blake 39:iv[2006] 148â82) did not include any exceptional items such as the print of The Good and Evil Angels or the watercolour designs for The Grave that have been listed in recent years, although 2005 did see a new record for the sale of a Blake drawing, The Ghost of a Flea for ÂŁ72,000. Essick notes rather wryly that this price tag shows that âthe usual standards of aesthetic appreciation and connoisseurship are not helpfulâ when dealing with Blake, where collectors often seek not so much a finished work as âa documentary record of an extraordinary mindâ (p. 148). The same issue of Blake contains a short but very useful analysis by Aileen Ward, âBuilding Jerusalem : Composition and Chronologyâ ( Blake 39:iv[2006] 183â5), that convincingly argues against Bentley's suggestion that nearly half of the poem had been composed by 1807. Harry White's âCruel Holiness and Honest Virtue in the Works of William Blakeâ ( Blake 40:ii[2006] 52â65) has some interesting comments to make about Blake's moral understanding, making a subtle but important distinction between acts judged as good and evil and those based on impulsive virtue, the latter of which, suggests White, is the real focus of the poet's radical assault on Moral Law. While Jeanne Moskal's Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness [1994] is more sympathetic to the real difficulties of acting according to a Christian ethic of turning the other cheek, White does offer a systematic account of the various elements of Blake's moral thinking. â Grave Indignities: Greed, Hucksterism, and Oblivion, Blake's Watercolours for Blair's Grave â, by E.B. Bentley ( Blake 40:ii[2006] 66â71), is a lively summary of the events surrounding the original commission and subsequent sale of the Grave watercolours, with most new information dealing with the actual auction in 2006 and making the heartfelt observation that âthe separation of the set of watercolours is a major cultural disasterâ (p. 68). This issue also includes a brief account by Mark Crosby, Troy Patenaude, and Angus Whitehead, of the Interdisciplinary Blake MA at the University of York, which ran from 1998 until 2004, as well as a checklist of publications and dissertations, âWilliam Blake and the Age of Revolutionâ ( Blake 40:ii[2006] 72â4). As well as two books on reception, an important contribution to the theory of how Blake's texts are used and abused by later writers and artists was Mike Goode's âBlakespottingâ ( PMLA 121:iii[2006] 769â86). Entertaining as well as instructive, Goode tracks down ephemeral examples of the circulation of Blake's proverbs, âunmappable formationsâ that indicate perhaps the most radical feature of his texts, what Rajan called the âlogic of absolute differenceâ (p. 772) that denies a univocal poetic voice. The excess of the proverbs (from Donald Trump's library to Dead Man ) is an example of tactics that generate a rhizomaticâand inconsistentâreadership. In contrast to these disseminated nodes of reception, âThe Search for a Method: A Rhetorical Reading of Blake's Prophetic Symbolismâ by Darren Howard ( ERR 17:v[2006] 559â74) makes the case for a systematic reading of the longer prophetic works. Although I am one of those critics that Howard identifies as distrustful of reading Blake's work as unified allegory, there is some extremely useful material here on the role of deixis in the prophecies as a means of placing both reader and speaker in relation to those texts. Michael Ackland, in âBreeding âReptiles of the Mindâ: Blake's Dialectics of Vision and Stead's Critique of Pollitry in The Man Who Loved Children â ( SNNTS 38:ii[2006] 234â49) is a detailed attempt to pin down the influence of Blake on Christina Stead, arguing that it was the doctrine of contraries that was most important to Stead's work. Ackland is better on Stead than Blake, with a stronger sense of the context of the later novelist rather than the Romantic poet, but this is a helpful contribution to our understanding of the reception of Blake by a Marxist writerâone who was engaged in a relationship with William Blech, who later changed his name to William Blake. In ââThe road of excess leads to the palace of wisdomâ: Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake's Continental Propheciesâ ( PLL 42:i[2006] 3â24), Katey Castellano starts from recent scholarly work into the diversities of 1790s radicalism to critique the libertarian position of many in the Johnson circle. This essay does not necessarily offer a huge amount that cannot be found in authors such as Jon Mee and Saree Makdisi, and her appropriation of a Bataillean theory of economicsâwhile extremely interestingâlacks some of their historical rigour. Nonetheless, her conclusion that Blake âwas no progressive, for he held to tradition as fiercely as Burkeâ (p. 23) indicates the significant ways in which easy, post-Erdman assumptions are currently being challenged in Blake studies. âDiogenes the Cynic in the Dialogues of the Dead of Thomas Brown, Lord Lyttelton, and William Blakeâ ( TSLL 48:ii[2006] 102â22), by David Mazella, focuses on the emblematic role of Diogenes in three satirical texts from the eighteenth century, arguing not for a continuous development but how he âappears as a discontinuous trope within each work's treatment of the underworldâ (p. 103). Unfortunately, when turning to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Mazella brings a great deal of weight to bear on what is a single comment within Blake's text. More substantial is Mark L. Barr's âProphecy, the Law of Insanity and The [ First ] Book of Urizen â ( SEL 46:iv[2006] 739â62), which is part of Barr's ongoing work into the appropriation and disruption of legal discourse during this period. Reading Urizen against the background of sedition trials and prosecutions of the day, as well as the regency crisis, Barr makes a sophisticated and well-argued case that Los as an insane prophet was a deliberate strategy adopted by Blake to preserve himself from prosecutionâwhich has interesting implications for the traditional popular reception of âmadâ Blake. Anca Munteanu's âVisionary and Artistic Transformations in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion â ( JES 36:i[2006] 61â83) reads Blake's early prophecy against post-Renaissance notions of melancholia: it is a detailed and close explication of the text in those terms that gives a good summary of previous criticism and is particularly engaging when relating Oothoon to eighteenth-century renditions of Sappho. Mention should also be made of two very brief articles published in 2006: âBlake's âThe Flyââ, by G.S. Morris ( Expl 65:i[2006] 16â18), argues that the poem is a reductio ad absurdum of Cartesian logic, while John Beer's âLamb, Coleridge and Blakeâ ( ChLB 136[2006] 105â6) comments mainly on Charles Lamb's knowledge of Blake. Substantial changes and additions were made to the Blake Archive ( www.blakearchive.org ) during 2006. While the interface largely appears the same to end-users, WBA 2006 (as the editors renamed it) transferred the contentâat that time, seventy-three works and 1,441 imagesâfrom a largely HTML to an XML format, the advantage of which should allow better searching and navigation for documents. While important work has obviously been done with the structure of the site, it does point to the fact that key innovations in web design since 2000 which would make the interface more user-friendly, such as customizable cascading style sheets to tailor presentation to a visitor's requirements, need addressing. The Blake Archive is one of the most valuable and important tools ever produced for scholars in the field, but it is often far too cumbersome to use properly. June 2006 saw the publication of two more versions of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the archive, copies V (from the Pierpont Morgan Library) and Y (Metropolitan Museum), both produced towards the end of Blake's life. The end of the year was particularly busy, with the addition of the Linnell set of Job watercolours, Copy D of The [ First ] Book of Urizen (British Museum), two versions of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (B and O, both from the British Museum), and the newly discovered watercolours to Blair's The Grave . The scale of material now available online is little short of astonishingâwith an overhaul of the interface, it should move fully into the twenty-first century. The year's work in this field seemed, on the whole, to be looking forward, with a sense, albeit tentative, of optimism and opportunity. The dense and sometimes guilt-ridden historicist negotiations of work on Romantic fiction have over recent years been lightening into a more positive sense of the possibilities offered by the Romantic past, reflected in this year's work. There were thoughtful engagements with history, including a collection celebrating Marilyn Butler's contribution to scholarship of Romantic prose fiction; individual works which mapped Scott and Austen onto modern writing and cultural identities; and broader studies which looked to the future by bringing Romanticism into dialogue with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Lisa Hopkins's lively reading of the Gothic trope in adaptations of Clarissa , Mansfield Park and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone , or the collection of essays in The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature . One of the year's most interesting studies in the field came from Gavin Edwards, whose Narrative Order, 1789â1819: Life and Story in an Age of Revolution identified and analysed scepticism concerning narrative in the period. Order, in Edwards's reading, means both the opposite of disorderâa regular, stable arrangementâand sequence. If British Enlightenment writers shared an assumption that there was a link between the two, Edwards posits a post-revolutionary sense that âthe narrative ordering of experience is either superficial, or dangerous, or impossibleâ (p. 5). This narrative scepticism could take many different forms and be employed for different political ends, as Edwards demonstrates through his varied and exciting readings of writers as diverse as Burke, Wordsworth, William Tenchâwhose narrative accounts of the founding of New South Wales reveal âthe impact of radical, repeated and unpredictable changeâ (p. 12)âGodwin, Wollstonecraft, Scott and Mary Shelley. As well as emphasizing the profound impact of the revolution, Edwards also points to the vexed relationship between narrative and contract, and between social and stylistic order. Throughout the book there is an acute attention to semantic shifts, changes, and ambiguities, both in the period and today. The study begins with Samuel Johnson, whose Life of Savage offers an apparent example of narrative orderâbeginning with Savage's birth, ending with his death. Yet its ârelentless forward movementâ only serves to highlight the âbackward-looking and regressiveâ form of Savage's life (p. 25). Johnson, says Edwards, is always battling against the disorderly, his narrative order a necessary stylistic and ideological bulwark. Burke, as the next chapter shows, battles with narrative order too, but from the opposite direction. Edwards claims that the abrupt and violent interruptions, new starts and sudden endings of the French Revolution âconverted a fundamental feature of narrative ⊠into a threat to social orderâ (p. 35) from which Burke shied away. In some superb close readings of Reflectionsâ such as the famous passage which claims âwe have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in bloodââEdwards argues that, for Burke, ââweâ are always in process, never at the beginning or endingâ. For Burke, claims Edwards, it's all about âmiddlesâ, âmediationsâ. The close relationship between political form and narrative is expanded further in the chapters on Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, where Edwards discusses the ways in which they deal with the changing cultural and semantic meanings of key concepts such as family and domesticityâand how, even within their own stories of families, meanings shift. Discussing ârelationsâ both as family and as storytelling, Edwards explores links between narratives and lives in the Godwin/Mary Shelley circle, showing how Frankenstein âtakes up and takes further the illocutionary power of autobiographical storytellingâ (p. 141). There is a strong closing chapter on Scott, which makes the claim for the historical novel, together with the short lyric, as âthe most influential literary form to emerge from the dissolution of the narrative idea of lifeâ (p. 159). The Bride of Lammermoor is read alongside âOde on a Grecian Urnâ: both, claims Edwards, encourage the reader to think not only about storytelling but also about the way in which life might be ordered as narrative, and the relationship between visual and verbal narrative. These striking comparisons, while sometimes contentious, help the book to give a real sense of the period as a living whole, of novels and lyrics and politics in deep conversation togetherâhow stories were constructed from conflict and irresolution, and how the stories of the period can in their turn be told. A larger study also has relevance for this period. Franco Moretti's collection The Novel has a global reach: a âcollective reflection on the pleasures of storytelling, and their interactionâat times, complicityâwith social powerâ (vol. 1, p. x). Its second volume contains a chapter by Ian Duncan analysing Scott's historicism and his contribution to the history of the novel through Waverley , and a piece by Nancy Armstrong âThe Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualismâ. This ranges around Defoe, Scott, Shelley and Dickens, amongst others, to argue for the British novel as supremely (albeit warily) responsive to historical change. The collection's meditations on the âpleasures of storytellingâ and âthe rise of fictionalityâ are grounded by details of book trade and marketing relevant to this period, such as James Raven's statistical analysis on publishing history in Britain 1750â1830 (vol. 1, pp. 429â65). While we await two large studies on the reception of Walter Scott and Jane Austen in Europe in 2007, this year saw ValĂ©rie Cossy, in Jane Austen in Switzerland: A Study of the Early French Translations , give the first sustained reading of Austen's Continental transitions. Whereas we have become adept in reading Austen's transposition from text to film, and accepting liberties and modifications, Cossy claims that âour expectations regarding the translation of literature ⊠are still romantic in essenceâ (p. 18): her careful and informative study of Austen's early French reception therefore opens up major questions of textual originality and integrity. The study begins with two conservative and didactic translations published by the BibliothĂšque Britannique; the âfeminineâ fiction created by the Pictets's didactic Orgueil et PrĂ©jugĂ© and the âconventional sentimentâ of the translated Mansfield Park both demonstrate the need to contain and soften Austen's troubling scepticism. The second half of the study focuses on the more intriguing work of Isabelle de Montolieu, whose own fame ensured a wide contemporary readership for her translations of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion . Montolieu's dramatic rewritings of Austen are discussed very thoroughly. Her solution to the hastily narrated marriage between Brandon and Marianne, for instance, long a sticking point for the romantic reader, is a grand âcoup de thĂ©Ăątreâ: Willoughby's wife is suddenly killed off in a suspicious-sounding carriage fall, allowing him instantly to propose to Marianne (Maria in Montolieu's version), and prompting her into a realization of her overwhelming love for Brandon quite at odds with Austen's original. Cossy gives the clearest insight yet into the reasons for Austen's continuing âinvisibility in Franceâ, and probes some fascinating, and ongoing, cultural misunderstandings on both sides of the Channel. There were two more monographs of note this year in Austen studies: Barbara Britton Wenner re-read Austen's landscapes, fictional and physical, and Gabrielle D. V. White defended her once more against Said. Beginning with her own personal experiences of Chawton, Lyme and Bath, Britton Wenner's Prospect and Refuge in the Landscape of Jane Austen asks both how Austen read her own surroundings and how we read her landscapes. She discusses how Austen's very strong sense of landscape was formed in relation to contemporary attitudes and literature, from the âsecluded and savageâ glens of Radcliffe to the threatening Vauxhall alleys which entrap Burney's Evelinaâand also suggests how we might read it in a larger context of women endangered in landscape in the writing of Margaret Atwood and E. Annie Proulx. From the juvenilia onwards, Austen's women may be lost and threatened in the landscapeâthink of the steel traps which catch Lucy in âJack and Aliceââbut they may also be enclosed and comforted by it, finding places of creative refuge, as in CatharineâOr The Bower . Britton Wenner traces this double movement through Austen's fiction up to Persuasion , where the safety of Anne's embowering hedgerow is contrasted with the exposed dangers of the Cobb. Britton Wenner compares Austen's intimate placing of the heroine with Walter Scott's portrayal of Jeanie Deans as cultural representative in the landscape. We are in the hedge with Anne, she argues, whereas we are invited to view Jeanie âobjectively as we would an actor on a large stage setâ (p. 100). This is not, of course, the first time that Austen's landscapes have been scrutinized, and Britton Wenner scrupulously credits critics such as Mavis Batey and, especially, Alistair Duckworth. Her own study, however, is interested in the ways in which women respond to landscape, and has as its central trope this interest in âprospects from which to see and hidden refuges from which to avoid noticeâ, which she links to Jay Appleton's formulation of the importance of âa good place to hide and a good place to seekâ (p. x). This gendered approach, inflected by theories of aesthetic geography, is the original aspect of this reading of Austen's landscapes: it owes, as she points out, something to Jill Heydt-Stevenson's work, and also something to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's theory of Austen's âcover-storyâ, and the âcamouflage-screensâ she uses to criticize convention from within. At times the application of the tactics of survival adopted by, say, Atwood's heroines to Austen's gently ironic landscapes (especially in the âJuveniliaâ) can seem slightly strained, but nonetheless this range and scope are refreshing and this is a subtle and readable study. Gabrielle D. V. White, in Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition: âA fling at the slave tradeâ , discusses Austen's keen awareness of abolition, and explores her possible response to Cowper's question concerning chattel slavery in The Task : âWe have no Slaves at homeâthen why abroad?â While firmly refuting Said, White gives a good overview of critical approaches to this vexed question. The most interesting chapter moves away from the better-known debates around Mansfield Park to give a new reading of the âfling at the slave tradeâ in Emma . On âsecond lookâ, Jane Fairfax's struggle for autonomy reveals, she argues, Austen's concern âfor the victims of the prohibited slave trade who remain enslavedâ (p. 71)âchattel slavery was not abolished in British colonies until the 1830s. White provides a usefully wide critical and historical context for the last three novels, situating them in terms of âa transition period between the two great events of legislation for abolitionâ (p. 153). Her ingenious close readings make a forceful case against Said, although she does, reluctantly, admit that Austen's âsubtlety may give rise to an impression that the texts are ambiguousâ (p. 171). White's study vividly shows the impact Said continues to have on Austen criticism. George E. Boulukos, in âThe Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slaveryâ ( Novel 39:iii[2006] 361â83), offers quite a different post-Said reading. Like White, Boulukos also argued for the novel to be positioned in the midst of a very specific cultural moment, but this time in terms of a âpolitics of âameliorationââ (p. 362), in which colonialism might be viewed as âmorally redeemableâ (p. 362), benevolent, and even heroic. A different focus was adopted by Sara Salih's âThe Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of âRaceâ in the Abolition Eraâ ( ECF 18:iii[2006] 329â53), which returns the âhalf-mulatto, chilly and tenderâ Miss Lambe to the company of her âtaciturn fictional predecessorsâ (p. 331) in the novels of Charlotte Smith and Helena Wells and suggests that her subtle differences help us to understand how she forms a crucial part of â Sanditon' s representation of the shifts taking place in English moral and financial economies at the turn of the nineteenth centuryâ (p. 353). Similarly, the run of articles on Mansfield Park offered by the JASNA journal, Persuasions (28), returned to postcolonial debate around the novel, with two articles by Alison Shea and David Monaghan re-examining the energetic abolitionist Fanny presented in Patricia Rozema's film version, and June Sturrock re-reading the novel's attention to âmoney [and] moralsâ in light of the Antiguan connection. An insightful essay by John Wiltshire, âExploring Mansfield Park : In the Footsteps of Fanny Priceâ ( Persuasions 28[2006] 81â100), discusses the âgreat critical effort of historicizationâ (p. 82) in Austen studies over the last few decades in light of his editing of the Cambridge Mansfield Park . His struggle to clarify details (where, exactly, was Mansfield Park? Or Sotherton? What size was Mary's harp?) shows the deep âimaginative and intellectual attentionâ (p. 100) which has helped distinguish the Cambridge editions. Claudia Johnson's article in the same issue, âJane Austen's Relics and the Treasures of the East Roomâ ( Persuasions 28[2006] 217â30), nicely counterpoints Wiltshire, in its discussion of our continuing fascination with Austenian relicsâwe, like Fanny prizing Edmund's letter, seize and treasure up scraps of physical connection to the author, exhibiting an âattachment to thingsâ which poses its own problems (p. 229). This puzzle of how to place Austen historically prompted several other interesting rereadings. Beth Lau continued her excellent work âfirmly integrating Austen within the Romantic movement and canonâ (p. 82) in âJane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Realityâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 81â110) and âHome, Exile, and Wanderlust in Austen and the Romantic Poetsâ ( PCP 41[2006] 91â107). Janet Todd, in âJane Austen and the Professional Wifeâ (in Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton, eds., Repossessing the Romantic Past , pp. 203â25), took as her starting point the âintense interest in Austen as social commentatorâ which began in the 1970s, spurred by Marilyn Butler's analysis of the nuances of Austen's political stance. Her chapter rereads both the status of Austen as professional writer, and the novelsâ delineation of a newly emerging professional class (and their wives), from clergymen to barristers such as Emma's brother-in-law, and âbetwixt-and-betweenâ medicine men like Perry. Todd's careful delineation of the complex social world of Austen's novels is seconded by J.A. Downie, in âWho Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novelsâ ( ECS 40:i[2006] 69â84). Who says? Well, for Downie the main culprits seem to be Arnold Kettle and Marvin Mudrick, whose influential studies of the 1950s he holds responsible for a misleading reading of the âsocial world of her novelsâ. Carefully reconstructing the specific material and social gradations of Mansfield Park and Highbury, he argues instead that Austen must be understood as belonging to the âimpoverished lesser gentryâ (p. 81) rather than the middle classes. In ââDomestic Virtues and National Importanceâ: Lord Nelson, Captain Wentworth, and the English Napoleonic War Heroâ, Jocelyn Harris ( ECF 19:iâii[2006â7] 181â205) offered a sensitive historicist reading of the âcult of naval heroism ⊠a new kind of masculinity and a new kind of Englishnessâ (p. 181) exemplified by Nelson, whose career is paralleled by the conquering Wentworth. But Harris shows how Wentworth's âbright, proud eyeâ is borrowed from Austen's reading of Byron, whose admiration for Napoleon then complicates Austen's portrait of the war hero. In ââA mere skeleton of historyâ: Reading Relics in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey â ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 215â27), Terry F. Robinson suggests Austen's own awareness of historiography, and the role of romance in constructing history. She argues that the tussles between Catherine and Henry might be read as representative of a larger conflict between Catholic and post-Enlightenment Protestantism. In the same issue of ERR , Joanna Aroutian discussed Austen's presentation of the complicated relation between sexuality and the family in âThe Sexual Family in Mansfield Park â ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 229â35). A meditation on the relationship between history and fiction in Austen is explored by William Galperin in ââDescribing what never happenedâ: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunitiesâ ( ELH 73:ii[2006] 355â82), who meditates on her âradically skeptical (skeptically radical?) refusal to regard history as a template for the futureâ (p. 364). On a more material level, some useful bibliographical history was uncovered by A.A. Mandal, in âMaking Austen Mad: Benjamin Crosby and the Non-Publication of Susan â ( RES 57[2006] 507â25). Susan was sold to Benjamin Crosby and Co. in 1803, whose non-publication prompted Austen to write a vexed complaint under the name of âMrs Ashton Dennisâ: the novel was finally to appear, of course, as Northanger Abbey , once the copyright had been repurchased. Mandal gives a good deal of information on the firm, demonstrating their substantial output of novels at the time. Why, then, didn't they publish Susan ? Eschewing previous critical speculations (as befits his subject), Mandal sticks firmly to uncovering the bibliographical facts, and concludes that the reason lies, unmelodramatically, in the financial difficulties and conflicts within the firm. In a wide spread of other articles this year, Austen emerged in many guises from the transgressive to the Aristotelian. Joyce L. Jenkins's article, âThe Puzzle of Fanny Priceâ ( P&L 30:ii[2006] 346â60), reads Mansfield Park as âhard, unforgiving, Kantian, and retributivistâ (p. 354), and puts forward a somewhat hard and unforgiving view itself of a fearful, tearful Fanny Price. Susan C. Greenfield, âThe Absent-Minded Heroine: Or, Elizabeth Bennet Has a Thoughtâ ( ECS 39:iii[2006] 337â50), argues for Austen's interest in epistemology and discusses the ârelationship between material absence and the mindâ in Pride and Prejudice . Karen Stohr, in âPractical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibilityâ ( P&L 30:ii[2006] 378â94), uses Austen's characters to illustrate âthe importance of moral imagination for good moral practiceâ (p. 392) in a somewhat sombre Aristotelian reading. Alison Searle, in âThe Moral Imagination: Biblical Imperatives, Narrative and Hermeneutics in Pride and Prejudice â ( Renascence 59:i[2006] 17â32), strives to elucidate the romance of Pride and Prejudice in terms of the âbiblical metanarrative of ultimate salvation imaged in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation 21â (p. 17). It's an ideal vision which doesn't leave much room for Elizabeth's shrewd appreciation of those âbeautiful grounds at Pemberleyâ, or for Austen's own slyness. William Nelles, in âOmniscience for Atheists: or, Jane Austen's Infallible Narratorâ ( Narrative 14:ii[2006] 118â31) also circles around the same issues, but, more flexibly, argues that âthe model for Austen's infallible narrators is not God in heaven but Jane Austenâ, bounded by particular limitations of gender and mobility (p. 128). Far more fun was had by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson amid the âjoyful lawlessnessâ of the âjuveniliaâ, in a great supplement to her monograph of last year: ââPleasure is now, and ought to be, your businessâ: Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's Juveniliaâ in the Romantic Circles Praxis series, Historicizing Romantic Sexuality , edited by Richard C. Sha ( RCPS [Jan. 2006] http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality ). Busy purloining pastries, bonnets, bank-notes and men, the manic young ladies of the âjuveniliaâ âsteal back their vitalityâ from eighteenth-century propriety. Munching on jellies and curries, wielding their bottles and dice, Heydt-Stevenson's heroines provided some lively relief from the more heavy-going philosophical and postcolonial Austens we also encountered this year. Some more modest but equally knowing heroines were presented by Katie Halsey in âThe Blush of Modesty or the Blush of Shame? Reading Jane Austen's Blushesâ ( FMLS 42:iii[2006] 226â38). Arguing, like Mary Poovey, that Austen does employ strategies familiar from the conduct-book, Halsey then differs from Poovey in suggesting that Austen goes on to exploit conventional constructs of the meanings of the blush, creating a narrative bond with the reader, who, like Emma, is brought to âblush and laughâ (p. 235) at their own blunders. Film adaptations have become an area of Austen studies in their own right. Linda V. Troost, in âFilming Tourism, Portraying Pemberleyâ ( ECF 18:iv[2006] 477â98), contrasts different adaptations of the novelâFay Weldon's screenplay; Andrew Davies's BBC version; the recent Working Title films productionâand their presentation of Elizabeth Bennet's pivotal visit to Darcy's âbeautiful grounds at Pemberleyâ as a way of understanding heritage tourism, then and now. Antje Ascheid, in âSafe Rebellions: Romantic Emancipation in the âWoman's Heritage Filmââ ( Scope 4[2006] http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk ), addressed the âdouble discourseâ of adaptations from Clueless to Mansfield Park , which address their audience in terms both of âfeminist politics and a feminine eroticsâ. Cheryl Wilson's â Bride and Prejudice : A Bollywood Comedy of Mannersâ ( LFQ 34:iv[2006] 323â31) with its blithe agreement that the film does manage to close âthe gap âfrom Amritsar to UKââ, didn't quite pin down the unsettling nature of this particular cultural translation, which, while it sets out to âprobe contemporary cultural stereotypesâ (p. 324), seems to engender still more. The less said about Becoming Jane the betterâbut a useful corrective to its frothy excess was offered by Joan Klingel Ray in âThe Truth about Jane Austen and Tom Lefroyâ ( N&Q 53[2006] 311â15), who showed Lefroy to be a highly serious, âpious, ambitious, and pre-engaged young manâ (p. 314), his letters crammed with biblical allusions. There was a good deal of strong writing on Edgeworth this year, starting with two extensive edited collections. An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts , edited by Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, is reviewed in detail in this chapter in section 1 , and so will not be covered here. Julie Nash, ed., New Essays on Maria Edgeworth (also reviewed in section 1 ) comes first. Some excellent, challenging work has emerged on Edgeworth over the last few years, but, as Nash points out, âfew projects examine the range of Edgeworth's writing from her moral tales, to her letters, to her novelsâ (p. xv). Beginning with a colonial reading of Belinda and encompassing Edgeworth's writings on education, her historical fiction, and her relationship to Ireland, this collection aims to give a fuller sense of its subject's energy and range as well as her contradictions: this was a âfeminist who parodied Wollstonecraftian radicalism, an abolitionist who idealized the loyal slave, a paternalist who undermined patriarchal power, a realist who never lost sight of the idealâ (p. xvii). Nash's own essay perhaps best captures this âskeptical, puzzled, and unresolvedâ Edgeworth (p. 161), delicately exploring both Edgeworth's Burkean allegiances and her interest in social change through the contradictory nature of her servant characters, by turns âflat comic charactersâ and vividly realized moral and intellectual individuals. Elsewhere in the collection, Alison Harvey explores how Edgeworth aligns Harriet Freke with âthe obeah womanâ, who posed a special threat to colonial order in the West Indies. This is not simply a conservative strategy to contain Harriet's radical feminismâit raises, Harvey argues, more complex and ambivalent questions of marginalization in English domestic situations which also shape Belinda's position. Eve Tabor Bannet's essay also discusses how to read Edgeworth's relationship with the marginalized figure, in an analysis of her correspondence with the Jewish American Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. Edgeworth's educational writings, including her Moral Tales and Practical Education , are explored in detail by Mona Narain and Kathleen B. Grathwol: for both, she emerges as a âstrong advocate of female agencyâ whilst also arguing âfor the relevance of the private sphere for menâ (p. 69), disrupting conventional gender practices. Grathwol concludes that Edgeworth writes an âalternate female historyâ, insisting âon the importance of female community and the potential of the female intellectâ (p. 88). Female community is also the focus of Frances R. Botkin's essay, which explores the bonds among womenââmothers, daughters, sisters, and female friendsâ (p. 93)âin Helen , which she takes as crucial to understanding Edgeworth's mature creative identity. The essays by Irene Basey Beesemyer and Joanne Cordon second Narain's assertion that Edgeworth was equally keenly engaged with constructions of masculinity and nationality. For Beesemyer, Castle Rackrent , Ennui and The Absentee work towards a didactic portrayal of an âeducated, socially aware man ⊠an ideal masculinityâ (p. 129); Cordon analyses Edgeworth's deconstruction of stock rhetorical stereotypes of âthe Stage Irishmanâ and English society women, âthe Simpering Missâ (p. 132). The closing essays by Kara M. Ryan and Laura Dabundo reassess Edgeworth's relationship to Ireland: Ryan reads The Absentee as a âLukĂĄcsian historical novelâ, which presents a âprogressiveâ and âcritical historiographyâ of Ireland (p. 175), and, from a different perspective, Dabundo argues for a âmystical, mysterious, and powerful Celtic impulseâ at the heart of Edgeworth's writing (p. 193). Teresa Casal, in ââI did not know what to think, so I said nothingâ: Narrative Politics in Castle Rackrent â (in Patricia A. Lynch, Joachim Fischer, and Brian Coates, eds., Back to the Present Forward to the Past: Irish Writing and History since 1798 , pp. 69â82), similarly probes Edgeworth's complicated negotiations with constructions of Irish identity and the Irish story, and investigates the claim that Castle Rackrent represents a turning point in Anglo-Irish fiction. Another essay in the volume, Kellie A. Donovan's âImprisonment in Castle Rackrent : Maria Edgeworth's Use of Gothic Conventionsâ (pp. 145â56), focuses instead on the interplay between Gothic and realist modes in her work. Perhaps a more lively analysis of her style was offered by Jeffrey Cass in âIthuriel's Spear and Detecting the Counterfeit: Edgeworth's Miltonic Allusions in Belinda â (in Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler, eds., Romanticism: Comparative Discourses , pp. 117â30). While plenty of critics allude to Edgeworth's complicated relationship with her father, Jeffrey Cass directly tackles her relationship with her literary parents. Revising the viewpoints of critics such as Gilbert and Gubar, and Pearson, who put forward an Edgeworth who is a âcompliant, even hagiographical, junior partnerâ (p. 118), he argues for a different, post-Bloomian reading of Miltonic influence itself, and an appreciation of how a positive understanding of Miltonic allusion can open up layers of interpretation in Belinda . As well as Todd's essay on Austen, Glen and Hamilton's edited collection Repossessing the Romantic Past also contains two strong pieces which revisit Butler's scholarly interest in Edgeworth: âMaria Edgeworth and âthe Light of Natureâ: Artifice, Autonomy, and Anti-Sectarianism in Practical Education (1798)â by Susan Manly (pp. 140â61) and âEdgeworth and Scott: The Literature of Reterritorializationâ by James Chandler (pp. 119â39). Butler's work, begins Chandler, has opened up our sense of the dialogues between Edgeworth and her contemporaries, and his essay enlarges on âEdgeworth's relation to Scott's work in transformingâsome would say âinventingââthe historical novelâ (p. 119). He focuses on their representation of place, and points out how at the heart of Scott's âethnographic realismâ (p. 122) and detailed topographies lie vagaries and vagueness of setting, debatable lands, arguing that this is derived from Scott's reading of Edgeworth (in particular, the literally contested family lands of Patronage ). He uses this as a means of exploring how the historical novel is in dialogue with its sentimental predecessor, and, then, how its representation of place is âdisplaced by ⊠attention to the expressive qualities of the sentimentalized face â (p. 120), âclose-upsâ which foreshadow later cinematic technique and which renegotiate space and the territories of feeling. Indeed, Chandler's essay itself, roving around period and genre, from Deleuze to Eisenstein, explores new territories for Romantic criticism. Manly explores the traces of radical and anti-authoritarian writers and thinkers in Edgeworth's Practical Education . While not shying away from describing the harshness and severity of the Edgeworth family's early educational experiments, she emphasizes the qualities of inventiveness, imagination and attention to âsocial integration and practicalityâ (p. 145) which characterize Maria's writing on educationâthe important role of play and free discovery which would lead later critics to distrust it as subversive. In another chapter in the same volume, âElizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and Romantic Orientalismâ (pp. 183â202), Nigel Leask reflects on Butler's readings of Hamilton alongside Edgeworth and Austen, and furthers her work by setting Hamilton in a new contextâagainst the travel writing of Abu Taleb, whose work was translated from the Persian into English in 1810. Their overlaps, Leask demonstrates, urge a reconsideration of âour sense of colonial interaction as a one-way street between those articulate Europeans who possessed the power of representation, and their colonial subjects who were silent or ventriloquized objects of that powerâ (p. 200). Mona Narain also addresses the book in âColonial Desires: The Fantasy of Empire and Elizabeth Hamilton's Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah â ( SiR 45:iv[2006] 585â98), this time focusing on how questions of gender connect with new critical understandings of this ânexus between Romanticism and Colonialismâ (p. 585). Claire Grogan's âIdentifying Foreign Bodies: New Philosophers and Hottentots in Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers â ( ECF 18:iii[2006] 305â27) opens with Bridgetina Botherim snatching up crumbs of Political Justice from the paper of a snuff package and goes on to discuss Hamilton's engagement with the âpervasive fear shared by educationalists and authority figures that the most innocent packages might harbour foreign bodiesâ (p. 306). Like Harvey's discussion of Harriet Freke as âobeah womanâ, Bridgetina is presented as an âEnglish Hottentotâ in the context of contemporary portrayals of the Hottentot and fascination with Saartje Baartman: Hamilton, argues Grogan, attempts to make philosophical differences racial, disturbingly sexual, âfreakishâ and foreign. Edgeworth also featured in Comitini's Vocational Philanthropy and British Women's Writing, 1790â1810 , which explores the philanthropic dimension of writing from Wollstonecraft to Hannah More and Dorothy Wordsworth. Belinda , Comitini argues, âhelps to reenvision the purpose of the novel at a transitional historical moment in 1801â (p. 111) and to reshape its ideological function, in which, as she neatly puts it, âform will be reconciled with reformâ (p. 113) and the middling classes will be awakened to the ameliorative possibilities of fiction. To this end, she discusses Belinda as the reader's surrogate, âa guide to moral propriety and proper reading of circumstancesâ (p. 124). This philanthropic aspect was also explored by Judith W. Page, in âReforming Honeysuckles: Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife and the Politics of Women's Gardensâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 111â36), for whom the gardens in Coelebs become âa challenge for women to turn domestic labor into public goodâ (p. 112). Like Austen turning a critical eye on Rushworth's Sotherton âimprovementsâ, More interrogates the grand masculine designs of landscape gardening and puts forward a vision of women's gardens as âworking, productive, and sustainingâ (p. 136). It was in general a thin year for publications on the novels of Godwin and Wollstonecraftâalthough we eagerly await the digitized version of Godwin's diary now being completed in Oxford, which will help further recent critical interest in his sociability and collaborative work. Indeed, one of the most interesting essays on Godwin this year centred on âthe erotics of literary collaborationâ (p. 81) through an analysis of his editing of Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman . Gerard Goggin's âEditing Minervas: William Godwin's Liminal Maneuvers in Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman â (in Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, eds., Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship , pp. 81â99) suggests that the novel remained unfinished âbecause the intertextual and intersubjective dynamics of Wollstonecraft's relationship with Godwin are ultimately bound up with a framing scene of instruction and writingâ (p. 85). While emphasizing Godwin's âsympathetic, and courageousâ (p. 98) role as an editor, Goggin also contends that his editorial decisions raise questions both of textual and sexual power. Political power in Godwin's work forms the subject of Daniela Garofalo's ââA Left-Handed Wayâ: Modern Masters in William Godwin's Caleb Williams â ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 237â44). This offers a sharp reading of power struggles and âmanly ruinâ in the novel, exploring Godwin's âinterest in the shift from an overtly patriarchal culture to a modern political landscapeâ against his acknowledgement of the violent underside of this âmodernâ, apparently benevolent and egalitarian, power. David O'Shaughnessy's âSt. Dunstan and De Occulta Philosophia : An Inspiration for Godwin's St. Leon â ( N&Q 53[2006] 314â15) adds to our understanding of the rich historical and literary sources for the novel by uncovering its hidden connection with Godwin's first (abandoned) play St Dunstan [1790]. Wollstonecraft's complicated ârevisions of the sentimental narrativeâ are examined by Deborah Weiss in âSuffering, Sentiment, and Civilization: Pain and Politics in Mary Wollstonecraft's Short Residence â ( SiR 45:ii[2006] 199â21). This article also tackles Godwin's presentation of Wollstonecraft's legacy, but Weiss reads his interventions more bluntly, suggesting that he sentimentalized and feminized Wollstonecraft (especially in his comments on A Short Residence ) to make her âintelligible and acceptable to an increasingly conservative British audienceâ (p. 200). In âMary Wollstonecraft and the âReserve of Reasonââ ( SiR 45:i[2006] 3â24), Simon Swift rereads recent critical developments negotiating the relationship between reason and affect in the period in the light of Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Swift continues and furthers the exciting work of Barbara Taylor, Jon Mee and John Whale, placing Mary Wollstonecraft in a wider, European, context of Enlightenment rationalism and âcultural debate about sensationâ (p. 6). Meanwhile, Wollstonecraft's twentieth-century legacies are explored in Harriet Devine Jump's ââOne Cry for Justiceâ: Virginia Woolf Reads Mary Wollstonecraftâ (in Davies and Turley, eds., pp. 41â60), a nuanced collection which puts forward what Lucy Newlyn in its introduction terms âan integrative model of influenceâ (p. xiii) borrowing both from New Historicism and Ricksian close reading. Jump's reading of Virginia Woolf's âlively and impressionistic ⊠psychological biographyâ (p. 46) of Wollstonecraft demonstrates Woolf's indebtednessâideologically and stylisticallyâto her predecessor's writing. Ana M. Acosta's study, Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From Milton to Mary Shelley , discusses the contrasting reading and writing patterns of Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in a larger context of adaptations and interpretations of Genesis and scriptural language, including Milton and Rousseau. This tradition of interpretation âself-consciously negotiated the fault lines between visionary ideals and secular goalsâ (p. 2) and allows us to trace the survival of utopian thought into the eighteenth century. Wollstonecraft's rewritings of Genesis seem to formulate a paradoxical yet optimistic poetics, which âwould reconcile a radical vision of gender equality and the ideals of the Protestant middle class within the new civil society emerging from the Revolution in Franceâ (p. 6). Her daughter's work, however, offers a mournful caricature of the utopian construct. The concluding chapter argues that Frankenstein stages a âdissection of the main goals that the Enlightenment had defined for itself: social progress, the intensification of all material and spiritual powers, and freedom from natureâ (p. 6). The creature's reading ( Werther , Plutarch's Lives , and Paradise Lost ) is key to what Acosta reads as the novel's critique of âthe Enlightenment tradition of utopian rewritings of Genesisâ (p. 160). The Creature, she argues, reminds us that âtotal enlightenment slips into total mythâ (p. 177). We end the study with the Creature's lonely cry, as fruitful Enlightenment utopias end in the midst of an icy and desolate wasteland. Just who or what is this Creature? Several essays this year supplied different answers. Stephanie Rowe's ââListen to Meâ: Frankenstein as an Appeal to Mercy and Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animalsâ (in Palmeri, ed., pp. 137â52), suggests he should be read in the context of discourses of vegetarianism and awareness of animal rights around the young Mary Shelleyâput forward not only by Percy but also by her father and his friend Joseph Ritson, who spoke vehemently on âthe horrid, unnatural crime of eating your fellow creaturesâ (p. 141). Frankenstein , she argues, âtraces the barrier by which humanist discourse separates the human species from all other animal speciesâ (p. 138), probing what constitutes a creature , and asking how we might sympathize with creaturely suffering. Maurice Hindle, however, in âVictim of Romance: The Life and Death of Fanny Godwinâ ( WW 13:iii[2006] 331â47), has a more specific source in mind for the illegitimate and nameless Creature. He traces Fanny Godwin's sad life story from her âlively and boisterousâ childhood to the final, lonely voyage to an unmarked grave, after her suicide in a hotel room in Swansea in October 1816âas Shelley was writing the early chapters of Frankenstein . Fanny's âdisplaced statusâ and her âdisputed nameââshe could also be called Fanny Imlay, or Fanny Wollstonecraftâshould be allowed to play a part, suggests Hindle, in her half-sister's construction of the complex Creature. And might the Creature also ârepresent the weatherâ, asked Bill Phillips, in â Frankenstein and Mary Shelley's âwet ungenial summerââ ( Atlantis 28:ii[2006] 59â68)? Informed by new trends in ecocritism, he finds an echo of the dark and cold weather experienced in 1816â18 in the lowering skies of the novel, and the Creature, he suggests, also has âthe indifference of a force of nature ⊠a monstrous volcano of destructionâ (p. 67). Frankenstein was placed in a wider Romantic and Regency-era context in a special women's writing issue of the KeatsâShelley Journal containing Patricia Comitini's article âThe Limits of Discourse and the Ideology of Form in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein â ( KSJ 55[2006] 179â98). Untangling how the novel helps âhistorically to produce the quintessential Romantic notion of transcendence that negates its historical moment, yet which, paradoxically, produces its own historicityâ (p. 180), Comitini discusses how this duality fuels critical interest. To understand how the novel works, she argues, is to recognize that its ideology is still âthe lauded part of our literary historyâ (p. 198). Sara Guyer, in âTestimony and Trope in Frankenstein â ( SiR 45:i[2006] 77â115), analyses questions it raises about autobiography and, also, testimony. Invoking Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben's reading of Levi's work, she discusses the nature of âwitnessingâ and uses it to explore the limits of testimony in Shelley's novel. âA Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rightsâ, by Diane Reese ( Rep 96[2006] 48â72), discusses the novel âas the instantiation of a critical dilemma for attributions of the human proceeding from Enlightenmentâ, and positions it in relation to various theories of human liberty, including Rousseau and Kant. James OâRourke, in Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession , argues that âthe most compelling work that literary texts can do is counterintuitiveâ, disrupting and resisting our ethical assumptions. In this light, he rereads the ethical and intellectual challenges posed by the 1831 edition of Frankenstein . First, he contends that the most important predecessor to Frankenstein is Rousseau, from whom Shelley learnt the âimperative for scrupulous self-examinationâ (p. 98), but whose failingsâparticularly his abandonment of his childrenâshe takes as a âcautionary taleâ, a necessary âlesson of humilityâ which she turns upon herself (p. 99). When she returns to revise the novel in 1831, OâRourke contends, this humility is uppermost in her mind. He demonstrates this through an extremely intriguing close reading of an extensively emended 1831 passage, the âtransformation of Elizabeth Lavenza from Victor's cousin into an adoptee of the Frankenstein familyâ, who is separated from her rough peasant family only to meet her death in her new privileged situation. Shelley's rewriting of the fairy-tale is part of a self-examination which should extend to the readerâit should warn us, argues OâRourke, that âwe cannot safely exonerate ourselves from responsibility for the exclusions that arise from structures of social privilege just because those decisions are not our faultâ (p. 130). From a slightly different direction, Monique R. Morgan, in â Frankenstein's Singular Events: Inductive Reasoning, Narrative Technique, and Generic Classificationâ ( RoN 44[2006]), also argues that Shelley's narrative techniques both invite and frustrate the reader's moral judgement. She then links this ethical disruption to Shelley's rereading of Gothic tropes such as the doppelgĂ€ngerâFrankenstein's, of course, answers back, and âdisrupts the asymmetrical doubling associated with the gothicâ. Frankenstein' s relation to the Gothic was discussed by Christopher Keep, in âGrowing Intimate with Monsters: Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl and the Gothic Nature of Hypertextâ ( RoN 41:ii[2006]). Keep uses Jackson's âelectronic novelââwhere Patchwork Girl's limbs are links, which the reader may reassemble into a different body of narrativeâto discuss the hypertextual possibilities of Frankenstein itself. Jackson's work, Keep claims, responds to questions first voiced about the affective force of the Gothic novel and shows us how âthe gothic is not so much a literary genre, as it is a recurring moment within the history of modernityâ. Jackson's reinvention of the novel was also discussed in detail by Carolina SĂĄnchez-Palencia Carazo and Manuel Almagro JimĂ©nez in âGathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl â ( Atlantis 28:i[2006] 115â29). Jules Law, in âBeing There: Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein , Dracula , and Strange Days â ( ELH 73:iv[2006] 975â96), also tackled the interplay between Gothic and technology and argues that the Gothic dreams of âtechnically surpassing the narrative constraints of experienceâ, a âyearning for pure immanenceâ which is also a nightmare (pp. 992â3). ââDung, guts and bloodâ: Sodomy, Abjection and Gothic Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Centuryâ, by George E. Haggerty ( GothicSt 8:ii[2006] 35â51), opens with a stomach-turning description of the punishment meted out to the Vere Street sodomites. Pelted with offal, dung, mud, rotten cats, the crowd marked them out, writes Haggerty, as âfigures of deformityâ, attacking them with âthe venom that is reserved for the cultural enemyâ (p. 38). Analysing the Gothic horror of the descriptions in The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street Coterie [1813], Haggerty suggests the intimate connections between Gothic and the history of sexuality. He goes on to connect this to treatments of monstrosity in Frankenstein and Confessions of a Justified Sinner , and intriguingly explores Gothic fiction's use of homoerotic motif and its invocation of the monstrous codification of the sodomite. But Haggerty leaves some questions unaskedâfor (as OâRourke and Morgan analyse) while others regard the Creature as monstrous, the reader is fully aware of the sympathetic and complex character of both Frankenstein and his creation. Having raised the spectre of the sodomite in these novels, what conclusion might we be able to draw from the way in which both Shelley and Hogg then persistently frustrate the reader's desire for clear ethical and moral judgements about transgressive behaviour? And how might readers respond to this coded depiction? The article might profitably be set alongside Eduardo Cadava's âThe Monstrosity of Human Rightsâ ( PMLA 121:v[2006] 1558â65), which follows H.L. Malchow's connection between Frankenstein and contemporary abolitionist debates in drawing an analogy between the monster and stereotypical depictions of blacks. The Creature has a particular resonance in American anti-slavery rhetoric, as Cadava shows through analysis of Frederick Douglass's speech, âWhat to the Slave is the Fourth of July?â Douglass, he argues, is drawn to the novel because Shelley's depiction of the outcast Creature âallows him to mobilize the political resources of a certain rhetoric of monstrosityâ (p. 1560) against the monstrosities of slavery and racism. There was some interest in Shelley's other novels. Claire Raymond, in The Posthumous Voice in Women's Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath , focuses on the nature of the âfeminine self-elegyâ, where a dead speaker mourns herself, and examines both the formal and the ideological implications of such rhetoric. The posthumous feminine voice, argues Raymond, is an evasive, sceptical, resistant one, whose âbodilessnessâ is a way of challenging âthe feminine voice's lack of claim to cultural centralityâ. Mary Shelley is the starting point for an argument which moves through the work of Emily BrontĂ«, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti and Sylvia Plath. The novella Mathilda opens and closes with the scene of Mathilda's death, which gives âa spectral momentum to the work's otherwise static dramaâ (p. 69). Raymond detects, too, another hidden momentum carrying the work forward: it should be read in the context of Percy Shelley's work on The Cenci and his desire that Mary should translate The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci , details of which she found âhorrible and unfit for publicationâ (p. 76). The novel, she argues, should be seen as part of âan intertextual conversationâ between Shelley and her husband, and their audience. ââA vacant space, an empty stageâ: Prometheus Unbound , The Last Man , and the Problem of Dramatic (Re)Formâ, by David Taylor ( KSR 20[2006] 18â31), also discusses the intertextual conversations of Percy and Mary Shelley, suggesting that The Last Man critiques Percy's âconfidence in drama as the bearer of radical human sympathy and agencyâ with its images of the earth as a âvacant space, an empty stageâ (p. 28). Two books which explore the interplay of the Gothic and the marketable commodity were not mentioned last year. First, Franz J. Potter's The History of Gothic Publishing 1800â1835: Exhuming the Trade reminds us of the twilight half-life of the genre: âwe have to view the good novels with the awful, the âartâ and the trade. We need to lower our sightsâ (p. 13). Its first chapters offer a statistical analysis of Gothic in the literary marketplace, exploring its place in the circulating library, the production of bluebooks, and the serialization of novels in periodicals. The second half revives some forgotten best-selling authorsâWilliam Child Green and bluebook author Sarah Wilkinson, whose own life declined into Gothic peril, poverty and illnessâand concludes with an analysis of Frankenstein' s recreation in an 1825 pamphlet âThe Monster Made By Manâ, an example of the way in which trade Gothic could âdisseminate and perpetuateâ tales we now think of as canonical (p. 151). Screening the Gothic by Lisa Hopkins similarly offers an excellent insight into perpetuations and recreations of the Gothic tale. One of the most surprising and original aspects of Hopkins's study is its demonstration of the ways in which novels which were âborn out of varying degrees of conscious opposition to the Gothic movementâ become transformed into Gothic texts in their recent film adaptations. Close readings of the âlowering and lurid skiesâ of Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility or the âcadaverousâ settings chosen by Patricia Rozema for her Mansfield Park bring out the ways in which we continue to inhabit the Gothic. Hopkins most convincingly situates Gothic within the home: in Frankenstein it lives inside the family, and this trope is continued in contemporary films such as The Mummy Returns and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone . âThe Gothic is alive and wellâ, argues Hopkins, but it has fled âits original lairsâ to resurface âat the heart of âfamily entertainmentââ (p. 146). A special issue of Romanticism on the Net [November 2006] was devoted to âThe Gothic: from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Riceâ. Frances A. Chiu, in the wonderfully entitled âFaulty Towers: Reform, Radicalism and the Gothic Castle, 1760â1800â ( RoN 44[2006]), begins by examining the trope of the haunted house, the instantly recognizable Gothic ruined castle or decaying mansion. She links its construction to the increasing deployment of architectural metaphors to denote the âancien rĂ©gimeâ in radical reforming rhetoric, and then shows how this might have fed back into the Gothic novel, itself a âmagnificent, unpredictable castleâ of detours and digressionsâso that the castle âmay be said to afford as much a refuge for the disempowered and politically marginalized as it did for the hated political eliteâ. Max Fincher, in âThe Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk â ( RoN 44[2006]), employs a âqueer theoretical approachâ to read Lewis's excesses of fetishistic Catholicism. Fincher suggests that recognizing a âqueer-camp aestheticâ within the Gothic would help us understand how the Gothic novel might reflect the âindeterminacy surrounding same-sex desire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuryâ. Jennifer Beauvais, in âDomesticity and the Female Demon in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya and Emily BrontĂ«'s Wuthering Heights â ( RoN 44[2006]), suggests that Dacre puts forward a new sort of female demon, defined not through physical deformityâlike the monstrous female grotesques of earlier Gothicâbut through her mutability and ability to âcross social and gender boundariesâ. For Beauvais, she then re-emerges in the shape of Catherine Earnshaw. These fluid, dissembling female forms allow both writers to explore representations of the ideal of femininityâbut these shape-shifters are finally undone, in this reading, by domestication, which makes them revert to nothing more than a âtraditional Gothic ghostâ. Ann Radcliffe's negotiations with depictions of the female form were the topic of Yael Shapira's âWhere the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's âDelicateâ Gothicâ ( ECF 18:iv[2006] 453â76). âThe heroine who gravely ponders etiquette while running for her life is a peculiar feature of Radcliffe's Gothicâ, Shapira points out, citing, for instance, Emily pausing in her flight from the Castle of Udolpho to buy a modesty-preserving hat (p. 454). This decorum is vividly contrasted with Matthew Lewis's âpreoccupation with the shape-changing, stomach-turning female grotesqueâ (p. 466). Shapira discusses the deep ideological and aesthetic conflict between Radcliffe and Lewis through this management of the bodyâand suggests how the delicate and decorous strategies of The Italian attempt to answer and refute The Monk . However, Shapira concludes, once the impropriety of Lewis's Gothic became associated with Radcliffe, she fell silentâwas her career ended by those anxieties of bodily propriety and âcorporeal slanderâ experienced by her own heroines? L. Andrew Cooper, in âThe Role of Danger in the Critical Evaluation of The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho â ( GothicSt 8:ii[2006] 18â34), also reads Radcliffe alongside Lewis as part of his analysis of how critical strategies seek to contain the threat of the Gothic. Looking closely at early reviews, he shows how Radcliffe's early critical reception was shaped by her attentiveness âto the demands of conservative criticsâ, and her own containment of dangerâalthough the thrust of her writing often undercuts this perceived conservatism. He traces the fate of the Gothic through criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and into present struggles to contextualize and classify it. Fiona Price, in ââMyself creating what I sawâ: The Morality of Spectator in Eighteenth-Century Gothicâ ( GothicSt 8:ii[2006] 1â17), approaches the problematic position of the Gothic spectator, poised between disinterest and voyeurism, and suggests that a rereading of the Gothic in light of recent critical work on the formulation of the gaze (which she outlines) might allow us to perceive a âmore complicated aesthetics of distressâ at work therein. Analysing key passages in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and The Mysteries of Udolpho , she argues that Radcliffe repeatedly interrogates the gaze and suggests that this anxiety about the âmorals of visionâ forms âan important contribution to the eighteenth-century debate concerning the construction of the ethical spectatorâ (p. 2). Pam Perkins also focused on the nature of Gothic vision in âJohn Moore, Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Vision of Italyâ ( GothicSt 8:i[2006] 35â51), reading her fictional Italy alongside its representation in contemporary travel writing such as John Moore's to show how âGothic representations of the country overlap with and fade into less overtly fictionalized versions of itâ (p. 35). Anne Chandler, in âAnn Radcliffe and Natural Theologyâ ( SNNTS 38:ii[2006] 133â53), makes clear the difficulties of pinning down Radcliffe's religious standpoint (recent readings have, variously, attempted to identify her allegiances to radical Dissent and to latitudinarian Anglicanism). However, Chandler seeks to explore the âartistic implicationsâ of the spirituality in her novels, and very interestingly places her work alongside that of Anna Letitia Barbauld, a possible acquaintance, and her views on devotional expression as a human right. In the Gothic groves and âalpine amphitheatresâ of The Italian , Chandler sees Radcliffe attempting to elucidate a natural theology: a âcomplex interchange of religious faith, literary thinking and landscape aestheticsâ (p. 146). Jayne Lewis, in ââNo color of languageâ: Radcliffe's Aesthetic Unboundâ ( ECS 39:iii[2006] 377â90), discusses the importance of colour, the vivid hues and purple glows which abound in Radcliffe, which situate her, in Lewis's reading, âat the crossroads of visual image and lexical inscriptionâ (p. 378) and which give us insight into her representation of feminine perception. Radcliffe's visual attentiveness points to her innovatory aesthetic critique which Lewis sees as also challenging âprevailing forms of cultural authorityâ (p. 388). There were some good articles on a range of other novelists in the period. A.A. Markley, in âAristocrats Behaving Badly: Gambling and Dueling in the 1790s Novel of Reformâ ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 161â8), discussed attacks on gaming in Mary Robinson's writing and Godwin's St Leon , and on duelling in Amelia Opie's The Dangers of Coquetry , Anna Maria Porter's Walsh Colville , and Robinson's Walsingham . Such bad behaviour, Markley argues, became a powerful political tool in reformist novels, exemplifying âthe unfitness of contemporary aristocrats to continue to serve as the ruling classâ (p. 167). Leigh Wetherall Dickson, in âAuthority and Legitimacy: The Cultural Context of Lady Caroline Lamb's Novelsâ ( WW 13:iii[2006] 369â91), continues Paul Douglass's work in restoring our sense of the range and power of Lamb's writing. She explores the three published novels in the context of Lamb's self-conscious interrogation of her own social and political class, turning away from focus on the Byronic to build up a careful picture of Lamb's own creative and cultural identity as an aristocrat and Whig. Michael J. Franklin, in ââPassion's Empireâ: Sydney Owenson's âIndian Ventureâ, Phoenicianism, Orientalism, and Binarismâ ( SiR 45:ii[2006] 181â97), focuses on Owenson's novel The Missionary , discussing its origins in her Irish tales. Blithely forging links between Gaelic and oriental culture, writes Franklin, âSydney Owenson launched herself into the troubled waters of Orientalism as easily as she might take a dip in Bantry Bayâ (p. 182). He suggests that the impact of Owenson's âIndian Taleâ was not so much connected with the story of British imperial rule as with the seductive power of the sentimental narrative. Sharon Ragaz analysed Charles Robert Maturin's vexed but fruitful relationship with his publisher in âMaturin, Archibald Constable, and the Publication of Melmoth the Wanderer â ( RES 57[2006] 359â73). While critics have called attention to the novel's interest in ânarrative transmissibility and communicationâ, Ragaz is the first to detail the story of the novel's composition. No straightforward publishing history, this account of Maturin's correspondence with Constable shows the crucialâalmost collaborativeâpart played by the publisher, not only in wresting the manuscript from a reluctant and infinitely distractable author, but then in piecing together the novel from the fragments which he did manage to coax from him. This is book history at its best, opening up new perspectives on the structure of the novel, and reminding us of âthe continuing need to incorporate what we might loosely call publishing events into any full account of literary texts in the Romantic periodâ (p. 373). Laura Mandell, âProducing Hate in âPrivateâ Letters: Horace Walpole, Mary Haysâ ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 169â77), parallels the 1810 publication of Walpole's aggressive correspondence with Madame du Deffand with Hays's publication of her own letters to and from Godwin in Memoirs of Emma Courtney . Mandell argues for a new reading of these curiously semi-private epistolary publications as âpsychoanalytic practiceâ (p. 169). This interesting exploration of the ways in which Hays is articulating not simply personal anger, but also âhistorical traumaâ, allowing us to probe âthe interface between private psyche and public historyâ (p. 176), would have been greatly strengthened by engagement with Tillotama Rajan's article, âAutonarration and Genotext in Mary Haysâ Memoirs of Emma Courtney â ( SiR 32:ii[1993] 149â76). Also published this year, but not received in time for review, was Gina Luria Walker's Mary Hays (1759â1843): The Growth of a Woman's Mind . It will be covered with material from 2007. Emily Allen's thoughtful and witty âLoss Incommensurable: Economies of Imbalance in Mary Robinson's Walsingham â ( ECN 5[2006] 67â92) shows how the novel's stylistic and generic imbalances are mapped onto its âvision of psychic and financial economy gone awryâ to help us understand how the eighteenth-century novel might represent âthe linked economies of private sentiment and public creditâ (p. 69). Recently discussed most frequently in terms of gender politics, the novel benefits from Allen's fresh and lively critical repositioning, which incorporates its most startling featureââSirâ Sidney Aubrey's cross-dressingâinto a larger consideration of loss and debt, âimbalances and inversionsâ. ââBelonging to No/bodyâ: Mary Robinson, The Natural Daughter , and Rewriting Feminine Identityâ, by Morgan Rooney ( ECF 18:iii[2006] 355â72), discusses Martha Morley as a woman who belongs to nobody in several sensesâshe has escaped a possessive husband, and also refuses to be defined by the bodyâand whom Robinson presents âas a legitimate, sustainable alternative to the suffocating scripts of illegitimacy and the fallen womanâ (p. 355). Through her, argues Rooney, Robinson presents a ânew, writing, self-authorizing female subjectâ (p. 372) who borrows from Robinson's own self-construction as an author, and who also puts forward an ideal for the future. There was an important publication for Smith scholars this year. Pamela Clemit's âCharlotte Smith to William and Mary Jane Godwin: Five Holograph Lettersâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 29â40) shows the intellectual and social engagement of Smith with the Godwins, a friendship whose significance has not previously been recognized. Written in a frank, confessional manner, the letters reveal Smith's very interesting self-presentation as impoverished and long-suffering, and show that she was by no means isolated from other writers. Essaka Joshua's âCharlotte Smith's Desmond : Romance and the Man of Principle in the Domestic and Public Spheresâ ( ECN 5[2006] 277â319) discusses the novel's interplay of reason and romance and its appropriation of conservative motifs. Smith, argues Joshua, redeploys Burke's conservative rhetoric of chivalry for radical ends: her work therefore âchallenges the automatic ascription of characteristic narratives to particular political viewpoints, even as it exploits and diverts the power of such narrativesâ (p. 318). Meanwhile, Nancy Metzger, in âWomen Writers and Romantic Constructions of Power: Towards Constructing a âPoetics of Spaceâ for the Sentimental Novel: A Topo-Analysis of Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House â (in Peer and Long Hoeveler, eds., pp. 87â98) relies heavily on Gaston Bachelard as a way of getting inside the spatial geography of the novel, with its locked doors, passageways, caskets and tin boxes. Two essays missed last year, Cheryl Nixon's âLegal and Familial Recordkeeping: Chancery Court Records and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House â ( LitComp 2[2005] 1â24) and Janina Nordius's ââA kind of living deathâ: Gothicizing the Colonial Encounter in Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House â ( JEngS 86:i[2005] 40â50), are discussed in section 3 ( b ) above. Michael Wiley's âThe Geography of Displacement and Replacement in Charlotte Smith's The Emigrants â ( ERR 17:i[2006] 55â68) also offers a rereading of space in Smith's workâalthough he focuses primarily on her poetry, his identification of her âcomplex critique of the dominant geographies of nations and national identitiesâ (p. 57) also has relevance for Desmond and The Banished Man . Two more essays also focused on women writers looking across the channel. Katharina Rennhak's âTropes of Exile in the 1790s: English Women Writers and French Emigrantsâ ( ERR 17:v[2006] 575â92) similarly discussed The Emigrants and The Banished Man , placing them in a larger context of 1790s literary preoccupation with French emigration, including Frances Burney's The Wanderer . The trope of the wandering, suffering, exiled woman is used by both novelists, claims Rennhak, as a way into envisioning a âreformed model of societyâ (p. 576)âalthough she also explores the problems of such imaginative strategies. Anne K. Mellor, in âEmbodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Woman Writerâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 289â300), re-examines recent critical use of the term âcosmopolitanâ, and arguesâunusually and undogmaticallyâfor a more restrictive definition. Can a text simply be defined as cosmopolitan, she asks, or should we limit the term to those authors who actually endorse both a âtheoretical and an embodiedâ form of âinternational, inter-faith and inter-racial unionâ (p. 296)? Examples might include Smith's portrayals of ProtestantâCatholic, EnglishâFrench marriages in Desmond and The Banished Man , or Sydney Owenson's IrishâEnglish union in The Wild Irish Girl ânovels which Mellor reads in the light of Kant's demand for âcosmopolitan rightsâ. Kari E. Lokke, in âWoman and Fame: Germaine de StaĂ«l and Regency Women Writersâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 73â9), took the opening scene of Corinne , where the heroine is crowned with laurels, as a central image in her exploration of woman and fame in the Regency era, discussing how other womenâMaria Jane Jewsbury and Letitia Landon especiallyâresponded not only to StaĂ«l's writing but also to her celebrity Optimistic possibilities for Scott studies were opened up by an original and lively monograph by Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow , which analysed âScott's perplexed role within Scotland's cultural and political matrixâ (p. 4). From Scott's son-in-law Lockhart commenting dubiously on âSir Walter's Celtified Pageantryâ at the King's Visit in 1822, to the new Scottish parliament minister for tourism, culture and sport acknowledging that âthe cultural images and identity created by Scott have, in a sense, been too successfulâ (p. 4), Scott's romantic visions of the past have often been accusing of hindering Scotland's present progress by keeping it rooted in nostalgia. McCracken-Flesher, however, argues that actually Scott challenges the reader to look towards the future: his novels are not locked in a stultifying tartan romance but are energetic and dynamic. So too is this study. It is largely chronological, beginning with a chapter on Waverley and Guy Mannering , then moving to âthe complexities of telling, the variability of talesâ (p. 29) that comes to preoccupy Scott in 1816â18, from The Antiquary to The Heart of Mid-Lothian . For instance, despite the apparent backward-looking stance of The Antiquary , McCracken-Flesher argues that Scott uses it to multiply the voices and stories of Scottishness. She reminds us that âwhat Scott claims with regard to history is not what he does. Bringing an end to history, he opens it upâ (p. 30). There are very good readings of lesser-known novelsâincluding The Fortunes of Nigel and Castle Dangerous âand a sense of their intimate connection with Scott's life. McCracken-Flesher's conclusion that Scott's indeterminacy is âa condition that disrupts our processes and keeps them self-consciousâ (p. 186) is echoed by Andrew Krull in âSpectacles of Disaffection: Politics, Ethics, and Sentiment in Walter Scott's Old Mortality â ( ELH 73:iii[2006] 695â727). âFiction lets Scott displace the traumas of the modern dayâ, he writes, discussing the novel's composition immediately post-Waterloo (p. 696). But this âdisplacementâ, as Krull very convincingly argues, isn't evasive, although it might be easy to read Scott's historical narratives as simply tidying away contemporary problems into neat resolutions. Instead, through some strong readings, Krull shows how Morton's âheart-sickâ response to the spectacle of violence prompts âa sense that the more set political paradigms seem, the more tenuous moral convictions becomeâ (p. 697). Scott's fictions of the past, he concludes, release a powerful âinquisitive disquietâ into the novel-reader's consciousness of the present. Bonnie J. Gunzenhauser, in âReaderly Agency and the Discourse of History in The Antiquary â (in Peer and Long Hoeveler, eds., pp. 155â64), argued along much the same lines, discussing The Antiquary as a âhistoriographical commentaryâ (p. 156) which may also be self-critical, as Scott spoofs his own attraction towards Romantic antiquarianism. This self-awareness transfers itself onto Scott's readers too, whom âhe provides ⊠with the raw materials they need to make sense of history for themselvesâ (p. 162). Andrew Lincoln, in âWalter Scott, Politeness, and Patriotismâ in the Romantic Circles Praxis series, Romanticism and Patriotism , edited by Orrin Wang ( RCPS [May 2006] http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/patriotism ), takes a slightly different perspective on Scott's construction of history, arguing that it is shaped by his own patriotic paternalism, an ideal relationship of mutual affection between social orders which functions as a defence against the perceived modern threat of social disintegration and divisiveness. Lincoln's Scottâas opposed to Krull's more challenging and disruptive authorâconstructs his historical fictions in the service of âa paternalist fantasy of harmoniously restored dependencies in rural communitiesâ. In âResisting âthe Spirit of Innovationâ: The Other Historical Novel and Jane Porterâ ( MLR 101:iii[2006] 638â51), Fiona Price takes issue with a dominant LukĂĄcsian model of the historical novel, linked to progress and change, and argues for a rereading of Scott's contemporary, Porter, whose novels represent an âalternative mode of historical novel, which emphasizes history as continuityâ (p. 639). Brian Hamnett, in ââFictitious Historiesâ: The Dilemma of Fact and Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novelâ ( EHQ 36:i[2006] 31â60), discusses how the nineteenth century viewed itself through the historical novel, and outlines Scott's key role in the development of the genre, which Hamnett traces through Manzoni, Flaubert and Balzac. Hamnett's compelling discussion of the historical novel as âa pan-European enterpriseâ shows how literary influence might cross political and national boundaries to alter our perspective of ânational historyâ (p. 55). Stepping inside Scott's historical landscapes, Nicola J. Watson's seductively entertaining The Literary Tourist took us on a journey through the novelistic terrain of Abbotsford, a house which is also a shrine, and a âmeta-narrative derived from and referencing material thingsâ (p. 99). Watson brilliantly explores how and why we map our reading onto particular landscapesâin the case of Scott, we are positively encouraged to read Abbotsford as historical novel. Here the boundaries between story and life dizzily blur as the visitor is faced with Rob Roy's gun, the key that âturned the lock on Effie Deansâ, Flora Macdonald's pocket-book. Watson's account is also engagingly personalâher own rainy October visit to Abbotsford is discussed in the context of a pervasive melancholy in Victorian descriptions of the house, and also poses the question of where Scott might be placed in the Scotland of the future. As the category of âRomantic dramaâ expands to include the plays that were popular on the contemporary stageânot just the more philosophical or lyrical âmental theatreâ or âcloset dramaâ that was initially considered more worthy of studyâour views of Romantic drama change as well: we see how socially engaged it is, how artfully it manoeuvres around topical issues to present sometimes challenging notions in an entertaining format that will allow it to maintain a life on the stage. We also discover that much of this particular variety of Romantic drama was penned by women. A special issue of ERR (17:iii[2006]) is devoted to papers that came out of the conference on British women playwrights, 1780â1830, held in March 2005 at Chapman University. William D. Brewer leads off with âMary Robinson as Dramatist: The Nobody Catastropheâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 265â73), in which he rehistoricizes this famous disaster, where Robinson's first (and last) play closed after its third performance, successfully damned by servants and supporters of the Whig government, which feared it satirized them. Unwittingly they âdoomed a good-natured satireâ (p. 266) in which a City banker reforms an aristocratic gambler, and by silencing Robinson effectively cut off what could have been a significant dramatic voice for the Whig political agenda. Wendy C. Nielsen follows with âA Tragic Farce: Revolutionary Women in Elizabeth Inchbald's The Massacre and European Dramaâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 275â88); she compares Inchbald's play with its French source, Louis-SĂ©bastien Mercier's Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux , arguing that in her covert look at revolutionary women, translation from European drama allowed Inchbald to cross boundaries in conventions of both genre and gender. Anne K. Mellor's contribution, âEmbodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic Woman Writerâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 289â300), is particularly timely; she contends that female playwrights constructed a hitherto unnoticed version of Kant's abstract cosmopolitanism which is concrete, relationalâi.e. âembodiedââand manifested through interracial and interfaith romances and the âhybridized offspringâ thereof (p. 292). Mellor rereads Mariana Starke's The Widow of Malabar [1791] as a play that shows an âanxious commitment to a cosmopolitan, international peace sealed by an inter-racial romanceâ (p. 294) (albeit one that requires a voluntary conversion to Christianity). Joanna Baillie biographer Judith Bailey Slagle brings to light a new complication in her subject's religious views in âJoanna Baillie's Religious Ideology: The Dichotomy of Fundamentalism and Liberalism in The Martyr and A View of the General Tenour of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 301â14); she concludes that while upon a first reading The Martyr' s fundamentalism (from Baillie's Church of Scotland upbringing) and A View of the General Tenour' s liberalism (from her later interest in Unitarianism) seem to indicate a sharp change in Baillie's theological views, on closer inspection they are advocating the same thing: a return to âreligious experience unspoiled by doctrineâ (p. 312). Jeffrey Cass's ââThe Race of the Cidâ: Blood, Darkness, and the Captivity Narrative in Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 315â26) counters recent readings of Hemans's play to show it as a work that affirms the need for national purity; the blood that courses through the play becomes âthe conflicted sign of racial hybridity and sexual impurityâ (p. 316) of mixing between Catholic Spanish and Muslim Moor. Cass aligns the play with popular female captivity narratives that also stress the connection between women's purity and national security. In âDesires and History: Historical Representation in Frances Burney's Edwy and Elgiva and Joanna Baillie's Ethwald â ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 327â34), Elizabeth Deirdre Gilbert also addresses historical tragedy. Building upon Stephen Bann's Romanticism and the Rise of History [1995], she claims that the distance inherent in historical tragedy allows Burney and Baillie to âinvestigate tabooâ (p. 333)âincest in Burney's play and homoeroticism in Baillie'sâwithout appearing unseemly. Kathryn Tucker presents âJoanna Baillie's and Elizabeth Inchbald's Moral Aesthetics: Humanizing Actors and Madmenâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 335â40), calling attention to how these playwrightsâ aesthetics of sympathy with afflicted characters both paralleled the progress in late eighteenth-century mental health practices and led the way towards modern performance therapies. Continuing the analysis of Inchbald's progressivism, Dewey W. Hall's âBeggars Can Be Choosers: From Gay to Inchbaldâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 341â50) discusses the smuggled social criticism in both dramatistsâ work by comparing the images of kneeling in supplication in The Beggar's Opera and Hogarth's painting of Act III, scene 11, of Gay's play to Every One Has His Fault , where Inchbald inverts the typical image of the female kneeling to the male, and shows that the (usually female) beggar can be a chooser. Marjean D. Purinton's âOn Teaching A Bold Stroke for a Husband and Other Comedies by Romantic Women Playwrightsâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 351â60) offers five combinable approaches to Cowley's play (highlighting geo-criticism and New Historicism, cross-dressing and masquerade, metatheatricality, science and medicine, and music) along with a list of creative and useful ideas for classroom projects. Finally, closing and anchoring the collection of essays is Jeffrey N. Cox's âCowley's Bold Stroke for Comedyâ ( ERR 17:iii[2006] 361â75), which rewrites our view of comedy in the era. While we have concentrated our critical energies on deploring a decline in tragedy in the Romantic period, many commentators of that time were lamenting a decline in comedy, which is borne out in Cox's evidence that after 1810 the patent theatres experienced a nearly 50 per cent drop in the writing and staging of new comedies. The old comedy of manners style did not seem to fit in the new age of democratic revolutions, with its levelling of society (p. 365); there is so much uniformity to modern life, Hazlitt argued, that we don't see the sharp physical distinctions that used to create so much comedy. There needed to be a new basis for comedy, and Cox sees Cowley's A Bold Stroke for a Husband , along with Cumberland's The Jew and The West Indian and James Kenney's The World , as re-energizing the genre and offering a comic vision of and for the era. He argues that Cowley âdiscovers a new kind of comedy in examining a society in which we find not subjects revealed in objective types but instead desiring bodies deploying a series of self-consciously adopted roles and masksâ (p. 374). Still, concern over the decay of tragedy haunts early nineteenth-century criticism, which, as Diego Saglia puts it, âreveals the deep cultural anxiety caused by the fact that the highest genre in the legitimate canon was becoming increasingly contaminated by less noble and more spectacular forms of theatreâ (p. 250). A symptom of this âcontaminationâ was its impure âmixedâ or âhybridâ quality. In one of the year's most substantive essays, Saglia introduces the forgotten name of Richard Lalor Sheil to drama scholars as well as Romanticists. ââThe illegitimate assistance of political allusionâ: Politics and the Hybridization of Romantic Tragedy in the Drama of Richard Lalor Sheilâ ( TJ 58[2006] 249â67) focuses on his historical tragedies Adelaide [1814], The Apostate [1817], Bellamira [1818], and Evadne [1819], hybrids of âGothic mode, melodramatic features, Orientalist themes, and Renaissance modelsâ (p. 251) that are also âkeyed to specific political and ideological concernsâ (p. 253) of this Irish playwright in London and âthrow light on the engagement of post-Waterloo Romantic tragedy with a wide array of contemporary domestic and international issuesâ (p. 267). We should not be surprised by the decline, or, from another perspective, by the mutated and experimental nature of much Romantic-era drama and theatre, for the proliferation of theatrical forms was a natural outcome of a culture sharply curtailed by institutionalized censorship and the patent theatresâ claim on spoken drama, David Worrall argues in his wide-ranging, often excellent, always fascinating Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures 1773â1832 . His âreconstructive anthropology of Georgian dramaâ (p. 3), the product of years of meticulous research, moves readily between theatre and drama, and economic, cultural, and literary history. The chaptersâwhich he aptly refers to as âmicrohistoriesââturn variously to the workings of individual theatres outside of central London (the Royal Coburg south of the Thames, the Royalty Theatre in the East End); the bewildering practices of the Examiner of Plays (Worrall describes John Larpent's role as dramatic censor as âsomething of an unofficial cottage-industry conducted in the domestic setting of a Georgian living roomâ (p. 105)); the influence of de Loutherbourg's involvement in Freemasonry on scenic design and theatrical spectacle; relationships between the radical press and the stage; and the theatricalization of British popular culture. Why, he asks, in the age of unprecedented democratic revolutions and reforms, was the drama a censored formâthe only literary form under state censorship? Theatric Revolution is particularly insightful in showing how the repressive measures and constraints on dramatic expression helped to develop specifically working-class forms such as burletta and pantomime and to create a âplebian public sphereâ (p. 363). Laura Tunbridge's âFrom Count to Chimney Sweep: Byron's Manfred in London Theatresâ ( ML 76:ii[2006] 212â36) also depicts the relationship between legitimate and illegitimate stages by describing how burlesques took on the role of critiquing the legitimate drama. When Manfred was presented at Covent Garden in 1834 it was spoofed at the (illegitimate) Strand by Gilbert Abbott Ă Beckett's Man-Fred , which changes Byron's Count into a London chimney sweep; Ă Beckett's version, Tunbridge argues, was âdirectly involved in the gradual erosion of the rule of the patent theatres Drury Lane and Covent Garden, which came to an end in 1843 with the Theatre Regulation Act, allowing all theatres to stage âlegitimateâ dramaâ (p. 219). Two decades later, when Byron's play had a revival at Drury Lane in 1863, Martin Dutnall's farce Mad Fred played at the Surrey, but without the political bite of the former. Betsy Bolton, in âSaving the Rajah's Daughter: Spectacular Logic in Moncrieff's Cataract of the Ganges â ( ERR 17:iv[2006] 477â93), examines how this 1823 melodrama âre-framed the vexed question of Indian autonomy in terms that justified British conquest as humanitarian interventionâ (p. 478); she argues that in the dichotomy between lush and splendid Indian scenery and a plot concerned with saving a widow from the practice of sati , spectators were granted both their âorientalist pleasures and the British moral pleasure of renouncing themâ (p. 486). The engagement with the world that is currently in favour in Romantic drama scholarship is reflected and extended in Regina Hewitt's most recent work, which is aiming to âfurther the movement of Romantic-era studies out of aesthetic isolation and into the social worldâ (p. 12). One-third of her important new âpost-disciplinaryâ (p. 8) study, Symbolic Interactions: Social Problems and Literary Interventions in the Works of Baillie, Scott, and Landor , is applicable to this section. Using sociological research from Jane Addams and George Herbert Mead, Hewitt reads the dramas of Baillie as a form of social work designed to provoke audiences into sympathizing with others and reforming social relations. Over several chapters she discusses a number of Baillie's plays, including ones that have not received much critical attention, such as The Dream , Henriquez , The Stripling , and The Homicide , as well as the more familiar Witchcraft , The Election , Constantine Paleologus and The Family Legend , contextualizing them to show Baillie's concern for reforming the criminal justice system, lifting women out of poverty, and ending cycles of domination and revenge. As she states in her introduction, she treats the texts âas symbolic resources ⊠that can enrich social programsâ (p. 7). Also working with Baillie is Barbara Judson, whose highly engaging ââSympathetic Curiosityâ: The Theater of Joanna Baillieâ ( TSWL 25:i[2006] 49â70) reminds us that the Plays on the Passions were written in the wake of the Reign of Terror, and reflected the controversy over sentiment in the 1790s. Recognizing that in the present day the theatre rather than the church is the place for moral instruction, Baillie creates plays on the passions that are reminiscent of plays on the Passion: while a central figure (like Christ) suffers violence, a spectating mob looks on and is moved to feel sympathy. Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia [1823] enjoyed a surge in critical popularity this year. As John-David Lopez observes, it has become a case study for debates over Hemans's political affinitiesâthe âsite of the most serious challenges to the perception of a conservative Hemansâ (p. 70). Lopez's âRecovered Voices: The Sources of The Siege of Valencia â ( ERR 17:i[2006] 69â87) returns to the source materials for Hemans's play (John Home's The Siege of Aquileia [1760] and Edward Jerningham's The Siege of Berwick [1793]) in order to show that, comparatively, Hemans emerges as the progressive dramatist, challenging the earlier visions; and, in adding an âintentionally ambiguousâ (p. 83) ending to her play, she produces a âfairly radicalâ response especially to Jerningham's âpatriarchal jingoismâ (p. 83). Although the play's plot allows the male, public ethos to win out and can be seen as endorsing that view, Hemans's use of the mother's âanguished voice of discontentâ (p. 85) makes the play appear to critique the elevation of the national over the familial. For us to understand Hemans and be comfortable with her within the canon of Romantic drama, Lopez concludes, we will need to hear both of her voices, the patriotic and the dissenting. Hearing the more traditional Hemans voice, Aileen Forbes's âBesieged Vision: The Siege of Valencia and Felicia Hemans's Theater of Sacrificeâ ( KSJ 55[2006] 158â78), after noting Hemans's âunsettling preoccupation with the sacrifice of childrenâ (p. 159), makes a case that the play âreconceptualises sacrificial responsibility through a gendered revision of Abraham's ordealâ (p. 161) and presents âmaternal passion as the fulfillment of a feminine responsibilityâ (p. 178). Shelley's Prometheus Unbound has also been receiving new scholarly attention. David Taylor's ââA vacant space, an empty stageâ: Prometheus Unbound , The Last Man , and the Problems of Dramatic (Re)formâ ( KSR 20[2006] 18â31), winner of the KeatsâShelley Essay Prize, considers how Percy Shelley initiates idealistic reform through his dramatic form. Over the course of its four acts, Prometheus Unbound' s dramatic structure metamorphoses from a classical tragic form based on âhierarchical oppositionsâ into a âharmonizing pageant and a masque of democratic choreographyâ (p. 27). (He contrasts this with Mary Shelley's The Last Man , which uses a staging of Macbeth to depict the failure of such idealistic reform measures.) Sandro Jung, in âOvercoming Tyranny: Love, Truth and Meaning in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound â ( KSR 20[2006] 89â101), provides a close reading of the lyrical drama to demonstrate a key difference between it and Aeschylus's original: the centrality of love to liberation. Christopher Goulding's lens, however, is science. In âShelley's Cosmological Sublime: William Herschel, James Lind and âThe Multitudinous Orbââ ( RES 57[2006] 783â92), he uncovers evidence that the astronomer William Herschel, whose work Shelley was introduced to by his Eton mentor Dr James Lind, a personal friend of Herschel's, had a significant impact on Prometheus Unbound . Act IV in particular âresonates with echoes of Herschel's workâ (p. 785) in volcanic theory. A passage describing the âmultitudinous orbâ that has long puzzled scholars is revealed by Goulding to have come from a model by Herschel of a âplanetary nebulaâ that Shelley transformed poetically into a vision of âa huge cosmic life cycle encapsulating the organic process of formation of all things from the greatest stars to the smallest particles of natureâ (p. 791). While's Shelley's interest in science has long been known, Jie-Ae Yu informs us that Byron, too, was influenced by his reading of contemporary scientists who thought that humans are born with an âirresistible desire for wrongdoingâ (p. 127). In âHeredity and Free Choice: Byron's Werner â ( KSR 20[2006] 119â32), Yu argues that Werner' s central conflict (in response to critics who complain that it lacks dramatic conflict) is the tension between heredity and free will; Werner fears that his son Ulric will inherit his criminal mind and habits. Following Victoria Myers's recent excellent legal research on The Borderers comes Cara Norris's most interesting âThe Suspension of Habeas Corpus and Narrative Proliferation in Wordsworth's The Borderers â ( ERR 17:ii[2006] 197â203). Through her analysis of the play's seemingly unnecessarily complicated narrative structure, Norris finds Wordsworth âstaging the consequences immanent in the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794â (p. 198); in a sense, he suspends the body of the accused, who becomes the absent centre around which narratives multiply. Wordsworth's source text was Schiller's The Robbers , the subject of George W. Brandt's âBanditry Unleashâdâ or, How The Robbers Reached the Stageâ ( NTQ 22:i[2006] 19â29), an entertaining and richly detailed account of the young Schiller writing his first drama, which he originally intended as a âdramatic novelâ (p. 21) rather than a stage play, his trials with having his subversive play censored into a socially acceptable performance text, his director's challenges to stage a play created by a theatrically inexperienced dramatist, and the production's unfortunately poorly cast actorsâall of which ânevertheless proved a landmark in German theatre historyâ (p. 28). Google Scholar Google Preview Month: | Total Views: | November 2016 | 1 | December 2016 | 2 | February 2017 | 2 | March 2017 | 2 | April 2017 | 8 | May 2017 | 4 | June 2017 | 3 | July 2017 | 2 | August 2017 | 5 | September 2017 | 1 | October 2017 | 3 | November 2017 | 3 | December 2017 | 16 | January 2018 | 27 | February 2018 | 29 | March 2018 | 26 | April 2018 | 35 | May 2018 | 53 | June 2018 | 56 | July 2018 | 26 | August 2018 | 33 | September 2018 | 40 | October 2018 | 86 | November 2018 | 116 | December 2018 | 64 | January 2019 | 39 | February 2019 | 42 | March 2019 | 45 | April 2019 | 63 | May 2019 | 38 | June 2019 | 26 | July 2019 | 13 | August 2019 | 34 | September 2019 | 61 | October 2019 | 17 | November 2019 | 41 | December 2019 | 42 | January 2020 | 31 | February 2020 | 34 | March 2020 | 27 | April 2020 | 48 | May 2020 | 31 | June 2020 | 15 | July 2020 | 54 | August 2020 | 40 | September 2020 | 42 | October 2020 | 34 | November 2020 | 16 | December 2020 | 41 | January 2021 | 29 | February 2021 | 40 | March 2021 | 64 | April 2021 | 48 | May 2021 | 32 | June 2021 | 40 | July 2021 | 27 | August 2021 | 33 | September 2021 | 71 | October 2021 | 68 | November 2021 | 25 | December 2021 | 28 | January 2022 | 41 | February 2022 | 22 | March 2022 | 49 | April 2022 | 37 | May 2022 | 21 | June 2022 | 9 | July 2022 | 21 | August 2022 | 17 | September 2022 | 43 | October 2022 | 60 | November 2022 | 17 | December 2022 | 71 | January 2023 | 94 | February 2023 | 56 | March 2023 | 88 | April 2023 | 106 | May 2023 | 116 | June 2023 | 87 | July 2023 | 88 | August 2023 | 62 | September 2023 | 63 | October 2023 | 119 | November 2023 | 96 | December 2023 | 82 | January 2024 | 119 | February 2024 | 151 | March 2024 | 273 | April 2024 | 249 | May 2024 | 130 | June 2024 | 78 | July 2024 | 53 | Email alertsCiting articles via. - About The Year's Work in English Studies
- Recommend to your Library
Affiliations- Online ISSN 1471-6801
- Print ISSN 0084-4144
- Copyright © 2024 The English Association
- About Oxford Academic
- Publish journals with us
- University press partners
- What we publish
- New features
- Open access
- Institutional account management
- Rights and permissions
- Get help with access
- Accessibility
- Advertising
- Media enquiries
- Oxford University Press
- Oxford Languages
- University of Oxford
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide - Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
- Cookie settings
- Cookie policy
- Privacy policy
- Legal notice
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers OnlySign In or Create an Account This PDF is available to Subscribers Only For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. ENGL405: The American RenaissanceThe romantic period, 1820â1860: essayists and poets. This article offers even more information about the romantic period in US literature. Many use the labels "American Romanticism" and "American Renaissance" interchangeably; as you dig into this course, ask yourself whether you see a potential distinction between these two terms and what each of them defines. The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of "the American Renaissance". Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts: For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of "self" â which suggested selfishness to earlier generations â was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "selfrealization", "self-expression", "self-reliance". As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" â an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) â produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension. Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists â Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates â were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil. TranscendentalismThe Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world â a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God. Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the battle, "Concord Hymn", has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature: By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world. Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others. The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands. Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences â on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero â like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym â typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice â all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) that American writers rose to the challenge. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church". The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit. Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance", Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas â the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation â are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens: Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past...? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut". He complained that Alcott's abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a man's hat, in a child's spoon". Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing". Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals: If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven. This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma". The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings. Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called "Economy", he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars. In Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of selfdiscovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind". Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance. In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851: English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America. Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", while Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience", with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century. Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself", the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success. A visionary book celebrating all creation, Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson's writings, especially his essay "The Poet", which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry. Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through "Song of Myself" like restless music: My ties and ballasts leave me... I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision. The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman's birds are not the conventional "winged spirits" of poetry. His "yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs". Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, "Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any". But he is equally the suffering individual, "The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs....I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken..".. More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem". When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the "open road". Whitman's greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism's "Gilded Age". In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its "mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry" that mask an underlying "dry and flat Sahara" of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population ("Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does"). Yet ultimately, Whitman's main claim to immortality lies in "Song of Myself". Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me As good belongs to you. Whitman's voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of "experimental", or organic, form. The Brahmin PoetsIn their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning. In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the 19th century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly . The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Wellmeaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the "jingle man"). They were pillars of what was called the "genteel tradition" that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost 100 years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters "Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858). Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer , retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving's Sketch Book . Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1854), "My Lost Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880) continue to give pleasure. James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review , Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge". Under his wife's influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women's suffrage and laws ending child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847-48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial "character" tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table , 1858), novels ( Elsie Venner , 1861), biographies ( Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1885), and verse that could be sprightly ("The Deacon's Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), philosophical ("The Chambered Nautilus"), or fervently patriotic ("Old Ironsides"). Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and human nature. Two ReformersNew England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman's. He was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for anti-slavery poems such as "Ichabod", and his poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism. Whittier's sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem "Snow Bound", vividly recreates the poet's deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England's blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated. The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842. Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women's role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of "self-dependence", which women lack because "they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within". Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all: ...Let us be wise and not impede the soul....Let us have one creative energy....Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside. Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress. Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered. Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman's. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects â a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson's standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes. A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435: Much Madness is divinest sense â To a discerning Eye â Much Sense â the starkest Madness â 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail â Assent â and you are sane â Demur â you're straightway dangerous And handled with a chain â Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life: I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you â Nobody â Too? Then there's a pair of us? Don't tell! they'd advertise â you know! How dreary â to be â Somebody! How public â like a Frog â To tell one's name â the livelong June â To an admiring Bog! Dickinson's 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson's poetry sometimes feels as if "a cat came at us speaking English". Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature. ![romantic period essay question Public Domain Mark](https://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png) ![](//sektorel.online/777/templates/cheerup/res/banner1.gif) |
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Struggling to find an essay topic for your romantic literature class? Here are some essay topics and thesis ideas about the romantic movement from a retired British Literature teacher. With these tips and ideas, your essay will come together in no time!
Writing a romanticism essay? Interested đž in the period's art and literature? Explore the ideas of romanticism with our titles đ for essays and research.
Explore insightful questions and answers on Romanticism at eNotes. Enhance your understanding today!
Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer ...
The Roots of Romanticism Tintern Abbey and the River Wye in Tintern, Wales. Often the term Romantic literature, particularly poetry, evokes the connotation of nature poetry. Although nature is an important component in much Romantic literature, Romanticism is much more than recording the beauties of the natural world.
Critical Essay Understanding the Romantic Period The romantic period is a term applied to the literature of approximately the first third of the nineteenth century. During this time, literature began to move in channels that were not entirely new but were in strong contrast to the standard literary practice of the eighteenth century.
In Romantic art, natureâwith its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremesâoffered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought.
The word romantic is mostly associated with feelings of love and intimacy. However, the Romantic Movement in literature incorporated so much more. Beginning in the late 18th Century, this period ...
Explore the enchanting world of the Romantic Age in English Literature. Delve into the passionate works of poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, as they evoke emotions and paint vivid landscapes through their words. Discover the essence of love, nature, and human spirit in this captivating literary era.
Romanticism on The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Romanticism as a literary movement from Mount Holyoke College. From NPR: The "Ode To Joy" [Beethoven's Ninth Symphony] As A Call To Action. Listen to Richard Strauss' "Thus Sprach Zarathustra." Essay by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker Questions Tips ...
English literature - Romanticism, Poetry, Novels: As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, "Romantic" is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled "Romantic movement" at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until ...
This article will describe the the key characteristics of Romanticism in English literature and provide examples from well-known Romantic poems and stories.
The Romantic Period in literature, which lasted from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, was a time of great change and innovation. This essay will explore the key themes of the Romantic Period, including nature, individualism, emotion, and the supernatural. By examining the history and debates surrounding these themes, we can gain a deeper understanding of the literature produced ...
Romantic Literary Criticism. English literary criticism of the Romantic era is most closely associated with the writings of William Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) and Samuel ...
Another collection of essays on a Romantic-period poet who has slipped from the canon addresses similar questions. Robert Bloomfield, labouring-class author of The Farmer's Boy , was a Romantic-period poetic celebrity, but he has singularly failed to become a 'Romantic' poet.
Test over The Romantic Period notes and poems by Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Learn with flashcards, games, and more â for free.
The "sublime"âan effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)âproduced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension. Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime.
The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets This article offers even more information about the romantic period in US literature. Many use the labels "American Romanticism" and "American Renaissance" interchangeably; as you dig into this course, ask yourself whether you see a potential distinction between these two terms and what each of them defines.
In regards to the reception of the Gothic aesthetic within the Romantic period, attitudes towards the style varied. Some thought it to be too into the past, reminiscent of the barbaric and dark times of history. It represented decay and destruction, ignorance, cruelty and persecution. Some believed looking back didn't allow forward movement.
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like What composer was married to Clara Wieck? What did Wieck contribute to music history?, How is an opera by Wagner different than that of operas by previous composers?, Illustrate the similarities and differences between styles of the Classical and Romantic period by comparing Mozart's Piano Concerto in A major and Mendelssohn's ...
View our collection of romantic period essays. Find inspiration for topics, titles, outlines, & craft impactful romantic period papers. Read our romantic period papers today!