XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

XIII

Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

MAXINE BRANAGH-MISCAMPBELL, ELIZA O’BRIEN,

MATTHEW WARD, PAUL WHICKMAN, AND CHRISY

DENNIS

This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry;4. Drama. Section 1 is by Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell; section 2 is by ElizaO’Brien; section 3 is by Matthew Ward and Paul Whickman; section 4 is byChrisy Dennis.

1. General and Prose

Two of the major themes to come out of the works published in 2014 in thefield of Romantic general and prose writing are those of local, national, andglobal identities, and questions of selfhood. Sarah Houghton-Walker’sRepresentations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period looks at the representationof the gypsy figure in the Romantic period in relation to English identities,among other themes. David Higgins’s Romantic Englishness: Local, Nationaland Global Selves, 1780–1850 examines local English identities in relation tobroader conceptions of the self in an increasingly connected national or globalcontext. Two texts also make use of the growing field of Atlantic studies totake a fresh look at travel writing, in the case of Elizabeth A. Bohls’s Slaveryand the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean 1770–1833, andthe theme of hospitality in Romantic-period texts in the case of CynthiaSchoolar Williams’s Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination, 1815–1835,which was published as part of Palgrave’s The New Urban Atlantic series.I will begin by discussing these texts before moving on to other keypublications, which include interesting new insights in the field of women’sreading and writing, the study of emotions and feeling, and historical andpolitical writing.Sarah Houghton-Walker’s Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic

Period sets out to analyse the ‘phenomenon of the gypsy as it was understoodby the Romantic Period’ (p. 2). She argues that the Romantic fascination withthe gypsy-figure grows in partnership with other broader cultural and societal

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changes such as ideas surrounding property, propriety, art, and sympathy.Houghton-Walker situates her subject in relation to the themes of the sublimeand English identity. The Romantic-period gypsy, Houghton-Walker argues,is situated between the ‘amusing rogues’ (p. 12) of the eighteenth century andthe ‘nostalgic, romanticized gypsy form’ (p. 12) of early Victorian literature.She thus sheds new light on the various cultural anxieties represented by theways in which the gypsy figure was depicted during the Romantic period. Sheoffers a useful overview of the background of the gypsy in eighteenth-centuryEngland, and its literary contexts, before going on to analyse the figure in thework of William Cowper and John Clare, Romantic poetry, and Jane Austen’sEmma, among others, including artists such as Thomas Gainsborough andGeorge Morland. Houghton-Walker situates these close readings in a broadercontext of literary culture, theories of aestheticism, and questions of class andindustry. In so doing, she highlights the importance of the gypsy in the ruralRomantic landscape as a significant symbol of Romantic-period anxieties andconcerns.David Higgins’s Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves,

1780–1850 also deals with identity in English Romantic writing, specificallyquestioning how localized selfhood is produced in relation to global ornational identities and how individuals connect with the national community.Higgins’s analysis focuses on autobiographies (including autobiographicalpoems, personal essays, and letters) written within or about England duringthe Romantic period, with chapters devoted to focused case studies on WilliamCowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Samuel Bamford,Thomas Bewick and William Cobbett, John Clare, William Hazlitt, CharlesLamb, and Thomas De Quincey. In his work, Higgins re-examines theconnection between the local, the national, and the global, and argues thatRomantic localism was outward-looking to the national and the global, andwas particularly informed by imperialism and colonialism. Higgins aims tobring together two main strands in Romantic Englishness � ‘an ecocriticalaccount of the relationship between Romantic autobiography and place’ and‘an argument for the significance of Englishness in Romantic-period writing’in light of recent critical work on ‘Four Nations Romanticism’ (p. 12). In hisintroduction, Higgins admits that, despite its broad scope, RomanticEnglishness is not definitive in its inclusion of autobiographical writers andfocuses on ‘analysing Englishness in relation to masculinity’ (p. 13). Despitethis, the inclusion of labouring-class narratives by Samuel Bamford, ThomasBewick, and William Cobbett in conjunction with the other writers offers awide-ranging and fascinating insight into the construction of ‘Englishness’,and its relationship to place, in Romantic-period autobiography.Another key publication in 2014 which deals with theories of place and

space in relation to Romantic-period writing, focusing specifically on colonialtravel and slave narratives, is Elizabeth A. Bohls’s Slavery and the Politics ofPlace: Representing the Colonial Caribbean 1770–1833. Bohls argues that thepopularity of travel writing during the Romantic period cannot be understoodoutside the context of colonial expansion. Bohls deals with a variety of writingby planters, scientists, soldiers, politicians, and journalists, and a particularstrength of the project is her inclusion of women’s narratives in relation to

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theories of feminist geographies and concepts of home and domestic space.Bohls’s analysis does not just focus on the colonial spaces of the Caribbean butalso draws on recent scholarship in Atlantic studies to examine the place ofRomantic-period writing which covers the spaces between sites of slavery andthe imperial centre.Cynthia Schoolar Williams’s Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination,

1815–1835 also draws on recent scholarship in Atlantic studies to examine thediscourse of hospitality in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. SchoolarWilliams argues that ‘hospitality is an experience and a discourse of paradox.Scenes of welcome evoke, suspend, and defy many of our most powerfulbinaries’ (p. 2). This was particularly important in the ‘post-Waterloo’ periodwhen questions surrounding national identity were pertinent (p. 177). Eachwriter Schoolar Williams deals with employs the discourse of hospitality to‘ask a series of questions about displacement and the nation’ (p. 3) in atransatlantic, or Anglo-American, context. The book is structured intochapters each dealing with a specific writer: Mary Shelley, James FenimoreCooper, Washington Irving, and Felicia Hemans. The grouping of thisparticular set of writers enables Schoolar Williams to draw conclusionssurrounding ‘the competing imperatives of universal rights, local affiliation,and the global reach of empire’ (p. 177).Brief mention should also be made of Jeffrey N. Cox’s Romanticism in the

Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years, reviewed morefully in Section 3 below. Cox argues for viewing the writing of key Romanticwriters not only in the context of the Napoleonic Wars but also in the contextof the smaller battles, or ‘struggles at the periphery’ such as the Russo-Ottoman War, the War of 1812 in North America, and the Latin AmericanWars of Independence (p. 2). Although his main focus is Romantic poetry andtherefore beyond the scope of this section, this text is useful in consideringgeneral and prose writing of the Romantic period in light of the various‘moments of expectation turned to disappointment’ (p. 23).Three key publications in the field of women readers and writers were

published in 2014. Richard De Ritter’s Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820:Well-Regulated Minds is a fascinating addition to the field of the history ofreading. De Ritter explores the place of female readers in British culturebetween 1789 and 1820. Focusing on fictional and idealized representations ofreaders and evidence of ‘actual’ reading practices in letters and diaries, thisbook offers an interesting new insight into the cultural significance of women’sreading in the Romantic period, and De Ritter argues that the texts examined‘imagine an alternative identity for novel reading women’ (p. 12). Drawingupon recent criticism in the history of reading, and examining work byHannah More, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West, MariaEdgeworth, and Jane Austen, De Ritter argues that reading was depicted asa form of ‘symbolic labour’ (p. 11), rather than a dangerous, ‘pernicious’(p. 3), or unproductive activity. De Ritter concludes that ‘constructions ofwomen readers are . . . shaped by the debates impinging upon British publiclife’ (p. 199) while simultaneously resisting ‘stabilising categorisations’ (p. 200).Amy Culley’s British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship,

Community and Collaboration focuses on three main groups of female

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autobiographers: early Methodist women, late eighteenth-century andRegency courtesans, and British women in Paris during the FrenchRevolution. This structure allows Culley to examine the social networks,exchanges, and friendships between various women during the Romanticperiod and challenges the traditional view of life-writing as a solitary, privatepractice. The combination of well-known writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft,Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Robinson, and the introduction of less well-known female contributors to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centurylife-writing is a particular strength of this book and allows the analysis tomove beyond the canon of published autobiographies. Culley also examines awide range of ‘women’s self-narration’, including ‘spiritual autobiographies,family memoirs, scandalous memoirs, diaries, journals, biographies, corres-pondence, travelogues, romans a clef, and eye-witness accounts in both printand manuscript sources’ (p. 2). This book therefore highlights that life-writing,in all its various forms, played an important role in the female literary cultureof the Romantic period and, as Culley argues, ‘provides a fuller history ofwomen’s literary experiences in the period’ (p. 204).Jeffrey W. Barbeau’s Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought sheds light on

the biographical and intellectual history of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s onlydaughter. The majority of her writing remained unpublished, with theexception of a small collection of children’s poetry, a fairy tale, andtranslations of travel literature. Barbeau’s book examines the corpus of SaraColeridge’s unpublished letters and manuscript material, dividing thesethematically into writings on beauty, education, dreams, criticism, authority,reason, regeneration, community, and death. Barbeau argues that it was Sara’sediting of her father’s work which helped her develop ‘a thoroughlyColeridgean frame of mind’ (p. x). Her writing, he goes on to argue, ‘revealsone of the most fascinating and neglected women in nineteenth-centuryliterature, theology, and history’ (p. xiv). It is very interesting to see how SaraColeridge framed and preserved her father’s ideas for the Victorian period,while gaining an insight into her as a writer in her own right, and the thematicstructure of the book is particularly useful for this.Three articles printed in Romanticism also pay attention to women’s writing

in the shape of pamphlets by Charlotte Smith and Hannah More. Two articleswhich deal with Smith’s writings were published in 2014: Claire Knowles’s‘Hazarding the Press: Charlotte Smith, The Morning Post and the Perils ofLiterary Celebrity’ (Romanticism 20:i[2014] 30–42) was printed inRomanticism’s special issue on celebrity culture, while Carmel Murphy’s‘Jacobin History: Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House and the FrenchRevolution Debate’ (Romanticism 20:iii[2014] 271–81) was printed later in theyear in ‘Unusual Suspects’. Carmel Murphy argues that Old Manor Housemakes use of the tradition of historical writing from the 1770s, which useshistory to comment on contemporary political debates. However, she goes onto say that Smith’s intentions go beyond this. Murphy argues that Smith’s OldManor House is an ‘important contribution to the developing FrenchRevolution dialogue’ (p. 281). Claire Knowles examines the celebrity culturewhich grew around female writers as the popular press grew. She examines sixpoems published by and about Charlotte Smith in The Morning Post in order


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to analyse the way in which the authorial identity which Smith constructs forherself is challenged by the celebrity image created by the popular press. Alsoappearing in the special issue on celebrity culture was Cato Marks’s ‘ ‘‘LetPoor Volk Pass’’: Dialect and Writing the South-West Poor out ofMetropolitan Political Life in Hannah More’s Village Poetics’ (Romanticism20:i[2014] 43–59). This article focuses on More’s use of language in VillagePoetics in order to challenge her ‘positive contribution to female andlabouring-class education’ (p. 56). Marks argues that ‘through this depictionof the South-West poor, Hannah More attempts to exclude them, and othermarginalized peoples she identifies with them, from polite and political debate’(p. 57).Halina Adams also addresses a woman writer, Helen Maria Williams, and

her approach to the French Revolution in Letters Written in France [1790]. In‘Imagining the Nation: Transforming the Bastille in Williams’s Letters Writtenin France (1790)’ (ERR 25:vi[2014] 723–41), Adams argues that Williamsmakes use of ‘architectural imagination’ to transform the Bastille into ‘theideal site for Williams to interrogate the idea of the nation and nationalism’(p. 723). Her close reading of various passages from the letters reveals ‘theenthusiasm and fervor of those heady days’ of the Fete de la Federation(pp. 738–9). Williams instructs her readers on how to read her books, statingthat ‘if the reader will participate in the creation of the narrative, then her textwill be successful’ (quoted p. 738), and so Adams argues that ‘the realsubversive danger of the architectural imagination in Letters is that theaudience may construct a building, or a nation, one entirely new andcompletely derived from their own plans’ (p. 738).Randall Sessler’s ‘Recasting the Revolution: The Media Debate between

Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine’ (ERR 25:v[2014]611–26) argues that the debate which emerged from Edmund Burke’sReflections on the Revolution in France [1790] can be read as an early formof media debate. Sessler argues that approaching the responses of Burke,Wollstonecraft, and Paine to the French Revolution using a media theory,rather than by only addressing their genre or textuality, enables us to come todifferent conclusions about the debate (p. 611). Sessler therefore attempts tochallenge the idea that the exchange between Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Painewas ‘a ‘‘struggle to control’’ the revolution’s ‘‘textual representation’’ ’ by‘maintaining the distinction between genre and media’ in order to reveal ‘newapproaches [to] and readings [of]’ the debate (pp. 624–5).Catherine Packham also addresses Wollstonecraft’s response to the French

Revolution but focuses on her Historical and Moral View of the FrenchRevolution [1794]. In ‘ ‘‘The Common Grievance of the Revolution’’: Bread,the Grain Trade, and Political Economy in Wollstonecraft’s View of the FrenchRevolution’ (ERR 25:vi[2014] 705–22), Packham argues that Wollstonecraft’sconclusion in View ‘indicates the difficulties of integrating economic improve-ment, as envisaged by Smithian political economy, into philosophical history’snarrative of human progress’ (p. 718). She states that Wollstonecraftforegrounds the bread shortages and the liberation of the grain trade in herportrayal of the march on Versailles in October 1789 while making sure not to‘write a history of revolution founded on the purely economic cause of bead


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shortages’ in order to provide a ‘dual representation of the mob as both objectof improvement and agents of it’ (p. 719).Remaining in the field of women writers, two articles were also published on

Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing in 2014, in European Romantic Reviewand Studies in Romanticism. Mary Ellen Bellanca’s ‘After-Life-Writing:Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals in the Memoirs of William Wordsworth’(ERR 25:ii[2014] 201–18) examines the printing and reception of DorothyWordsworth’s journal in Memoirs of William Wordsworth [1851]. Bellancaaims to ‘dispel any lingering impression that her [Dorothy Wordsworth’s]prose remained unpublished in her lifetime (she lived until 1855)’ (p. 201) withher examination of the ten printed pages of Dorothy’s Grasmere journal andforty-five pages from Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, 1803, both ofwhich were included in the Memoirs. Through this it is possible to ‘examinewhat her early readers glimpsed of Dorothy Wordsworth’s life writing’ andtherefore ‘recalibrate our narratives of her presence in literary history’ (p. 215).Bellanca argues that ‘the Memoirs interposes her [Dorothy’s] voice into itstelling of William’s life, so that she becomes a distinct autobiographicalsubject, an agent and a partner as well as witness and source’ (p. 202) andfurthermore brings a ‘more palpable sense of Dorothy Wordsworth as aperson, one with an astute, engaged consciousness and a voice’ (p. 203). It isthe late nineteenth-century editors’ dismissal of the importance of the extractscontained in the Memoirs which, Bellanca argues, ‘obscured the Memoirs’exposition of Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose and its readership in her life’(p. 202).Rachel Feder’s ‘The Experimental Dorothy Wordsworth’ (SiR 53:iv[2014]

541–59) examines ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace chapbook, acircumscribed collection of poetic ‘‘consolations’’ that occurs withinWordsworth’s commonplace book’ (p. 542). Feder argues that ‘DorothyWordsworth’s archive survives as a special case of radicalized mixed genres,entextualized or captured in overlapping forms and modes’ (p. 543). Her aimin examining this writing is ‘to facilitate a reading of Dorothy Wordsworth asan experimental author writing in the literal and figurative margins of aliterary history that she is working to construct, and to open up a conversationabout how reading the experimental Dorothy Wordsworth might enrich ourunderstanding of the Romantic inheritance’ (p. 542).Two texts which serve to expand our understanding of historical writing in

the Romantic period significantly are Ben Dew and Fiona Price’s HistoricalWriting in Britain, 1688–1830: Visions of History and Porscha Fermanis andJohn Regan’s Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845. Dew andPrice’s volume covers the long eighteenth century but contains a number ofchapters which are relevant to Romantic studies. It deals with the establish-ment of ‘history’ as a genre throughout the long eighteenth century, withhistorians of the period being ‘a rather motley collection of philosophers,journalists, historical pamphleteers, churchmen and academics who, with thepossible exception of Edward Gibbon, tended to produce works of historywhile performing other literary and non-literary functions’ (p. 2). In theirintroduction, Dew and Price argue that the end of the eighteenth century saw ashift towards a ‘broader conception of history’ and ‘the emergence of a range


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of innovative forms of more specialist writing, as sizeable literatures developedaround the history of commerce, literature, art, music, natural history, andvarious scientific disciplines’ (p. 6). Historical writing, they argue, is also animportant player in the development of other genres. This volume bringstogether various essays which provide case studies to show how different typesof historical writing changed and adapted across the period in line withsocietal changes. Of particular interest to Romanticists is Dafydd Moore’schapter, ‘Caledonian Plagiary: The Role and Meaning of Ireland in the Poemsof Ossian’, in which he argues that his reading of Ossian can ‘provide acompelling example of recent thinking about the relationship betweenEnlightenment and Romanticism in Scotland’ (p. 104). Sanja Perovic’s‘Lyricist in Britain; Empiricist in France: Volney’s Divided Legacy’ providesan interesting insight into the different receptions of Constantin-FrancoisVolney’s work in Britain and France in the wake of the French Revolution.Fiona Price’s chapter, ‘Making History: Social Unrest, Work and the Post-French Revolution Historical Novel’, argues that the historical novels of theFrench Revolution, pre-Waverley, ‘have a much more immediate sense of thethreat of ‘‘convulsive metamorphosis’’ ’ (p. 158).Fermanis and Regan’s Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845 also

offers a selection of essays dealing with various types of historical writing inthe Romantic period. Divided into sections dealing with ‘History, Rhetoric,Genre’, ‘Historical Space and Time’, and ‘Aesthetics of History’, this volumeaims to ‘rethink three longstanding ‘‘narratives’’ about the nature of Britishhistorical writing in its wider European and imperial context from 1770 to1845’, namely, ‘the widely held belief that the relationship between history andliterature was open and porous’, ‘the exclusion of literary texts from variousaccounts of the rise of historicism and the birth of the modern historicalmethod’, and ‘the widespread characterization of Romantic history as asubjective and emotionally charged reaction to philosophic history and otherEnlightenment modes of representing the past’ (p. 7). Its selection of essays issuccessful in complicating these received narratives about historical writingand its crossover into the fiction and poetry of the period.Also of interest is Sean Franzel’s essay, ‘Romantic Encyclopedics and the

Lecture Form: Schelling, A.W. Schlegel, A. von Humboldt’ (ERR 25:iii[2014]347–56). Franzel examines the proliferation of Romantic-era lectures whichaimed to be encyclopedic in their scope and subject matter. Franzel’s articleanalyses Friedrich Schelling’s 1799 lectures, Method of Academic Study,August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Berlin lectures, The Encyclopedia of the Sciences,and Alexander von Humboldt’s 1827/28 Kosmos lectures. In so doing, he shedslight on the ‘concrete institutional, medial, and formal features of lecturing,including the sequential unfolding of lecture series; the differentiation betweendisjointed, ‘‘historical’’ information and embodied ‘‘living’’ knowledge; thescene of pedagogical address and the tendency to address a general or so-called‘‘popular’’ audience; and, in the German case, the underpinnings of scholarlylecturing in the conceptual apparatus of transcendental idealism’ (p. 348).Franzel argues that, read ‘against the backdrop of earlier projects of Romanticencyclopedics, the lecture comes into view as form that opens a space for


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experimentation with a de-differential discourse, a discourse that can linkdifferent sciences and fields of inquiry to each other’ (p. 354).Two texts which deal with the theme of emotions or feeling in the Romantic

period in an innovative way are Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha’s editedvolume, Romanticism and the Emotions, and Jeremy Davies’s Bodily Pain inRomantic Literature. Romanticism and the Emotions brings together severalessays which offer a fascinating insight into the nature of emotion in Romanticliterary culture. Dealing not only with the emotions typically associated withthe Romantic period, such as trauma and melancholy, but also with‘happiness, humiliation, and various states of peaceful apatheia or affectless-ness’, the essays in this collection offer scope for new directions in the study ofRomantic emotion (p. 4). The chapters provide wide-ranging new insights intohow various writers engaged with the emotions, including Adam Smith, PercyBysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, LordByron, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas De Quincey.Davies’s Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature also offers an interesting new

argument related to the nature of feeling in Romantic literature. His bookdiscusses four Romantic writers; Jeremy Bentham, the Marquis de Sade,Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Each chapter of Davies’sbook is devoted to one of these writers, who are dealt with in a roughlychronological order, with the study ending with the development of surgicalanaesthesia in 1846, the absence of which, Davies argues, is significant inRomantic literary depictions of pain ‘as a feeling of being compelled to noticethe body’s very capacity for feeling’ (p. xi). Davies argues that pain should bethought of ‘as a reflexive or ironic phenomenon’ and that it is ‘a demand toattend to the vital sense of sensing that is otherwise diffusely present in thebackground of experience’ (p. 168). The four readings in this volume thereforeserve to highlight the significance of literary representations of bodily pain in apre-anaesthetic era, in relation to broader Romantic concern with ‘the fullextent of one’s powers of feeling’ (p. 169).The remaining texts reviewed in this section are all related to the works of

specific political writers: William Cobbett, William Godwin, and WilliamHazlitt. The second volume of Godwin’s letters was released in 2014, and is tobe followed by two further volumes. Following on from the first volume,published in 2011 by Oxford University Press, the collection publishes, for thefirst time, all of Godwin’s letters. Edited by Pamela Clemit, it focuses on theyears 1798 to 1805 and ‘represent[s] a distinct phase in Godwin’s life andcareer’ (p. 1). Clemit argues that the letters in this volume show Godwin‘adapting to changes in public mood, seeking compromise in his philosophicalcommitments, rebuilding his social circles, and remaking himself as the authorof novels, plays, biographies, and children’s books’ (p. 1). The letters in thisvolume include an eyewitness account of the condition of Ireland on the eve ofthe 1800 Act of Union and Godwin’s search for a new companion in the wakeof the death of Mary Wollstonecraft. The letters also provide further insightinto Godwin’s publishing and social networks at the time.Stephen Burley’s Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics,

1766–1816 is the first book-length account of Hazlitt’s early literary career,and life as a dissenter. Burley aims to provide a fresh reading of Hazlitt’s early


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writings and situates these within the context of eighteenth-century, ratherthan nineteenth-century, literature. By focusing on Hazlitt’s early literarycareer, Burley hopes to suggest alternative readings of Hazlitt’s ‘more famousbody of work as an essayist and critic in the post-Napoleonic era’ (p. 8). Thebook is structured chronologically and draws on previously unattributedmaterials. Burley’s focus on religion in Hazlitt’s writings is a particularstrength of the book, and his interdisciplinary approach makes this volume animportant contribution, not only to literary studies, but also to theunderstanding of the ‘religious and cultural milieu that frames Hazlitt’swriting’ (p. 166). Also on Hazlitt, Amanda Louise Johnson’s ‘William Hazlitt,Liber Amoris, and the Imagination’ (ERR 25:vi[2014] 743–56) examinesHazlitt’s Liber Amoris [1823], and his erotic memoir and polemic againstroyalism entitled ‘On the Spirit of Monarchy’. Johnson argues that these twotexts demonstrate Hazlitt’s ‘theory of the imagination’ (p. 743): ‘that the pressoffers the ideas that mediate the relationship between a subject’s privateinterest and a ‘‘common sympathy’’, both of which exist in the imagination’(p. 753).James Grande’s William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism

and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835 offers a re-examination of the work ofWilliam Cobbett. Grande aims to ‘read Cobbett’s career as a serious andsustained attempt to think through a set of ideas that had been crystallized inthe pamphlet wars of the 1790s’ (p. 17). He argues that Cobbett, ‘having beenthe champion of a bellicose, anti-French Britishness’, discovers ‘an oppos-itional identity rooted in rural England’ (p. 17). The book covers Cobbett’spublished and unpublished writings to provide a thorough overview of hiswork and why he came to represent, to Hazlitt, ‘a kind of fourth estate in thepolitics of the country’ (p. 4).The key themes and approaches to come out of 2014 criticism in the field of

Romantic general and prose writings are largely concerned with differentnotions of identity: the local, the national, and the global. There is also anincreased focus on the political writings of female writers during the pamphletwars of the 1790s, and a number of publications have made use of newmaterial from canonical writers, and material from less well-known writers, toprovide new perspectives on and new directions in political, historical, travel,and life writing, as well as in the broad field of women’s writing.

2. The Novel

In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters, by Ingrid Tieken-BoonVan Ostade, offers a sociolinguistic study of Austen’s grammar, vocabulary,and spelling, examining Austen’s letters in careful detail. The result is athorough study not only of Austen’s language as letter-writer as opposed tonovelist, though there is also a section on Austen’s ‘Authorial Identity’(pp. 208–24), but of the formulae of letter-writing in Austen’s time, the postalsystem, Austen’s correspondents, and the corpus of letters. As Tieken-BoonVan Ostade’s study progresses, the importance of her central claim becomesmore apparent as an absence in Austen studies to date emerges: why, when


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Austen is the subject of so much criticism, parody, and inspiration, has herepistolary language gone almost undiscussed? The author reaches someinteresting conclusions about the essentially conservative nature of Austen’slanguage, her brief uses of dialect, and contemporary grammatical correctness.She also argues for the revision of dates for certain undated letters, as well asthe dating of The Watsonsmanuscript, based on linguistic evidence rather thananecdote. Though this is a study in sociolinguistics, it contains plenty ofinformation to attract the literary critic.All varieties of the wonderful online life of Jane Austen are presented in

Kylie Mirmohamadi’s concise Palgrave Pivot guide to The Digital Afterlives ofJane Austen: Janeites at the Keyboard, in which the author sets out not only totrace the proliferation of Austen fans online, but to examine what it is theywrite, reading it as literary endeavour in its own right while also regarding it asbelonging to the wider tradition of publishing Austen’s works, reading, andresponding to them critically. One of the subjects Mirmohamadi covers is aCanadian online literary community, Wattpad, and its array of Austen-themed fan fiction. Her study of this site shows that such is the familiarity ofAusten’s work as its own self-referential system in the world of fan fiction thatnew Austen stories can be produced by readers who have scarcely encounteredthe original Austen, yet whose works perfectly navigate their online world,revealing the boundless creative potential represented by the idea of Austenonline, however far from the novels that idea may have travelled.In The Hidden Jane Austen, John Wiltshire offers a counterpoint to the

current scholarship on celebrity, cults, and fan fiction in his starting point ofrereading. He quotes Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan’s perceptiveargument [2005] about the deliberate crafting of Emma as a novel aiming to‘ ‘‘sacrifice readability’’ to re-readability’ (p. 3), in order to further Austen’sclaims to be considered a serious writer, rather than the generator ofdisposable trash. Wiltshire’s fascination with the rereadability of Austen’snovels is the motivation for his study of the ‘hidden’ Austen, that is, the ‘facetsof her writing that might elude the attention of the first-time reader’ (p. 4).While Wiltshire is interested in themes of secrecy, silence, and evasion withinthe novels, he is also an astute reader of Austen’s plotting in which thesignificance of the hidden (a smile, a fear, a lie) comes to be revealed on thefirst or repeated reading of the novel. His seven chapters address each ofAusten’s completed novels in turn (Mansfield Park gets two chapters) andanalyse memory, religion, intimate history, eavesdropping, and how to createa secret where there is none, in Northanger Abbey. This study is elegantlywritten and presents nuanced and persuasive readings of the novels. It exhibitsits own readability and rereadability as well as those of Austen.An excellent new resource is offered in Approaches to Teaching Austen’s

Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire.Part of the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, this is aneasy-to-use and thorough teaching aid whose contributors are engaginglysubjective and self-reflective in places, are always student-focused, and offer anaccessible but scrupulous account of the different aspects of the novel. Thestudy is divided into two parts, ‘Materials’ and ‘Approaches’. Part I containsuseful information about the different editions of Mansfield Park from its


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publication date to the present, its critical reception, an account of the threefilm versions of the novel, and a list of current digital resources, includingspecialist Austen websites, free sites, and subscription databases. Part II,‘Approaches’, begins with an introduction by the editors (pp. 21–49), and itssubheadings give a clear indication of its utility: the historical and navalcontext, religion, the slave trade, introspection, Fanny Price, first-cousinmarriage, and the final chapter. The rest of the book consists of four sections.‘Classroom Strategies and Approaches’ (pp. 50–104) covers gift theory, thetextual scholarship, unexpected locations for the expression of desire, theplausibility of the ending as a happy one, and a discussion (including the rules)of the card game Speculation, which features in the novel when Sir Thomasrecommends it as a suitable choice for the family’s evening entertainment.Family forms the focus of the second section, ‘Thinking about Fanny Priceand Families’ (pp. 105–42), where sibling relations, a close reading of Fanny’scharacter, Austen’s development of interiority from Pride and Prejudice toMansfield Park, and the opacity of the Crawfords are discussed. The thirdsection, ‘Teaching about Mansfield Park in Literary History and Context’(pp. 143–207), covers tragedy, morality, landscape, and a group of essays onreaders, reading, and drama. In ‘Understanding Mansfield Park through theRehearsals for Lovers’ Vows’ (pp. 155–63), by Penny Gay, we encounter notonly Inchbald’s play but the descriptions and responses of students whoperformed it while studying the novel; their awareness of character parallelsbetween Mansfield Park and the play, between movement and sociability, andlanguage and desire in Austen’s novel is heightened by an understanding of thecrucial theatricals. The final section, ‘Teaching Mansfield Park in the BroaderPostcolonial Context’ (pp. 208–32), concludes with geography, nationalismand imperialism, and rights. These three essays, by Lynn Voskuil, LisaMasker, and Paula Loscocco respectively, provide invaluable explanations andpractical examples of interpreting the novel in the light of Said’s argumentabout it in Culture and Imperialism [1993], which allows the novel to keep itscentral focus in the classroom discussion by moving beyond the conversationabout Antigua between Fanny and Sir Thomas in order to apply Said’s viewsmore perceptively and rewardingly.Marie N. Sørbø’s new study Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and

Prejudice and Mansfield Park on Screen provides a very detailed account ofeach novel and its adaptations. The two sections, each on one novel, eachbegin with an analysis of the novel in question. Pride and Prejudice receivestwo chapters, and ‘Austen’s Ironic Voice’ (pp. 15–46) sets up an importantaspect of Sørbø’s later argument relating to the adaptations, in relation to thedifficulty of translating Austen’s irony on screen. The second chapter issimilarly attentive to irony, this time in relation to courtship (pp. 47–78), withfour chapters following covering the 1940 Hollywood film, the 1980 BBC TVversion, the 1995 BBC TV version, and the 2005 British film, in which theeffect of the revision or replacement of Austen’s dialogue is considered, fromincreasing the sentiment, to decreasing the satire, to suggesting an approval ofpatriarchal culture. The section on Mansfield Park is similarly structured, withtwo chapters on the novel and four on screen versions. The novel chaptersaddress class and patriarchy, and marriage as speculation (again returning to


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Sørbø’s central interest in irony, here opposed to romance). The fouradaptations in question are the 1983 BBC TV series, the 1999 film directed byPatricia Rozema, to which two chapters are given (the most interestingadaptation here in terms of characterization, framing, and narration, and inmany ways the version most attuned to the irony in its source-text, as Sørbøargues), and the 2007 ITV film. In a crowded field on Austen adaptation,Sørbø’s book provides a clear and coherent path with some persuasivearguments.Deirdre Le Faye’s handsome book, Jane Austen’s Country Life: Uncovering

the Rural Backdrop to Her Life, Her Letters and Her Novels, is packed withcolourful nineteenth-century illustrations of rural activities, landscape, andlivestock and takes the reader on a pleasant tour through Austen’s Hampshirecountryside, situating the routine of life in Steventon rectory, as well as atGodmersham and Chawton, within details of a typical rural existence not onlyfor the Austen family but for labourers and landowners too.Joel Faflak argues that Austen picks up on the early stirrings of a now-

dominant cultural trope of happiness as a timeless, affective right, in hisanalysis of feeling in Persuasion and other novels, in ‘Jane Austen and thePersuasion of Happiness’ (in Faflak and Sha, eds., pp. 98–123; reviewed fullyabove). In ‘Emma’s Depression’ (SiR 51[2014] 3–29), Marshall Brown presentsa wide-ranging exploration of the conditions of, and possibilities for,happiness in Highbury. Margaret Russett offers a subtle exploration of themedia of communication (sentiments, speech, noise, bodies, poetry) in‘Persuasion, Mediation’ (SiR 51[2014] 414–77).The Austen novel explored by Persuasions this year is Mansfield Park,

following on from the Jane Austen Society of North America’s AGM title of‘Contexts, Conventions, and Controversies’ (Persuasions 36[2014]). Thevolume contains the usual variety of excellent responses to, and interrogationsand re-evaluations of, Austen’s work, with notable papers on adoption,marriage, noise, morality, editing, habit, and family; its sister journal,Persuasions On-Line contains a valuable series of articles on teaching practicesfor Austen, Gothic parody, and Jane West’s novels as a contrast to Austen’s(Persuasions On-Line 35[2014]). The contexts for engagement with Austenrelate to street culture, digitization, and the Austen craze, and the volume alsocontains a most helpful appendix consisting of the syllabi of the contributorsensuring their good practices can be incorporated and extended.Elsewhere, Matthew P.M. Kerr explores how new beginnings are figured as

repetitions or returns in ‘A ‘‘First Return to the Sea’’ in Persuasion’(EIC 64[2014] 180–201). Shawn Normandin asserts the narratologicalimportance of letters in Austen’s completed novels on their own terms,rather than viewing them as having an importance solely in the early epistolarydrafts of Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, in ‘Jane Austen’sEpistolarity’ (ANQ 27[2014] 158–65). Kathleen E. Urda provides a thoughtfulexploration of the effects which the lack of representation of the much-discussed theatricals have upon interiorization and identity in ‘Why the ShowMust Not Go On: ‘‘Real Character’’ and the Absence of TheatricalPerformances in Mansfield Park’ (ECF 26[2014] 281–302). J.A. Downieturns to time in ‘The Chronology of Mansfield Park’ (MP 112[2014] 327–34).


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Eric C. Walker analyses Persuasion and Emma in screen adaptations, in linewith the philosophy of Stanley Cavell in relation to marriage and adoption, ina substantial essay, ‘Austen and Cavell’ (RCPS [2014] 36 paras.) IngridTieken-Boon van Ostade examines the familial community surroundingAusten as evinced in her will, in ‘ ‘‘To My Dearest Sister Cassandra’’: AnAnalysis of Jane Austen’s Will’ (ES 95[2014] 322–41). Amy Baker attends tocharacter representation in grammatical forms in ‘Caught in the Act ofGreatness: Jane Austen’s Characterization of Elizabeth and Darcy bySentence Structure in Pride and Prejudice’ (Expl 72[2014] 169–78). ValerieWainwright explores the tests Austen sets for a range of heroines, includingEmma Woodhouse, Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Fanny Price,illuminated by recent personality theory, in ‘Jane Austen’s Challenges, or thePowers of Character and the Understanding’ (P&L 38[2014] 58–73). In ‘WhatNever Happened: Social Amnesia in Sense and Sensibility’ (SEL 54[2014]773–91) James O’ Rourke offers a detailed rethinking of the narrativestructure and focalization techniques employed in the novel which both affirmand destabilize Elinor’s perspective. Rebecca Richardson examines theconfessional scenes in Austen’s novel and locates them in an importantformal developmental stage in Austen’s writing in ‘Dramatizing Intimacy:Confessions and Free Indirect Discourse in Sense and Sensibility’ (ELH81[2014] 225–44). In ‘Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)SensibleWoman’ (WW 21[2014] 575–91) Naomi Booth tracks the development of thefeminine, erotic spectacle of the swooning subject in Sense and Sensibility[1811] from Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling [1771].Susan Spencer provides a good account of the new online resource co-

devised by Austen scholar Janine Barchas at http:www.whatjanesaw.org,which seeks to re-create an 1813 exhibition of the paintings of Sir JoshuaReynolds visited by Austen, and also provides other online resources, in ‘WhatJane Saw’ (ECL 38[2014] 93–101). In ‘Jane Austen and ‘‘Banal Shakespeare’’ ’(ECF 27[2014] 105–25) Megan Taylor argues that Austen’s few directquotations from Shakespeare (as opposed to her frequent allusions to andassimilations of his work) in the context of her own works manage to re-energize the recognizable and even the banal. Alessa Johns examines Austen’smoral and philosophical debt to a previous woman of letters in ‘Jane Austenthe Stoic: Channeling Elizabeth Carter and the Bluestocking Ethos’(WW 21[2014] 444–63). Nick Bujak considers the shared history of narrativedevelopment in fiction and poetry in ‘Form and Generic Interrelation in theRomantic Period: Walter Scott’s Poetic Influence on Jane Austen’ (Narrative22[2014] 45–67).Olga Volkova rethinks the influence of Scott’s novels upon Russian fiction

in relation to history, geography, and nation, and traces Gogol’s response toScott, in ‘Historicity in The Bride of Lammermoor and Dead Souls’(SiR 51[2014] 149–70). In a welcome analysis of Scott’s relatively under-discussed novel of 1828, Katherine Inglis explores the contemporary fascin-ation with blood transfusion in a variety of the novel’s reanimation scenes in‘Blood and the Revenant in Walter Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth’ (in Coyerand Shuttleton, eds., Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832,pp. 196–215). In an exploration of sentiment, sociability, and the threat posed


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by commercial self-interest to the bonds of community, Natasha Tessoneexamines Scott’s critique of community models past and present in ‘Tending tothe (National) Household: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and ‘‘That HappyCommerce’’ of the Enlightenment’ (ECF 26[2014] 261–80). Timothy Campbelloffers a thoughtful consideration of the ways in which Scott refuses to allowthe past to return (in this instance, the old Scottish guillotine) in relation toThe Antiquary, in ‘Pennant’s Guillotines and Scott’s Antiquary: The RomanticEnd of the Present’ (RCPS [2014] 27 paras). Valerie Wallace uncovers the partplayed by the Reverend Thomas M’Crie, a reviewer for the EdinburghChristian Instructor, and his ally in Nova Scotia, the Reverend ThomasMcCulloch, in a dispute over the representation of the Covenanters in Scott’s1816 novel, in ‘Fictions of History, Evangelical Whiggism and the Debate overOld Mortality in Scotland and Nova Scotia’ (in Dew and Price, eds.,pp. 182–99; this work is reviewed fully above). L. Levy offers ‘A Note onWalter Scott and Irish Literature’ (ScotLR 6[2014] 91–4). Different forms oftransportation, location, and circulation are discussed by Chris Ewers in ananalysis of spatial fluidity in ‘Roads as Regions, Networks and Flows:Waverley and the ‘‘Periphery’’ of Romance’ (JECS 37[2014] 97–112).In A Life with Mary Shelley, by Barbara Johnson, the late scholar’s final

study on Mary Shelley is published within a collection of Johnson’s earlieressays and some critical and personal tributes to Johnson. The slim volumebegins with an introduction by Mary Wilson Carpenter to Johnson’s careerand publications, her involvement with Shelley criticism from an early stage,and her development as an influential feminist and deconstructionist critic.Johnson’s early essays ‘The Last Man’ [1980], ‘My Monster/My Self’ [1982],and ‘Gender Theory and the Yale School’ [1984] are followed by an afterwordby Judith Butler, ‘Animating Autobiography: Barbara Johnson and MaryShelley’s Monster’. Part II of the volume containsMary Shelley and Her Circle(pp. 51–122), and is in turn followed by an afterword by Shoshana Felman,‘Barbara Johnson’s Last Book’. Mary Shelley and Her Circle [2009] consists offive chapters on Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, Byron, and Polidori.As Felman argues in her afterword, the absence of Shelley from this study ofher circle is deliberate on Johnson’s part, using the structure of absence toexplore ideas of marginality and the marginality of Shelley herself, in herwritings and her life. The study itself is concise, economical, and has a densityof thought that lends it an epigrammatic air at times.A trio of articles focuses in great depth on one of Mary Shelley’s novels in a

special volume of European Romantic Review. Siobhan Carroll exploresShelley’s use of air in The Last Man to consider ideas of contagion, globalunity, and futurity in ‘Mary Shelley’s Global Atmosphere’ (ERR 25[2014] 3–17). In ‘A Clandestine Catastrophe: Disciplinary Dissolution in Mary Shelley’sThe Last Man’ (ERR 25[2014] 19–34) Elizabeth Effinger examines a differenttype of possibility in the novel, that which is produced when the arts arereduced and almost reduced, and allows for the renewal of music and literatureonce something of them survives. Ranita Chatterjee turns to Shelley’sValperga [1823] as a way of drawing out the relation of the contagionmetaphor to biopolitics and the state of the individual’s existence within thepolitical, in ‘Our Bodies, Our Catastrophes: Biopolitics in Mary Shelley’s The


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Last Man’ (ERR 25[2014] 35–49). Elsewhere, James P. Carney expands thecurrent scholarly understanding of the effects of classical rhetorical andhistorical writers on Romanticism in his identification of ‘Some PreviouslyUnrecognized References to Classical Historians in Mary WollstonecraftShelley’s The Last Man’ (N&Q 61[2014] 527–30). Jonas S. Cope argues that ananalysis of the character of Winzy in Shelley’s short story ‘The MortalImmortal’ enables a better understanding of his fellow over-achievers inFrankenstein and Valperga, in ‘The Mortal Immortal: Mary Shelley’s‘‘Overreachers’’ Reconsidered’ (Expl 72[2014] 122–6). Miranda Burgessreads Frankenstein in connection to the overlapping discourses of tropicalmedicine, epidemiology, and transportation in ‘Transporting Frankenstein:Mary Shelley’s Mobile Figures’ (ERR 25[2014] 247–65). Anna E. Clarkexamines the levels of characterization in Shelley’s novel to argue that thecreature ‘is truly unique’ because of ‘his ability to understand and narrate theperspectives of other characters’ (p. 245), in ‘Frankenstein; or, The ModernProtagonist’ (ELH 81[2014] 245–68). Jackson Petsche offers a reading of thevegetarian creature in which he, composed of carcasses, presents a critique ofthe human consumption of meat, in ‘An Already Alienated Animality:Frankenstein as a Gothic Narrative of Carnivorism’ (GS 16[2014] 98–110).Tilottama Rajan’s densely argued ‘A Peculiar Community: Mary Shelley,Godwin, and the Abyss of Emotion’ (in Faflak and Sha, eds., pp. 147–70)reads Shelley’s novels as explorations of negativity imbued with thephilosophies and attitudes of Byron and Godwin, and existing as an attemptto revisit and revive ideas of community.Carmel Murphy offers a nuanced consideration of Godwin’s intervention in

the debate about the uses of history in his 1817 novel Mandeville and relates itto his attempt, in the later History of the Commonwealth in England [1824–8],to revive republican politics in ‘Possibilities of Past and Future: RepublicanHistory in William Godwin’s Mandeville (KSR 28[2014] 104–16). In ‘DonQuixote and the Sentimental Reader of History in the Works of WilliamGodwin’ (in Dew and Price, eds., pp. 162–81) Noelle Gallagher considers thepersistence of Godwin’s interest in quixotic readers and his approval ofsentimental reading practices when reading history as well as fiction, in achapter that ranges across Caleb Williams, ‘Of History and Romance’,Thoughts on Man [1831], History of the Commonwealth [1824–8], and Life ofChaucer [1803]. Cathy Collett works through Godwin’s developing ideas offuturity and the propagation of the human race from Political Justice [1793] toSt Leon [1799] in ‘Every Child Left Behind: St Leon and William Godwin’sImmortal Future’ (ERR 25[2014] 327–36). Yasmin Solomonescu turns toCaleb Williams to test Godwin’s attitudes to rhetoric and truth-telling, andwhether the two are incompatible or not, in ‘ ‘‘A Plausible Tale’’: WilliamGodwin’s Things As They Are’ (ERR 25[2014] 591–610). Rodney StenningEdgecombe corrects the provenance of an allusion previously credited to KingJohn, in a discussion of language, parody, and myth-making, in ‘ParaphrasticAllusions in Caleb Williams’ (N&Q 61[2014] 502–4). Peter Melville readsGodwin’s St Leon in the light of Kant’s essay ‘On a Supposed Right to Liefrom Altruistic Motives’ [1797] and finds much to say about the complexity of


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truth-telling in both writers’ philosophies, in ‘Lying with Godwin and Kant:Truth and Duty in St Leon’ (ECent 55[2014] 19–37).There was an interesting collection of essays on Mary Wollstonecraft in

Hypatia this year. Alan M.S.J. Coffee considers the philosophy of independ-ence in a range of Wollstonecraft’s writings, including The Wrongs of Woman,in ‘Freedom as Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Grand Blessing ofLife’ (Hypatia 29[2014] 908–24). Martina Reuter tracks Wollstonecraft’scritique of Rousseau’s views of nature, sensibility, and women in ‘ ‘‘Like aFanciful Kind of Half Being’’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ (Hypatia 29[2014] 925–41), and Lena Hallendius concludeswith a searching evaluation of the commodification of rights in The Wrongs ofWoman in ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Critique of Property: OnBecoming a Thief from Principle’ (Hypatia 29[2014] 942–57). DianaEdelman-Young examines Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights ofWoman in the context of natural and reproductive sciences to suggest thatWollstonecraft uses the language of such sciences to argue explicitly andimplicitly for gender equality, in ‘Chubby Cheeks and the Bloated Monster:The Politics of Reproduction in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication’ (ERR25[2014] 683–704). Catherine Packham examines another of Wollstonecraft’sworks in a different context, that of political economy, in her analysis of therepresentation of bread shortages in ‘ ‘‘The Common Grievance of theRevolution’’: Bread, the Grain Trade, and Political Economy inWollstonecraft’s View of the French Revolution’ (ERR 25[2014] 705–22).Ingrid Horrocks explores the rhythms created in Wollstonecraft’s argumentsby her idiosyncratic use of dashes (categorizable in three separate ways) indifferent print editions in ‘ ‘‘– –Pugh!’’: Rereading Punctuation throughWollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence’ (WW 21[2014] 488–508). In an exploration of rhetoric Inna Volkova argues that examples are usedas the starting point for Wollstonecraft’s argument, rather than the usualcritical view of them as simply a supplement to argument, in ‘ ‘‘I Have LookedSteadily around Me’’: The Power of Examples of Mary Wollstonecraft’s AVindication of the Rights of Woman’ (WS 43[2014] 892–910). A fascinating andalmost entirely unknown work of Romantic fiction is presented and examinedin ‘Selene: Lady Mount Cashell’s Lunar Utopia’ (WW 21[2014 559–74) byAnne Markey. The three-volume novel dates from 1823 and was neverpublished. Analysing the novel’s radical political perspectives and the targetsof its utopian satires, Markey makes a compelling case for much greatercritical attention to be paid to Mount Cashell’s writing, and that she deservesto be known for more than her position on the fringes of the Godwin–Shelleycircle and as Mary Wollstonecraft’s most famous pupil.The work of Ann Radcliffe receives several significant re-evaluations in an

authoritative and compelling new collection of essays. In Ann Radcliffe,Romanticism and the Gothic, Dale Townshend and Angela Wright havegathered some of the most recognizable and influential Gothic critics whosework has done so much to shape the current critical field of Gothic fiction andRomantic Gothic studies more widely; here Radcliffe’s central position in thefield of Romantic Gothic studies is variously recovered, reappraised, andproblematized in the wide-ranging collection of chapters. The collection is


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divided into three sections. Part I, ‘Cultural Contexts’, begins with the editors’contribution, ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception ofAnn Radcliffe, 1789–1850’. It offers a point of orientation for the newcomer toRadcliffe, presenting a useful range of critical responses to her novels, fromearly dismissals to the blazing celebration of her works by the time of herdeath in 1823, and provides a helpful overview of the ways in which Radcliffeestablished a type of novel-writing which produced both astute imitations andcritical praise, and doggerel and critical condemnations, which ‘Augmentedrather than tarnished’ the years of silence before Radcliffe’s death (p. 14). Inthe final section the editors examine the views of Radcliffe’s skill held by laterRomantics such as Hazlitt, Scott, Percy Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and traceRadcliffe’s progression towards the high place she attained in her contempor-aries’ literary canon. The second chapter, Joe Bray’s ‘Ann Radcliffe,Precursors and Portraits’ takes up the question of Radcliffe’s literary qualitiesand her ability to be at once realistic and fanciful, in Bray’s analysis of portraitpainting in Radcliffe’s fiction and the significance of the discontinuitiesbetween the image, or likeness, and the person depicted therein, tracing itspotential for emotional affect and the rupturing of reality. The next chapter,‘Ann Radcliffe and Romantic Print Culture’ by Edward Jacobs, examinesRadcliffe’s effects on the form and the status of the novel. Jacobs argues thatRadcliffe’s fusion of fiction and poetry in her novels ‘staged and constructed,to an unprecedented extent’ the division between the intensive reading ofpoetry and the casual reading of popular fiction, leading a new form of mass-market fiction which affected print culture more widely (p. 49). In chapter 4,‘Ann Radcliffe and Politics’, James Watt assesses recent critical views ofRadcliffe’s political position, noting the irony inherent in attempts to constructRadcliffe’s views by largely depending on the political opinions held by herhusband and other male relatives. Watt carefully negotiates the competingcritical claims for conservatism, loyalism, and reformism, and concludespersuasively that it is difficult to trace any engagement with contemporarypolitics in her work, and that any such claims become more tenuous the moreclosely we attend to Radcliffe’s rhetorical sophistication. Part II, entitled ‘AnnRadcliffe’s Creative Output’, begins with Alison Milbank’s ‘Ways of Seeing inAnn Radcliffe’s Early Fiction: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) andA Sicilian Romance (1790)’. Here Milbank examines the ways in whichRadcliffe adopts the perspective of a ‘medieval ballad writer’ (p. 85) which,Milbank argues, enables Radcliffe to gain a detached perspective. While thisperspective anticipates Romantic poetic vision in certain ways, ultimately itbecomes Gothic rather than Romantic, and Milbank offers detailed analysis ofthe two novels and the double perspective achieved by their melancholiccharacters and condition. In chapter 6 Diane Long Hoeveler discusses theenormous popularity among readers and influences upon writers, publishers,and the print market of one of Radcliffe’s novels throughout the nineteenthcentury in ‘The Heroine, the Abbey, and Popular Romantic Textuality: TheRomance of the Forest (1791)’. In the next chapter Robert Miles takes as hisstarting point the old critical opposition of Romanticism to the Gothic (highand low, poetry and prose, irony and sensation) and casts a critical eye overRadcliffe’s eligibility to be considered as a Romantic writer by interrogating


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the concept of Romanticism itself in the light of a new understanding of thepopular (low, prosaic, sensational) and its claims on Romanticism, in ‘PopularRomanticism and the Problem of Belief: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)’. Inchapter 8, JoEllen DeLucia’s ‘Transnational Aesthetics in Ann Radcliffe’sA Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 [...] (1795)’, the relationships betweenRadcliffe’s travel writing and contemporary discourses of aesthetics areexplored, with DeLucia arguing that in Radcliffe’s writing about the wartimeContinent and the Lake District in 1794 she uses techniques that often jar orstartle the reader, which enable ‘spectators to rethink the occlusions anddisplacements of the picturesque’, and that Radcliffe may be considered, withBurke and Paine, as a writer about citizenship, statelessness, and nationalbelonging (p. 145). The next chapter presents Jerrold E. Hogle’s contribution,‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian; or, The Confessional of theBlack Penitents (1796–1797)’, in which he reads Radcliffe’s The Italian as herDissenting and rational response to Lewis’s The Monk, which is also informedby, and can be read further as a response to, Walpole’s two prefaces to TheCastle of Otranto, resulting in a novel which exemplifies Radcliffe’s contra-dictory visions of progressive and regressive social history, and which ‘re-establishes the roots of new ‘‘romance’’ in Walpole’s Gothic and thus thegrounding of Romanticism in the Gothic’s ungrounded mixture of openlyincompatible beliefs and styles’ (p. 167). Part II concludes with Samuel Baker’schapter, ‘Ann Radcliffe Beyond the Grave: Gaston de Blondeville (1826) andIts Accompanying Texts’, which discusses (via a brief cinematic fantasy) thereasons for the posthumous publication of Radcliffe’s novel amid selectionsfrom her journals and poetry and the polite critical neglect it has receivedsince. Part III, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Romantic Literary Culture’, contains thefinal three chapters. Jane Stabler, in ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Poetry: The Poetics ofRefrain and Inventory’, produces a perceptive and rewarding reading ofRadcliffe’s poetry as poetry in its own right, not simply as poems whichinterrupt the novels. Stabler’s formal attention to the poems published in anunauthorized collection of 1816 demonstrates Radcliffe’s technical skill anddeliberation in using repetition to explore ideas of creativity, escape, andagency. Sue Chaplin’s chapter, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Romantic-Era Fiction’,discusses Radcliffe’s immediate literary effect on contemporary women writerssuch as Eliza Parsons, Eliza Fenwick, and Maria Regina Roche, hercontribution to ideas about literary taste in the period, consumption, and afinal comparison drawn between Scott and Radcliffe and the ways in whicheach writer examines Gothic ‘hauntings’ (p. 217). The final chapter, chapter13, comes from Diego Saglia, ‘ ‘‘A Portion of the Name’’: Stage Adaptation ofRadcliffe’s Fiction, 1794–1806’, which is an account of the rapidity with whichRadcliffe’s novels reached the Romantic stage, how they were reshaped inorder to suit it, and the ways in which the stage dealt with Radcliffe’s concernswith history and ideology.Two chapters of Gothic interest appear in Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-

Century Literature and Culture, edited by Ana De Freitas Boe and AbbyCoykendall. Abby Coykendall briefly discusses the reputation of HoraceWalpole as a feminine man in ‘Queer Counterhistory and the Specter ofEffeminacy’ (pp. 111–29), and elsewhere in the same volume George E.


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Haggerty considers the ‘quasi-perfunctory endings’ of Radcliffe’s TheMysteries of Udolpho [1794], Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor [1806] andMaturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer [1820], arguing that attempts to re-establishheteronormativity at the conclusion of each are unsuccessful, and that theyexemplify the ambivalence at the heart of the Gothic genre, in ‘The Failure ofHeteronormativity in the Gothic Novel’ (pp. 131–49). Scott J. Juengel debatesKantian hospitality with a brief swerve towards Radcliffe’s The Italian [1797]in ‘Late Hospitality: Kant, Radcliffe, and the Assassin at the Gate’ (ERR25[2014] 289–98). Peter Otto examines the connections between identity andlocation in ‘ ‘‘Where Am I, and What?’’: Architecture, Environment, and theTransformation of Experience in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho’(ERR 25[2014] 299–308).Irish Gothic continues to gain critical ground, and this year Christina Morin

and Niall Gillespie’s edited collection Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, andTraditions, 1760–1890 contains some provoking arguments about and reflec-tions upon what that branch of Gothic studies might address. Of relevancehere are the following chapters. Diane Long Hoeveler expands the focus of herrecent work on anti-Catholicism in Gothic literature to include the popularchapbooks imported and circulated in Ireland in the early nineteenth century,in ‘The Irish Protestant Imaginary: The Cultural Contexts for the GothicChapbooks Published by Bennett Dugdale, 1800–52’ (pp. 34–57), and NiallGillespie discusses the Gothicization of the Irish political and geographicallandscape, as well as popular literature and poetry, in ‘Irish Jacobin Gothic,c.1796–1825’ (pp. 58–73). Jim Shanahan, in ‘Suffering Rebellion: Irish GothicFiction, 1799–1830’ (pp. 74–93), analyses John Banim’s novel The BoyneWater and The Nowlans [1826], Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer [1820], andThe Milesian Chief [1812] amidst a consideration of the seeming inseparabilityof political rebellion and atrocity, and the fraught engagement of Irish Gothicwith both silence and screams in the face of suffering in the historical andliterary aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. Finally, Richard Haslam examineshow Melmoth’s ‘demonic pact device’ (p. 113) is taken up by the writersBanim, Griffin, James Clarence Mangan, and William Carleton and used toincorporate Catholic perspectives into an anti-Catholic mode of writing intheir Gothic tales, in ‘Maturin’s Catholic Heirs: Expanding the Limits of IrishGothic’ (pp. 113–29).Amy Culley’s engaging and detailed study, British Women’s Life Writing,

1760–1840 (reviewed above), contains chapters of particular interest here also.These are the chapters on Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft. In ‘TheLiterary Family and the ‘‘Aristocracy of Genius’’ in the Memoirs of MaryRobinson’ (pp. 103–15), Robinson’s Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson [1801]provides Culley with the grounds for a thoughtful examination of theconnections between Robinson’s complex memoir and her other many andvaried literary productions, the still vexed question of Robinson’s manipula-tion of her scandalous reputation, and her support for other women writers.In ‘ ‘‘The Little Hero of Each Tale’’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Travelogue andRevolutionary Autobiography’ (pp. 173–88) Culley turns to A Short Residencein Sweden, Norway and Denmark [1796] and views it within the framework ofAn Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution [1794] to demonstrate


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how ‘Wollstonecraft developed personal narrative as a historical mode in thecourse of her career’ (p. 174), suggesting further that in A Short ResidenceWollstonecraft ‘avoids personal confession in favour of a life writing work thatis at once secret, intimate, and yet outwardly focused, an effect created inpart by correspondence’ (p. 179). The chapter continues with a discussion ofGodwin’s understanding of ‘the relational self’ in his memoir ofWollstonecraft (p. 185), and concludes with a consideration of how MaryHays’s ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ [1800] may be viewed, likeGodwin’s text, as a means by which Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary ideascan be circulated in biographical writing as well as in her own, concluding that‘like Helen Maria Williams, Wollstonecraft moved Romantic autobiographyaway from solitude, isolation, and introspection in favour of socially engagedand dialogic modes that in turn inspired auto/biographical writing and self-examination in others’ (p. 173). Robinson’s Memoirs are also discussed byWhitney Arnold in ‘Mary Robinson’s Memoirs and the Terrors of LiteraryObscurity’ (WS 43[2014] 733–49) in a reading which takes in Robinson’sattack on her contemporary print world and explores the Gothic structure ofthe Memoirs text itself.A different type of community is uncovered in British Women Writers and

the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785–1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India. KathrynS. Freeman delves into a world of scholarly activity in her study of the AsiaticSociety of Bengal, whose members studied and translated Sanskrit, wrotepoetry, and worked for the British East India Company, making theirorientalist studies look more Said’s orientalism in practice. Freeman’sintroduction takes the reader through recent critical history and postcolonialperspectives, and separates women’s writing from men’s in this period, arguingthat they need to be extricated ‘from assumptions behind scholarship thatrepresents them as participating in the cultural imperialism that postcoloni-alism attributes to both the Orientalists and canonical male writers; thisinclusiveness has subjected these women authors to a discourse that limitscritical engagement with them alongside male writers and the east. Mycontention is that women’s writing connects Orientalism’s literalized genderingof east and west in its ambivalence towards nondualism’ (pp. 15–16). Arguingthat this period of literary history in Anglo-Indian culture is pre-colonial, notcolonial or postcolonial, Freeman analyses a range of novels, plays, and poetryby women in the period to uncover their critique of Western dualism, and thebinaries relating to reason and emotion, masculinity and femininity, authorityand submission, within their encounters with Indian philosophy, culture, andlanguage. Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah[1796] and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary [1811] receive fresh andrewarding interpretations here in Freeman’s analysis of authorial controland metatextuality, and the ambivalence throughout the sentimental novel ofPhebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta [1789] is usefully recovered. Elsewhere,a fascinating account of the development of a discourse surroundingvegetarianism in the midst of British imperial discourse in India is offeredby Marguerite M. Regan, who discusses Hartly House, Calcuttaand Translations of the Letter of a Hindoo Rajah in ‘Feminism,Vegetarianism, and Colonial Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British


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Novels (SNNTS 46[2014] 275–92). Elsewhere, ‘Empire, Race, and the Debateover the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of ModernPhilosophers (1800)’, by John C. Leffel, traces Hamilton’s absorption ofreproduction of contemporary prejudices regarding the Indian marriagemarket and female British emigrants in her Translation of the Letters of aHindoo Rajah [1796] as well as her re-evaluation of these prejudices in her nextnovel (ECF 26[2014] 427–54).A community of maternal authority is explored in Rebecca Davies’s well-

written and engaging study, also discussed in Chapter XII. Written MaternalAuthority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Booktakes as its starting point the author’s claim that women writers’ acceptance ofthe socially approved role of woman as the educator of children allowed themto create a new textual authority as educational writers. From this seeminglysimple claim Davies constructs a detailed analysis of the shift from oral ortransitory maternal advice to the written authority of educational writers in avariety of genres. Six chapters take us through the writings and authorialdevelopment of influential writers: Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft,Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and the now obscure Ann Martin Taylor,with a selection of her works from 1814 to 1819. The study opens with achapter on Samuel Richardson, and from this unexpected beginning Daviesargues persuasively that the models for exemplary maternal authority in placeat the end of the eighteenth century were absent at the mid-century point,evinced in Richardson’s fraught attempts in Pamela II [1741] to negotiateexisting models of femininity in order to construct a new version of hischaracter as a mother, suggesting that Richardson’s solution is to presentPamela as a mother who writes her authority rather than performing it.Through the following five chapters Davies traces the development of thiswritten form of maternal authority and educational discipline in relation toDissenting culture, empiricism and epistemology, radical politics, and thedeveloping form of the eighteenth-century novel. Despite the writers’successful establishment of a discourse of maternal authority in their texts,such a discourse, as Davies shows, remained stubbornly limited to the writtenword, and never quite made the leap into the public sphere as a discourse offeminine authority.Published in 2013 but not reviewed last year is Morgan Rooney’s substantial

study on The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790–1814: TheStruggle for History’s Authority. In this Rooney traces the development of thehistorical novel, ending with the publication of Scott’s Waverley in 1814 andtaking in radical and conservative fiction in the 1790s, the emergence of thenational tale, and the many debates on the proper use of historical discourse inwriting at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Many ofthe novels Rooney examines will be familiar to readers of Romantic fictionnow, from those by Godwin (St Leon [1799]) Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent[1800]), and Charlotte Smith (The Old Manor House [1793]), to George Walker(The Vagabond [1799]), Robert Bisset (Douglas [1800]), and Jane West (A Taleof the Times [1799]), but rather than arrange these authors on grounds ofpolitical opposition (radical versus conservative, Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin)Rooney attends to the ways in which novelists more generally turned to and


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used history in these decades, writing that ‘the literary landscape of the 1790sis populated largely by figures who are operating under an interventionistagenda, and this study examines the (unintended) generic consequences oftheir interventions’ (p. 10). That said, after setting out the debate for historyand authority in 1790s political and philosophical writings in his first twochapters (Richard Price, Edmund Burke, James Mackintosh, MaryWollstonecraft, Thomas Paine) Rooney goes on to devote a chapter toreformist and Jacobin novels, and another chapter to anti-Jacobin andconservative novels. These binaries are hard to shake off, but Rooney’sdiscussion of the novels fills in an important backdrop in the history of genericdevelopment, on which Scott so ably capitalized. Mooney claims the work ofSydney Owenson (The Wild Irish Girl [1806]) and Jane Porter (Thaddeus ofWarsaw [1803] and The Scottish Chiefs [1810]) as Scott’s most activeprecursors, before concluding with an analysis of Waverley itself.In ‘Making History: Social Unrest, Work and the Post-French Revolution

Historical Novel’ (in Dew and Price, eds., pp. 145–66) Fiona Price brings tolight a fascinating range of novels like the anonymous Charles Dacres: or, theVoluntary Exile, An Historical Novel, Founded on Facts [1797] and Lioncel; or,Adventures of an Emigrant [1803], and E. Cornelia Knight’s Marcus Flaminius[1792] in a detailed argument about the immediate post-revolutionary originsof the awareness of history as a mass experience which has previously beenargued to have occurred much later. In ‘ ‘‘By force, or openly, what could bedone?’’: Godwin, Smith, Wollstonecraft, and the Gagging Acts Novel’(pp. 109–36), John Bugg turns to fiction’s engagement with politics in hisnew study of silence and repression in the 1790s, Five Long Winters: The Trialsof British Romanticism. Bugg’s selection of novels consists of Godwin’s CalebWilliams, Charlotte Smith’s Marchmont [1796], and Wollstonecraft’s TheWrongs of Woman, or Maria [1798], arguing that they respond to politicalattack in their very form as well as in their content. Throughout his study Buggexamines a variety of 1790s literature illuminated by his central argument ofthe texts’ negotiation of political repression during the revolutionary debates,the Gagging Acts of 1795, and this chapter is an important contribution to ourunderstanding of political fiction and its response in form as well as content tocontemporary debates. Bugg writes: ‘To trace the arc described by CalebWilliams, Marchmont, and The Wrongs of Woman is to see obfuscation andreticence entering into the conceptual, structural, and even grammatical shapeof the novel, as writers discover more sensitive and complex modes forformally registering the trials of the Pitt era’ (p. 111).Anne Frey provides an account of Agnes C. Hall, author of twelve novels

written between 1819 and 1834 using the pseudonym Rosalia St Clair, herengagement with the national tale, historical novels, and the literary modelsprovided by Sydney Owenson in ‘The National Tale and the PseudonymousAuthor: Mobile Identity in the ‘‘Rosalia St. Clair’’ Novels’ (ERR 25[2014]181–99). Hall’s ‘generic incoherence’ (p. 182), Frey argues, is what provides acosmopolitanism lacking in more conventional national tales. Carmel Murphypresents a well-informed reading of Charlotte Smith’s engagement with thehistorical novel to critique government, authority, and Edmund Burke in‘Jacobin History: Charlotte Smith’s Old Manor House and the French


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Revolution Debate’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 271–81). Smith’s early depictionsof suburban space, rather than her usual rural scenes, provide the focus forKate Scarth’s interesting exploration of how women occupied and engagedwith such locations in ‘Elite Metropolitan Culture, Women, and GreaterLondon in Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline and Celestina’ (ERR 25[2014] 627–48).Roxane Eberle offers a thoughtful account of the ways in which Amelia Opieand her husband John wrote, lived, painted, and debated Romantic creativityin the 1790s, in ‘Amelia and John Opie: Conjugal Sociability andRomanticism’s Professional Arts’ (SiR 51[2014] 319–41). John B. Pierce andShelley King recount the recent discovery of a lost poetry notebook,contrasting its contents to the recent Collected Poems and the Oxford editionof Opie’s poems, in ‘The Rediscovery of Amelia Opie’s Cromer Notebook’(N&Q 61[2014] 498–501). Matthew J. Rigilano applies Lacanian theory andproduces a lucid and engaging analysis of literalization in ‘Absorption,Literality, and Feminine Subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s The Recess’(ECF 26[2014] 209–32). Halina Adams looks at the ways in which HelenMaria Williams uses the site of the Bastille in her travel writing as a way tothink about past, present, and future in ‘Imagining the Nation: Transformingthe Bastille in Williams’s Letters Written in France (1790)’ (ERR 25[2014] 723–41). An interesting account of Elizabeth Inchbald’s farce from 1788 and itsconnection to French scientific theories about, and against, animal magnetismis offered in Nathaniel Leach’s exploration of theatrical and satirical attackson the discourses of power in ‘Gendering Pseudo-Science: Inchbald’s AnimalMagnetism’ (LitComp 11[2014] 715–23). Another of Inchbald’s plays isdiscussed, this time A Mogul’s Tale, in an exploration of spectacle by PaulaR. Backscheider in ‘From The Emperor of the Moon to the Sultans’ Prison’(SECC 43[2014] 219–37).Some interesting aspects of Romantic fiction in translation are presented by

Laura Kirkley’s new edition of Caroline of Lichtfield, the popular sentimentalnovel by Isabelle de Montolieu from 1786 which was translated by ThomasHolcroft into English in the same year that it first appeared in French. Theintroduction sets up the literary and political world of Isabelle de Montolieu,the prolific Swiss writer and translator (including of Austen’s novels). Kirkleyaddresses the surprising popularity that a sentimental romance had amongwriters like Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Holcroft himself,uncovering Montolieu’s philosophical inheritance (Rousseau plays a centralrole here) and her place in Swiss literary circles. The edition is completed by anappendix containing Montolieu’s charming songs, substantial editorial notes,and a list of textual variants between the original English text and the editionsfrom 1786 (second edition), 1797, and 1798. Another new edition to note isAnn Yearsley’s The Royal Captives of 1795 (in The Collected Works of AnnYearsley, reviewed in Section 3 below).Regina Hewitt argues for a new and rewarding reading of ‘Maria

Edgeworth’s Harrington as a Utopian Novel’ (SNNTS 46[2014] 293–314),suggesting that the novel operates in a more beneficial and socially progressiveway when viewed as ‘methodologically utopian’ (p. 295) in its aims toovercome anti-Semitism, rather than as a novel which concludes with adisappointing and prejudiced dismissal of Judaism. Alex Howard analyses the


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ways in which the theory and practice of reading from Maria Edgeworth andRichard Lovell Edgeworth’s Practical Education [1798] are embodied anddisrupted in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent [1800], and argues for its connectionto contemporary political discourse, in ‘The Pains of Attention: ParatextualReading in Practical Education and Castle Rackrent’ (NCL 69[2014] 293–318).In an article about Edgeworth’s short stories, Ashley L. Cohen arguespersuasively for their shared political concerns relating to 1790s discourses,rather than to the more usual interpretations based on historical practice asrepresented in the stories, in ‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and GlobalLabor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales’ (ECent 55[2014]193–215). Slaney Chadwick Ross examines the metaphorical discussion ofEnglish, Scottish, and Irish concerns as interdependent in Edgeworth’s little-discussed closet drama from 1817, in ‘Maria Edgeworth’s The Rose, Thistle,and Shamrock: Symbolic Unification, Women’s Education, and the MarriagePlot’ (ECent 55[2014] 377–90). Mary Mullen explores the transhistoricaldisruptions and discordances in Castle Rackrent and their opposition toEdgeworth’s ideas of history elsewhere in her work in ‘AnachronisticAesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the ‘‘Uses’’ of History’ (ECF 26[2014]233–59). David Francis Taylor, in ‘Edgeworth’s Belinda and the Gendering ofCaricature’ (ECF 26[2014] 593–624), casts new light on the use of caricature inthe novel, and argues for its important relation to the other discoursessurrounding women’s bodies in the novel. Deborah Weiss turns to another ofEdgeworth’s relatively neglected writings, The Parent’s Assistant [1796; 1800],for a discussion of the contribution to capitalist theory made by Edgeworth, in‘Maria Edgeworth’s Infant Economics: Capitalist Culture, Good-WillNetworks and ‘‘Lazy Lawrence’’ ’ (JECS 37[2014] 395–408). CatherineCraft-Fairchild returns to the fraught portrayal of Anglo-Jewish culture andidentity in ‘The ‘‘Jewish Question’’ on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Harringtonand the Correspondence between Maria Edgeworth and Rachel MordecaiLazarus’ (ECL 38[2014] 30–63), examining how Edgeworth’s inaccuraterepresentation is bound up in her inability to move effectively between livedexperience and the solely textual, and her reliance upon previous, prejudicedwritten accounts.Peter deGabriele considers the connections between letters and the law in

‘The Legal Fiction and Epistolary Form: Frances Burney’s Evelina’ (JEMS14:ii[2014] 22–40). Eleanor C.L. Crouch surveys a wide range of Burney’swritings to support an argument about her subtle use of nerve theory in hernovels in relation to gender and social behaviour, in ‘Nerve Theory andSensibility: ‘ ‘‘Delicacy’’ in the Work of Fanny Burney’ (LitComp 11[2014]206–17). Jason S. Farr explores the difficult position women (unlike men)occupied in the eighteenth century when intellectual brilliance was notmatched by physical perfection, in ‘Sharp Minds/Twisted Bodies: Intellect,Disability, and Female Education in Frances Burney’s Camilla’ (ECent55[2014] 1–17; also discussed in Chapter XII).Jacqueline George considers the paradox of individual literary confessions

merging with mass-market commodities in ‘Confessions of a Mass Public:Reflexive Formations of Subjectivity in Early Nineteenth-Century BritishFiction’ (SNNTS 46[2014] 387–405). George discusses a subgenre of Romantic


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fiction here, the fictional confession, drawing upon a range of obscure andoften outrageous novels from 1814 to 1839 by authors such as EdmundCarrington, John Ainslie, and Thomas Little. Lauren McCoy interrogateshistories of the novel which place the roman-a-clef as one of the casualties ofthe novel’s progress towards realism, and argues that its continuationinvigorated Regency reading practices, in ‘Literary Gossip: Caroline Lamb’sGlenarvon and the Roman-a-clef’ (ECF 27[2014] 127–50). Nicholas M.Williams, in ‘ ‘‘The Liberty Wherewith We Are Made Free’’: Belief andLiberal Individualism in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of aJustified Sinner’ (SHW 24[2014] 32–41) considers the ways in which thestructure of belief and the divided structure of the novel work with and againsteach other, informed by Charles Taylor’s arguments in A Secular Age [2007].

3. Poetry

In this section, Matthew Ward covers general work on Romantic poetry andwork on poets from A to K; Paul Whickman covers poets from L to Z.The majority of works published on Romantic poetry in 2014 focused on

individual authors. But there were several general studies in the field ofRomanticism that included discussion of poetry. A number of these works areconsidered in more detail in the Section 1 of this chapter, and so are onlybriefly highlighted here. Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature by Jeremy Daviesincludes discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelley amongst itsbrilliant analysis of feeling in the period. Percy Shelley is also the subject of achapter in Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha’s edited collection, Romanticismand the Emotions, as are Byron and Wordsworth, alongside a number of prosewriters. Amidst its socio-cultural interests, Sarah Houghton-Walker’sRepresentations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period finds plenty of roomfor the role and figuration of the gypsy in John Clare’s and WilliamWordsworth’s verse. Though it is more concerned with the prose writing of theperiod in its valuable charting of a distinct English identity, David Higgins’sRomantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–1850 alsofruitfully explores Clare and Wordsworth, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Cynthia Schoolar Williams’s Hospitality and the Transatlantic Imagination,1815–1835 reflects on the shadow cast by the Napoleonic Wars, and offers achapter on Felicia Hemans in the light of this context. These studies are alldiscussed in detail above.Two further important studies were published by Cambridge University

Press in 2014. The pervasiveness of conflict in the Romantic period is ofcentral concern to Jeffrey N. Cox in Romanticism in the Shadow of War:Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years. As he reminds us at the start ofhis study, ‘war is never far from the central works of the Romanticimagination’ (p. 1)—whether that be the discharged soldiers or the ruinedcottages populating Wordsworth’s poetic landscapes, or the romances of theCockney School that critique and counter the drums of war. Cox congeniallyredraws the critical field of Romanticism, challenging the monumentalizingturn towards the ‘Big Six’ as well as the big military and cultural battles of the


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period. Instead, he argues for the Romantic period as ‘an era of small feints,limited campaigns, border raids’ (p. 4), both militarily and in the production ofits artworks. Cox’s nuanced readings of Barbauld, Byron, the Shelleys, and theCockney School reveal how a range of poets produce ‘new forms of art’, asthey respond to ‘moments of crisis’ (p. 7). Romanticism in the Shadow of War isa superb example of the historicist approach in which Cox has long excelled,and as such it achieves its author’s ambition to illustrate that sound historicistreadings arise less from a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (p. 5) than from acelebration of aesthetics amidst awareness of ideological contexts.The relation between the first- and second-generation Romantic poets is the

subject of Andrew Warren’s The Orient and the Young Romantics. Warren’sthought-provoking monograph explores why Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keatsso frequently set their works in orientalized settings or Eastern locations.Looking beyond the simple answer, namely that everyone else was doing it atthe time too, this fascinating account of canonical poets argues that eachwriter criticizes the growing imperialism of Europe and the aesthetics as well asthe politics of Western expansionism. Warren reads the second-generationRomantic poets as self-conscious and ironic in their handling of the Orient, asthey seek creatively to critique the ‘Orientalism practised by the eighteenthcentury and the First Generation Romantics’ (p. 3). Indeed, alongside hisperceptive close readings that afford fresh insight into well-known poems likeLamia and The Revolt of Islam, Warren’s chief contribution is in noticing theway his young Romantics anticipate key debates within postcolonial studies,not least, as Warren lays out, the fact that the construction of the Orientthrough the orientalized phantasmagoria of the previous generation isconsistently confronted by the second generation through Romantic irony.This year saw the publication of two large critical editions of two relatively

non-canonical abolitionist poets. The first of these, Paul Baines’s TheCollected Writings of Edward Rushton, is a triumph. As well as an abolitionist,Rushton was an accomplished seaman, poet, and bookseller. This is a well-presented scholarly hardback, typical of Liverpool University Press publica-tions, and this first critical edition of Rushton’s work is serious withoutappearing overly formal or dry. Space is given to Rushton’s poetry and prosein a manner that allows them to speak for themselves. Baines does not clutterthe text with lengthy notes concerning textual variants, history, or glosses,instead confining these to a detailed but concise ‘commentary’ at the end of thevolume. The effect of this is to emphasize the Liverpool-based Rushton as awriter of merit who exceeds his marginal reputation in British Romanticism,and not simply as a figure of regional, historical, or academic interest. Indeed,this edition, containing all his known works, shows Rushton to be a far moreprolific writer of poetry than of prose. Not all of Rushton’s poems can belabelled ‘abolitionist’, even if slavery and colonialism are his most commonthemes and the subjects of his strongest poetry. In this light it is tempting toview Rushton as a transatlantic poet, not only for biographical reasons—hisseamanship—but because of the transatlantic themes of much of his writing.His prose, for instance, includes a letter to George Washington admonishinghim for ‘continuing to be a Proprietor of Slaves’ [1797] while his poem ‘TheDismember’d Empire’ [1782] opens with the Liverpool-based poet reflecting


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on the seven years of the American War of Independence and the feared‘dismemberment’ of the transatlantic empire: ‘SEVEN times the globe hasmade its annual round, / Sublimely rolling thro’ the vast profound, / SinceBritons first aspir’d to govern slaves, / And hurl’d destruction ’crossth’Atlantic waves’ (p. 33, ll. 1–4).Rushton’s relative critical neglect in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is

detailed in Baines’s introduction. Although this may partly be due to thenineteenth-century distaste for his radical politics, and the peculiar nature ofhis posthumous publication, the Popean echoes of this opening passagesuggest another reason. Baines sees Rushton’s ‘splicing of the high diction ofPope and Gray with the populist lyric forms sung by actual sailors in pubs’ as‘proto-Romantic’ (p. 17). Yet although Rushton engages with themes andforms popular among his Romantic contemporaries, such as poems on thedeaths of Chatterton and Burns as well as Wordsworthian echoes in poemssuch as ‘To the Redbreast’, much of his work is in the form and style of earlier,eighteenth-century poetry. Could Rushton, therefore, simply have been seen asunfashionable? Nevertheless, he is most certainly a poet worthy of criticalattention, and Baines’s excellent edition will serve an important role in addingRushton to the wider Romantic canon.The other substantial critical edition appearing in 2014 was the three-

volume Collected Works of Ann Yearsley, edited by Kerri Andrews. Yearsleywas a formerly impoverished Bristol poet, playwright, and novelist known farmore for her fascinating biographical details, many of which are detailed inRobert Southey’s 1831 account, than the actual works that she produced.Although this biographical focus is typical of Romantic-period writers outsidethe ‘Big Six’—though such attention has of course historically overshadowedmuch of their work too—it is nevertheless more commonly the case for womenwriters, and Yearsley most particularly. This monumental edition ofYearsley’s works from the Pickering Masters series serves to buck the trend.Of the three volumes of Andrews’s edition, only the first contains Yearsley’s

poetry (as well as letters); the two further volumes contain her play, EarlGoodwin (first performed in 1789), and the novel The Royal Captives [1795].Yearsley only produced three volumes of poetry, but Andrews includes her‘Occasional Poems’ and, most interestingly, the poems published in variousnewspapers of the period. This aligns Yearsley’s publishing practices withthose of contemporary poets such as Coleridge, and such a discovery isevidence of Andrews’s impressive scholarship. Elsewhere, Andrews does notallow her research to crowd the poetry and letters by keeping paratextualelements to a minimum. Apart from a few sparse headnotes, Andrews confinesdetails of textual variants, glosses, and contextual information largely to theback of the volume. This is in marked contrast to earlier Pickering Masterseditions, such as the editions of Southey’s works [2004, 2012] for instance,which include textual variants as footnotes. Southey’s frequent revisions andreissues of his works throughout his life, however, necessitate such anapproach and this lack of standardization in the series is therefore to bewelcomed.Andrews’s concise introduction challenges the narrative that Yearsley’s

popularity declined from the success of her first volume [1785], which had


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1,000 subscribers, to the third [1796], which had far fewer, arguing that thiscould in fact indicate confidence on the part of her booksellers that Yearsley’swork would sell without pre-publication subscription (p. xxvii). Andrews goeson to trace Yearsley’s developing poetic style across her three volumes ofpoetry, highlighting her changed relationship to patronage. Whereas Poems,on Several Occasions contained seventeen poems dedicated to one of her twopatrons, Hannah More and Elizabeth Montagu, her final volume containedonly two such poems to her then patron Frederick Hervey, fourth earl ofBristol. Andrews argues that this book, The Rural Lyre, ‘is the mostadventurous of Yearsley’s three volumes’ as a result, stating that ‘as her careerprogressed she became less and less reliant on patrons, and therefore had morespace in her work—both literally and intellectually—in which to explore othermodes’ (p. xxx).It is hoped that Yearsley’s relative critical and literary neglect—Duncan

Wu’s most recent edition of Romanticism: An Anthology, published by WileyBlackwell in 2012, includes only two poems by Yearsley for instance—canbegin to be challenged by Andrews’s work. A poet of the late eighteenth-century so heavily influenced by the much earlier poetics of Milton, Young,Pope, and Gray, however, is always likely to appear stylistically at odds withher more Romantic contemporaries and, at worst, decidedly unfashionable.Nevertheless, Andrews’s thorough scholarship and clear confidence inYearsley’s literary value are very much in evidence in this edition, and atleast allow for the debate concerning her merit to take place.A book published in 2013 but not received in time for review in last year’s

YWES was Kerri Andrews’s monograph Ann Yearsley and Hannah More:Patronage and Poetry. This is in fact fortunate for our purposes, since themonograph very much works alongside Andrews’s edition of Yearsley’spoetry, particularly in considering the role of literary patronage as discussed.More and Yearsley are frequently considered as (eventual) antagonists.Indeed, the rivalry was such that in 1788 the publication of Yearsley’s Poem onthe Inhumanity of the Slave Trade was purposefully timed to rival More’sSlavery: A Poem. Although More was once Yearsley’s patron, the two hadfallen out following disagreement over the control of the profits the latter hadearned from her first volume Poems, on Several Occasions. Although this isrelatively well-trodden ground, discussed in Donna Landry’s The Muses ofResistance [2005] and Mary Waldron’s Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton [1996]for instance, Andrews’s approach is one that explores the relationship betweenthe two poets throughout their careers. As Andrews puts it, the short-livedliterary collaboration of the two has been rather ‘well mined’ (p. 8). The oncecollaborative relationship that gave way to rivalry, Andrews argues, was infact fruitful for both poets. For instance, Andrews not only compares the twoabolitionist poems above, but notes how each woman turned to fiction later,and at a similar point in her career (More’s Cœlebs in Search of a Wife of 1808and the less successful The Royal Captives by Yearsley).The rivalry between the two poets has often been put down to class

antagonisms, politics—More’s ultra-conservatism versus Yearsley’s relativeradicalism—as well as mundane financial matters. Andrews does notnecessarily dismiss these; rather, she considers the significance of the complex


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role played by patronage in the eighteenth century in relation to all the above.In particular, Andrews notes how it was expected that a patronized poetshould show gratitude, not only in private, but in print. This is evident inYearsley’s poetry, but not sufficiently so to satisfy More, who herself had beenpatronized by David Garrick (p. 58). Andrews also considers how theMore/Yearsley system of patronage was complicated further by gender, in thatthe traditional paternal male/female dynamic was of course disrupted. Aninteresting, and much-needed work, Andrews’s monograph is as revealing ofthe creative processes of writing in the changed, and changing, publishingenvironment that had become increasingly professionalized as it is of the workof these two female poets. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, itoffers an insight into a creatively beneficial literary relationship, often vexed,between two female Romantic poets beyond the oft-covered male figures ofthe ‘Big Six’.Hannah More was also the subject of a short article in 2014. Edmund

Downey’s ‘An Unpublished Letter from Hannah More to Ralph Beilby:Radical Connections and Popular Political Literature’ (N&Q 61[2014] 504–7)is a thorough piece of scholarship that reaffirms, with nuance, the work ofKevin Gilmartin and Olivia Smith. In particular, it reminds us of how theChristian conservative More engaged in similar publishing practices, includingeven using the same publishers, as radical writers. One example is theNewcastle-based publisher Ralph Beilby, who had previously published thework of the ‘ultra-radical’ Thomas Spence. Downey includes a full transcrip-tion of an unpublished letter between More and Beilby, arguing that this directcorrespondence confirms More’s conscious and direct interest in securing theservices of this particular publisher. A very convincing piece, Downey’sargument is that both conservatives and radicals alike were keen to co-opt aplebeian and vernacular mode.Turning to individual authors, the most important work on Blake from 2014

concerned his religious background. In his seminal 1954 critical work, Blake:Prophet Against Empire (reviewed in YWES 35[1956]), David Erdmanwondered whether Blake’s background was Methodist. Blake and theMethodists, by Michael Farrell, considers this a very real possibility. Farrellinvestigates the work of the poet and painter within the context of thisimportant contemporary branch of Christianity, contributing to the continu-ing and contentious debate surrounding Blake’s theology by suggesting hissympathy towards Wesleyan Methodism. As Farrell outlines in his excellentfirst chapter, Methodism emerges out of the eighteenth-century evangelicalrevival to become the biggest ‘dissenting’ religious movement in Blake’slifetime. But there was a large range of dissenting religious groups at this time,and whilst some adhered closely to one single sect, many others saw andappreciated a commonality witnessed between faiths, and held eclectic views.These believers or ‘seekers’ adopted a ‘compound of doctrinal sympathies’,Farrell explains, attending various religious meetings but rarely ‘subscribing tomembership of any particular denomination’ (p. 15). Farrell reads Blake assuch a seeker, with heterogeneous religious views and practices. Far frombeing the extreme radical that criticism has tended to paint him as, then,Farrell finds Blake to be much more typical of the syncretic theology of his


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time. Still, a number of other scholars have comprehensively contextualizedBlake’s religious views, as Farrell explains. Closest to Farrell’s own reading isRobert Ryan’s suggestion, in The Romantic Reformation (reviewed in YWES77[1999]), that whilst Blake’s theology was relatively orthodox for the time,this does not have to be incompatible with religious radicalism. WhereFarrell’s book is so useful, however, is in developing these issues still further.One of the great strengths of Farrell’s argument is its openness to the Blake’sambivalence towards religion. It is a mark of this generous study that Farrellputs forward Blake’s wide-ranging theological perspectives even as heconvinces us of Methodism’s important place in the poet’s distinctive vision.Hazard Adams’s Thinking through Blake (McFarland) was not received in

time for review, and will be covered with material from 2015.Paul Miner published three essays broadly built around influence and

allusion in Blake in Notes and Queries. ‘Blake and Burke: The Druid Majestyof the Foetus’ (N&Q 61[2014] 22–7) argues for the poet’s adaptation ofBurke’s conception of the sublime and beautiful. Via a number of perceptiveclose readings, Miner contends that Blake adopts Burke’s dichotomies for ‘hisown allegorical purposes’ (p. 27), particularly in the visionary works. Pickingup some of the strands of that essay, ‘Blake: The Metaphors of Generation’(N&Q 61[2014] 33–8) is a fascinating assessment of Blake’s wordplay on‘generation’. Reading Blake’s raids on the Bible and Christianity, Miner findsBlakean ambivalence, especially in Milton and Jerusalem. We know that aswell as producing 537 watercolours of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Blakealso drew on it for his own enigmatic poetic art. In ‘Blake: Thoughts on NightThoughts’ (N&Q 61[2014] 27–33) Miner explores a number of ‘submergedborrowings’ in the verse, arguing that these allusions help Blake to ‘create anew mythology’ (p. 27). I enjoyed the close attention to detail Miner offersthroughout these three short essays. Collectively, they illustrate how Blakeanallusion contributes to his powerfully compelling mythology.Since the invaluable publication in 2009 of Robert Bloomfield’s letters by

Romantic Circles, edited by Tim Fulford and Lynda Pratt, a number ofscholars have detailed his significance to our understanding of Romanticculture. In 2012, for instance, a special issue of Romantic Circles, edited byJohn Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, offered a range of fruitful impressions ofthe poet’s self-fashioning through his letter-writing, especially his attempts toengage with publishers in London, and Bloomfield also played a part in Classand the Canon, edited by Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji (also 2012). In 2014,Angus Whitehead offered three short pieces in Notes and Queries on thelabouring-class poet that bring further details of his life and work to thesurface. ‘ ‘‘I anticipate rather a smile at my adventures’’: An UnrecordedLetter from Robert Bloomfield to Sir Charles Bunbury’ (N&Q 61[2014] 73–6)presents a recently discovered letter from Bloomfield in March 1806 to thehorse-racing administrator and Whig MP for Suffolk. Whitehead reveals to usthe political context in which Bloomfield operated (or perhaps it would befairer to say in which he tried to operate). As Whitehead explains, the letter toBunbury shows rather comically the limited progress Bloomfield makes ingetting a foothold in, let alone patronage from, Westminster’s elite. In ‘ ‘‘Arelish for hedge-row poetry’’: A Newly Discovered Letter from Robert


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Bloomfield to Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges’ (N&Q 61[2014] 76–80), meanwhile,Whitehead suggests that Bloomfield’s only traced usage of ‘hedgerow poetry’implies ‘self-deprecation on the labouring-class poet’s part’ (p. 80). He writeseager to secure both literary support and financial assistance from Brydges—who was a writer, patron of the arts, and founder member of the RoxburgheClub. Finally, ‘ ‘‘Thou Gem of the Ocean, That Smil’st in thy Power’’: TheFull Text of Robert Bloomfield’s ‘‘Address to the British Channel’’ ’ (N&Q61[2014] 81–3) reflects on the ‘chequered textual and reception history’ (p. 83)of Bloomfield’s widely circulated poem. As Whitehead observes, the ques-tionable state of so much of Bloomfield’s work as it has been handed down tous calls out for a reliable and definitive edition, as well as the need for a morecomprehensive biography of this notable figure.In the past five years there have been a number of major editorial

undertakings on the collected works of Scottish Romantic writers. EdinburghUniversity Press will soon be publishing the Edinburgh edition of the poetry ofWalter Scott, a project under the stewardship of Alison Lumsden at Aberdeen,and over the next decade or so we will have the fifteen-volume Oxford Editionof the Works of Robert Burns from the team at the centre for Burns studies atGlasgow, with Gerard Carruthers as its general editor. The first volumeoffered as part of this huge undertaking is the Commonplace Books, TourJournals, and Miscellaneous Prose, edited by Nigel Leask. Burns’s songs andpoetry are justly regarded as some of the most vibrant and evocative of theRomantic period, and his letters afford a valuable example of life-writing. Butthe prose works presented in this edition have tended to be marginalized byBurns’s editors over the years. Indeed, the volume offers the first editedcollection of Burns’s writing in prose. Leask’s Robert Burns and Pastoral(reviewed in YWES 91[2012]) previously illustrated the critic’s deep appreci-ation of the poet’s place in eighteenth-century life and letters. Here, as editor,Leask brings all his vast knowledge to bear in a series of introductory essaysfor each item in the edition. In command of his sources and a range ofscholarship, he neatly conveys the salient issues for modern readers of Burns,especially useful in the context of these less well-known works. Leask providesan uncluttered working text, with the accompanying notes given at the back ofthe volume. At a little over 100 pages, the notes take up a quarter of thevolume. But they are a delight, and both inviting and illuminating. To readthem in isolation is to find it confirmed just how knowledgeable Burns wasabout the history, politics, and literature of the British nation, and to seeilluminated his deep love of Shakespeare and Pope in particular. It was also adelight to discover that whimsy was a favourite word of Burns’s (p. 318). Sincethey constitute key periods in Burns’s career many readers will probably delveinto the three commonplace books reproduced here, at least initially. But evenin the ‘Prose Fragments’ of the final chapter there is much to discover. In just afew pages we are offered a chance to peer into the playful workings of Burns’scrafty imagination as he engages with contemporary issues, and mocks literaryhacks. Unlike the work of some of those scribblers Burns enjoyed ridiculing,Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose is a major pieceof scholarship, offering ample new material for Romanticists. It is a highlyaccomplished opening to what promises to be a seminal edition of Burns.


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The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, offersfourteen critical essays that trace the cultural impact of Burns’s work on theContinent. Often thought of as Scotland’s national poet, Burns’s appeal haslong stretched right across Europe. From the beginning, his verse and songwere situated within issues of national identity, celebrated for drawing out anddemarcating various cultural memories. As befits a book detailing Burns’stransnational influence, Pittock has assembled an international group ofscholars and translators that bring with them a broad expanse of knowledge.Each critic helpfully outlines the finer details of a country’s historical relationto Burns, something I found extremely helpful. The book opens with PaulineMackay’s very useful timeline which delineates the response to Burns on theContinent between 1795 and 2012 and puts us on a firm footing for the largelyhistoricist readings that lie ahead. Pittock’s own introduction nicely highlightsthat the assimilation of Burns within the complex cultural needs and narrativesof European nations had the inevitable effect of removing the poet from hisoriginal concerns. Burns initially gained traction on the Continent by way ofthe German states during the Napoleonic era. As Frauke Reitemeier’s chapter,‘Lost in Translation’, shows, German reference books published Burns whilehe was still alive. According to Reitemeier’s research, these early translationssuggest that what attracted German readers most were the folk-song traditionand the perceived primitivism of Scotland. Burns’s progressive politics andlinguistic dexterity, in contrast, were of less significance. As Jahn Thon showsin chapter 13, though, these issues were of central importance in Norway asBurns contributed to its growing national fervour.The reception of Burns in Austria is the subject of Eleoma Bodammer’s

chapter. As she explains, nineteenth-century Austrian responses to Burns tookvarious forms, and included translations, adaptations, and reviews. Scholarsof the German-language reception of Burns have generally overlooked hissignificance in Austria, however, and Bodammer is effective in explaining theway Austro-German reaction to Burns differs from the better-understoodGerman reception. Rounding off the German-language reception, SilviaMergenthal considers the impact of Burns in the context of multilingualSwitzerland. Dominique Delmaire is keen to ‘explore an enigma’ (p. 68) in hishighly detailed chapter on ‘The Critical Reception of Robert Burns in France’.The enigma, as Delmaire understands it, is why Burns’s reputation plummetedin France at the start of the twentieth century, when it had been so high and sopolitically and culturally significant prior to this time. Focusing on Burns’sreception in Italy between 1869 and 1972, Francesca Saggini traces the interestof successive generations of Italian critics in the Scottish poet. In contrast tothe rather complex cultural landscape that emerges out of Saggini’s sketch ofItaly, Andrew Monnickendam, in ‘Robert Burns and Spanish Letters’, arguesfor only a limited response to Burns in Spain; ultimately Walter Scott’s fameappeared to bar any other Scot from getting much of a foothold.Eastern Europe is pleasingly well represented in this collection by a number

of insightful essays. Veronika Ruttkay considers Burns’s place amongstpopular poetry in nineteenth-century Hungary, while the reception of Burns inall sections of Russian society is well captured by Natalia Kaloh Vid. MartinProchazka, in his chapter on Czech translations of Burns, wonders just how


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significant a part the poet played in constructing a tenacious national identity,particularly through folk tradition. The impact of Burns on Ukrainian rights isexplored by Hanna Dyka, and, much like her impressive charting of Burns as asymbol of liberty to states within the Soviet bloc, Miroslawa Modrzewskaargues that Burns’s relevance to Poland is a particularly contemporarypolitical phenomenon. In chapter 12, Valentina Bold explains that Slovenia’sappreciation of Burns began in the nineteenth century, and continues strongtoday, with Burns primarily understood there as a nature poet and a poet oflove (p. 254). The final chapter of the collection, by Kirsteen McCue andMarjorie Rycroft, moves away from the structure of focusing on one nation ata time, and considers the broader theme of ‘The Reception of Robert Burns inMusic’. This feels a fitting end to a book that details so well the rich migrationof Burns. Excepting only ‘Happy Birthday’, Burns’s ‘Auld lang syne’ is surelythe most widely known song around the world. Burns’s songs travelled acrossmany continents, in part at least because of Scottish emigration. But his songswere also amongst the earliest recorded music at the beginning of the twentiethcentury. Focusing on specific historical periods, McCue and Rycroft highlighthow European composers and musicians have consistently found Burns to bea personal, political, and musical stimulus. This valuable volume, whichcombines depth with breadth, illustrates the mixed reputation and continuingimportance of Burns in European nations, and is an excellent example of theway reception studies draws attention to the complex interweaving of peoples,periods, and ideas.Reading Robert Burns, by Carol McGuirk, aims to provide a comprehensive

assessment of Burns’s poetry and songs. Like other recent studies, McGuirk’sbook challenges the ‘broad brush of myth’ (p. 1) that has turned Burns into acultural icon. McGuirk is keen to re-engage with the elusive and ambiguouselements of his writing. Throughout she saves biographical matters, andpolitical and social contexts, for when she feels they most influence the writing.Her primary attention is given to early manuscripts, Burns’s favoured verseforms, and his habits of revision. McGuirk believes that Burns’s inventiveintertwining of ‘vernacular Scots with standard English, changed literarylanguage forever’ (p. 4), and she gives a good indication of the importance ofhis contribution in this field. In her ‘Epilogue’, McGuirk extends this largelylinguistic matter into a discussion of how Burns’s distinctive poetic languagehas become ingrained in what she calls the ‘interactive matrix of living culturalexchange’, as Burns is ‘spoken and sung, or transplanted into new contexts’(p. 190). McGuirk’s wide-ranging thesis is most incisive when she reads Burnsin relation to other writers, a trend that has become increasingly popular andproductive of late. McGuirk naturally feeds off Burns’s instinctive openness.Frequently in poetic conversation with others, Burns has also regularly been apoet towards whom others have gravitated for inspiration. WilliamWordsworth’s relation to Burns has long been a subject of critical discussion.But McGuirk finds fresh things to say on the ways in which Wordsworth seeksto emulate and resist Burns’s poetic example. A chapter on Burns and otherScots poets, meanwhile, highlights the significance of drinking in Scottishverse, from the eighteenth century to the modernist vernacular of HughMacDiarmid. Despite the challenge that such a comprehensive account


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inevitably creates, McGuirk’s is largely a cohesive argument that offers afruitful reminder of Burns’s creativity.‘The Letters of Robert Burns’ (CQ 43[2014] 97–119) by Grace Egan makes a

compelling case for the need to examine the poet’s epistles as self-consciousexercises that provide vital insights into the life of a writer. Byron, as so often,might have been speaking of himself when he famously described the‘antithetical mind’ possessed by Burns, which was ever ‘soaring andgrovelling’, and mingled ‘dirt and deity . . . in that compound of inspiredclay’ (quoted p. 97). Egan’s brilliant essay illustrates that it is in the letters asmuch as the verse that we find this ‘antithetical mind’ labouring upon itsliterary ambitions. For Egan, Burns’s ‘letters mix together the ‘common . . .Clod’ and the sentimental to create antithetical writing that is as true to formas it is true to life’ (p. 119). ‘James Morison, Book Illustration and The Poemsof Robert Burns (1812)’ (SLR 6:ii[2014] 25–48), by Sandro Jung, contextualizesan under-evaluated two-volume edition of Burns’s verse. Jung details theMorison firm’s use of the production of the illustrated book as part of acultural and patriotic agenda to promote a Scottish canon. In ‘The FirstPublication of Burns’s ‘‘Tam o’Shanter’’ ’ (SSL 40:i[2014] 105–15) meanwhile,Bill Dawson examines the early publishing history of the poet’s macabremock-epic.Byron’s place in the cultural landscape of Romanticism has often been

directed by a cult of personality, or the politics of celebrity. New Historicistshave commonly appropriated Byron as a means by which to critique Romanticideology as a result of his voice’s ironic countering of his Romanticcontemporaries, acknowledged by critics such as M.H. Abrams. In recentyears, however, there has been a gradual formalist turn, with critics engagingwith Byron at the level of the reading experience. Published in 2013, but notreceived in time for review in last year’s YWES, Byron and the Forms ofThought by Anthony Howe is therefore both timely and appealing in itsinsistence that the study of poetry must directly engage with its constituentparts, what Howe calls a poem’s ‘ways of being’ (p. 5). For Howe, it is notsimply a poet who is thinking in verse, in Simon Jarvis’s terms, but any readerattentive to literary form. As Angela Leighton observes in On Form, whichHowe quotes in his introduction, this formalist method ‘stops us in our tracksof thinking, and inserts itself in that moment of stillness. To attend to form isthus to admit some other kind of mental attention, which is not the quickroute to a name or the knowledge of an object’ (quoted p. 5). Part of Howe’sthesis therefore rests on the belief that literary studies affords a dynamic meansof unsettling modernity’s quantitative analysis in favour of a more capaciousand cautious acknowledgement of the complexity of human experience. Hethus subtly extends the study of Byronic forms beyond their significance to theRomantic period into questions of the value of literary criticism in modernuniversities and the wider culture in which they operate. Howe’s book is alsopart of a growing trend to defend Byron as thinker. Emily Bernhard Jackson,in The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain inUncertainty [2010], recently offered a reading of Byron as deeply engagedwith British empiricism. For Bernhard Jackson this engagement can be tracedthroughout Byron’s writing, and by the time of Don Juan has developed into a


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fully fledged epistemology. Howe shares the belief that Byron’s thinking hasbeen underestimated, but he differs in arguing for a more indeterminate andhesitant philosophical stance on Byron’s part, and in assuming that it isthrough the process of composing poetry that Byron is continually engagingwith and questioning his thoughts.Howe divides his book into six essays, and ends with a coda. These essays

perhaps necessarily privilege the later works such as Cain, but most especiallyDon Juan. In Part I, Howe relates Byron’s absorption in philosophicalscepticism, and how this leads the poet to believe that verse carries a‘philosophical agency of its own’ (p. 8). Part II addresses Byron as literarycritic, as he reflects on what poetry might offer ahead of any othercompositional practice. In Part III, Howe turns to the poetry in greaterdetail. He is excellent on Byronic nuance, not least those richly suggestivemoments performed by punctuation. Discussing the nihilism in Don Juan,canto XVI, for instance, Howe shows Byron’s failure to communicate throughsimile: ‘The evaporation of a joyous day’ finally leads to his conclusion that itis ‘like—like nothing that I know / Except itself’. Suggestively, Howe notesthat the dash ‘represents a tiny stretch of the infinite quietness predicted byany quest for figurative identity’ but that ‘it is only through sleight of hand (byusing the failure of simile as a simile itself) that the narrator is able to continueat all’ (p. 140). For Howe, moments like these reveal Byron’s forms of thought;whilst Byron may have found a solution to the ‘voiceless thought’ in ChildeHarold’s Pilgrimage, the answer is uttered with the ‘suspicion that we havemerely exchanged despair for textuality’ (p. 140).Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and critics regularly derided

publishers as a distasteful feature of literary life. Charles Lamb was not alonein feeling that writers were slaves to the marketization of books propagated bypublishers for their own profit. In contrast, Mary O’Connell’s Byron and JohnMurray: A Poet and His Publisher suggests publishers can be enablers ofliterature, and offers a much-needed reappraisal of one of the most profitableassociations in book history. As O’Connell notes, a lot of attention has beenpaid to the rise of the marketplace and its impact on the Romantic period.Much less notice has been given to the influence of a single publishing figure asan arbiter of taste, or as shaper of a literary text, or as facilitator of thecomplex relationship between writer and reader. O’Connell’s choice of Murrayis a smart one. As the most significant publisher in the Romantic period, hewas also an essential patron of the literary world. His reach extended farbeyond Byron to include publishing the Quarterly Review and Jane Austenamongst numerous other achievements. No wonder Wordsworth was eager tobe taken on, and even Keats flirted with the idea, so successful was Murray inturning a profit for poets as well as for himself. Frequently imagined asantagonistic, and posited as at best a mercenary relationship by Byronscholars, O’Connell convincingly shows that despite their political polarity and‘the difference in class’ Byron and Murray ‘had fundamentally compatiblepersonalities’ (p. 201). For O’Connell, they were friends. At least as Byrondefined friends in a letter to Mary Shelley as ‘like one’s partners in the waltz ofthis world—not much remembered when the ball is over, though very pleasantfor the time’ (quoted p. 201). The transitory nature that such a remark suggests


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also accommodates Byron’s pleasure in picking up the dance of friendship atany time. O’Connell’s meticulous archival research and thoughtful readingsreveal that poet and publisher were frequently in step with each other, and thatthis presented a personal and creative profit, as well as a financial one.Sensitive yet piercing in its observations, Byron and John Murray opens up newpathways in the fields of book-trade history and Byron studies.The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs is an invaluable collection of the late Peter

Cochran’s essays and papers written over twenty years. An independentscholar, Cochran was a leading authority on Byron for decades, and many ofthese essays have not been published before or even heard in public. The essayscover various aspects of Byron’s life and work, including his complexrelationship with friends and family, his conversations with, and allusions to,other writers, and his feelings about men and women. Their range, in keepingwith Cochran’s capacious interests, is eclectic. Byron’s ‘dirty jokes’ and‘problem with mothers’ sit alongside the challenge of being Byron’s bankerand the poet’s relation to nations—especially Scotland and Greece—and toother poets, most notably and insightfully his relation to Shakespeare. Theessay from which the book gets its title is a tour de force of documentation,detailing the way Byron’s Memoirs were destroyed days after his death wasannounced. Each essay in this collection benefits from Cochran’s interest incontemporary issues—from geopolitics to sexual politics. Cochran’s engage-ment with these issues is fired by what he feels is Byron’s own prescience. AsCochran points out, the ‘one thing you can’t say about Byron, on mostsubjects, is that he’s out-dated’ (p. xii). The Burning of Byron’s Memoirsaffords its readers an insight into the enormous importance of Cochran’s workto Byron studies over the years. His website, at https://petercochran.wordpress.com/, has serviced us with accounts of Byron’s life and writing,whilst his editorial work and commentary have been priceless. Cochran died inMay last year. The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs articulates how much his voicewill be missed.Byron’s sociability is addressed by a number of articles that reflect on his

friendships, and relationship to other writers. David Francis Taylor exploresByron’s obsession with the oratory of the late eighteenth century in ‘Byron,Sheridan, and the Afterlife of Eloquence’ (RES 65[2014] 474–94). Taylorfocuses on a number of speeches by Sheridan from 1787–8, and suggests thatByron self-consciously problematizes any attempt at rendering what wasspoken in the past. This thoughtful essay nicely conveys the way Byron’sbuoyant emulation of Sheridan is also one of inevitable, and necessary,imperfection. ‘The Politics of Byron and Alfred de Musset:Marino Faliero andLorenzaccio’ (ERR 25[2014] 757–71), by Joanne Wilkes, shows the importanceof Byron’s play to the development of Musset’s later stage work. WhileByron’s influence on Musset was immediately recognized on the firstpublication of the French poet’s work in 1829, assessing the overlaps anddivergences between the two from a political context reveals Musset’s cynicismregarding the chance for any meaningful change, Wilkes argues. This is askilful essay that combines context with intertextuality.‘The Variants and Transformations of Fantasmagoriana: Tracing a

Travelling Text to the Byron–Shelley Circle’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 306–20),


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by Maximiliaan Van Woudenberg, looks at the infamous ghost-story contestat the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. Instead of raking over familiarground, however, the essay delves into the now little known Fantasmagoriana,the French volume of ghost stories, which, according to Mary Shelley later,had been one of the inspirations behind the contest. Van Woudenberghighlights the narrative and genre influence of Fantasmagoriana onFrankenstein and Byron’s ghost story, which would subsequently be adaptedby John Polidori as The Vampyre. The period after that year without asummer is the subject of ‘Byron—Frere—at the Octave’ (ByronJ 42[2014] 133–43) by N.E. Gayle, which reconsiders the comic creative vista that opened upfor Byron in 1817 once he was more familiar with ottava rima. Byron alreadyknew the form in the shape of works by Pulci, Ariosto, and Tasso. For Gayle,however, it is Byron’s discovery in 1817 of the humorous English epic,supposedly by the brothers Whistlecraft, but actually by John HookhamFrere, that is of distinct importance to a poet seeking an alternative to thetragic Tales and Manfred. In ‘P. L. Møller: Kierkegaard’s Byronic Adversary’(ByronJ 42[2014] 35–47), Troy Wellington Smith looks at the philosopher’sturn away from the poet via their contemporary Peder Ludvig Møller. Smithdiscusses how both Byron and Møller serve as models for Kierkegaard’sfictional character Johannes the Seducer. In ‘Catullus and the Missing Papers’(ByronJ 42[2014] 111–22) Timothy Webb reflects on the politically fraughtrelationship between Byron and Leigh Hunt, and the publisher John Murray.In October 1822, spurred on by Murray’s refusal to return The Vision ofJudgement to Byron, Hunt sent his friend an adaptation of a satirical poem byCatullus. Webb uses this incident to illustrate both Byron’s and Hunt’sindignation at Murray, and links this to Byron’s turn to Leigh’s radicalbrother John in 1823 for the publication of the remainder of Don Juan, andThe Vision of Judgement itself. Webb’s insightful essay throws new light on thealliance between Byron and Hunt, who were living near each other near Genoaduring this time and collaborating on The Liberal.Ideological as well as literary disputes within publishing history are also the

subject of Jason Kolkey’s confident and convincing ‘Mischievous Effects:Byron and Illegitimate Publication’ (ByronJ 42[2014) 21–33). Focusing ontexts and paratexts, Kolkey shows that the battle between legitimate and‘pirate’ booksellers was a pivotal factor in the marketization of books, anddetails Byron’s adroit response to the ever-increasing commodification of hispoetics and personality. Paratexts are also of central concern to OuraniaChatsiou’s exploration of Byronic irony. In ‘Lord Byron: Paratext and Poetics’(MLR 109[2014] 640–62) Chatsiou focuses on annotation to illustrate howByron imaginatively utilizes the opportunity that liminality affords. Delvinginto Byron’s annotations reveals that his notes are not simply an ‘undisciplinedor calculated authorial self-projection’, but also essential to how he seducesand disrupts his readers—what Chatsiou sees as the poetics of Romantic irony,part of a ‘total ‘‘macro-text’’ in which everything matters and productivelyinterplays’ (p. 642).A number of critics addressed Byronic travel, broadly conceived, in 2014. In

‘Prospects of Europe: The First Iteration of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’(KSR 28:i[2014] 37–48) Richard Lansdown offers an analysis of Byron’s


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ambivalent reaction to the history, land, and people of Europe. Lansdownbelieves that Byron’s travels constitute not the ‘random series they appear tobe’ but rather an ‘intellectual sequence’ that is fashioned from the poet’sendeavour to ‘understand the present in terms of the past’ (p. 38). Thisexcavation of Europe’s history in relation to the geopolitical landscape Byronsaw all about him is what makes the first two cantos of Childe Harold’sPilgrimage, for Lansdown as for many others, the greatest European poemsince the Aeneid. ‘Transformations of Byron in the Literature of British India’(VLC 42[2014] 573–93), by Maire nı Fhlathuin, reflects on the reception of,and responses to, Byron’s writing by a community of British poets inRomantic-period India. It provides a fascinating account of the disseminationof Byron’s work and the personality politics that surrounded the poet. NıFhlathuin shows that Indian-based writers also co-opted Byronism into theirworks via various allusions, adaptations, and imitations, as was also the casewith British-based poets in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thisinfluence was freighted with political and cultural agency, according toFhlathuin, as Byron’s exoticized vision of the Orient is reconfigured in thecontext of British India. Paul Giles argues for an important antipodeanimaginary in Byron’s poetry. ‘Romanticism’s Antipodean Spectres: Don Juanand the Transgression of Space and Time’ (ERR 25[2014] 365–83) makes aconvincing case for reading Romantic poetry via the ‘relativism associatedwith spatial boundaries’ (p. 365). For Giles, the ‘spectre of antipodes Britishimperial enterprises’ (p. 365) helped to fashion the writing of the Shelleys andByron. Of particular note in this essay is the way Giles understands thisprocess as at work on a formal level in Byron’s verse.In ‘ ‘‘The Controlless Core of Human Hearts’’: Writing the Self in Byron’s

Don Juan’ (ByronJ 42[2014] 123–32), by Michael J. Plygawko, Byron’s claim tohis publisher in April 1817 that ‘I hate things all fiction’ becomes a means ofinvestigating what truth might mean for the poet. Via a series of closereadings, Plygawko considers the creative agency at play whenever Byronbrings into tension the imagined and the real. ‘ ‘‘Our Mix’d Essence’’:Manfred’s Ecological Turn’ (ByronJ 42[2014] 5–20), by J. Andrew Hubbell,attempts new insight into a well-worn critical field: Byron’s radicallyambivalent approach to nature. Manfred dramatizes the failure of aWordsworthian faith in nature for Byron, as Hubbell notes. Hubbell’secocritical stance benefits from recent work by Stephen Cheeke and TimothyMorton, as he acknowledges. But his primary interest lies in pursuing what hesees as Byron’s lifelong attention to ‘the co-evolutionary interdependencebetween the natural environment and human society’, what Hubbell calls thepoet’s ‘theory of cultural ecology’ (p. 6). The brooding Byronic hero is thesubject of an article by Gregory Olsen, though with a telling difference. In‘Rewriting the Byronic Hero: ‘‘I’ll try the firmness of a female hand’’ ’ (ERR25[2014] 463–77) Olsen shows in compelling ways how Gulnare in The Corsairhas many of the characteristics of the Byronic hero. Like Byron’s male heroes,Gulnare is ‘both Romanticized and demonized’ (p. 470) throughout, while her‘crime’, for Conrad at least, is her defining feature. ‘Energy Like Life: Byronand Ballet’ (ByronJ 42[2014] 145–56), by Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol,rehearses the balletic movement of Don Juan. Offering a reappraisal of the


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Romantic period’s response to dance culture by challenging the assumptionthat Englishmen did not view ballet very highly, Tontiplaphol details thevarious references to ballet in Byron’s writing. Byron’s club foot left himrather envious of dancers, and meant he generally refrained from dancing inpublic. But Tontiplaphol suggests that ballet is the ‘non-literary art with whichDon Juan is most profoundly and productively engaged’ (p. 147) and traces thethematic and formal value of the dance to the vim and vigour of his verse.Jonathon Shears’s ‘Byron’s Habits’ (KSR 28:i[2014] 25–36) delves into thepoet’s personal peculiarities. Shears’s compelling argument is that, even whenhis actions are apparently desultory, Byron’s behaviour might be understoodthrough internal compulsions that the poet was not always conscious of. Usingthe theory of Pierre Bourdieu and others, Shears provides a fresh approach tothat typical Byronic paradox: that the poet is most in control when seeminglysurrendering to the loss of it.Each year John Clare’s reputation grows. Yet the criticism that at times his

writing focuses too intently on describing the natural world to the detriment ofhuman feeling is one that seems to linger for scholars of his work, despiteJonathan Bate’s efforts to reverse this. In Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and ThreeModern Poets, however, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner deftly unearths how Clare‘perceives, feels, and thinks about the world’, and how his lyric moments inturn ‘invest that world with vividness and immediacy’ (p. 3). Her three essaysdevoted to Clare follow the poet’s own practice in being excellent examples ofthe value of close attention to little details. But Kuduk Weiner also has thecapacity of drawing out onto a broader canvas. The first chapter reads Clareas a close listener, and understands the poet’s skill at pulling the reader withhim in rapt attention to the sounds of the natural world which Clare rendersthrough the soundscape of verse. Kuduk Weiner argues that Clare’s use ofsound at once admits and looks to overcome the limitations of any verbalmimesis in reading. The second chapter makes a compelling case for readingClare’s hundreds of sonnets as attempts to ward off enclosure by using endingsto invite new beginnings. Chapter 3 gives us a fascinating account of Clare’slate asylum poems and suggests that he self-consciously uses the medium ofpoetry to consider ‘the linguistic and poetic challenge of representing absence’(p. 87). The second part of the book is concerned with the inspiration poetsderive from other poets. Kuduk Weiner explores the impact of Clare’s lyricson Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery. Being, as KudukWeiner concedes, ‘the foremost theorist of the cosmopolitan, urban, impres-sionistic aestheticism of the fin de siecle’ (p. 125), Symons might seemsomewhat out of place amidst Clare’s creative streams. But Symons’sintroduction to his 1908 edition of Clare’s poems is full of searching insight,and Kuduk Weiner captures the kinship between the two of them well. Inchapter 5, Kuduk Weiner finds Clare illuminating Blunden’s response to thehorrors of the First World War. Her final chapter considers Ashbery’s creativeand critical responses to Clare as he seeks to ‘extract pieces of the world inorder ‘to re-create reality’ within the frame of a work of art’ (p. 169). The joyof this book is its framing of Clare’s poetics in relation to other artists, askingus to look again at his place in the canon.


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The wonderful John Clare Society Journal kept up its high standard with anumber of admirable essays. ‘John Clare’s Recollections of Home: The Poeticsof Nostalgia’ (JCSJ 33[2014] 5–19), by Valerie Pedlar, captures the tensionsClare felt and exhibited about being ‘at home’, not, as she explains, the‘physical attributes’ of the place, but the ‘fragility and vulnerability of one’srelation to oneself, and one’s community’ (p. 18). Clare’s ‘nostalgia for home’(p. 18) is expressive of his craving for a time and space before these conflictsexisted, Pedlar believes. In a highly suggestive essay, Erin Lafford explores ‘theway Clare represents health and madness at the level of sound’ (p. 24). ‘Clare’sMutterings, Murmuring, and Ramblings: The Sound of Health’ (JCSJ33[2014] 24–40) argues that Clare’s use of indeterminate, non-linguistic vocalsounds counters the prevailing medical belief at the time that mutteringconnoted insanity. Employing the work of Gilles Deleuze, Lafford argues thatClare’s sounds bring ‘health and madness together in the same poetic voice’(p. 25). In ‘John Clare and William Hone: A Letter Redated’ (JCSJ 33[2014]48–56) Robert Heyes delves into the history of a letter purporting to be from15 May 1823. It is a letter, Heyes explains, that has always ‘puzzled’ him(p. 48) because there is no other evidence that Clare was even aware of Hone atthis time. Whilst Heyes solves the puzzle simply enough, he uses the mystery tosketch further details of Clare’s contact with the literary scene in London, anarea, as he says, we still do not know enough about. ‘Hic Inde Clare: Interity,Exocognition, & John Clare’s ‘‘Proposals for Building a Cottage’’ ’ (JCSJ33[2014] 57–72), by Ron Paul Salutsky, offers a neuroscientific approach toClare’s writing, and to art more generally. For Salutsky, a time will soon beupon us when we will be able to read more accurately what occurs in the brainduring an aesthetic experience, and not only gain a fuller appreciation of whatart means for individual pleasure, but also its therapeutic benefits for ourwider community. In ‘John Clare’s Spenserian Lyric Fragments’ (JCSJ33[2014] 73–86), Adam White locates Clare within the tradition of theRomantic fragment poem. Like other exponents of the form, Clare’sfragments invoke the idea of a whole. But, White argues, unlike Byron,Shelley, or Keats, Clare’s Spenserianism frequently combines its ‘interrelationswith, and independence from . . . The Faerie Queene’ (p. 73). This continualconstruction of Spenserian fragments, White contends, offers a new formalcontext for thinking of Clare as ‘the poet of ‘‘little things’’ ’ as Mina Gorji hasproposed (quoted p. 74).Two essays found new things to say about the status of enclosure in Clare’s

thinking. ‘The Place of Rhyme in John Clare’s Northborough Poems’ (KSR28:i[2014] 14–20), by Alex Latter, makes a fine case for the need for greatercritical attention to the poetry Clare wrote between 1832 and 1837. In his closereadings, Latter skilfully shows how Clare’s later use of rhyme was a majorinnovation in both the sonnet tradition and the eighteenth-century pastoralmode. Essentially, Latter hears the rhyme from this time as a destabilizingimpulse redolent of Clare’s resistance to all forms of enclosure. In ‘John Clareand Biopolitics’ (ERR 25[2014] 665–82) Chris Washington offers a differentspin on ecocritical readings of Clare by considering how enclosure shifts thepoet’s understanding of the relation between humans and animals.Washington shows how, in Clare’s ethical and poetic vision, the consequences


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of the Enclosure Act transform spaces of human–animal relations once‘consciously and conscientiously respectful’ (p. 667) into ‘confrontationalstaging grounds’ (p. 666).The poetry of George Crabbe was given a special issue in Romanticism this

year. As the editors explain in ‘George Crabbe: Times and Spaces’(Romanticism 20[2014] 103–5), the essays were originally offered as papers atthe ‘Crabbe’s Tales’ conference at Newcastle University in July 2012. Thisevent had celebrated the bicentenary of the publication of the Tales byconsidering Crabbe’s place in nineteenth-century poetry and cultural life.Francis Jeffrey felt Crabbe was ‘the most original writer who has ever comebefore us’ (quoted p. 103), and the range of articles offered reflect on thatoriginality in a broad but always richly detailed context. Claire Lamont’s‘ ‘‘The smallest circumstances of the smallest things’’: Domestic Interiors inCrabbe’s Poems’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 106–16) delves into the variousdwellings described in Crabbe’s oeuvre. Throughout, Lamont thoughtfullyweaves close reading with valuable nods to Crabbe’s inheritance of aneighteenth-century tradition, including that of Goldsmith, who influencesCrabbe’s The Village [1783], and Gray, as well as the many allusions to Burns.Lamont argues for the ‘shared spaces’ (p. 115) that Crabbe creates—be theypoetic, personal, or physical—which, she says, he carefully constructs and seesas so essential to the building of human experience. Lamont is unusual,however, in galloping across Crabbe’s published work, from The Village [1783]up to Tales of the Hall [1819]; the remainder of the essays in the special issuefocus in the main on The Borough and Tales. The latter is the focus of ‘PuttingStories Together’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 185–94) by Gavin Edwards. In afascinating account, Edwards takes us through the various relations anddivergences between the Tales and various frame narratives like A Thousandand One Nights, the Canterbury Tales, and the Decameron.In ‘Crabbe’s Times’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 117–27) Michael Rossington is

interested in revealing the ‘sophistication of Crabbe’s historical sensibility’(p. 117), something that few critics have paid much attention to. Rossingtonreads this sensibility as subtle, with the tales reflecting several narrative andhistorical perspectives that rarely take priority over each other and so establishtensions between the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when Tales was firstpublished, and the periods which the narratives inhabit. For Rossington, thetales therefore invite the reader to identify any political and religious tensionsin an English past, while understanding present divisions within that pastexperience. And while this may provide remedies for repairing social tensions,Rossington argues that it also undermines the very enterprise by suggestingtheir embedded and repetitive inevitability through history. In ‘The ‘‘Species inThis Genus Known’’: The Influence of Taxonomy on Crabbe’s Tales’(Romanticism 20[2014] 128–39) James Bainbridge acknowledges Crabbe’s‘love of ambiguity’ (p. 139) while arguing for the importance of natural sciencein the verse. It is the ‘tension between the known and unknown’ that makesCrabbe’s ‘poetry unique’ (p. 139), according to Bainbridge.Crabbe’s The Borough—a series of verse letters that detail the personal lives,

events, and buildings of a coastal town—offers a fascinating example of theincongruity at the heart of Crabbe’s poetics. It brings into view the specialness


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of common everyday things so prevalent in much Romantic writing, and in itsdescriptions anticipates the detail and richness of Victorian novels. Formally,however, it capitalizes on the refinement associated with the heroic couplets ofthe eighteenth century. This special issue of Romanticism reserves a number ofits pages for this vital work. In ‘ ‘‘Fences . . . form’d of Wreck’’: GeorgeCrabbe’s The Borough and the Resources of the Poor’ (Romanticism 20[2014]140–50) Matthew Ingleby is interested in the still live issue of the poet’scontentious relation to, and description of, the poor. For Hazlitt, after all,Crabbe was incurably conservative, rarely sympathizing with those hedepicted, and seemingly unable or unwilling to question the state of thenation. For Fiona Stafford, The Borough affords an opportunity to discuss theresonance of the sea, not only as something vital in and of itself, but also asway of evoking the internal movements of Crabbe’s thoughts, an ‘emblem ofmy mind’, as he was keen on calling it. ‘ ‘‘Of Sea or River’’: Crabbe’s BestDescription’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 162–73) is sensitive to Crabbe’s interest inthe limitations of language in capturing the world around him, in a way thatStafford feels is comparable to contemporaries like Wordsworth andColeridge, and would later be explored by Percy Shelley. Andrew Lacey alsoconsiders Crabbe in relation to Wordsworth in ‘The Epitaphic Poetry ofCrabbe and Wordsworth’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 151–61). Lacey addresses thefact that whilst Romantic epitaphic writing has been the subject of somediscussion over the years, Crabbe’s place within this tradition is consistentlyoverlooked. As Lacey points out, this is typical of Crabbe’s marginal positionin Romantic critical discourse, partly because he is associated with anAugustan aesthetic at least as much as a Romantic one. Lacey is right to pointout the curiosity of this critical position, since most of the mature work waspublished after the seminal date (for Romanticists at least) of 1798. Lacey iskeen to treat Crabbe as Wordsworth’s contemporary, and trace what he callsthe ‘incongruent treatment of the epitaphic in each poet’s oeuvre’ (p. 151).Thomas Williams investigates Crabbe’s relation to another contemporarypoet. In ‘George Crabbe and John Clare: Refinement and Reading’(Romanticism 20[2014] 174–84) Williams considers both social and subjectiveidentities in poetry. Clare is an interesting poet to bring into comparison withCrabbe, not least because of the former’s once marginalized place in the canonand increasing significance for Romantic studies—something that all theseessays seek for Crabbe—but more specifically because, as Williams explains,each poet explores how reading provides a means of attaining a curious formof refinement in rural life. As a collection, these essays go a long way inrevealing Crabbe’s important place in critical discourse, as both Romanticistand witty critic of such a notion. Perhaps the most crucial contribution theseessays make to literary criticism is in giving Crabbe an equal footing with moreestablished writers.Published in 2013, but not received in time for review in last year’s YWES,

Chris Murray’s Tragic Coleridge details the poet’s multitudinous interest intragedy. The significance of classical precedent to Coleridgean thought isaddressed when Murray examines ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, a lectureColeridge wrote late in life. But for Murray its philosophical argument, aheadof any detailed engagement with Aeschylus, suggests that by this stage


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Coleridge was unwilling to engage with tragedy (p. 158). Moreover, Murraysuggests that Coleridge’s reluctance to offer a theory of tragedy might lie in afear that it might be in conflict with Christian orthodoxy. That is not to saythat the tragic did not continue to play an important role in Coleridge’sthinking. As Murray neatly shows, it pervades Sibylline Leaves, BiographiaLiteraria, and The Statesman’s Manual. What Murray calls ‘tragicRomanticism’ (p. 2) is revealed as an idiosyncratic concept for Coleridge,rather than something reducible to classical inheritance or genre. Murraycaptures the importance of not only London theatre but also Romanticorganicism and the fragment in fostering Coleridge’s tragic thoughts. Hesuggests that Coleridge would have been more than capable of advancingtragedy on the stage if there had been more of an opportunity for him to do so.Murray’s thesis is a timely contribution to two areas recently given attention.His long section on ‘The Daemon’, for instance, reveals a parallel withGregory Leadbetter’s Coleridge and the Daimonic Imagination [2011] in itsattraction to Coleridge’s unease over his own inspiration, perpetually dazzledby daemonic poesis yet fearful of its threat to Reason. Murray’s well-arguedbelief that drama is an essential means of understanding Coleridge’s outputpicks up, as Murray acknowledges, J.C.C. Mays’s call for the dramatic modeto be ‘incorporated within his writing as a whole’ (quoted p. 95). It will beinteresting to see how these two strands of Coleridge criticism are taken upfurther in the years ahead.Like Tony Howe’s Byron and the Forms of Thought reviewed above, Ewan

Jones’s Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form is wedded to the idea thatpoetry is a medium that performs and reveals a particular kind of thinking. Inhis introduction, Jones notes that focusing on poetic form flies in the face ofthe current state of Coleridge scholarship. But as he outlines in his ‘Coda’,recent years have brought something of a turn towards defending literary formas a subject worth critical investigation (and many of the works reviewed hereseem to back this assertion up). Throughout, Jones is attentive to verse form,both in his perceptive and original close readings of its constituent parts, andas a broader category that might tell us something significant about artisticthought. This is a revisionary account of Coleridgean poetics and philosophy.In his four chapters Jones unsettles any simplistic summary we might like tobelieve in, of the best years of Coleridge’s verse belonging solely to the energiesof his youth. Chapter 3, as well as being full of perceptive observations on thebackground and practice of the pun, is also admirably focused on Coleridge’slate composition ‘Limbo’. In the face of Coleridge’s own assertions ofunproductiveness, Jones proves the significance of Coleridge’s post-1800 verse.The established chronology of Coleridge’s intellectual development—in broadterms Associationism, to German Idealism, to the ‘hermetic idiosyncrasy’(p. 9) of the late Highgate years—is also thoroughly undermined. Rather thandetecting a coherent and consistent Coleridgean system, Jones is in agreementwith Seamus Perry concerning the ‘muddlesomeness of Coleridge’s writing’(quoted p. 9). What Jones brings to this notion, however, is the idea thatColeridge philosophized through verse because its form frequently affordedhim a particular means of playing with his thoughts. In Jones’s hands, very


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often the turns and returns of Coleridge’s verse form are shown to generateunforeseen and unintended consequences for Coleridgean philosophy.As well as her 2013 essay in Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient on ‘The

Integral Significance of the 1816 Preface to ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ ’ (reviewed YWES94[2015]), Heidi Thomson published further material on the poet in Notes andQueries. ‘Coleridge’s ‘‘On a Supposed Son’’ and Friedrich Von Logau’s ‘‘AufEin Zweifelkind’’ ’ (N&Q 61[2014] 58–61) details the ‘private preoccupations’as well as the ‘political and economic situation’ (p. 59) reflected in the epigram‘On a Supposed Son’. Thomson locates this work partly in the personalcontext in which Coleridge found himself. As she explains, in the winter of1800 Coleridge was starting to publicly express his unhappiness over hismarriage, and his more insecure feelings over the long-term prospects offruitful relations with the Wordsworths. Other pieces on Coleridge appeared inNotes and Queries. In ‘Twenty Untraced Allusions in Coleridge’s BiographiaLiteraria’ (N&Q 61[2014] 61–9) Adam Roberts identifies a number ofpreviously unattributed references in Coleridge’s monumental work. AsRoberts notes, Biographia Literaria is a ‘complex web of quotation, reference,allusion, and intertextuality’ (p. 61), and trying to account for all of themappears an impossible task. But Roberts seems to have meticulously tracedalmost all of those either not glossed or not able to be traced in the Princetonedition of 1983, edited by James Engel and W. Jackson Bate. ‘Coleridge andKurrentschrift’ (N&Q 61[2014] 50–4), by Maximiliaan Van Woudenberg, looksat Coleridge’s difficulties with reading German characters—the handwrittenscript today known as Kurrentschrift. Despite learning German, Coleridgestruggled with Kurrentschrift not least because its representation of a numberof vowels and consonants is illegible for anyone more used to Latin script.Coleridge portrays his difficulties comically. But the incident ‘opens up a newperspective about his reading activities . . . while in Germany’ (p. 51). KathrynWalls, in ‘The Wedding Feast as Communion in The Rime of the AncientMariner (N&Q 61[2014] 56–8), offers an interpretation of the final stanzas ofthe poem based on two religious contexts: Christ’s parable of the weddingfeast, and the Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper or HolyCommunion as it is offered in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. As Wallssays, this text was the Church of England’s standard prayer book at the timeColeridge was composing The Ancient Mariner.Thomas Owens produced two very different yet equally compelling essays

on Coleridge. In ‘Coleridge, Nitric Acid and the Spectre of Syphilis’(Romanticism 20[2014] 282–93) Owens is careful never to state categoricallythat Coleridge did in fact suffer from syphilis. But he makes a convincing casefor his suffering from a ‘psychological preoccupation with venereal disease . . .real or imagined’ (p. 282). Owens combines knowledge of the medicaldiscourse of the time with a biographical reading of the poet to provide afascinating insight into Coleridge’s own fear that he had the symptoms of thedisease, and the sexual experience to have contracted it. In ‘Coleridge’sParentheses and the Question of Editing’ (EIC 64[2014] 373–93), Owens readsColeridge’s punctuation, including his ‘mispunctuation’, as ‘load-bearing’,registering ‘the absence or presence of strain conceived as mimetic patterns ofrestraint or exertion’ (p. 390). He makes a compelling case for the need for an


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edition of Coleridge’s occasional prose that affords full credence toColeridgean textual variance, one that does not efface ‘Coleridge’s mentalactivity beneath the print’ and gives full range to his ‘ ‘‘antiphonal voice’’ ’(p. 390).‘ ‘‘Jealous of the Listening Air’’: Silence and Seduction in Christabel’

(Romanticism 20[2014] 261–70), by Richard Berkeley, examines the Gothicassociations of Coleridge’s enigmatic poem. Berkeley sees Christabel asoffering an ‘interesting interpretive problem’ (p. 261), not least because itrefuses to offer its reader a rationalization of its narrative meaning. Berkeleydetails the way Coleridge identified himself with Christabel’s experience sothat what is at stake in the seductiveness of the poem is emblematic of the‘poet’s own guilty encounter with gothic literature’ (p. 261). Coleridge’sengagement with European thought is outlined in detail by James Vigus in‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (in Mander, ed., The OxfordHandbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 520–40). AsVigus explains, Coleridge’s literary, philosophical, and theological pursuits allmake up his ‘encyclopaedic quest for unified knowledge’ (p. 520). This tookthe form of a deep engagement with German philosophy, and especiallyKantian arguments, so as to pursue a ‘rational religion’, something thatconsistently underpins Coleridgean speculation, and which was, Vigus shows,the ‘great philosophical challenge of the age’ (p. 521).In ‘Coleridge’s Disappointment in The Excursion’ (WC 45[2014] 147–51)

Seamus Perry shows how frustration was also fruitful for Coleridge. As part ofa special issue of Wordsworth Circle on The Excursion, Perry’s essay deftlyexamines crucial divergences that emerged between Wordsworth andColeridge that can be perceived in the latter’s reaction to The Excursion.Examining an imaginative difficulty Coleridge felt was at the heart ofWordsworth’s philosophical poetry, Perry explains that the problem ‘lies in therelationship between the profound universality of the wisdoms that the poemsets out to enunciate and the highly particularized representation of theircontingent spokesman’ (p. 148). As Perry shows, this was an issue thatstretched back to the two poets’ collaborative heyday in the 1790s. ‘Coleridge:‘‘Work without Hope’’ ’ (WC 45[2014] 21–9), by Graham Davidson, examinesone poem in subtle and rich detail. Coleridge wrote the first draft of ‘Workwithout Hope’ in February 1825. As Davidson explains, on first inspection thepoem appears to readers as a pleasingly simple work—displaying the kind ofimpressions that seemed to form ‘themselves into verse instinctively’ as J.C.C.Mays has said (quoted p. 22). Davidson nicely weighs up the oddities andambiguities at play in the poem, however, and their touching import toColeridge’s life.Sara Coleridge is gradually being accepted as much more than just the

preserver of the Coleridge family reputation, or defender of her father’s legacy.A number of scholars, perhaps most especially Peter Swaab, have offered us aportrait of her as polymath: a talented poet and prose writer, and a thinkerwho engaged with politics, philosophy, and theology. Because of this we areslowly appreciating her as one of the leading scholars and artists of the lateRomantic and Victorian eras. Jeffrey W. Barbeau’s Sara Coleridge: Her Lifeand Thought (also discussed in Section 1 above) adds to this portrait in various


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ways, skilfully capturing her ‘inquiring spirit’ (p. ix). Underpinning this book isa belief in the interrelation between parents and their children. Barbeauunderstands Sara as ‘heir to her father’s capacious mind’ (p. x), and arguesthat her intellectual and creative development was fashioned out of her deepknowledge of her father’s writing, which produced in her a ‘thoroughlyColeridgean frame of mind’ (p. x). But at its heart this is a biography of, andcritical introduction to, Sara, one that deepens our knowledge of its subject inadmirable ways. Barbeau reveals her engagement with the key religious andphilosophical debates of her time. As he explains, the issues that concerned herfather’s generation were well known to her, but she was conscious of the needas a woman to wrestle with new concerns emerging out of an increasingly fast-moving modern world. By the end of this book we better appreciate Sara’sindependent and energetic intellect, and richly creative voice.Much good scholarship continues to be published on the evocative verse of

Felicia Hemans. Two essays appeared in Studies in Romanticism that show thealmost limitless ways in which we might read and interpret her poetry.‘England and Spain and Domestic Affections: Felicia Hemans and the Politicsof Literature’ by Juan Sanchez (SiR 53[2014] 399–416) offers a perceptivehistoricist account of Hemans’s engagement with war and imperialism.Sanchez shows how literature becomes a political weapon by which Hemansintervenes in the most charged concerns of her time. Sanchez discerns anambiguity at the heart of Hemans’s response. England and Spain, for instance,appears to advance support for Tory policy during the Peninsular Warthrough its invective against Napoleon and patriotic call to arms, yet Hemanscan also be heard ‘consciously adopting a radical voice’ that at times shifts thefocus of tyranny from Napoleon and onto England (p. 405).Image of Dionysian inspiration and Christian sacrifice, of physical pleasure

and spiritual healing, the motif of the drinking cup has been ebullientinspiration for numerous Romantic writers. While this theme has regularlyfocused on a masculine poetic economy, Young-Ok An’s ‘The Poetics of the‘‘Charmed Cup’’ in Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’(SiR 53[2014] 217–38), explores the image in the context of female authorshipand power. Hemans and Landon understand the cup and its intoxicatingpowers as a ‘metapoetic device’ for analysing the ‘intersections of gender,authorship, and life’, An argues (p. 218). She proposes that Hemans andLandon ‘invert and revise the male-oriented rhetoric of the charmed cup’ notonly to ‘signify their struggles for authorship but also to explore thetransformative potential of those struggles’ (p. 218). An’s intertextual readingis highly suggestive and consistently convincing. These two articles (and theworks on Yearsley discussed above) aside, however, there was on the wholetoo little published on individual female poets, as is further indicated below.Michael Edson offers us a new way of approaching the retirement poem in

the Cockney School of poetry. In ‘Leigh Hunt, John Pomfret, and the Politicsof Retirement’ (ERR 25[2014] 423–42) Edson explores how Hunt’s turn to thismode ‘reflects the rise of a city-bound, middle-class audience for whomretirement was necessarily limited to the reading of retirement poetry’ (p. 425).Far from the conservative and conformist response to the pressures of modernlife that retirement poetry is sometimes classed as, Edson proposes that Hunt


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and his contemporaries celebrated the ‘pleasure of escaping politics’ (p. 425) asa means, paradoxically, of accommodating and realizing reformist principles.Byron’s problem with Keats, so he said, was that his writing too often

displayed signs of a ‘sort of mental masturbation—he is always f-gg-g hisimagination’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand,HarvardUP, 7: 225). For Byron, Keats’s 1820 volume of poetry, theextraordinary Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, wasthe work of an adolescent (‘p-ss a bed poetry’), whose sexual immaturity lenthis verse an obsessive over-indulgence in sensual desire. The intriguing thingabout Keats, Modesty and Masturbation is that Rachel Schulkins uses this ideaof Keats self-indulgently playing with his quill to suggest that it can be read asoffering a form of social utility. Schulkins assumes that the autoeroticism thatunderscores Keats’s verse exists as a ‘sexual-political stance’ which reveals hiscriticism of the ‘conservative construction of the female as passionless’ (p. 3).Like so many other Keats scholars, Schulkins benefits from the brilliant workof Jeffrey Cox and Nicholas Roe, in this case by associating the sensuality ofthe verse with Keats’s liberal politics. Schulkins attempts to move from poeticanalysis to wider cultural issues throughout her thesis. Specifically, sheproposes that Keats’s lines of verse need to be understood within the ‘liberal-conservative debate surrounding sexual freedom . . . specifically femalesexuality’ (p. 3). This is Keats’s ‘radical eroticism’ (p. 43) according toSchulkins, which counters the notion of an asexual woman. Thus femalemasturbation is read as a performance of ‘social revolt against sociallimitations, pursuing in private that which is publicly prohibited’ (p. 5).Schulkins seeks to distinguish her argument from Marjorie Levinson’s inKeats’s Life of Allegory [1988], which, Schulkins suggests, reads Keats’sonanistic style with his literary and social insecurities. In contrast, Schulkinsidentifies masturbation with the ‘private sphere of imagination’ one where an‘individual seeks his own personal advantage over social good’ (p. 4). ForSchulkins, this is more typical of the context of the time, which sawmasturbation not just as a physical gratification but also indicative of furtherconditions of the mind.In ‘Keats, Antiquarianism, and the Picturesque’ (EIC 64[2014] 119–37),

Rosemary Hill offers a lively account of how the poet’s sensibility was ‘imbuedwith popular antiquarianism’ (p. 120). In tracing this aspect of the Keatsianaesthetic, Hill delves into the philosophical underpinnings of the picturesque,specifically the way landscape painting influences the manner in which thenatural world is viewed and how in turn it is re-represented in art. For Hill,Keats is keener on mediated rather than direct experience; and certainly manyof his letters and verse back up this idea. Not surprisingly, then, thepicturesque, with its ‘re-echoing between art and life[,] appealed to Keats’stemperament’ (p. 121). Hill is particularly adept at illustrating how the‘synthetic, the imitative, the second-hand, and sometimes frankly second rate .. . were the ideal subjects for Keats’ (p. 121). In ‘John Keats and SomeVersions of Materiality’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 233–45) Richard C. Sha seeksin Keats’s poetry a Romantic aesthetic that ‘refuses to choose betweenmateriality and ideality, substance and event’, and seeks out a ‘possible groundof synthesis’ (p. 241). In a complex but sparklingly communicated argument,


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Sha describes what he calls ‘Romantic matter’, and what this means for anunderstanding of Keats; how, in moving away from mechanism, writers‘sought to restore volition, attraction, and sympathy to the physical world’conceptualizing things as dynamic, but ‘always on the move, in the process ofbecoming’ (p. 238).For Carmen Faye Mathes, passivity is, paradoxically, a dynamic propos-

ition for Keats. ‘ ‘‘Let us not therefore go hurrying about’’: Towards anAesthetics of Passivity in Keats’s Poetics’ (ERR 25[2014] 309–18) conjures thestaged detachment Keats assumes in order to engage with others, arguing that‘Keatsian passivity invites sociability’ (p. 310), opening up mediated lines ofdiscourse to others. As Mathes states, this essay invites us to think throughnew ways of reading the productivity that emerges out of Keatsian indolence.‘Reading the Heart, Reading the World: Keats’s Historiographical Aesthetic’(ERR 25[2014] 275–88), by Emily Rohrbach, looks afresh at the relationbetween William Robertson’s History of America and Keats’s sonnet onChapman’s Homer. Instead of offering another account of the thematic andhistoricist influence of Robertson’s text on Keats’s sonnet, however, Rohrbachconsiders the importance of its mediation through its form. This approachallows Rohrbach to show that Keats’s poem ‘both critiques Enlightenmentcausality and progressive historical narration’, making available to the‘historical imagination an alternative temporality of surprise that foregroundsthe individual subject’ (p. 276).‘Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up

Hyperion’ (SiR 53[2014] 171–93), by Yohei Igarashi, builds on recent worksurrounding ideas of media and Romantic poetry. Igarashi is an importantfigure in this movement, having participated in an MLA roundtable on‘Romantic media studies’ in 2013. In this essay, he centres his interest onKeats’s fascination with ‘imagining communication at a distance’ (p. 174).Igarashi attempts, as he says, to take that familiar image of Keats, indoors,absorbed in what he is reading, and ‘superimpose upon it an image ofRomantic-era Britain enmeshed in increasingly far-reaching domestic andglobal communication and transportation networks’ (p. 174). Where Igarashiis eager to reimagine our impression of Keats via the criss-crossing ofinternational relations of his writing, Scott McEathron, in ‘William Hilton’sLost Drawing of Keats’ (KSJ 63[2014] 58–77), focuses his gaze on a specificportrait of the poet. William Hilton’s iconic image from 1822, which iscurrently sitting at Keats House in Hampstead, is based, as McEathronexplains, on a miniature produced by Joseph Severn in 1819. Hilton haddepicted Keats in a chalk drawing in 1820, but this has long since vanished—something that has frustrated Keats scholars for years. McEathron, though,has discovered that it survives not only in the known Wass engraving of 1841,but also via an 1865 copy made by George Scharf. This image, reproduced inthis essay for the first time, gives us, as McEathron nicely suggests, a contrastto the ‘ornate, dark, and almost saddened mien of the Wass engraving’, via themore ‘open countenance often assigned to the poet’. This valuable essay alsomakes an important case for giving the rather peripheral figure of Hilton moreprominence in Romantic studies.


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‘The Narrow Road to the Western Isles—If Keats Had Journeyed withBasho’ (KSR 28[2014] 49–57), by Geoffrey Wilkinson, is an imagining of thesimilarities between Keats and the Japanese poet. As Wilkinson shows, thesepoets are very different in a number of significant ways. But each shares asense of himself as a literal and metaphorical traveller at times seeking theanonymity and even annihilation of the self. Christopher Langmuir examinesKeats’s interest in, and the spiritual nourishment of, travel in ‘Keats: The Twoand Thirty Palaces Revisited’ (N&Q 61[2014] 514–15). Keats’s letter toReynolds in February 1818 refers to a place of ‘two-and-thirty Palaces’, andLangmuir is keen to account for it beyond the orientalist explanations oftenproposed by editors and critics alike. Langmuir shows that the palaces are theabodes of the winds, something Keats uses to represent the all-encompass-ing—those ‘conceivable points of the compass’ (p. 515). As Langmuir explains,this ties in to readings of Keats’s thoughts on the capacity of the mind, free tofollow its own path, as ‘the flight of the imagination radiates in all directions’(p. 515).Previously reviewed in last year’s YWES, but reissued in paperback in 2014,

was Kathleen Kerr-Koch’s Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory inBenjamin, de Man, Shelley. One of the early figures associated withdeconstruction, and an important critic of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was thesometime controversial figure of Paul de Man. The posthumous discovery ofde Man’s wartime journalism in 1988, written for occupied Belgium’snewspaper Le Soir, revealed alleged collaborationist tendencies with theNational Socialist occupiers and, most damningly, implicit and explicit anti-Semitism. The fact that de Man has both been tarred by accusations of fascistsympathies and seen as a philosopher and literary theorist with a particularinterest in Romanticism is striking; it reminds us of what Kerr-Koch refers toas ‘the often presumed antecedent connection between Romanticism andirrationalist ideologies’ (p. xii). Whether fascism is necessarily irrational andcounter to the Enlightenment project or, in fact, the Enlightenment’sapotheosis, is not, however, up for debate.It is fitting that Kerr-Koch considers de Man alongside Walter Benjamin—a

figure who also flirted with anti-Semitism in his life—as readers of PercyShelley. Kerr-Koch’s study is not so much an investigation into the connectionbetween the ‘romanticism’ of Shelley and the ‘fascism’ of de Man andBenjamin, as the perhaps misleading title suggests. Rather, Kerr-Koch’sinterest is in the role played by literary allegory in the works of three writers inthe so-called ‘age of modernity’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Herstudy seeks to contest the notion that allegory is somehow ahistorical ordepoliticized; its ‘process of regraphing’ (p. 2) makes it highly appropriate inaddressing the vexed issue of ‘modernity’, perceived as constantly changing,evolving, or advancing. The book essentially turns on considering differingreactions to the Enlightenment legacy that spawned ‘modernity’. Benjamin, deMan, and Shelley have, for Kerr-Koch, thought ‘about the question ofprogress in modernity’s claim to historical advancement’ and ‘each hasmobilized allegory in the configuration of modern temporality’ (p. 9). The factthat these three figures are considered in the same volume, and not inchronological order, can be seen as evidence enough that Kerr-Koch’s study


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offers a challenge to conceptions of a modern, linear, and progressivetemporality.Kerr-Koch’s critical and theoretical framework is rigorous and well

researched, but her approach would benefit from far more attention to closereading and form. Too often Shelley is not allowed to speak for himself.Formal attention would have aided Kerr-Koch’s argument, such as inconsidering specific examples of Shelley’s shifting, unsettled—and unsettling—metaphors. The complexity of the topic cannot be overstated and, generally,Kerr-Koch’s prose is clear and accessible (but not always). Nevertheless, this isan ambitious work that rewards close scrutiny and is sure to be of use toscholars of Shelley interested in recontextualizing his approach to allegory andrevisiting the history of Shelley criticism.Two other 2014 articles explore the rich poetic and theoretical legacy of

Shelley. Luke Donahue’s essay, ‘Romantic Survival and Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to theWest Wind’’ ’ (ERR 25[2014] 219–42), on the (im)possibility of ‘ending’ inShelley’s poetry, engages with and contests both deconstructive and historicistreadings, from Paul de Man to James Chandler. Focusing on ‘Ode to the WestWind’, Donahue seeks to ‘address the possibility of the final end of mutability’(p. 220) in a poem that seems to suggest the opposite. What follows is a closereading that is often convincing if not always sufficiently attentive. Forinstance, the leaves in the opening stanza are not ‘ghosts’ as Donahue states;rather, they are simply ‘like ghosts’ (this is a crucial distinction in Shelley).Similarly, the discussion of the death-to-life movement of the leaves wouldhave been enriched by a consideration of the slipperiness of metaphor inShelley’s poem where the leaves, in fact, are always ‘dead’, but simply signifyor allegorize different things (the poet, his words, his thoughts, etc.). This isnevertheless largely nit-picking of what is a theoretically stimulating piece thatadds to, and contests, the wealth of criticism on the poem. Forest Pyle’s brief‘Skylark-Image, or the Vitality of Disappearance’ (ERR 25[2014] 319–25)explores the tension between Shelley’s ‘vitalism’ and, read through Deleuze,his aesthetics of disappearance or absence. Focusing on ‘To a Skylark’, Pylecompares Deleuze’s notion of the time-image with the (non)image of Shelley’sbird, which he terms ‘Skylark-Image’. Of course, the ‘Skylark-Image’ is absentor not ‘visual’, yet this does not mean that the poet does not attempt to figureit with a series of imagistic ‘failed’ similes. Pyle calls this process an‘untethering’; this disappearing bird is conceived as ‘vital’, and related to thevitally disturbing effect of the Deleuzean cinematic time-image. An interesting,original, and theoretically thorough article, it is hoped that Pyle will expandthis into a larger project and apply this framework to Shelley’s poetry morewidely.Cian Duffy produced four short Shelley pieces in Notes & Queries that

remind us of a number of influences on, and sources for, Shelley’s poetry. Thefirst of these, ‘ ‘‘Such sweet and bitter pain as mine’’: Mary Wollstonecraft’sShort Residence and Percy Shelley’s ‘‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’’ ’(N&Q 61[2014] 515–17), reasserts the clear influence of Wollstonecraft. Notonly does Duffy trace the verbal and linguistic echoes of a section ofWollstonecraft’s Short Residence in Shelley’s ‘Lines Written in the Bay ofLerici’, he also suggests these are ‘conceptually equivalent’ (p. 517); both


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concern the loss of someone loved. Two of his further pieces are concernedwith aspects of Shelley’s Hellas. ‘ ‘‘Less accessible than thou or God’’: WhereDoes Percy Shelley Locate Ahasuerus in Hellas?’ (N&Q 61[2014] 517–19)considers sources for Shelley’s location of the Wandering Jew figure in thepoem beside the Bosphorus, and speculates that Shelley’s blending of hissource material served as a way to dodge the censor. ‘Percy Shelley’s ‘‘Displayof Newspaper Erudition’’ in Hellas, A Lyrical Drama (1822)’ (N&Q 61[2014]519–23) considers Shelley’s use of newspapers, the Galignani’s Messenger inparticular, as sources for an authentic account of the rebellion in Greece. Thisis strange, however, since the Galignani’s Messenger was unfavourable to therebellion, although Duffy demonstrates that Shelley drew on it for what hecalls ‘matters of fact’ (p. 521). Duffy’s final piece, ‘ ‘‘Radiant as the MorningStar’’: A Little-Known Shelley Fragment and its Context’ (N&Q 61[2014] 523–25), considers a short manuscript fragment of Shelley’s that is yet to appear inany scholarly edition of Shelley’s poetry. Duffy sets out to contextualize thepiece, arguing that it is likely associated with Shelley’s relationship with JaneWilliams and the ‘Fragments of an Unfinished Drama’ that Mary Shelleyincluded in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This is not simplyhistorical context, however, as Duffy notes thematic echoes. One other Shelleypiece that appeared in Notes & Queries was Andrew Lacey’s ‘A Possible Echoof Herrick in Shelley’s ‘‘The Flower That Smiles Today’’ ’ (N&Q 61[2014] 525–7). Lacey suggests that this short poem, originally entitled ‘Mutability’, echoesthe seventeenth-century carpe diem tradition of poetry that is evident in RobertHerrick’s ‘To the Virgins, to make much of time’. A convincing reading, thefact that Shelley’s poem was originally entitled ‘Mutability’ reminds us also ofShelley’s other influence, Edmund Spenser and his ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’, only ageneration preceding Herrick.Stephanie Dumke’s ‘Rediscovered Keats and Shelley Manuscripts in

Krakow’ (KSJ 63[2014] 39–57) is a fascinating and thoroughly researchedarticle that reminds us not only of the fetishistic nature of nineteenth-centurymanuscript and holograph collections of Romantic poets, but also the oft-neglected notion of a pan-Continental literary culture in the period (see alsoPaul Stock’s The Byron-Shelley Circle and the Idea of Europe, reviewed inYWES 91[2012]). Dumke’s discovery of manuscript fragments in Krakow,particularly the Shelley pieces, shines a new light on to the vexed relationshipbetween author’s fair copy and publisher’s printed page. Of particular interestis Dumke’s tracing of the differences between a fragment of Laon and Cythna,canto I, and the version that made it into print. The fact that this poem waslater revised into The Revolt of Islam, even though Dumke notes that thisparticular passage remained unaltered, nevertheless raises interesting questionswhen attempting to read the Laon and Cythna/Revolt of Islam alterationsthematically. This article is recommended to scholars of Keats and Shelley ifonly to remind them that authoritative texts of these two poets may yet bechallenged with further manuscript discoveries.A number of 2014 articles reflected a growing trend in Shelley scholarship to

consider Shelley in the context of his readership and the publishing realitiesof his age. Much of this work is indebted to Neil Fraistat’s ‘IllegitimateShelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance’


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(PMLA 94[1994] 409–23). Like his article on Byron (see above), Jason I.Kolkey’s ‘Venal Interchanges: Shelley’s Queen Mab and Literary Property’(ERR 25[2014] 533–50) argues that the copyright law of the period, largelydetermined by Southey v Sherwood (1817) concerning Southey’s Wat Tyler,had a profound impact on the readership of Shelley’s Queen Mab following its1821 piracy. Not only was this in terms of numbers of readers but, moreimportantly, in terms of their class. Kolkey illustrates Shelley’s contradictoryand vexed position on this issue and demonstrates some thorough researchinto letters, periodicals, statutes, and court proceedings. The reality of this‘democratic’ piracy is excellently related to Shelley’s own writing; althoughsome close reading of Queen Mab itself would have helped to develop anunderstanding of its attraction to such a readership. Nevertheless, Kolkey isconvincing in demonstrating how piracy in the period should make us refigureour conceptions of Romantic authorship and genius.Similar interests are encountered in Alison Morgan’s ‘ ‘‘God Save Our

Queen!’’: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Radical Appropriations of the BritishNational Anthem’ (Romanticism 20[2014] 60–72). This thoroughly researchedarticle is as much a study of the vexed history of the British National Anthemas it is of the relationship between Shelley’s ‘A New National Anthem’ [1819]and the radical tradition of appropriating ‘God Save the King’. Morgan showshow the history of the traditional anthem is itself formed by popular Jacobitetavern singing and the contested rearticulation by English and Welsh citizens.Shelley’s radical appropriation—in which ‘our Queen’ is ‘liberty’—is thereforean appropriation of an appropriation. This contextualized reading of Shelleyhelps us to reconsider the poet alongside not only a ‘radical’ tradition, but avernacular culture more widely.Byoung Chun Min’s ‘Beyond an Intellectual Bourgeois Public Sphere: Percy

Bysshe Shelley’s ‘‘Hermit of Marlow Pamphlets’’ ’ (KSR 28:ii[2014] 86–103) isanother example, as evidenced by its title, of a work that attempts toreconsider Shelley’s relationship with the wider reading public. Min’s essayfocuses on Shelley’s so-called ‘Hermit of Marlow’ pamphlets—A Proposal ofPutting Reform to the Vote and An Address to the People on the Death of thePrincess Charlotte—published in 1817. Min’s contention is that thesepamphlets mark an increasingly close political relationship with Leigh Hunt,particularly in how the elite intellectual poet could begin to engage the publicin wider political discussion. Whereas for Min these pamphlets attempt toconstruct heterogeneity in political discourse, inculcating a unified andinclusive public sphere, this attempt failed. Instead, the pirating and‘illegitimate publishing’ of Shelley’s works after his death, making him achampion of radical, working-class causes, ‘consolidated class consciousness . .. rather than Shelley’s inclusive public sphere open to all classes’ (p. 102). Aninteresting reconsideration of Shelley’s relationship to the Habermasian publicsphere, Min’s contention is that readings of Shelley’s radicalism are essentiallya misappropriation of his project.Shelley’s relationship with and to the wider population is at stake in Dallin

Lewis’s ‘Prophesying the Present: Shelley’s Critique of Malthus in A Defenceof Poetry’ (ERR 25[2014] 575–90). Lewis’s article details Shelley’s nuancedengagement with Malthus, noting, for instance, that ‘if Shelley was largely


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persuaded by Malthus’s ratios and principles of population, he was aghast atthe social policies he drew from them’ (p. 579). Lewis intriguingly andconvincingly goes on to consider this in light of A Defence of Poetry, indicatingthat it not only appropriates Malthus’s rhetoric of scarcity and excess, butreflects Shelley’s anxiety that a Malthusian political economist should usurpthe prophet-poet’s role as an anticipator of the future.Charlotte Smith’s hugely important role in the Romantic-period sonnet

revival is evident in two 2014 articles that focus on these most particularly,offering attentive close reading as well as thorough contextual research. KeithHasperg’s ‘ ‘‘Saved by the Historic Page’’: Charlotte Smith’s Arun RiverSonnets’ (SiR 53[2014] 103–29) considers the clear historical and historicizingimpulse in Smith’s writing, such as in The Emigrants [1793] and Beachy Head[1807], in relation to the literary history evident in her earlier Arun Riversonnets [1786]. Hasperg’s opening contention is that Smith’s sonnets ‘containthe genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection’(p. 103) that she develops in her later blank-verse poems. As well as notingSmith’s invocation of local historical literary figures such as Thomas Otway,Hasperg’s most interesting argument is that Smith ‘meld[s] a Continentaltradition, the Petrarchan sonnet of complaint, with an English strand of loco-descriptive verse’ (p. 121). In this engaging piece, Hasperg re-emphasizesSmith’s abilities as a sonneteer as well as her complex relationship to traditionand originality. This discussion, and particularly Smith’s engagement withPetrarch, is similarly encountered in Mary Anne Myers’s article, ‘UnsexingPetrarch: Charlotte Smith’s Lessons in the Sonnet as a Social Medium’(SiR 53[2014] 239–59). Myers traces Smith’s varying Petrarchan influencethrough the different versions of the Elegiac Sonnets that first appeared in1784, noting the various intertextual echoes. While arguing that Petrarchserved as Smith’s model of poetic immortality, Myers also argues for Smith’soriginality in radically transforming ‘Petrarch into something historical yetmodern: a sad sonnet speaker freed from gender constraints’ (p. 245). Not onlydoes Myers remind us of Smith’s poetic abilities, she also offers an intriguinggendered, or rather non-gendered, reading of her aesthetics arrived at throughPetrarchan influence.Discussions of the relationship of a highbrow Romantic poet to the murky

publishing realities of the age were not limited to Shelley in 2014. David Duff’s‘Wordsworth’s ‘‘Prospectus’’: The Genre’ (WC 45[2014] 178–84), for instance,does much the same with Wordsworth. Duff relates the 107-line passage fromthe unfinished first book of The Recluse, which Wordsworth had called ‘a kindof Prospectus’ in his preface to The Excursion, to a genre that would have beenfamiliar to many of his readers. A prospectus was not only a manifesto of theliterary and philosophical concerns of, say, Wordsworth’s poem or ofRomanticism more widely, but also, as Duff reminds us, a simple printedadvertisement for a future publication in order to attract readers and, mostimportantly, sales. Not only are we thus reminded of Wordsworth’s positionwithin, and negotiation with, the marketplace, but through a thoroughconsideration of a variety of sources Duff demonstrates how the ‘language ofthe marketplace’ frequently also inflects poetic language, for example in thework of Byron and even Keats. In this sense, Wordsworth’s prospectus works


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on a number of levels, and it is of course striking that this prospectus was for apoem that never appeared. This, as Duff reminds us, was not uncommon tothe genre. This is an excellent example of New Historicist criticism at its best.Duff’s interest in The Excursion was not an isolated example. The year 2014

was, after all, the bicentenary of its publication, and journals, mostparticularly the special issue of Wordsworth Circle, published a large volumeof articles and papers on the poem. Famously derided by contemporary critics,a number of bicentenary articles worked not only to salvage the poem from itsrelative critical neglect, but also to argue for its profound literary merit and itsimportance within Wordsworth’s oeuvre. Some articles, such as GrahamDavidson’s ‘Wordsworth’s Wasteland or the Speargrass Redemption’(Romanticism 20[2014] 73–83) and Sally Bushell’s ‘From ‘‘The RuinedCottage’’ to The Excursion: Revision as Re-Reading’ (WC 45[2014] 75–83),focus on the vexed textual history of the much-revised poem. Both take thefirst book of The Excursion, more commonly anthologized separately as ‘TheRuined Cottage’, as their starting point. Davidson’s piece offers sensitive closereading of the different manuscript versions in which the stories of the Pedlarand Margaret are either separate or ‘yoke[d] . . . together’ (p. 74). Davidson’sargument is that Wordsworth’s final decision to combine the two stories is ‘acourageous acknowledgment of a conflict in his genius’ (p. 74). This conflict isessentially between the mortal, momentary, and earthly suffering of non-poetic everyday life (Margaret) and the visionary, poetic infinite demonstratedby the Wordsworthian poet-figure of the Pedlar. Davidson therefore enablesus to see The Excursion as a critical poem in the Wordsworth canon thatbridges the gap between Lyrical Ballads and the more visionary Prelude.Bushell’s article similarly notes the tensions involved in revision and (writerly)rereading, but uses such theorists as Barthes and Bakhtin to argue for howconceptions of a text’s totality and temporality inflect our reading(s) andinterpretation(s) of fragments and vice versa. Bushell posits Wordsworth as a‘writerly reader’ in this light, and notes how Wordsworth’s ‘return’ to thepoem is akin to the Pedlar-cum-Wanderer who guides the reader through ‘TheRuined Cottage’ and The Excursion.William Galperin’s ‘The Essential Reality of The Excursion’ (WC 45[2014]

104–18) similarly begins with the revisions made between ‘The RuinedCottage’ and Book I. Galperin’s convincing argument is that many of therevisions reflect Wordsworth’s shifting attitude(s) to the nature of reality andhis revised emphasis on ‘human life’ as opposed to ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ asargued for in the prospectus. The narrative present-tense vignettes in thepoem, Galperin argues, serve as a ‘memorial to the living’. This article verymuch functions in dialogue with Jonathan Wordsworth’s The Music ofHumanity (reviewed in YWES 50[1971]) and serves as an excellent supplementto this monumental work. A consideration of The Excursion’s ‘musicality’ isthe focus of Richard Gravil’s ‘The Excursion: An Unparalleled ‘‘Variety ofMusical Effect’’ ’ (WC 45[2014] 84–92), which not only reminds us of JohnThelwall’s reading of The Excursion (Wordsworth had praised, as Gravilreminds us, Thelwall’s good ear) but also offers an overview of Wordsworth’smetrical theory. This, excluding Gravil’s own work, is barely covered byWordsworth scholars. Gravil’s thorough scansion of passages from The


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Excursion helps to remind us of the variety of musical effects in the poem,arguing strongly for an aural approach to the text that may help us to discernthe different speakers more easily. Gravil also situates Wordsworth’s prosodyas conversely both within and outside literary tradition, allowing us to reflecton the position of Wordsworth’s poetics in literary history. Michael O’Neill’s‘Ebb and Flow in The Excursion’ (WC 45[2014] 93–8) similarly makes a verystrong case for The Excursion’s literary merit, referring to it as a ‘masterpiece’that requires no ‘self-qualifying apologia’ (p. 93) from critics. O’Neill proceedsto justify his claim through his trademark formal attention that shows thepoem to be one of sophisticated, intellectual paradox. O’Neill concludes thatthe poem is one aware of its own ‘struggle and difficulty’ (p. 98), in ways thatlater influenced Keats and Shelley.Jonathan Farina’s ‘The Excursion and ‘‘The Surface of Things’’ ’ (WC

45[2014] 99–105) reconsiders Wordsworth’s attitude to surfaces and depth inthe poem, noting that, despite Wordsworth’s accomplishment in a ‘depthmodel of character’ (p. 99), surfaces nevertheless remain important to him.Farina suggests in particular that ‘The Excursion exhibits a meaningfulsuperficiality’ (p. 99). Highlighting the frequent references to ‘things’ both inThe Excursion and in Wordsworth’s poetry more widely, Farina’s mainargument is that these things or objects allow for a ‘process of abstraction thatproduces [a] kind of social connectivity and knowledge’ (p. 100). Essentially,surface interest in objects produces an ‘epistemological credibility’ and servesas a way of determining character through their ‘interfac[ing] with the outsideworld’ (p. 105). Tom Clucas’s article ‘Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in TheExcursion’ (WC 45[2014] 126–30) shares a similar interest in Wordsworth’scharacterization but takes a rather different approach. Focusing on theinfluence of Plutarch, Clucas argues for how Plutarch’s view of charactershaped Wordsworth’s own. In particular, by incorporating ‘Essays uponEpitaphs’, Clucas discusses the ‘Parallel Lives’ of Grasmere, ending bydemonstrating how ‘The ‘‘Church-yard Among the Mountains’’ offers morethan Christian solace in The Excursion: it serves as a library of humancharacter every bit as replete as Greek and Roman history with exemplarylives’ (p. 130). Although Wordsworth’s classical inheritance is hardlyneglected, as J. Douglas Kneale and Bruce Graver have shown us, Clucas’sarticle nevertheless offers a reading of classical character as fundamental tohis poetics.A number of scholars focused on the religious medieval history in the poem,

as opposed to the classical. Ruth Abbott’s ‘Scholarship, Spontaneity, and TheExcursion Book IV’ (WC 45[2014] 119–25) adds a level of nuance toconsiderations of Wordsworth’s epistemology. The detailed accounts of earlyreligious practices outlined by the Wanderer in Book IV are considered as theresult of Wordsworth’s meticulous scholarship rather than solely spontaneous,poetical inspiration. Abbott’s argument is that Wordsworth sees the relation-ship between scholarship, that is, learning from books, versus inspiration orlearning from nature such as in ‘The Tables Turned’ [1798], as a tense one;nevertheless, it is one that is ‘paradoxically co-dependent’ (p. 125). TheWanderer’s religious history narratives, then, are seen as illustrating howscholastic learning can inform spontaneous inspiration and vice versa. Clare


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A. Simmons’s ‘Medievalism in The Excursion’ (WC 45[2014] 131–7) reads thepoem in the light of Gothic medievalism despite its early nineteenth-century‘setting’. Simmons notes how The Excursion’s four speakers find something ofvalue in the medieval past which combines to give a Wordsworthian-inflectedand ‘reformed’ medievalism. The medieval past—and the unreformedchurch—is acknowledged patriotically by the four speakers as part of thepast of England and as a pointer towards futurity. The physical churchencountered in Book V, often regarded as resembling St Oswald’s inGrasmere, is read as a palimpsest in which English and Anglican values areread ‘over’ the Catholic medievalism that preceded them.Richard E. Brantley’s ‘The Excursion: Wordsworth’s Art of Belief’

(WC 45[2014] 162–70) continues this interest in Wordsworth’s theology.Brantley notes the tension between the Anglo-Catholic metaphor of a Gothicchurch that Wordsworth employs in describing his corpus, and TheExcursion’s expression of High Church Romanticism. Brantley’s reading ofthe poem, however, is one that reminds us of Wordsworth’s engagement with aLow Church dissenting and evangelical tradition as much as, if not more than,Anglicanism. The Wanderer’s testimony, for instance, is likened to theteachings of Isaac Watts and John and Charles Wesley. Similarly, the Pastor’sstory of Ellen is compared to John Wesley’s account of Mary Pendavres.Brantley’s main contention is that The Excursion dramatizes the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century tension between faith and works, or Calvinism andArminianism, with Wordsworth seeming to settle on the latter. However, thistension is nevertheless poetically fruitful, in that Wordsworth lets the‘theological conundrum of inspiration versus obligation deepen his poeticfaith’ (p. 170). Brantley helps us to remember that much of the co-opting ofWordsworth as wholly Anglican, whatever his public declarations, was morethe work of Victorian appropriation. In this sense, Stephen Gill’s work still hasa very discernible influence. The consideration of Victorian readings ofWordsworth’s theology is the subject of Robert M. Ryan’s ‘ReligiousRevisioning in The Excursion’ (WC 45[2014] 171–7). Indeed, Ryan’s mainargument is that ‘Wordsworth’s poetry, The Excursion in particular, figuredprominently in theological discussion during what is called the Victorian crisisof faith’ (p. 171). Ryan rightly highlights how the poem was claimed bynumerous different religious denominations and was seen as fulfilling oftenopposing spiritual needs. The theological discussions between the fourspeakers of the poem are seen to offer ‘a model of speculative freedom intheology’ with various readers seeing Wordsworth’s poetry either as ‘supple-mentary to the Bible’ or as ‘an alternative to scripture’. Ryan’s article is itselfan excellent supplement to his magisterial The Romantic Reformation(reviewed in YWES 77[1999]) and is a superb addition to the debatesconcerning Wordsworth’s religion as well as posthumous reception.This reading of Wordsworth through a Victorian perspective is, at least in

part, also found in Kenneth R. Johnston’s ‘Wordsworth’s Excursion: Routeand Destination’ (WC 45[2014] 106–13). Contextualizing the composition ofThe Excursion/Recluse project within the repressive climate of the FrenchRevolutionary Wars, Johnston reads the Solitary as a figure sufferingideological despair following the apparent failure of the ideals of the


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revolution. Johnston sees Wordsworth’s project, then, as one that attempts torevive the Solitary’s lost idealism but, unfortunately, results in failure.Intriguingly, Johnston contrasts this to the apparent optimism in CharlesDickens’s A Tale of Two Cities [1859]. Following attentive close reading of thenovel, Johnston argues that it is in the intertextual reading of the two writersthat one can observe how the ideals of the French Revolution could still liveon in nineteenth-century British culture. Dickens and Wordsworth, then, areseen as writers keen on capturing revolutionary ideals despite the difficultdomestic and cultural politics of their respective ages. Revolutionary ideals arealso the subject of Stuart Andrews’s ‘Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge: TheirIberian Spring’ (WC 45[2014] 49–3). Andrews’s piece is a meticulouslyresearched account of these three poets’ reaction to the military and politicalsituation in Spain during the Peninsular Wars as well as their various writingson such issues as the Convention of Cintra. Although Andrews’s piecefunctions more as a historical overview rather than necessarily presenting arigorous argument, he nevertheless concludes by suggesting that, far from thepoets having abandoned their revolutionary ideals by 1810, the location of‘revolution’ had simply moved to Spain, as Southey had himself declared in hisletters. This article can therefore be read in relation to the work of DiegoSaglia, who argues that the Iberian peninsula was seen as a space of Britishimaginative and revolutionary possibilities.Reading Wordsworth in relation to, or through the lens of, another writer

was the subject of four further articles in 2014. Two of these discussed the co-influential relationship between Wordsworth and Robert Southey in relationto The Excursion. Tom Duggett’s ‘The Dramatic End of The Excursion’(WC 45[2014] 157–61), for instance, notes how the Wanderer’s calls for a‘System of National Education’ are not only inspired by the writings of theeducational theorist Dr Andrew Bell. We are also reminded, in an echo ofAlan Richardson’s Literature, Education and Romanticism [2004], how BooksVIII and IX are heavily indebted to Southey’s recent writings in the QuarterlyReview. Duggett goes on to demonstrate how the debt to Southey is even morepronounced when considering manuscript drafts, and suggests that theseeming endorsement of Bell’s theories contains within it the seeds ofWordsworth’s later rejection of them by 1838, perhaps influenced by Southey.Quentin Bailey, by contrast, argues in ‘ ‘‘The Ruined Cottage’’ and Southey’sEnglish Eclogues’ (WC 45[2014] 151–7) that Southey’s ‘English Eclogue VI’,known as ‘The Ruined Cottage’, was heavily influenced by the first version ofWordsworth’s poem of the same name. Bailey also compares the protagonistof Southey’s poem ‘Hannah’ to Wordsworth’s Margaret. Because of what hesees as Southey’s reassertion of class difference, however, the presentation ofhuman suffering is seen as very different in the two poets’ work, with Baileyarguing that Southey’s depictions result in ‘sentimental morality’ or ‘condes-cending sympathy’ (p. 161). While this is subjective, Bailey’s analysisnevertheless helps to reassert the fruitful poetic relationship between the twomen, while simultaneously emphasizing their marked differences andindividuality.Robert Stagg’s ‘Wordsworth, Pope, and Writing after Bathos’

(EIC 64[2014] 29–44), focuses on a rarely studied element of Wordsworth’s


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poetry through an even rarer literary comparison. Stagg traces Wordsworth’suse of bathos in relation to its extensive use by Alexander Pope, who iscredited as having brought the word into English in his Peri Bathous; or, TheArt of Sinking in Poetry [1727]. Whereas Pope generally employed it forsatirical effect, Stagg argues for Wordsworth’s bathos as working alongsideand even enhancing the wonder of the sublime. In order to exalt or to rise,Stagg argues, Wordsworth often has ‘to sink’ first, meaning that ‘wonderemerges from the bathos that initially contains it’ (p. 42). This articleessentially reveals the Augustan source for a distinctly Romantic effect. DanielClay’s ‘Milton, Mulciber, and The Prelude’ (WC 45[2014] 66–8), on the otherhand, revisits and reinterprets The Prelude’s Miltonic inheritance and allusionsto Paradise Lost. Although noting the Miltonic echoes in Wordsworth is notnew, indeed, Robin Jarvis, Lucy Newlyn, Jonathan Wordsworth, and HaroldBloom are clear influences on the piece, Clay nevertheless offers an originalclose reading. Clay notes an allusion in descriptions of Wordsworth’schildhood games in both the 1805 and 1850 Prelude to the fall of Mulciberin Milton’s poem. Such a comparison seems a strange one. Clay’s suggestion isthat this allusion is perhaps to be considered in the mock-heroic mode, muchlike Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Furthermore, in the light of Harold Bloom,it is perhaps another example of the anxiety of influence.Two further articles that did not focus on The Excursion in 2014 both took

original approaches to some key Wordsworthian concepts. James Castell’sshort article, ‘Wordsworth, Silence and the Nonhuman’ (WC 45[2014] 58–61),turns on two familiar Wordsworthian tropes or themes—his poetry’sengagement with animal and other non-human elements, and his paradoxicalrepresentation of silence—and considers them through a sophisticatedtheoretical lens. Not only, then, does Castell’s article work within theemerging ‘nonhuman turn’, it is also far more philosophically and theoreticallyrigorous, as well as formally attentive, than many pieces that characterize thisnew literary-critical approach. Considering literature as paradoxically ‘silent’and ‘breaking the silence’, Castell relates this to treatment of the nonhuman,‘when the human noise of language interacts with the natural world’(pp. 58–9). Focusing on ‘Yes! Full surely ’twas the Echo’ [1807], Castellconvincingly demonstrates that ‘the relation of animal life to song . . . results ina voiced silence as profound as it is obscure’ (p. 61). A stimulating piece, itwould be pleasing to see such formal and theoretical rigour applied in a longerarticle and to a wider body of Wordsworth’s poetry.Although Wordsworth is perhaps most commonly seen as a poet of nature

and the nonhuman, it is worth remembering that the city—and London mostparticularly—plays an important role in much of his writing, whether in simpleopposition to Wordsworth’s desired ‘natural’ solitary repose or otherwise.Peter Larkin’s complex ‘Wordsworth’s City Retractions’ (WC 45[2014] 54–8)considers Wordsworth’s ambivalent attitude to London primarily in Books Iand VII of The Prelude but also the much-anthologized ‘Composed uponWestminster Bridge’ [1802]. Larkin reads Wordsworth’s city as a space thatresists easy definition. His discussion of the Bartholomew Fair passage isengaging, although the ‘blank confusion’ the poet encounters in his endlesslisting of the ‘faces’ of the tide of people (as Larkin discusses) could have been


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read as poetically self-conscious; is this ‘blank confusion’ a reference to the‘failure’ of Wordsworth’s blank verse in capturing the ineffable city?Nevertheless, this is a dense, theoretically informed article that rewardsattentive reading.Three articles took a slightly more biographical approach to Wordsworth’s

poetry, particularly focusing on youth, old age, and death. Peter Swaab’s‘Wordsworth’s Elegies for John Wordsworth’ (WC 45[2014] 30–8), forinstance, considers a number of elegiac poems Wordsworth wrote followingthe death of his brother John at sea in 1805. Noting the productive paradox ofelegy, in which grief essentially suits the poet’s aim, Swaab posits thatWordsworth does not quite seem to fit this pattern. At first, John’s deathhalted Wordsworth’s productivity, but ultimately, Swaab argues convincinglythrough thorough engagement with Wordsworth’s letters and poetry, not onlydo the poems dramatize a struggle to come to terms with grief, they also reflectprofound developments in Wordsworth’s professional career. Wordsworth’srevisionary tendencies throughout his long life, as seen in a number of otherarticles in 2014, are connected to his interest in the encounters between youthand old age that characterize so much of his poetry. Peter Manning’s article‘Wordsworth in Youth and Age’ (ERR 25[2014] 385–96) takes a multifacetedapproach to this issue, considering publication and book history, with images,as well as comparative readings between two 1800 poems and Wordsworth’sTo an Octogenarian [1846]. Whereas the earlier poems are concerned withpotentiality, from ‘the here’ to ‘the there’ as Manning puts it, To anOctogenarian is from the position of ‘there’ (which is now ‘here’), and is more acontemplation of loss and what has passed. Nevertheless, Manning is at painsto stress that potentiality still remains in the later poem, even if this futureremains a bleak one. As well as offering up a close reading of a number of lessfamiliar poems, Manning’s article encourages us to trace trends and themes inWordsworth—such as contemplations of youth and age—across his wholecareer in order to discern both continuation and revision. Returning to aconsideration of Wordsworth’s youth, Jack Vespa’s ‘Veiled Movements in‘‘The Vale of Esthwaite’’ ’ (WC 45[2014] 62–6) follows very much in the wakeof the work of David Fairer, in that this early poem of Wordsworth’s is read inrelation to a Virgilian georgic tradition. Vespa contends, however, that thisgeorgic mode is one approached through seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryunderstandings of Virgil’s georgics and that ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’demonstrates both an awareness of literary tradition and the promise of thepoet that is to come.Biographical approaches to Wordsworth dominated the monograph pub-

lications in 2014. Stephen Gill’s 1989 biography, William Wordsworth: A Life,is exhaustive, thoroughly researched yet written in an accessible style and thusof use to scholars and more casual readers alike. It is, therefore, rightlyconsidered the go-to critical biography of Wordsworth’s life and works andthe intersection of the two. In the decades since, numerous other biographies,such as those by Juliet Barker and Lucy Newlyn, have appeared to shedfurther light on the life of one of the most well-known poets of all time. Itwould appear then that there is very little space remaining or, indeed, need for,a further biography of Wordsworth. However, 2014 saw the publication of


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two, admittedly rather different, biographical studies. Of the two, JohnWorthen’s The Life of William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography is mostsimilar to Gill’s, at least in form, in that it is a single-volume work ofexhaustive and highly detailed research into the minutiae of Wordsworth’sdaily life. What Worthen adds to the wealth of biographical information is anintense attention to Wordsworth’s financial situation. Indeed, although it is nosecret that Wordsworth’s early years were largely spent in poverty, particularlyafter the death of his father while William was still a child, and then of hisbrother in 1805, Worthen’s study sets out to consider how these financialcircumstances in fact affected his creative work as a poet into adulthood andthroughout his life. Not only did this situation shape the character of a manWorthen sees as an obstinate, single-minded poet, but we are offered an insightinto Wordsworth’s publishing practices as allied to his existing economicconcerns. Worthen’s research is astonishingly attentive to very specific pricesand costs and to the mundane realities of a poet’s life.It is this very mundanity, however, that calls into question whether labelling

the text a ‘Critical Biography’ is helpful. Much of Worthen’s research does nothelp in interpreting the poetry, nor do we gain an insight into the creativeprocess; financial minutiae are not exactly thematic concerns for Wordsworth.Connected to this, it is difficult to discern the biography’s intended audience; anumber of footnotes gloss such things as pre-decimalization currency (p. 11),which would seem to imply an undergraduate readership. It is debatable,however, whether undergraduate students would learn much from, or beinterested in, such details of Wordsworth’s life. Nevertheless, the level ofresearch is to be commended, and Worthen’s book is sure to serve as avaluable resource for future scholars.Daniel Robinson’s Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life

Writing is an engaging and highly accessible short book that is more thansimple literary biography; it turns on the multiplicity of meanings in the phrase‘life-writing’. As well as suggesting Wordsworthian (auto)biography, it alsooffers up the notion of life-writing as not simply mimetic but life-creating,involving a construction of the self as much as it does a simple record. AsRobinson himself puts it ‘Wordsworth writes The Prelude to write that selfinto existence. This person, the life writing (that is, the living person doing thewriting), William Wordsworth, writes his life in the hope of finding words ofwriting himself as a writer, as Wordsworth’ (p. 2). This is not to suggest thatRobinson—or indeed Wordsworth—somehow sees this life-writing as thesolely authentic self since his title, adapted from the second book of ThePrelude, indicates that writing also creates a ‘second self’. Robinson’s bookthen, if implicitly, reminds us not only of Romantic writing’s influence ondeconstruction but also of Wordsworth’s own self-fashioning. It is evident thatAndrew Bennett’s work on Wordsworth is a strong theoretical influence.Robinson’s further consideration of the term ‘life-writing’ is one that refers

to the vocation in which a life is spent, that is, a ‘life [spent] writing’, and thecontinual editing of Wordsworth’s poetic autobiography serves to demon-strate that both life and writerly life are processes subject to revision.Robinson’s main contention is that ‘the life writing [is] part of the beginning ofthe writing life’ (p. 3) and we are reminded that The Prelude only details the


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‘growth of a poet’s mind’ in its earliest years, as a child and a young man. It isindeed the start of, or the prelude to, what is to come, despite its posthumousinitial publication. In tracing the life of a writer through his own life-writing,then, it is clever of Robinson to title his own opening chapter ‘Prelude’. Thischarming wit and informal style are evident throughout the book and, even iflong-term scholars of Wordsworth may not find much with which they are notfamiliar, this is a personal and innovative approach that is likely to inform newWordsworthians as much as it entertains old ones by the manner of its telling.It is indeed a popular as well as a scholarly pursuit to ‘locate’ Wordsworth.

If one visits the Lake District today one cannot escape the clearWordsworthian influence on the existing tourist industry. Not all of this isdown to the work of the Wordsworth Trust; popular consciousness has led tosuch a Wordsworthian association with the area that there are at least threeWordsworth Hotels (Cockermouth, Ambleside, and Grasmere) as well as aDaffodils Hotel (Grasmere). Wordsworth himself of course wrote one of thegreat guidebooks to the region, his Guide to the Lakes [1810], which has oftenled critics to consider him as the Lakes’ discoverer. As is evident from the titleof her William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, Saeko Yoshikawatreads along the same lines. Indeed, she reminds us how the very term ‘LakeDistrict’ did not come into being until the 1830s, and suggests that this namingwas influenced by the 1835 phrase ‘the District of the Lakes’ that appeared onthe title page of the fifth edition of Wordsworth’s Guide (p. 4). The fact that‘literary tourism’ did not quite take off in the region until the Lake Districtwas recognized as a single area, then, essentially implies that Wordsworthcreated it. Furthermore, Yoshikawa argues, this had a further influence ontourism more widely in the Victorian age. This may seem a bold claim, butYoshikawa’s meticulous research is often convincing. She covers subsequentguides to the Lake District that frequently quoted Wordsworth’s poems forpicturesque or topographical detail, some of which were even the firstinstances of the poems in print. In this sense, these guidebooks not only shapedtourists’ conceptions of the Lake District but also influenced the VictorianWordsworth canon. Indeed, the influence of Stephen Gill’s work is once againvery much in evidence here.Yoshikawa also details other accounts, such as a book of sketches of

Wordsworthian topography from 1850 by an anonymous ‘literary pilgrim’ inthe few weeks after the poet’s death. Yoshikawa demonstrates through suchattention that, whereas early Wordsworthian tourism was more of thepicturesque kind, this developed to become one more associated with poetryand literary pilgrimage; not only to visit the locations associated with the greatpoet Wordsworth, but also somehow to be imbued by the poetics of thelandscape. Fiona Stafford’s Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry(reviewed in YWES 91[2012]) would have helped Yoshikawa to consider theparticular poetic resonance of place that draws so many to visit the placesassociated with great poets, and it is a shame it is not included. Nevertheless,this is an engaging monograph that is exhaustively researched—the bibliog-raphy alone will serve as a superb resource for later scholars—and offers adifferent approach to a relatively well-trodden topic.


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Lastly, unfortunately The Charles Lamb Bulletin was unavailable through-out the entire writing of this section. Any articles published in that publicationrelevant to this section will be reviewed as part of 2015.

4. Drama

The texts in this year’s review cover a variety of topics including Shakespeare,gender, celebrity, reception, and the theatre itself.The first text reviewed is the excellent and comprehensive Oxford Handbook

of the Georgian Theatre 1737–1782, edited by Julia Swindells and DavidFrancis Taylor, also reviewed in Chapter XII. In his introduction, Taylorstates that the aim of the Handbook is ‘to look and listen for the gaps andsilences in the narratives we inherit’ (p. 2) and this provides the cohesion forthe diverse range of topics examined. The Handbook is organized into eightsections: ‘Theatre, Theory, Historiography’, ‘Legislating Drama’, ‘TheChanging Cultures of Performance’, ‘The Whole Show: Spectacles, Sounds,Spaces’, ‘Genres and Forms’, ‘Theatre and the Romantic Canon’, ‘Womenand the Stage’, and ‘Performing Race and Empire’. Sadly, it is not possible inthe scope of this piece to review all of the relevant chapters that fall under theheading of Romantic drama; the following is therefore a small representationof the excellent contributions made. Betsy Bolton’s engaging chapter‘Theorizing Audience and Spectacle’ examines the different approaches thattheatre historians and media theorists have used in the past, suggesting thatthere are a number of ‘truisms’ which need to be challenged (p. 32), forexample the relationship between the actors and the audience. Particularlyinteresting is Bolton’s discussion of the importance of the persona that thecelebrity actor has created, particularly when associated with prologues andepilogues that ‘are positioned precisely between the intersection between thebourgeoisie public sphere . . . and its ‘‘mass cultural public sphere’’ ’ (p. 42).Marvin Carlson’s chapter ‘Performative Event’ also challenges assumptionsthat have pervaded works about theatre by theatre historians. Carlsondemonstrates how changing methodologies in the arts and humanities haveopened up new possibilities for examining audience and performance. On aslightly different note, Heather McPherson examines ‘the heightened signifi-cance of the actor as cultural icon and artistic commodity’ (p. 192). Shediscusses prints, portraits, and ceramics that represented celebrity actors andactresses playing the roles that they were most associated with. In particularher chapter concentrates on ‘how the image of the actor was culturally re-configured, commodified and metamorphosed into porcelain’ (p. 193). PaulaBackscheider’s chapter, ‘Retrieving Elizabeth Inchbald’, begins with therecognition that Inchbald’s dramatic work, until recently, has been neglected.Backscheider suggests that part of the reason for this neglect is because of the‘unorthodox’ nature of Inchbald’s career, and that ‘to understand it requiresunderstanding of many kinds of theatrical practices of the time’ (p. 604). In herelucidation of Inchbald’s drama, Backscheider examines the relationshipbetween Inchbald and the Haymarket Theatre with Elizabeth Farren as its starand also Inchbald’s afterpieces, farces, adaptations, power balances, and ‘the


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Imperial mind’ (p. 616). Backscheider concludes by stating that we are justbeginning the work on Inchbald’s ‘mastery of theatrical practices’ (p. 618), andindeed it will be an interesting field of study. All in all, this volume is aconsidered, coherent, and excellent resource for students and academics in thisfield.Fiona Ritchie’s chapter ‘Jordan and Siddons: Beyond Thalia and

Melpomene’ is the most relevant chapter for readers of this section in hercompelling study, Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, alsoreviewed in Chapter XII. Ritchie also challenges some preconceived notionsabout Shakespeare which concentrate on the page by examining the role ofwomen, critics, actresses, and audiences in the eighteenth century, all of whomwere part of the reconfiguration of Shakespeare’s reputation across thecentury. In her examinations of the two actresses, Ritchie states that theidentification of Jordan and Siddons as ‘rival muses is restrictive rather thanproductive’ (p. 111), and moreover that the ‘relationship between Jordan andShakespeare’ has not been so clearly acknowledged (p. 134). Ritchie examinesthe identification of Siddons as playing tragic heroines and Jordan as playingbreeches parts. She also points out that there is little acknowledgement ofJordan’s most successful tragic role when she played Ophelia in 1796. This isan important study, and through Ritchie’s re-evaluation of their performanceswe can better understand the careers of these two important eighteenth-century actresses.Continuing the theme of the importance of women in eighteenth-century

theatre is Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr’s essay collection Stage Mothers:Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830, also considered in Chapter XII.The collection is presented in three sections, ‘Actresses, Motherhood, and theProfession of the Stage’, ‘Representations of Mothers on the Stage’, and‘Actresses and Their Children’, and examines ‘the overlaps and disconnectionbetween representations and realities of maternity’ (p. 2). In particular thecollection explores the tensions associated with maternity and motherhood forthe celebrity actress. McGirr and Engel state that the main aim of thecollection is to examine ideas of what it meant to be a woman in the eighteenthcentury and ‘how this shaped female performance’ (p. 7). The collection morethan achieves its aim. Among the many erudite chapters is Elena MalenasLedoux’s ‘Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage’, which concentrates onthe similarities and differences in the approaches taken by Sarah Siddons andMary Robinson in order to create their public personas. Moreover, Ledouxexamines the ways in which each woman adapted her persona as sheresponded to ‘life-changing events and physical alterations, including child-birth, motherhood, aging and illness’ (p. 80). A great strength of this chapter isthat Ledoux does not go over old ground with an examination positionedentirely on the personal lives of each woman; rather, she examines the‘enormous amount of slippage between the real and the theatrical . . . and themany layers of performance and intertextuality that they must negotiate toachieve their desired persona’ (p. 84). Jade Higa’s chapter, ‘My Son, MyLover: Gothic Contagion and Maternal Sexuality in The Mysterious Mother’,examines Horace Walpole’s closet drama written in 1786, although notpublished until 1781. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s concept of Gothic contagion


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and the work of Catherine Spooner, Higa examines the maternal sexuality inThe Mysterious Mother alongside eighteenth-century notions about mother-hood. Higa concludes that, in eighteenth-century terms, ‘the intertwining ofmotherhood and sexuality is monstrous and deviant because it has the abilityto spread through affect’ (p. 192). Other notable essays that are relevant forthis section, include Helen E.M. Brooks’s ‘ ‘‘The Divided Heart of the Actress:Late Eighteenth-Century Actresses and the ‘‘Cult of Maternity’’ ’, JudithHawley’s ‘Elizabeth and Keppel Craven and the Domestic Drama of Mother–Son Relations’, and Laura Engel’s ‘Mommy Diva: The Divided Loyalties ofSarah Siddons’.Texts about Shakespeare endure, and although much of Jean I. Marsden’s

The Re-imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-CenturyLiterary Theory falls outside the remit of this section, the text makes anumber of interesting points which are appropriate, not least because of itspremise that ‘the Restoration and eighteenth century produced one of the mostsubversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring ofShakespeare’s plays’ (p. 1). Moreover Marsden is more interested in thereception of these adaptations rather than a historical examination of theproductions. The text is organized in two parts: Part I, ‘The Re-imaginedText’, which examines adaptations and early criticism of Shakespearian textsand productions, and Part II, ‘Refined from the Dross’, which examines thedecline of adaptation towards the latter part of the eighteenth century.Chapter 5, ‘The Search for a Genuine Text’, is an interesting examination ofthe response to Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition of Shakespeare alongside ‘theother great Shakespearian phenomenon of the 1760s, Garrick’s 1769Shakespeare Jubilee’ (p. 127). Marsden concludes with a discussion of thereasons why so many of the adaptations have disappeared.The final monograph for this section is one that is slightly off-track, but

eminently readable. This is Richard L. Lorenzen’s The History of the Prince ofWales Theatre, London, 1771–1793. The first two chapters which are relevantto this section, outline the beginnings of the Tottenham Street theatre and itsvarious incarnations until it was renamed the Prince of Wales theatre in 1865;it closed in 1882. The text is meticulously researched and the playbills,engravings, photographs, and caricatures provide an enthralling read aboutthe theatrical activity, audiences, popular taste, and the managers of this nowdefunct theatre.The theme of Shakespeare and celebrity is continued in Joseph Roach’s

‘Celebrity Culture and the Problem of Biography’ (SQ 65[2014] 470–81), whichsuggests a correlation between the celebrity status of David Garrick and SarahSiddons and the ‘popular adulation’ of Shakespeare (p. 471). Moreover,Roach argues that ‘the ongoing collaboration by Shakespeare with celebratedactors and producers expands the idea of what constitutes his ‘‘life’’—[and] is amore illuminating part of the playwright’s proper biography than any of theextant Elizabethan or Jacobean documents or portraits, interesting as theymay be as evidence of the period’ (p. 471). To support his argument, Roachexamines letters between British diplomat Sir Charles Hanbury Williams andhis daughters in their discussion of their attendance at theatres and inparticular Garrick’s portrayal of Lear. Roach also examines a series of


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sketches by John Flaxman of actors, such as Sarah Siddons, playingShakespearian roles. Roach concludes his argument by stating that ‘a lifewritten in legal documents and real estate transactions is clearly to suggest itsevanescence’ (p. 481). However, where Shakespeare is concerned, to find theman we should look at the performances of his work.The final journal article reviewed this year is Slaney Chadwick Ross’s

‘Maria Edgeworth’s The Rose, Thistle, and Shamrock: Symbolic Unification,Women’s Education, and the Marriage Plot’ (ECent 55[2014] 377–90). Rossargues that this work, published in Edgeworth’s collection Comic Dramas[1817], ‘is both a re-envisioning of the Irish national tale and a pedagogicaltreatise for young, upper-class Anglo-Irish women’ (p. 377). MoreoverEdgeworth’s play demonstrates her ‘response to a variety of genericinfluences—from closet drama to the national tale to pedagogical theory’(p. 378). Ross discusses the problematic nature of ‘Characteristick Comedy[which] can be at odds with pedagogical performance: the language of contractand moral propriety’ (p. 384). Ross concludes with the assertion that althoughthe play is ‘a minor representative of Edgeworth’s extensive body of work’, it is‘a mighty example of Edgeworth’s championship of an enlarged sphere offemale authority’ (p. 387). Finally, it should be noted that the edition of thecollected works of Ann Yearsley reviewed in Section 3 above also contains avolume of Yearsley’s play, Earl Goodwin (first performed in 1789), madeavailable for the first time since the eighteenth century. It is pleasing to see thiswork in print once again, in this rigorous and intelligently conceived edition.

Books Reviewed

Andrews, Kerri, ed. The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley, 3 vols. P&C. [2014]pp. 1,008. £275 ISBN 9 7818 5196 6387.

Andrews, Kerri, Ann Yearsley, and Hannah More. Patronage and Poetry: TheStory of a Literary Friendship. P&C. [2013] pp. xþ 188. £60 ISBN 9 78184893 1510.

Baines, Paul, ed. The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton. LiverUP. [2014]pp. vii þ 348. £75 ISBN 9 7817 8138 1366.

Barbeau, Jeffrey W. Sara Coleridge: Her Life and Thought. PalMac. [2014]pp. xxþ 227. £57.50 ISBN 9 7811 3732 4979.

Bohls, Elizabeth A. Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the ColonialCaribbean, 1770–1833. CUP. [2014] pp. 288. £60 ISBN 9 7811 0707 9342.

Bugg, John. Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism.StanfordUP. [2014] pp. xii þ 246. $60 ISBN 9 7808 0478 5105.

Burley, Stephen. Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics,1766–1816. PalMac. [2014] pp. 240. £60 ISBN 9 7811 3736 4425.

Clemit, Pamela, ed. The Letters of William Godwin, vol. 2: 1798–1805. OUP.[2014] pp. 472. £100 ISBN 9 7801 9956 2626.

Cochran, Peter. The Burning of Byron’s Memoirs. CambridgeSP. [2014] pp. xivþ 435. £57.99 ISBN 9 7814 4386 8150.


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Cox, Jeffrey N. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in theNapoleonic War Years. CUP. [2014] pp. 296. £60 ISBN 9 7811 0707 1940.

Coyer, Megan J, and David E Shuttleton., eds. Scottish Medicine and LiteraryCulture, 1726–1832. Rodopi. [2014] pp. xiþ 315. £63 ISBN 9 7890 42038912.

Culley, Amy. British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship,Community and Collaboration. PalMac. [2014] pp. viii þ 270. £55 ISBN 97811 3727 4212.

Davies, Jeremy, Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature. Routledge. [2014] pp. 228.£90 ISBN: 9 7804 1584 2914.

Davies, Rebecca. Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-CenturyEducation in Britain: Educating by the Book. Ashgate. [2014] pp. xii þ170. £95 ISBN 9 7814 0945 1686.

De Freitas Boe, Ana, and Abby Coykendall, eds. Heteronormativity inEighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ashgate. [2014] pp. xiii þ 219.£65 ISBN 9 7814 7243 0175.

De Ritter, Richard. Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well-RegulatedMinds. MUP. [2014] pp. 224. £70 ISBN 9 7807 1909 0332.

Dew, Ben, and Fiona Price, eds. Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830:Visions of History. PalMac. [2014] pp. xþ 228. £55 ISBN 9 7811 3733 2639.

Engel, Laura, and Elaine McGirr, eds. Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and theTheater, 1660–1830. BuckUP. [2014] pp. 290. $90 ISBN 9 7816 1148 6032.

Faflak, Joel, and Richard C. Sha, eds. Romanticism and the Emotions. CUP.[2014] pp. xþ 264. $99 ISBN 9 7811 0705 2390.

Farrell, Michael. Blake and the Methodists. PalMac. [2014] pp. xþ 259. £55ISBN 9 7811 3745 5499.

Fermanis, Porscha, and John Regan. Rethinking British Romantic History,1770–1845. OUP. [2014] pp. 352. £60 ISBN 9 7801 9968 7084.

Folsom, Marcia McClintock, and John Wiltshire, eds. Approaches to TeachingAusten’s Mansfield Park. MLA. [2014] pp. 255. $24 (pb) ISBN 9 7816 03291989.

Freeman, Kathryn S. British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal,1785–1835: Re-Orienting Anglo-India. Ashgate. [2014] pp. viii þ 151. £65ISBN 9 7814 7243 0885.

Grande, James. William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism andthe Fourth Estate, 1792–1835. PalMac. [2014] pp. 264. £55 ISBN 9 7811 37380074.

Higgins, David. Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves,1780–1850. PalMac. [2014] pp. 240. £55 ISBN 9 7811 3741 1624.

Houghton-Walker, Sarah. Representations of the Gypsy in the RomanticPeriod. OUP. [2014] pp. 304. £60 ISBN 9 7801 9871 9472.

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XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

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Transcript of XIII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period