XIII
Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Abstract

1. General

Among the most impressive offerings of this year, Jon Klancher’s Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age stands out as a remarkably ambitious piece of historicist scholarship. This impressive multidisciplinary study seeks to illustrate the ‘Romantic turn’ in the ‘arts and sciences’ (p. 1) in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By examining the evolutionary history of the most prominent London institutions founded in this concentrated period, Klancher moderates the perception of Romanticism as a movement characterized by anti-institutionalism, and instead explores the symbiotic relationship between Romantic-era public intellectuals, and the institutions of the age. Chapter 1 ‘pursues the cultural logic of this emergence of public-sphere institutions in the Romantic age by first returning to Defoe’s “Age of Projects” in which even the wildest speculative schemes for profit or fame would call up a corollary response about the risk of such projects for the public weal and the vicissitudes of everyday life’ (p. 29). Klancher then parallels Defoe with Leibniz’s ‘Precepts for Advancing the Sciences and Arts’ [1680], before contrasting this early eighteenth-century paradigm with tendencies within the Scottish Enlightenment. In chapter 2, Klancher argues that we have almost entirely ignored the significant figure of the ‘administrator’ as a necessary facilitator of broader Romantic culture. He focuses on Thomas Bernard’s ‘little-recognized but far-reaching impact on his moment as a keynote in this chapter, since he was the rare figure who was able to traverse both modern fields of artistic and scientific production in a singular and strange career that has usually earned the misleading vocational title of “philanthropist” ’ (p. 52). Here, Klancher illustrates the unexpected way in which core Romantic-era institutions emerged from a contemporary crisis of charitable relief for poverty. Bernard’s co-establishment of the Royal Institution (1805) created a seminal paradigm, such that ‘onward, arts-and-sciences Institutions began appearing all over London, generally on the model of the Royal’ (p. 66). Chapter 3 explores the codification of books in an age of ‘bibliomania’, arguing that, ‘While the new Romantic-age bibliographers were starting to amass a huge if discontinuous database of early modern book knowledge, in service to a wider project of reconfiguring the “arts and sciences,” the more extreme and disorderly practices of the bibliomaniacs were effectively raising the larger question of what a “book” really is’ (p. 87).

Meanwhile, chapter 4 asks ‘how print media have figured into art controversies, which is also to ask how the arts and that kind of argumentative or intellectual exchange we call a “controversy” materializes for a particular public’ (p. 109), focusing on a series of periodic artistic controversies, perhaps most notably the Elgin Marbles debate. Priestley’s discovery of electricity (1767) and William Whewell’s work on induction in the 1830s are the framing chronology for chapter 5, in which Klancher examines the perception of science in the Romantic-era public sphere. This chapter addresses the popularity of Humphry Davy, before moving to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s engagement with the legacy of Hunter’s theories of vitality in the Lawrence–Abernethy controversy. The second part of Klancher’s study focuses particularly on questions of the formation of the category of the ‘literary’, with chapter 6 treating S.T. Coleridge as an embodied institution in his own right: ‘I shall take Coleridge to be the literary republic’s most provocative and perhaps perversely illuminating Romantic historian’ (p. 155). Finally, in chapter 7 Klancher focuses on the dissenting tradition in the broader Godwin–Shelley circle, in particular examining Percy Bysshe Shelley’s rather singular notion of the philosopher-poet as in some sense an ‘institutor’. Klancher concludes his study with the claim that ‘In the mid 1820s an end approached for the vibrant “arts-and-sciences” Institutions of the Romantic age as they began losing their central place in London life’ (p. 223).

Another major publication in Romantic studies is David Simpson’s Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, also reviewed in Section 2. Simpson’s subject is ‘the figure of the stranger and stranger syndrome’ (p. 2), a topic he considers of heightened political and ethical importance in our post-9/11 age. In this respect, Simpson aligns his study with theorists like Todorov, Kristeva, Derrida, Levinas, and other thinkers on alterity. Each chapter of Simpson’s fulsome study is dedicated to a different kind of otherness or strangeness, discovered to be uncomfortably inherent within Romantic culture, as the Enlightenment is compelled to confront the anxiety of irresolvable unknowability. Chapter 1 begins with an expansive overview of forms of prejudice and xenophobia expressed in the late Enlightenment, either in the works of William Wordsworth, Thomas Paine and Helen Maria Williams’s experiences in France, Edmund Burke’s anti-Semitism, or Thomas Jefferson’s resistance to the 1800 Alien Act. Simpson juxtaposes this with the literary archetypes of wanderers like Odysseus and Moses, and Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘universal hospitality’. Chapter 2 is tripartite, addressing the concept of the stranger in Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, Thomas De Quincey’s enigmatic Malay in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and a provoking, Saidian reading of Jane Austen’s Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, and his sublimated connections with the far East and the tea trade. Each case study is revealed as a form of pharmakon: both harmful and healing. In chapter 3, Simpson turns to Walter Scott’s ‘crusader’ novels, especially the Jewish characters, Rebecca and Isaac in Ivanhoe, again as archetypes of the pharmakon. For Simpson, ‘Scott’s Crusader novels, despite their nod toward a potential coming reconciliation … are masterful portrayals of the refusal of hospitality, and they offer a very gloomy account of the consequences of that refusal’ (p. 108). Simpson’s curious chapter 4 thematizes the idea of lengthy, scholarly, and over-determined footnotes in Robert Southey’s oriental romance Thalaba. Here Simpson muses that ‘Perhaps it is only now, in the light of a professional responsiveness to questions of globalism, diversity and postcoloniality, and under pressure from a history now commonly perceived as one of racism and imperialism, that we might be driven to speculate about the significance of Robert Southey’s footnotes’ (p. 112). Chapter 5 is concerned with translation theory, thinking through Derrida and Ricoeur to read Friedrich Schleiermacher, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and S.T. Coleridge. Chapter 6 contemplates Romantic-era slavery, the legacy of Oroonoko, Captain James Cook’s diaries, and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Here, Simpson finds that ‘Hospitality and affection (sometimes erotic) extended and betrayed are core components of the literature of slavery’ (p. 186). Simpson’s seventh and final chapter turns to the issue of gender, and female alterity in the Romantic period. Focusing on Sydney Owenson, Madame de Staël, and Fanny Burney, Simpson considers representations of women purposively rendered strange and other, arguing that ‘the dreary history of male efforts to preserve power over females and thereby over their own maleness produces countless examples of how easy it has been to associate women with the threatening and potentially revisionary category of the stranger’ (p. 209). This is a serious and impressive piece of scholarly criticism, with breadth and ambition, but also an admirable underpinning coherence.

A really enjoyable contribution to this year’s publications is Ian Haywood’s multidisciplinary Romanticism and Caricature. As one might expect, this contains some terrific cartoons, caricatures, and illustrations throughout. Haywood posits that ‘somewhere near the heart of caricature’s proliferating layers of intertextual and intervisual meaning is the self-reflexive “signature” of the caricaturist, a visual imprint of the point at which history passes over into fantasy and phantasia through the transforming agency of the satirical imagination’ (p. 5). Each chapter in Haywood’s monograph addresses a specific caricature of a distinctive Romantic-era figure, or event, and traces the archaeology of intermingled textual and visual allusions encoded in each print, reinforcing his claim that ‘these influences are nearly always intermingled with the frisson of sensationalist motifs drawn from both traditional and newer cultural sources’ (p. 6). In this way, Haywood argues that ‘by treating a range of single prints in the same detailed manner in which we look at paintings or literary texts, [he] hope[s] to throw new light on caricature’s aesthetic and ideological complexity, and by doing so raise its status within Romantic studies’ (p. 8).

Chapter 1 begins with a reading of James Gillray’s notorious Sin, Death and the Devil [1792], which depicts Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, Lord Chancellor Thurlow, and Queen Charlotte in their respective characters, in a scene of confrontation which alludes to Milton’s depictions of Hell in Paradise Lost, Book II. Focusing on the grotesque portrayal of Queen Caroline, Haywood opines that ‘In an echo of Sin’s appalling story, caricature can be regarded as the monstrously productive offspring of corrupt power, continually releasing its fearsome litter into the cultural bloodstream’ (p. 14). Chapter 2 also features another cartoon by Gillray—his Midas: Transmuting all into [Gold] [1797], juxtaposed with George Cruikshank and William Hone’s satirical Bank Restriction Note [1819], in a discussion about the circulation of currency and the national debt. In a culture of literary and financial forgery, Haywood finds that ‘Romantic-period anxieties about authenticity and value achieved a form of visual apotheosis through the “formidable” power of the caricaturist’ (p. 35). Chapter 3 discusses Gillray as an uneasy collaborator with the forces of conservative reaction, arguing that ultimately Gillray became disillusioned with government endeavours to curb civil liberties: ‘the print which Gillray produced for the climactic moment of the offensive against “secret” societies—his intriguingly entitled Exhibition of a Democratic Transparency—is actually an attack on the abuse of state power and the manipulation of public opinion’ (p. 58).

In chapter 4, Thomas Rowlandson’s The Two Kings of Terror satirizes the rise of the ‘spectral tyrant’ Napoleon Bonaparte through the archaic motif of the ‘dance of death’: ‘Cruikshank’s Monument to Napoleon is therefore a “monument” to the artist’s own career which created this monster in all its mock glory, and in reviving this creature Cruikshank was also peering back nostalgically at his own achievements’ (p. 77). Drawing upon Derrida’s reading of Marx, Haywood’s fifth chapter appropriates the term ‘spectropolitics’ to discuss the phenomenon of Romantic ‘infidelism’ and Cruikshank’s The Age of Reason [1819], in which Paine becomes a phantasmal ‘Jacobinised Moses’ (p. 103), stalking the post-Waterloo political settlement. Chapter 6 addresses Hone and Cruikshanks’ remarkably popular A Slip at Slop, in the context of the Queen Caroline affair, the Convention of Cintra, and the Spanish Revolution. Finally, chapter 7 marks the end of the ‘golden age’ of political caricature in the early 1830s, through the ‘triumph of bourgeois political and economic ideology, the proto-Victorian hegemony of respectability and the rise of the illustrated periodical and “family” reading’ (p. 141). Haywood’s final case study is William Heath and Charles Jameson Grant’s satire of Henry Hunt’s speech in the Commons in their Matchless Eloquence [1831].

Alexander Dick’s Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 is an unusual, but impressively erudite and historically nuanced study that ‘takes seriously the idea that the logical contradictions, social inequalities, and variable meaning of money were absorbed into the cultural fabric of British society after the introduction of the gold standard in 1816’ (p. 3). One of the most likeable aspects of Dick’s monograph is the trouble he takes to explain complicated economic phenomena, and their social impact, to a readership that might otherwise struggle with such complex fiscal matters. In chapter 1, Dick delineates his thesis, centred on ‘the transformation of two affective registers common to the economic and literary writing of the Romantic period and instrumental to the formulation of the standard. These are confidence and embarrassment’ (p. 18). Dick’s second chapter addresses the ‘bullion controversy’, an event caused by heightened economic activity in the 1780s and 1790s, but also by a crisis of empire through endemic corruption. This crisis saw the Bank of England (then still a private entity), brought into tension with the government for refusing to provide liquid funds for the ongoing wars with France. It galvanized radicals in their opposition to national debt, and centred economics as a topic of public debate within the periodic press. This elicited scatological cartoons from James Gillray, and debates in the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s about the merits of Ricardian economic theory.

Chapter 3 addresses the controversial concept of paper money, and is anchored around S.T. Coleridge’s attempts to formalize a relationship between Anglican Toryism and economic exchange. As Dick observes ‘Writers as different as William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and F.D. Maurice combined Coleridge’s metaphysics and Ricardian materialism to delineate a standard that was neither strictly commercial nor wholly theological’ (p. 75). Conservatives like Coleridge found themselves in conflict with radicals like Cobbett over the circulation of paper money. The motif of the banknote is extended in chapter 4, which draws direct connections between the phenomena of monetary and literary forgery, emblematized in Cruikshank’s and Hone’s famous satirical cartoon of a banknote. The chapter then centres upon the broader Shelley circle, with Leigh Hunt and P.B. Shelley both opposed to paper money in The Examiner and The Mask of Anarchy, in comparison to Keats’s more commercially savvy and liberal advice to Shelley to load his verses with ‘ore’ (p. 137). Finally, chapter 5 focuses on novels about financial vicissitudes by Austen, Scott, and Edgeworth, all of whom experienced debt on some personal level, or through their families:

Scott’s and Austen’s experiments with narrative form represent important instances of how writing about money could straddle the divide and negotiate the tension between local and, increasingly, modern modes of monetary exchange, which enshrined the regional differences within Britain, and a classical mode of economic, historical, and aesthetic discourse that sought to subordinate these differences, which they regarded as unruly, shallow, primitive, and potentially dangerous. (p. 153)

This excellent study achieves the daunting task of bringing economic and literary discourse into dialogue with great success.

A beautifully written, critically attuned, and engaging work is Mark Sandy’s Romanticism, Memory and Mourning. The focus of Sandy’s monograph is not ‘a psychopathology of Romantic grief, but an attempt to trace the varying degrees to which Romantic poetic forms of memory and mourning offer consolation for some kind of retrospective (and proleptic) loss only to call these consolatory modes into question’ (p. 2). His first chapter ranges across William Blake’s early poetry, through to The Book of Los, on which he argues that: ‘As Blake recognized, human consciousness must come to terms with, at the level of the particular and the physical, as well as the universal and the personal, the reality that love is the cause of unremitting “bitter grief”, as those things which are most cherished will, eventually, be lost to us’ (p. 31). Moving to Wordsworth, chapter 2 ‘addresses those elements at work within Wordsworth’s writing which complicate and disrupt his consolatory vision of a circulation of grief, and for all its avowals of transcendence, permanence, and metaphysical communion, the poetry is drawn repeatedly to demystify its own consolations, revealing a contingent reality of absence, fragmentation, transience, and broken relations’ (p. 33). This chapter engages predominantly with the Lyrical Ballads, and ‘Michael’ in particular. In chapter 4, Sandy ‘reads Coleridge’s conversational poetics as imagining dialogue and communion only to turn in upon themselves to reveal the ingenious imagination of a solitary speaker’ (p. 47). Charlotte Smith and Felicia Hemans are the focus of chapter 5, where Sandy states that: ‘Allowing for stylistic, tonal, and thematic differences between them, the elegiac poetics of Smith and Hemans both transcend questions of gender through their treatment of personal loss and self-consuming grief and their distinctive shaping and reimagining of those pressing attendant Romantic preoccupations with artistic bequest, cultural legacy, and posthumous reputation’ (p. 77). Chapter 5 illustrates that ‘Byron’s poetry reveals a complex, and complicating, relation between biography and public record, between personal memory and public monument, and between poetic artistry and the writing of history’ (p. 79). Shifting between Childe Harold (I, II, and IV), the ‘Oriental Tales’ and Manfred, Sandy postulates that ‘Even if Byron’s poetic fiction can imaginatively preserve the glories of Greece, Rome, and Venice for posterity, nothing, Byron recognises in darker moments, can prevent the obliterating effects of time and the public annals of history that ensure those living witness “each lov’d one blotted from life’s page” ’ (p. 95).

P.B. Shelley’s ‘Potential moments of poetic vision and transformation are haunted by an awareness of loss and grief that returns us from the possibilities of transcendence and revelation to a confrontation with the limitations of poetry and our own contingent existences’ (p. 97) in chapter 6, where Sandy engages with Epipsychidion and Adonais. Keats is the subject of chapter 7, transitioning between the early poetry, Isabella, Hyperion, and the odes, to argue that ‘Keats’s negatively capable poetic works of mourning record universal loss on the most particular, discrete, and minute levels of existence, recognizing both the external effects of grief and its internally affective states’ (p. 116). Chapter 8 ‘explores how [John] Clare’s close observations of the minutiae of natural processes and transience of existence remind us that landscapes of love readily translate into landscapes of mourning’ (p. 132). Sandy’s final chapter explores the continuation of Keatsian motifs of loss in Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.B. Yeats.

This year produced a rich crop of studies of aspects of the Gothic in the Romantic era. One of the best of these is Angela Wright’s Britain, France, and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror (also reviewed below), which has several chapters of specific interest for Romanticists. Wright argues that ‘The Gothic genre’s very tangled origins come to reveal a long-standing reciprocity between England and France that belies military and political hostilities’ (p. 11). Her study engages with ‘the questions of how, when and why certain French authors were invoked by certain English Gothic novelists’ (p. 11). This tells us ‘much about the authors’ ambivalent responses to military tensions, and to the pressures which they came under (particularly in the 1790s) to lay aside their reciprocity’ (p. 11). Chapter 3 examines the place of the Gothic in the British responses to the French Revolution, and the atrocities committed against the Roman Catholic clergy. It focuses on the relationship between an anonymous article entitled ‘The Terrorist Novel’, and the pejorative association of British radicals—such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft—with the ‘terrorist system’ (p. 67) of Gothic melodrama. Chapter 4 examines the Gothic writings of Ann Radcliffe, focusing ‘on her hitherto underestimated continental literary heritage, the nationalist self-fashioning that she undertook to mask this heritage, and the particular implications of her sustained romance with France both for reading her romances, and for judging her “imitators” such as Maria Regina Roche, and Eleanor Sleath’ (p. 90). Wright demonstrates convincingly how Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest is inspired by numerous French sources, and operates as a critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile. Wright’s fifth chapter explores ‘textual aporias’ in Matthew Lewis’s prefatory material to The Monk, which she finds ‘indicative of the change in perceptions of French texts by 1796’ (p. 124) as Lewis seeks to distance himself from French sources. Yet Wright argues against the perception of Lewis as unequivocally conservative, reading him through the influence of the Marquis de Sade to argue that ‘the view of Lewis’s loyalty and his objective distance from the revolution becomes all the more difficult to sustain if we consider Lewis’s career beyond his 1796 publication of The Monk’ (p. 132). Wright concludes this interesting study with an afterword on the problematic nature of national identities in Scott’s nationalistic Gothic novels.

Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834 ‘charts how the political power of gothic writing stems from a spirited exchange between authors and consumers through the medium of a recognizable set of aesthetic conventions’ (p. 2). Drawing upon Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s paradigm of the ‘culture industry’, Ledoux argues that Gothic texts mask dominant ideologies through processes of naturalization. Yet she also claims that ‘Gothic texts encourage political activism in manifold ways’ (p. 5). Several chapters here are of interest to Romantic critics. In her second chapter, Ledoux seeks to modify the perception of spaces within Gothic novels as monolithically hyper-patriarchal, which, while not emancipatory, are more varied than has been countenanced hitherto: ‘by showing how women writing in the novel, play, and the bluebook genres represent Gothic interiors as sites of women’s oppression and potential empowerment, [she] trace[s] a rich and nuanced public dialogue occurring between authors and readers about what the meaning of those symbolically loaded spaces is’ (p. 59). Chapter 2 negotiates the pedagogical tension between Godwin’s dry moral philosophy in Political Justice and his florid Gothic romance St Leon. Godwin’s novel has been somewhat overlooked, and Ledoux argues that ‘His ambitious deployment of Gothic conventions reveals their robust potential to shape debate about important issues such as population pressure and inflation’ (p. 125). Chapter 5 investigates how the slave-plantation-owning Lewis ‘deploys Gothic motifs to construct elaborate structures of containment, which create rhetorical safety zones in which his play and journal explore the moral and practical problems of slavery’ (p. 158).

Romanticists may be interested in numerous chapters in Margarita Georgieva’s The Gothic Child, a study that traces Gothic representations of children and childhood from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto through to modern films. For Georgieva, the emergence and development of the Gothic also produced a new vision of the child. She maintains that her purpose in this book is ‘not to find and examine the subdivisions and undercurrents of the gothic but to bring unity and coherence into it by defining a common characteristic within the genre’ (p. xii). There is perhaps a sense of an underlying weakness in the lack of a very cogent, clear argument and rationale for this study, although it does compensate somewhat with some rather pleasing discrete readings and observations interspersed throughout. Chapter 1 begins a little slowly and unpromisingly, with an etymological discussion of the fact that ‘child’ rarely refers literally to children in early Gothic novels. Some of the framing commentary upon the character of children in Gothic novels is at times a little prosaic. Georgieva maintains that ‘Gothic children are images of their parents and inherit the parents’ past, their features and characters as well as their curses and their sins’ (p. 23). Chapter 2 has perhaps more to offer, with an intriguing set of parallels between childhood and the evolution of the Gothic novel as a sort of enfant terrible of the Romantic era, as

The crudeness and simplicity of gothic are linked to infancy as a notion which evokes new beginnings. Rusticity and the peasant, as well as the modest abode, are the attributes of a child-like adult figure in gothic. Likewise, the unpolished gothic narrative, the ‘most feeble attempt’ of the author ‘to excite awe or terror’ with all its ‘incongruities’ is linked to the infancy of a text. (p. 63)

The subject of chapter 3 is the Gothic’s attempt to ‘explain the phenomenon of parents rejecting, hating, abandoning and killing their offspring’ (p. 65). For this purpose, Georgieva engages with Lewis’s Monk, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya in their depictions of uneasy rituals surrounding childhood. Chapter 4 continues with readings of The Monk and Melmoth which orientate themselves around the child’s ambivalent location between the Christian concepts of salvation and original sin. In chapter 5, Georgieva considers the political symbolism in the wake of the French Revolution under the various auspices of monarchism, imperialism, and Burkean conservatism.

Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s collection of essays EcoGothic, draws upon the influence of Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology to argue for ‘a new way of thinking about the Gothic’ that ‘indicate[s] the way in which it engages with a major pressing political issue that confronts the world today’ (p. 13). Two chapters have significance here for Romanticists. Lisa Kröger addresses the eighteenth-century novel, focusing on Walpole’s Otranto and Radcliffe’s Udolpho, to argue that: ‘The Gothic ecology, then, seems to be one that suggests it is best for humanity and nature to live harmoniously with one another, though it may be the human counterpart that suffers most if that relationship is severed’ (p. 26). Meanwhile, Catherine Lanone explores the early nineteenth-century culture of Arctic exploration through the disastrous exploration of Sir John Franklin, which she reads in relation to the seminal Gothic fictions of Mary Shelley, John Polidori, and S.T. Coleridge.

Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik’s edited collection Gothic Kinship presents a series of essays that start ‘from the assumption that Gothic fiction is a key site where sociocultural figurations of the family are negotiated’. Their volume ‘aims to analyse how Gothic figurations of kinship both contest and reinforce orthodox notions of the nuclear family’ (p. 2). In her chapter, Kamilla Elliot ‘examines various ways in which first-wave British Gothic fiction ties matriarchal picture identification to bourgeois ideology to delimit, undermine and reform aristocratic ideology’ (p. 12). Meanwhile, Joanne Watkiss reads Lewis’s Monk and Dacre’s Zofloya against the contemporary Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry [2009], arguing that ‘In all of these families explored here, the familiar, the linear, and the domestic are revealed to be fragile constructions, demonstrating that the family unit is based on insecure foundations’ (p. 158).

Sam George and Bill Hughes’s edited collection, Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, presents a series of essays on the Gothic subject of vampirism throughout the ages, whose early sections have relevance for scholars of the long eighteenth century. George and Hughes delineate how ‘the vampire was originally, and for a short while only, an Eastern European folk panic which came under critical scrutiny by philosophes of the metropole, was adapted by them in turn as critical metaphor; then rose again as a literary motif, an inhabitant of Gothic fictions reacting against the Enlightenment’ (p. 7). This dynamic first emerged in the 1790s (albeit obliquely) in writers like Holcroft. Conrad Aquilina’s chapter traces the evolution of John Polidori’s The Vampyre from a blend of eastern European folk mythology, and from his personal dealings with Lord Byron: ‘Vampire literature remains indebted to Polidori for ushering in a new archetype, one that would be further embellished and revised by his many successors’ (p. 32).

In Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and ‘Race’, P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen present a volume of essays whose aim is to ‘move the compass and look more closely at the canonized continuum of Gothic fiction from the perspective of a different geographic and cultural variety’ (p. 1). This interdisciplinary and transnational study has a couple of chapters of potential interest to Romanticists. Henrik Van Gorp’s chapter (much like Angela Wright’s monograph) examines the relationship between early British Gothic novels by Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis and ‘other traditions in fantasy literature, especially in France’ (p. 13). Bridgett M. Marshall’s chapter addresses narratology in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, arguing that Godwin’s narrative structure presses the reader into political contemplation: ‘Godwin’s reality-based, yet fictional world allows the reader to step back and determine judgement not on a real individual, but on a fictional being. Standing outside the fictional world, the reader can do what Godwin wished every man to do: freely exercise his private judgement’ (pp. 43–4).

The study of various different notions of community was conspicuous in this year’s publications. Foremost among these was Mary Fairclough’s impressive, scholarly The Romantic Crowd, Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, which ‘makes the case that during the Romantic period, sympathy was understood as a disruptive social phenomenon which functioned to spread disorder and unrest between individuals and even across nations like “contagion” ’ (p. 1). Although interested to trace historical theories and paradigms of the individual, subjective experience of sympathy, at the heart of this study is the ambivalent concept of ‘collective sympathy’ which ‘disrupts understandings of autonomous, unitary selfhood, and breaks down distinctions between empirical and speculative enquiry’ (p. 5). Central to Fairclough’s argument is the claim that ‘Over the course of the Romantic period, sympathy becomes more often associated with the press than with the physical crowd, which seems to suggest that textual protest rather than collective assembly is increasingly considered the more powerful agent of reform’ (p. 10).

Chapter 1 considers the evolution of theories of sympathy in the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, especially in the works of David Hume and Adam Smith. Yet, despite the Enlightenment zeal for classification, Fairclough demonstrates that ‘Sympathy’s resistance to categorization is a crucial element of its pervasive and at times disorderly social application’ (p. 22). She illustrates the way in which sympathy is less a distinct emotion or a mental faculty, and more a malleable vehicle or ‘dynamic medium of communication’ and exchange (p. 47). In particular, this chapter describes how both Smith and Hume, the most celebrated philosophical advocates of sensibility, were alarmed by the ‘contagion’ of undirected, indiscriminate, collective sympathy. Chapter 2 discusses the aftermath of the French Revolution, where it focuses on conceptions of sympathy from Burke, H.M. Williams, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and John Thelwall. Fairclough finds that ‘While Williams, Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Thelwall all declare support for revolution in France and for political reform in Britain, the instinctive behaviour of collectives they describe in their analyses of sympathy proves a test of the limits of their support for democratic representation’ (pp. 60–1). Thelwall emerges as something of the hero of this chapter, as he ‘demonstrates how instinctive sympathy can form the foundation of charity and potentially of other beneficial processes’ (p. 113).

Chapter 3 engages with popular agitation in the periodic press post-Waterloo ‘because these writings share a sense of contingency, of topical response to often unprecedented events, which throws their internal tensions into sharp focus’ (p. 125). Here Fairclough turns her gaze upon William Hazlitt, Godwin, Henry Hunt, and Richard Carlisle—especially in their various responses to popular outrage at the Peterloo massacre. In contrast, chapter 4 engages with Hazlitt, De Quincey, the artist David Wilkie, and the philosopher Dugald Stewart, all of whom ‘make the case that sympathy can be seen as a medium not of unrest but rather of a cohesive patriotic spirit’ (p. 167) in the post-Waterloo firmament. This is a highly impressive book.

Another core volume within this group is Simon J. White’s Romanticism and the Rural Community, which argues that ‘the small rural community was the principal battleground for many of the participants’ (p. 1) in the culture wars of the 1790s, and beyond. While metropolitanism has received a good deal of recent critical interest, White finds that the ideal of the rural community is at the heart of Romantic-era political theory and polemic. His study is ‘an intervention in the debate about how we consider Romantic poetry in the context of the interaction between the physical and the socio-economic landscape of Britain’ (p. 12). Chapter 1 explores the ideological tussles over the figure of the rural cottager for political ends in the writings of Thelwall, Thomas Spence, Hannah More, and the Francophile Arthur Young. In an age of enclosures and industrial urbanization, curiously these writers ‘envisage the expansion of the cottager class, even onto the fringes of towns and cities, as a new solution to a perceived social and political crisis’ (p. 40). Chapter 2 explores Wordsworth’s notion of rural community in Adventures on Salisbury Plain, ‘Michael’, The Prelude, and The Excursion. A clear problem facing this chapter is that its subject matter would quite easily encompass a monograph in its own right, and as it is, White’s argument becomes too diffuse when spread over such a terrain of rich and lengthy poetry. Nevertheless, White finds that ‘For Wordsworth local identity was an ideal to be striven for and protected’ but ‘He was less clear about what produced it, and what caused it to be eroded’ (p. 77).

The subject of chapter 3 is the figure of the gentleman farmer in Austen’s fiction, especially Emma, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, where ‘The gentry’s abnegation of their duty to those who depend on the land for a living, both farmers and labouring people, would have serious consequences for the social infrastructure of rural communities’ (p. 100). Chapter 4 argues that George Crabbe’s metaphors of nature and community present ‘a countryside in which the certainty provided by [the] old organic world order has been disrupted’ (p. 102). Crabbe saw that it was impossible to ‘reinvent the past in a changing world, and his poetry points to modern social structures, dependent upon institutions rather than special individuals or an out-dated paternalistic mind-set’ (p. 122). White’s fifth chapter explores Burns’s sense of egalitarian community as a peasant-landholding poet, and parallels this with Robert Bloomfield, who was ‘interested in how farm service structured the identity of labouring people’ (p. 135), and Clare’s divided sense of community: ‘Clare represents the end of the process of disconnection, and the naissance of a kind of English village apartheid’ (p. 153). Finally, chapter 6 focuses on Ebenezer Elliott’s The Village Patriarch [1829], and The Splendid Village, which see the encroachment of the middle class upon the sphere of the village, which had hitherto been characterized solely by rustic, peasant culture. White concludes with some presentist comparisons between nineteenth-century agrarianism and David Cameron’s rhetoric of the ‘Big Society’.

Katey Castellano’s The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837 is also a study deeply interested in political theories of community and how they impact upon ecological and conservationist thought. As she argues persuasively, our contemporary perception of conservatism is tinged by the hegemony of neoliberalism, and thus we find it difficult to reconcile conservatism with conservation. And yet as Hazlitt understood, the anti-capitalism at the heart of Burke’s conservatism had important ideological ramifications for the culture of Romanticism. As Castellano observes: ‘British Romantic conservatism, however, emerged in reaction against capitalist modernity every bit as much as its leftist counterpart’ (p. 2), and so she seeks to avoid binaries of left and right wing, or monarchism and republicanism, in favour of liberal individualism versus conservative traditionalism. Chapter 1 addresses Burke’s Reflections, where Castellano finds that ‘Burkean conservatism articulates a social ecology that views the human place in the natural world as embodied and reciprocal rather than as rational and dominant’ (p. 16). Wordsworth is the subject of chapter 2, viewed through the genealogy of ecological criticism after Jonathan Bate. ‘We Are Seven’, the Essays on Epitaphs, and ‘The Brothers’ are at the heart of Castellano’s reading, and she concludes with an analysis of ‘Michael’.

Chapter 3 engages with Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, with some beautiful reproductions of his woodcuts, and insightful readings of his taxonomy of nature. Castellano’s fourth chapter addresses conservation and catastrophe in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish tales where: ‘The reflexive regionalism … advocates an ethos of cultural and environmental conservation that seeks to address the continuing attritional catastrophes of social discord and environmental mismanagement on estates in Ireland’ (p. 111). Castellano’s sixth and concluding chapter discusses Clare’s ‘various identifications with non-human life’ which ‘transform the conservative vision of returning to the past into an environmental ethics of “neglect” … that images … “a world without us” that opposes the privatization and improvement of common life’ (p. 144).

Susanne Schmid displays a very different form of community in her scholarly British Literary Salons of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, which constitutes a piece of highly impressive archival research. This study is centred upon three case studies of three different salons, each central to the culture of its specific period. These are Marry Berry’s drawing rooms, the ‘Whig hotbed’ Holland House, and Lady Blessington’s circle. Schmid situates the emergence of the British salon at the confluence of two different traditions: the decline of the French salon, and the rise of British bluestocking culture. An interesting methodological problem facing Schmid’s thesis is the importance of conversation to salon culture—an ephemeral, evanescent medium that frequently eludes record. Schmid’s impressive archival archaeology seeks to reconstruct this conversational milieu from a patchwork of texts: ‘If most conversations are irretrievably lost or survive only in the form of condensed diary entries, have left traces in poems, travelogues, and newspaper articles, salon guests, in contrast, can be tracked down more easily, and their biographies can be established’ (p. 97). Moreover, Schmid demonstrates how the salon occupies a liminal space between feminine and masculine, and public and private sphere, challenging the enduring dominance of Habermas’s ‘Public Sphere’.

Having addressed the evolution of the salon in her first chapter, Schmid’s second and third chapters address the conservative, feminist socialite Mary Berry as her first case study. Berry moved within the elderly Walpole’s circle at Strawberry Hill, kept copious notebooks of her continental travels, and staged an unsuccessful play, Fashionable Friends [1801], at Drury Lane. Although considered by de Stäel as ‘by far the cleverest woman in Britain’, Schmid finds Berry a Romantic who ‘simply vanished’: ‘In the case of Berry, one central reason for posthumous oblivion is the lack of openly acknowledged authorship’ (p. 69). Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to Holland House, the political centre of Whig sociability, which venerated both Charles James Fox and Napoleon Bonaparte. The Holland House circle was closely affiliated to the Whig Edinburgh Reviewer, and hosted such liberal artists as Samuel Rogers, Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, and his erstwhile lover Lady Caroline Lamb. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Countess Blessington and her circle in the 1820s and 1830s. Lady Blessington rose from humble origins through her marriage, and self-fashioned her social capital through this ‘aristocratic status’ (p. 123). Her The Conversations of Lord Byron [1832–3] commemorated the lately deceased Byron, while her epistolary novel The Victims of Society [1837] turns a sad eye on the negative and disturbing aspects of her ‘silver fork’ milieu. This is an impressive body of research, which opens a new sphere within Romantic metropolitan and cosmopolitan culture.

Complementing these analyses of community, there was also a wide variety of publications on the broad subjects of travel, location, landscape, the picturesque, and the sublime. Paul Smethurst’s Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 is a very enthusiastic book, packed with a wide display of scholarly knowledge on his subject. It has a very ambitious sweep, and perhaps attempts rather more than it can satisfactorily accomplish. For what is a relatively short book it endeavours to address far too many sub-topics in a variety of dense, but short, chapters. Even the topic of ‘travel writing’ is not qualified, distilled, and restricted to a particular nation or locale, but rather treated at a global level. Chapter 1 deploys Foucault’s analysis of Enlightenment taxonomy and ordering, and Clifford Geertz’s anthropological ‘thick reading’ to mid-century systematizers, including Cuvier, Buffon, Linnaeus, and Humboldt. Chapter 2 predominantly centres on the diaries of Cook, and argues that ‘The desire to impose order on nature and seek analogies between nature and society had particular significance at a time of revolution, colonization and class division’ (p. 67). Chapter 3 segues between tourism at Fingal’s Cave in the Hebrides, Cook’s exploration of Dusky Bay in New Zealand, and the aesthetic and political ethnography of Joseph Banks’s and J.R. Watson’s readings of tropical islands.

Showing the monograph’s impressive internationalist credentials to their best effect, chapter 4 addresses the scientific pioneer Alexander Von Humboldt in the milieu of German Romantic Naturphilosophie, arguing that ‘Humboldt’s aim was to produce a space in which the interconnection of natural forces and aspects of nature become[s] apparent, and to show how these interact through unseen dynamics to produce what appears to the naked eye as calm, serene equilibrium’ (p. 108). Chapter 5 discusses how Johnson and Boswell’s Hebrides sojourn revealed Britain to be a surprisingly divided island nation. Chapter 6 discusses the picturesque in the works of Gilpin and Thomas Gray, and finds that the picturesque ‘encouraged privileged metropolitan excursionists in England to fetishize the countryside and to forge a geographical sense of nationhood through idealized forms of nature’ (p. 152). Chapter 7 relates the sublime landscape of the Alps to feminine motifs in Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Radcliffe’s Udolpho. Chapter 8 moves from Wordsworth’s anxieties about tourism in the Lake District to a discussion of his metaphysical realization that ‘In his Guide to the Lakes … detailed localisation seems to organize the sublime in the landscape for the traveller as though it were intrinsic to nature’ (p. 180). Finally, chapter 9 discusses the disappearance of natural landscape through the processes of urbanization and industrialization in the writings of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, before turning to Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Going on a Journey’. From the profusion of chapters, their often rather unrelated content, and the lack of a coherent narrative linking the transition between sections, it is rather difficult to discern an undergirding thesis to this monograph.

Sebastian Mitchell’s Visions of Britain, 1730–1830: Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation merits a brief mention here, as its sixth and final chapter engages with Scott. Mitchell approaches the topic of Anglo-Scottish writing and representation ‘through the notion of vision, as a particular focus on the pictorial qualities of the works under consideration, and as a means of examining how such images are used specifically and generally, personally and publicly, favourably and unfavourably to project the nation in both accord and discord’ (p. 5). Chapter 6 focuses on Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, arguing that ‘If the Lay offers a compendium of Romantic expression, then it is also a poem which declares its status as distinctive British artefact by rooting its action in national antagonisms’ (p. 200). Mitchell then turns his gaze to J.M.W. Turner, many of whose paintings he finds to be in dialogue with Scott’s vision of the relationship between old and new, the mythic past, and the emergence of new cities.

In Evan Gottlieb and Juliet Shields’s edited collection Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830: From Local to Global (also reviewed in Chapter XII), the contributors endeavour to break with the Shaftesburyan, Smithean, and Burkean models of small concentric circles of affinity, and instead of embracing ‘a single and inevitably limiting theoretical framework for discussing the formation of local, national, and trans-national identities, the essays … explore the formation of community and the construction of place and space in terms largely derived from eighteenth-century writers themselves’ (p. 2). Part III of this volume is dedicated to Romanticism, and contains three essays of interest. Engaging with the Romantic topos of responses to industry, urbanization, and enclosure, Penny Fielding’s chapter reads Anna Seward’s poem ‘Colebrook Dale’, in which ‘the native purity of the river is “usurpt” by the Cyclops of the iron industry’ (p. 139), and argues that ‘the river comes to be rewritten as part of nature against its co-option into industrial Britain, and becomes the focus of the local as a place of affect, sheltering the subject from impersonal space’ (p. 139). JoEllen DeLucia also reads Seward in her chapter, but here focusing on the importance of the vernacular in Seward’s Lichfield poems. She juxtaposes her reading of Seward with an overlooked member of her circle, Francis Mundy, the author of Needwood Forest. DeLucia claims that ‘Seward’s extensive knowledge of British literature, as well as her position as the leader of an important coterie of provincial writers, makes Needwood Forest significant for discussions of eighteenth-century local poetry’ (p. 156). Finally, Deirdre Lynch reads Austen’s English idylls in parallel with those described by Mary Russell Mitford in the early to mid twentieth century.

In a special edition of Romanticism, Damien Walford Davies and Tim Fulford edit a collection of essays on the subject of the Wye Valley. In ‘Romanticism’s Wye’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 115–25) Davies and Fulford argue that ‘The valley revealed itself to be not only a palimpsest in which various “pasts” could be scrutinized, but also a charged site for self-interrogation and layered psychogeography’ (p. 115). More particularly ‘the Wye became a paradigmatic space of proscription for radicals in the late 1790s, haunted by various historical avatars, some of whom had shaded into myth’ (p. 117), a topic that recurs in this collection of essays. In ‘ “Crewable” Jones and the Sociable Pleasures of Riding and Rowing the Oxford and the “Old Carmarthen”; or How Circuiteers Invented Tourism’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 126–37), Michael J. Franklin examines the works of the barrister and orientalist William Jones, derived from his journey from Oxford on a tour of the Wye Valley. Franklin links the etymology of ‘lawyer’ with the Wye, paralleling legal circumlocutions with the meandering river. For Franklin, Jones is a Baconian figure, seeking to establish the foundational legal liberties of the individual: ‘If Jones was watering the floral borders of paradisal Wales from the fountain of justice, Wales and its borders were reciprocally refreshing him’ (p. 131). Centring his article on a reading of Jones’s touristic letters, Franklin concludes that ‘the rocky jurists/tourists of the Wye recall the difficulties of balancing prospects, patronage and principles, and the dangers of rocking the boat of sociability’ (p. 135).

C.S. Matheson’s ‘Charles Heath and the Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey’ (Romanticism 19 [2013] 138–52) examines Charles Heath, the bookseller, antiquarian, historian, travel writer, and ‘philosophical librarian’, who was a partial influence upon Coleridge’s plans for Pantisocracy. This article evaluates ‘Heath’s contribution to Tintern Abbey tourism by examining the circumstances—cultural, biographical and bibliographical—that gave rise to the first printed guide available at the ruins’ (p. 139).

In ‘The Imperial Wye’ (Romanticism 19 [2013] 153–62) Elizabeth Mjelde argues that ‘Gilpin’s published musings along the Wye provided an effective lens through which his imitators could envision an expanding empire as the British contended with the Dutch and Sinhalese for political, economic, and cultural dominance of the island’ (p. 153). Her article focuses on the relationship between picturesque aesthetics, and their instrumentality for British imperialism through the example of the colonization of Ceylon. For Mjelde, ‘The picturesque seen in this way, that is, as a practice crucial to the processes of re-construction, partial presence, and new history required for an island in the Indian Ocean to become a British colony, is itself a form of epistemic violence that must be included on the list of damage wrought by the British conquest of Ceylon’ (p. 161).

Dahlia Porter’s ‘Maps, Lists, Views: How the Picturesque Wye Transformed Topography’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 163–78) reads John Thelwall’s Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement and argues that ‘Thelwall’s separation of the sentiment-infused picturesque from antiquarian history in his 1801 collection reflects the process by which nineteenth-century topographical writers staked a claim to the scientific legitimacy of their works’ (p. 164). In ‘Joseph Cottle and Reminiscence: The Picturesque Gone Awry’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 188–96) Alan Vardy discusses Joseph Cottle’s walking tour of the Wye in 1795, and ‘recounts the problems of the tour, and Cottle’s heroic efforts to rescue it both in personal and aesthetic terms’ (p. 188). Cottle’s documentation of this tour was later to embroil him in arguments with the Coleridge family concerning Coleridge’s posthumous reputation and representation.

Stephanie Churms’s ‘There Was One Man at Llyswen That Could Conjure: John Thelwall—Cunning Man’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 197–206) broaches Thelwall’s appropriation of local provincial tales, and tricks of occult conjuration, which he encodes with political salvos in the turbulence of the 1790s. Churms reads the peripatetic Thelwall at Llyswen as ‘speech theorist and instructor’ who was interested in the Welsh language and dialect. For Churms, ‘Thelwall was able to perform his position as an “other” in Wales and to “occult” his identity by imaginatively inhabiting a living material culture of conjury and cunning men’ (p. 206).

The European Romantic Review published a special collection of articles edited by Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent, from a NASSR conference held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in August 2012 on the subject of ‘Romantic Prospects’. In their introduction (ERR 24[2013] 251–4), Esterhammer, Piccitto, and Vincent write that ‘The directions in which participants chose to take the broad, multivalent theme “Romantic Prospects” are indicative of some currently dominant themes in Romantic scholarship, including digital humanities, book history, cognitive science, embodiment, landscape and travel, natural history, and transatlantic relations’ (p. 254). Robert Darnton’s contribution to this collection is an article entitled ‘Blogging, Now and Then (250 Years Ago)’ (ERR 24[2013] 255–70). Darnton parallels the contemporary digital phenomenon of online blogging with the eighteenth-century circulation of ‘anecdotes’ by ‘libellistes’ or ‘paragraph men’ in British and French print culture. Such fragmentary, geographically and temporally limited, and ephemeral publications were closely bound to coffee-houses, and had connotations of Grub Street, but are an important facet of our understanding of the development of the history of the book. Darnton is not actually arguing for acute similarities between now and then, but rather the opposite—that the fragmentary nature of blogs and anecdotes operate in very different ways in their discrete ‘information ecologies’: ‘By consulting the blogosphere, I think we can appreciate an aspect of communication history that has never been studied—in fact, never even noticed’ (pp. 268–9).

Lisa Vargo’s ‘The Romantic Prospect of the Duke of Richmond’s Moose’ (ERR 24[2013] 297–305) parallels George Stubbs’s painting The Duke of Richmond’s First Bull Moose [1770] with Thomas Pennant’s illustration in Gilbert’s White’s Natural History of Selborne, for which Pennant inspected the duke’s ‘moose-deer’ (which he had had imported from Canada). Vargo reads these illustrations in terms of their sublime aesthetics, and in terms of Arctic zoology. Tom Mole’s ‘ “We solemnly proscribe this poem”: Performative Utterances in the Romantic Periodicals’ (ERR 24[2013] 353–62) illustrates how rhetorical gestures in Romantic periodicals, such as accusing, ridiculing, insulting, libelling, and judging, are all best understood as performative utterances. In this vein he reads such textual performances through the prism of J.L. Austin’s linguistic theory. Mole demonstrates that a problem facing Romantic-era periodical journalists was the ephemerality of their labours in this genre. Drawing upon Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Mole reads Leigh Hunt’s declarative voice in print in his altercations with Blackwood’s to argue that ‘Once their self-authorizing style was established, the periodicals became a powerful institution shaping and policing Romantic literary culture’ (p. 360).

Stuart Curran’s ‘Robin Jackson: Restoring Women’s Literary Culture’ (ERR 24:iii[2013] 363–7) is a eulogy to Robin Jackson, and his contribution to 1980s critical scholarship which facilitated the rehabilitation of academic interest in long-eighteenth-century women’s writing: ‘Many critic-scholars contributed to this phenomenon, but Robin Jackson provided the crucial instruments for effecting that alteration. He is our Archimedes, who found the right place to stand and the necessary lever, and with it he radically changed the world we inhabit’ (p. 367).

The use of the trope of lightning is the subject of Kate Flint’s ‘ “More rapid than the lightning’s flash”: Photography, Suddenness, and the Afterlife of Romantic Illumination’ (ERR 24[2013] 369–83) from Rousseau’s Confessions, to Burke and Kant on the sublime, Wordsworth in The Prelude, and Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. But really, this article looks beyond the Romantic era to the use of lightning in Victorian poetry and novels, in the visual art of J.M.W. Turner and John Martin, and in descriptions of early photography.

There were several significant publications in 2013 on the subject of the sublime. Cian Duffy’s The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: Classic Ground quite beautifully structures its subject in chapters dedicated to various sublime forms of landscape. The aim of this study is ‘to map the place of the “natural sublime” in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic period [and] to attempt to reconstruct a genre which ranges across the boundaries of what would now be viewed as discrete forms of cultural activity and productivity but which were, then, intimately entwined areas of enquiry with no clearly demarcated borders between them’ (p. 12). Chapter 1 addresses the importance of the Alps for Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches and The Prelude, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, the travel narratives of H.M. Williams, and Byron’s Childe Harold. Chapter 2 examines the dynamic sublime of the Italian volcanoes Etna and Vesuvius, especially for the imagery of Byron’s Don Juan, where ‘the build-up of magma in a volcano could result in significantly different eruptive outcomes’ (p. 96). Chapter 3 is set amidst the frozen tundra of the polar regions, and explores S.T. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, claiming that: ‘both texts seek to remediate the inhuman “nullity” which had been discovered in the high northern and southern latitudes, and to inscribe cultural significance on environments which were proving as hostile to European explorers as they were to the European imagination’ (p. 134). Chapter 4 is set against the desert, with the Romantic fascination with the Nile, the culture of Volney’s Ruins, Wordsworth’s enigmatic Bedouin in Book V of The Prelude, and of course Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Finally, chapter 5 addresses the sublime of the heavens and space, with Wordsworth’s ‘Star Gazing’ as a preamble to a reading of De Quincey’s essay ‘Description of the Nebula of Orion’.

Emily Brady’s The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature seeks ‘to reassess, and to some extent reclaim, the meaning of the sublime as it developed during its heyday in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory by the likes of Addison, Burke, Kant, and others, and mark out its relevance for contemporary debates in philosophy, especially aesthetics’ (p. 2). Her chapters on Kant and on the Romantic sublime will be of interest to Romanticists. Brady addresses the early, ‘pre-critical’ phase of Kant’s thinking upon the sublime, tracing the influence of empiricist sources from the Scottish Enlightenment upon his developing understanding. Brady then moves to consider the tension within Kant’s philosophy of the sublime as to whether it is an aesthetic or a moral category. Moving beyond Kant into the ‘Romantic Sublime’, Brady addresses various forms of the sublime in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Burns, and Shelley. This is a concise, compact book that is very comprehensive, but perhaps lacks a great deal of depth and substance in its treatment of British Romanticism.

Timothy M. Costelloe’s The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein considers the history of the philosophy of aesthetics, which was for a long time a distinctly British mode of thought. This book has several chapters dedicated to British Romanticism. Initially Costelloe considers the importance of the ‘picturesque’ for the early period of British Romanticism, addressing the theory and practice of Humphrey Repton, William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and Edmund Burke. Yet ‘the picturesque was to lose its precarious and short-lived independence by being absorbed into the concept of sublimity developed by Wordsworth and the “early” Romantics’ (p. 167). Costelloe then moves on to read Wordsworth and Coleridge as definitive representatives of British Romanticism, in particular addressing questions of outward reality and the internal imagination in Wordsworth’s Prelude and ‘Tintern Abbey’, and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.

Issues of race and otherness were prominent in works published in 2013. Foremost among these is Peter J. Kitson’s impressive, scholarly Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840. Kitson’s study ‘attempts to address the specific question of how British knowledge of China, its cultures, products, and its peoples, was constructed or forged from the writings and translations of a diverse range of missionaries, diplomats, travellers, East India Company employees, and literary personalities in certain key sites, notably Bengal, Canton, Guangzhou, and Malacca’ (p. 2). Moving beyond a simplistic Saidian binary, Kitson demonstrates the reciprocity between Orient and Occident. He argues that where the origins of British sinology have often been dated from the late nineteenth century, in truth it emerged in the mid-eighteenth century in the works of a variety of overlooked amateur sinologists. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to the eighteenth-century antecedents of Romantic sinology. In chapter 1, Kitson argues that Bishop Thomas Percy (more famous for his Reliques) was the first British sinologist, through his translation of the Chinese novel Haoqiu Zhuan [1683], and his own Miscellaneous Piece Relating to China [1762]: ‘Percy’s work thus represents the difficult birth pangs of British Romantic Sinology and he can, with much justice, be called the first British sinologist’ (p. 44). Percy’s Protestant engagement with Chinese Confucianism marks a divergence from earlier continental Catholic interpreters. Chapter 2 moves to focus upon two slightly later sinologists who continue Percy’s legacy: William Jones and Joshua Marshman. The celebrated orientalist Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society, went further than Percy in his enthusiasm for Chinese. Yet his lack of linguistic scholarship, and an abortive collaborative effort in the translation of the Shijing, cast a slight pall over his efforts to further British sinology. In particular, Jones attempted a synthesis between his understanding of Hindu culture, his appreciation of the Miltonic sublime, and his fascination with Chinese poetry. The missionary Marshman, although a more serious scholar, was somewhat apprehensive in his interaction with Confucianism through his Protestant sensibilities. Yet ‘With Percy, Jones and Marshman, Romantic Sinology begins to emerge from the enormous shadow of Jesuit scholarship’ (p. 71).

Chapter 3 continues this narrative through the figure of the missionary Robert Morrison at a central missionary station in Malacca. Continuing in the steps of Marshman, ‘Morrison’s influential depiction of Confucian thought [became] the orthodoxy of the Anglo-Chinese College established at Malacca’ (p. 96). Moving from the sacred to the secular, chapter 4 examines the more worldly sinology of George Thomas Staunton and John Francis Davis in Canton, with their interests (respectively) in the Chinese legal system and Chinese drama. Chapter 5 epitomizes this study’s dual interest in the exchange of material goods, as well as texts and ideas, in this instance grounded in the trade exchanges conducted at the McCartney embassy, concluding that ‘Neither British nor Chinese correctly read the symbolism of each other’s rituals’ (p. 152). Chapter 7 continues this sense of misinterpretation through the seminal trope of British refusal to kowtow—but the chapter then moves to a central motif of Kitson’s study: the concept of evasion of Chinese culture in the essays of Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. These readings are fascinating, but they do tend towards the New Historicist hermeneutic of reading what is absent from a text. One of the most interesting aspects of this monograph is chapter 8, in which Kitson persuasively illustrates Chinese influence in Wordsworth’s drafts for his satire on the ‘Child Prodigy’ in Book V of The Prelude. Finally, chapter 9 turns to Chinese drama, where Kitson argues that, ‘Rather than being a cover for colonial aggression against Qing China, I argue that this turn to comedy represented a real sense of the possibility of partnership between the British and Chinese and that this was not, viewed before the Opium Wars, simply an orientalist fantasy’ (p. 213). This is a pioneering piece of research.

William Christie also writes about Romantic-era China in his ‘ “Prejudices against Prejudices”: China and the Limits of Whig Liberalism’ (ERR 24[2013] 509–29). Here, Christie examines the importance of the Edinburgh Review as the foremost liberal publication in the early nineteenth century, with a particular interest in China. He too focuses on the McCartney trade embassy mission to China, finding in the Edinburgh’s responses to Sino-British diplomatic relations a fault-line within Whig ideology. For Christie, the Edinburgh’s liberalism is manifest in its stalwart defence of Chinese women’s human rights. Yet Christie finds that this humanitarian liberalism is also partly guilty of fuelling tensions that led to military conflict.

The subject of the slave trade plays a significant part in this year’s selection of scholarship. Stephen Ahern’s Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 presents a collection of essays that demonstrate how ‘In the later eighteenth century writers arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and for the emancipation of those in bondage consistently focused on the workings of affect—on the fleeting, volatile registers of embodied subjectivity—to make their case’ (p. 1). George Boulukos’s chapter seeks to ‘think through the implications for the relation of abolition to a key third term: capitalism’ (p. 24). Reading Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade in parallel with Richard Steele’s popular play Inkle and Yarico, Boulukos instructively demonstrates how, although early critiques of slavery always pit themselves against the market, ‘By the 1780s … the dynamic is reversed, and even committed Christian abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson want to harness the power of the market and of self-interest to the project of improving, ameliorating, and thereby, perhaps, eventually eliminating slavery’ (p. 43).

In his chapter, Tobias Menely draws upon the postcolonial and linguistic theories of Homi K. Bhabha to ‘focus on the self-reflexive rhetoric of sympathy in three abolitionist poems published in England in 1788, the year of the first nationwide antislavery campaign’ (p. 45). These abolitionist poems were by H.M. Williams, More, and Ann Yearsley. Anthony John Harding illustrates that abolitionism was perversely yoked to the very language of economic exchange. He ‘traces the course of one element of that language, a key rhetorical figure adopted by eighteenth-century abolitionist writers: the assertion that the very air of Great Britain was inimical to slavery’ (p. 71) in his reading of various works by More, William Cowper, Clarkson, and S.T. Coleridge. Focusing on Cowper’s The Task, Harding states that ‘the rhetoric of attachment to a sentimental-humanitarian vision of England as the land of ancient freedoms, adopted by Cowper, More, and their fellow abolitionists, can be reconfigured as a self-justifying and even hubristic misdirection of affect’ (p. 88).

Mary A. Waters reads Anna Laetitia Barbauld in terms of the alignment of sympathy with materialist physiology, and the political symbolism of national degeneracy, arguing that ‘Barbauld’s Epistle to Wilberforce draws on his embodied science of the mind to prophesy for British society a further moral and physical degeneration leading to an apocalyptic collapse’ (p. 106). Brycchan Carey’s essay ‘surveys sentimental representations of slaves and slavery on the eighteenth-century London stage’ (p. 110), focusing especially on adaptations of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Carey finds that ‘while the antislavery novel and the antislavery poem made a lasting impact on the campaign against the slave trade, dramatic interventions ultimately contributed little either to the development of antislavery discourse or to the progress of the abolition campaign in Parliament’ (p. 128). In her chapter, Joanne Tong demonstrates that Cowper’s earliest poetic remarks on slavery in the ‘slave ballads’ were ‘the culmination of his efforts on behalf of the abolitionist campaign’ which reveal ‘his growing disillusionment with the elusive ideal of activist art’ (pp. 129–30). Christine Levecq explores late eighteenth-century abolitionist petitions, exploring the dynamics and politics of sentiment encoded in such texts. Through a close reading of Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality [1774], Jamie Rosenthal argues that ‘This portrayal works to justify the subjugation of slaves, conjoining sensibility to common economic, proslavery discourses regarding the proper treatment of slaves’ (p. 173). He concludes that ‘Despite its potential for creating social bonds that transcend boundaries of gender, class, race, and nationality, sensibility could also buttress divisions and inequalities’ (p. 188).

Paul Youngquist’s collection Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic draws together some important scholarship on the slave trade. Although in his framing introduction Youngquist makes some very pertinent observations about the failure of Romantic studies to think in global terms, something of the tone here is at times a little abrasive. Moreover, several chapters in this volume are somewhat abstruse and verbose in their choice of diction and terminology. Nevertheless, there is also some very fine work here. Marlon B. Ross presents a heavily theorized reading of racialized contexts in the long eighteenth century, highlighting the difficulty of comprehending the historical experience of racial otherness from our situated position as readers. This is argued in rather convoluted prose. The dilemma of loyalty facing black slaves caught in conflict-ridden Nova Scotia during the War of Independence is the subject of C.S. Giscombe’s chapter. Here, in contrast, the frequent references to contemporary African American film and television culture work to distract through their excessive informality. Paul Youngquist’s own chapter argues that ‘Romanticism is transparent, the cultural production of a majority culture whose whiteness becomes visible only in relation to its raced Other’ (p. 81). To illustrate this point, he focuses on the figure of George II’s beloved consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg, also referred to as the ‘African Queen’. Peter J. Kitson demonstrates that Robert Southey’s Poems on the Slave Trade [1797] and Charlotte Smith’s ‘The Story of Henrietta’ [1800] are poems that ‘imagine and fictionalize slavery at second or even third hand and are not written from personal experience’ (p. 107). Pursuing the obscure Liverpudlian abolitionist poet Edward Rushton, Grégory Pierrot finds his activism and writings ‘profoundly different’ from those of his contemporaries (p. 126).

In her reading of Romantic-era representations of solitary African mothers, Debbie Lee argues that although ‘poets emphasized the black mother’s singleness, the historical documents, particularly those that allow the black lone mother to tell her own tale, reveal a different story: here she is anything but alone’ (p. 165). In their co-authored chapter, Elise Bruhl and Michael Gamer focus on Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Horatio Nelson, demonstrating that ‘for political cartoonists, an enduring practice in representing Emma Hamilton once her relationship with Nelson became public was to portray her as a North African. But … such issues extend beyond burlesque and satire into Emma’s self-representations’ (p. 184). Finally, Daniel O’Quinn’s chapter addresses the subject of boxing, and in particular a celebrated fight between the coloured fighter Tom Molineaux and his rival Tom Cribb—the cartoon of this incident by Cruikshank was used as a frontispiece to Pierce Egan’s Boxiana. O’Quinn explains that ‘Complaining that Britons were more versed in the staged bouts between Cribb and Molineaux outside Stratham than in Wellington’s struggles against Marmont on the Continent, the editors correctly identified a failure in the public’s comprehension of the scale of the respective conflicts, but themselves failed to understand that the hammering doled out in the ring was laden with historical significance beyond conventional notions of geopolitics’ (pp. 215–16).

Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach’s collection Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination is about ‘the ways British people drew upon and invoked a variety of discourses about slavery for many different rhetorical and political purposes during the long eighteenth-century’ (p. 1), and seeks to ‘recapture eighteenth-century understandings of the varied distinctions and elisions in notions of enslavement during the long eighteenth century in Britain’ (p. 2). Brett D. Wilson’s essay on More’s Slavery and James Thomson’s Liberty deserves special mention, as Wilson argues that ‘By capitalizing on the multiplicity of significations of liberty and slavery, More affixes the fate of African captives to that of British subjects, arguing that fetters must yield to attachments, yet political unity must not hypertrophy into riotous undifferentiation’ (p. 94). The two writers are brought into dialogue, because ‘The verse of James Thomson—a cri de coeur against the “slavery” of the fallen empires of Europe infecting Walpolean Britain—becomes a critical instrument in More’s linking British liberty to the lot of African slaves’ (p. 94).

Jing-Huey Hwang’s ‘Rethinking Britishness in the Fictional Japanese Letters of T.J. Wooler’s Black Dwarf’ (JECS 36[2013] 49–63) sheds light upon Wooler, an angry radical voice in the early nineteenth century, resurrecting the eighteenth-century tradition of epistolary dialogues between an oriental ingénue and an occidental correspondent. Hwang argues that Wooler draws upon this form to challenge the coherence of the concept of Britishness, but with the caveat that ‘by ostensibly addressing his comments to his Japanese friend instead of to Englishmen, the Dwarf’s criticism of English politics appears more oblique and hence less susceptible to charges of seditious libel’ (p. 50) in the potentially dangerous climate of post-Waterloo Britain. Wooler draws upon mock-orientalism for the purposes of a reformist social critique, especially following the Peterloo massacre.

In ‘A Neutered Beast? Representations of the Sons of Tipu Sultan—“The Tiger of Mysore”—as Hostages in the 1790s’ (JECS 36[2013] 121–47) Sean Willcock analyses works of art that emerged following the kidnap of two of the sons of Sultan Tipu of Mysore—who were held hostage for surety of his good behaviour. Willcock argues that in these representations the children become potent symbols of imperialism. Willcock focuses on the gender dynamics of kidnapping two children, arguing that ‘It seems that the very maleness of paternalism was problematic: Mysorean maternity confronted paternalism with the gendered limits of its parental power, while injecting an erotic element that disrupted the Christian basis for its supposed superiority’ (p. 144).

There was a wide selection of publications in 2013 marked by their emphasis upon the importance of various different aspects of gender. Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 ‘explores the connections between revolution and prophecy in the work of British Romantic women writers, placing their visionary claims within the context of a rich tradition of female prophecy and the ongoing debate regarding the merits and perils of enthusiasm in the long eighteenth century’ (p. 1). Drawing upon recent historicist scholarship in the field of late eighteenth-century millenarian enthusiasm, and combining this with the speech-act theories of J.L Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler, Smith argues that ‘Convinced that they were living in a period of spiritual and political crisis, many Romantic women writers assumed the mantle of the female prophet to sound the alarm before the final curtain fell’ (p. 2). Chapter 1 ‘explores the problem, and the attempted regulation, of female enthusiasm from the Civil War decades down to the Romantic period’ (p. 37). In chapter 2, Smith uses Hester Lynch Piozzi’s ‘catastrophic millenarianism’ and troubled personal life as a case study to demonstrate ‘the tremendous influence (both positive and negative) of contemporary female artists and writers on female visionary discourse during the Romantic period’ (p. 75). Chapter 3 ‘traces Helen Maria Williams’s efforts throughout her career to find an appropriate genre for her progressive millennialism’ (p. 99), focusing predominantly on Williams’s letters from France, where she ‘portrays herself and Robespierre as rival prophets with competing visionary agendas’ (p. 126).

Drawing upon Butler’s notions of speech and selfhood, Smith parallels Radcliffe’s novels, in her fourth chapter, with the notorious life of the prophet Joanna Southcott, and finds that:

The Radcliffean themes of loss of status and birthright, and their providential restoration rehearsed as a family tragedy, resonated for Southcott and other Britons in the Romantic period, who were convinced that they were witnessing the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and took comfort in Radcliffe’s emphases on the presence of a benevolent God, despite all appearances to the contrary, virtue tested and rewarded, and the triumph of good over evil through providential means. (p. 156)

In her fifth chapter, Smith turns to Anna Laetitia Barbauld, whose ‘early visionary poems reveal her belief that she has been singled out by God to be a spiritual leader or a poet-prophet like Milton’ (p. 158) and whose ‘forays into visionary verse were consciously in conversation with, contrasted to, or modelled on a series of powerful male figures’ (p. 169). The concluding sixth chapter focuses upon Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein, Mathilda, Valperga, and The Last Man. Smith argues that ‘Tracing the source of her prophetic abilities to the distant past, long before the advent of Christianity, enabled Shelley to interrogate the ways in which institutionalized religion colluded with patriarchy to silence the alternative visions of women’ (p. 190).

Developed from a conference held in 2008 at the British National Portrait Gallery, Elizabeth Eger’s edited collection Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730–1830 ‘provides an interdisciplinary treatment of bluestocking culture in eighteenth-century Britain’ (p. 1), and, ‘through its own re-alignments and juxtapositions’ offers ‘new understandings of the gendered construction of literary and artistic traditions in the long eighteenth century and beyond’ (p. 10). Several chapters here are relevant for a general Romanticist readership. Focusing on Richard Samuel’s painting The Nine Living Muses, Anne Mellor demonstrates how ‘The emergence of these “bluestocking” women writers into the print culture of the Romantic era aroused in the male writers of the day a powerful new anxiety’ (p. 22). This could be gauged by ‘The increasing hostility on the part of the male Romantic writers, artists and reviewers to bluestockings’ which ‘is in itself a telling index to the commercial success and cultural impact of these women writers’ (pp. 22–3). Alison Yarrington’s chapter focuses on the ‘attainments of Anne Seymour Damer as artist, author and student of classical antiquity [which] secure her place in this company of Brilliant women’ (p. 81). Devoney Looser addresses the representation of bluestockings in old age, especially Hester Lynch Piozzi, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Carter. She argues that ‘Whether remembered as minor saints or vain harridans, the portraits we have of bluestockings in late life demonstrate how difficult it was to convince the public that learned and literary women might age well’ (p. 116). Harriet Guest’s chapter is about the role of caricature in public representation of female writers, and focuses especially on Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. Guest suggests that ‘Robinson’s ambivalent position points to a source of cultural unease in the 1790s which has perhaps more significant and wide-ranging implications’ (p. 272).

In Curtis-Wendlandt, Gibbard, and Green, eds., Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women: Virtue and Citizenship, Paul Gibbard and Karen Green challenge the male hegemony of philosophical thought. Although Marxism and post-structuralism in the late twentieth century attacked philosophical complacency, Gibbard and Green claim that the ‘Death of the Author’ actually delayed interest in the figure of the female writer. Here they ‘make a small step towards the retrieval of an alternative, female-authored intellectual history concentrating on women’s contributions to political theory and practice’ (p. 2). The essays in this collection ‘offer a distinctive focus on the political ideas expressed in their works and on the ways in which they responded to each other, as well as to male political thinkers of the period such as Harrington, Mandeville, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Burke and Kant’ (p. 3). Quite a number of chapters in this volume will be of interest to scholars of the Romantic era. Karen Green’s chapter focuses on Barbauld and Catharine Macaulay, who have both been swamped by Wollstonecraft’s popularity, and yet who were both important critical respondents to Burke’s reactionary Reflections. As Green states: ‘They did not speak from a position of humility; nor did they apologize for the impertinency of a woman’s pen, but wrote confidently about universal subjects with full awareness that, as women, they were not guaranteed equal rights’ (p. 172). Continuing and developing this topic to some degree, Mary Caputi examines the influence of Macaulay’s philosophy on Wollstonecraft’s politics: ‘Macaulay and Wollstonecraft alike acknowledge the utmost importance of cultivating a new sensibility in women through education, since in their view women’s moral schooling and intellectual formation are, in the late eighteenth century, nothing less than “absurd” ’ (pp. 173–4). Jeanette Ehrmann also focuses on Wollstonecraft, but she reads through the prism of Hannah Arendt’s political theory, with the genealogy of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as a backdrop to the way in which Wollstonecraft parallels European womanhood with Caribbean slavery. Lesa Ní Mhunghaile’s chapter addresses the political thought of the Irish poet Charlotte Brooke as expressed in her Reliques of Irish Poetry. Mhunghaile finds that ‘Reliques provided a suitable vehicle for Brooke to assert both her Anglo-Irish identity and her credentials as a serious scholar; and it should also be considered in the context of women’s increasing interest in political and social affairs’ (p. 204).

Although the majority of Alex Wetmore’s Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction is primarily of use for scholars of the eighteenth century, her fifth chapter centres itself upon the ‘crisis of sensibility’ in the 1790s. In particular, this concluding chapter examines the assault upon sensibility from both political left and right by Wollstonecraft and More (and others), amid burgeoning fears about the impact of sensibility upon gender identity in the post-revolutionary milieu: ‘Developing alongside an increasing concern that sensibility was corrupting women was an anxiety surrounding any figure, whether man or woman, who transgressed or destabilized traditional categorizations of gender identity’ (p. 149). In ‘Malthus Our Contemporary? Toward a Political Economy of Sex’ (SiR 52[2013] 337–62) Maureen N. McLane draws upon Deleuze and Guattari to think about Thomas Malthus as a complex thinker about biology and gender (in rather highfalutin prose).

Philip Shaw’s Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art is a thoughtful and insightful commentary on Romantic-era representations of the wounds inflicted on soldiers. In the period following the American War of Independence ‘images of battlefields, strewn with the bodies of dead and mutilated soldiers and civilians, became a powerful tool of ideological enforcement, enabling ordinary members of the public to come to terms with the rapid, unpredictable and increasingly bloody course of national history’ (p. 4). This study is predominantly concerned with the interpretation of visual art, but also moves quite capably to draw connections with literary culture. Each chapter takes on a nuanced topic orientated around a series of smaller case studies, in each of which Shaw is looking for a ‘flicker’ that ruptures the normative ideology of the period: ‘for an instant, a viewer might get the sense that something of the harsh materiality of war resists appropriation by the dominant discourse of national salvation’ (p. 9). In such reading, Shaw draws upon the work of Elaine Scarry (albeit not uncritically).

Chapter 1 revolves around a striking anecdote in which Robert Burns was moved to tears by a picture by the artist Henry William Bunbury entitled Affliction. This piece is unusual, not least given Bunbury’s preference for Hogarthian satire, and, unlike his other works, Affliction is not about a deserter but about a wounded soldier in the aftermath of a battle. Shaw explores how this image is embroiled in the politics of Smithian Enlightenment sentimentality. Chapter 2 follows a similar pattern, this time an account of the poet William Haley weeping at an exhibition of Joseph Wright’s The Dead Soldier. In his reading Shaw attempts ‘to show how the focus on the lot of the common soldier and his wife could serve as a protest against the consequences of a particular kind of war: the folly of imperial expansion’ (p. 99). Chapter 3 addresses two landscape paintings by the Academician William Hodges, The Effects of Peace [1794] and The Consequences of War [1794], arguing that despite his use of the language of political moderation, these paintings potentially encode political radicalism. This chapter contains quite a strong section of literary analysis, triangulating this discussion with readings of S.T. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and the Cornish radical artist John Opie. Chapter 4 illustrates how ‘paintings, prints, and illuminations produced during and after the period of Britain’s war with imperial France focussed on the means by which information about the triumphs and deprivations of conflict was presented by news media to a composite public’ (pp. 141–2). Finally, chapter 5 examines explicit paintings and sketches of wounded and amputee soldiers, particularly focusing on some very graphic and moving images by Charles Bell, in the wake of Waterloo: ‘Caught between the sympathetic appeal of the eyes and the blank, un-regarding gaze of the open wound, our view shifts in turn between the illusory wholeness of the victorious nation and the fragmented “cut-up” condition of its repressed subjects’ (p. 207).

Neil Ramsey also discusses the figure of the returning soldier in his very interesting article ‘Reframing Regicide: Symbolic Politics and the Sentimental Trial of James Hadfield (1800)’ (JECS 36[2013] 317–34). Here Ramsey explores the attempted assassination of George III by the retired soldier and crazed religious enthusiast James Hadfield with a pistol in Drury Lane theatre. Engaging with the post-Smithian discourse of Romantic-era sensibility, Ramsey demonstrates how Hadfield’s image transmutes in the popular press from depictions of near sub-human monstrosity to a sentimental tableau of the weeping king and the returned soldier. In the end, both would-be victim and assailant are lionized for their manly self-command. In these representations, Ramsey concludes that ‘The body, therefore, was taking on a new kind of symbolic presence as the focus began to move away from monarchical right and grandeur and towards the kinds of bodily comportment that were so central to the production of sentimental feeling and benevolence’ (p. 331).

There were two engaging contributions to the field of long eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies of medical culture. Corinna Wagner’s Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture is ambitious, persuasive, and enjoyable. Her study traces ‘the ways that knowledge about the functioning of the body, new methods of diagnoses, innovative treatments, and changing ideas about the prevention of disease migrated into political culture’ (p. 7), as she endeavours to negotiate the ‘lacuna’ between the ‘two cultures’ of medicine and literature to demonstrate ‘how frequently medicine, politics, and morality were discursively and thus ideologically yoked’ (p. 13). Chapter 1 focuses on the body of Marie Antoinette, who became a hate-figure for Jacobins and British radicals. They indicated their revulsion through a series of assaults, deploying such misogynistic tropes as hermaphroditism, nymphomania, venereal disease, and masturbation. Wagner argues that ‘The accusations against Marie Antoinette and the gendered reading of the events of the Revolution were intimately related to then-circulating medical and philosophical discourses, both learned and popular’ (p. 37).

Chapter 2 provides a politicized reading of the cult of the Rousseauvian mother and the ideal of breastfeeding in the period of the French Revolution. Paralleling attacks against Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, and Wollstonecraft with contemporary salvos against Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wagner suggests that ‘These types of representations illustrate how political women—past and present—are subject to long-standing fears about their biology and their bodies’ (pp. 77–8). Chapter 3 focuses on pathologies of Godwin, attacked for the frigidity of his Memoir of his late wife, Wollstonecraft. Attacks against Godwin co-meddle suspicion of materialism and accusations of the influence of de Sade. Wagner finds that in the 1790s ‘democracy, materialism, modern medicine, and rationality made for a dangerous combination. This combination was all the more threatening when linked with the unfeeling and insensate body of an experimental philosopher or the sexually unpredictable, immoderately fertile, and overly nervous body of a woman radical’ (p. 128). Similarly, chapter 4 illuminates the vitriol poured upon Paine under the aegis of a critique of his allegedly unhygienic and monstrous body. Wagner finds that ‘biographers and propagandists could make so much of Paine’s supposed filthiness only because the rather loose standards of eighteenth-century personal hygiene were quickly giving way to a more fastidious emphasis on cleanliness’ (p. 135). Both chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the corpulent body of George IV, with chapter 5 arguing that an emphasis upon hereditary disease had republican overtones, and chapter 6 paralleling George’s bloated body with the racial discourse of ‘Hottentot buttocks’: ‘To be goutish, to display immoderation at table, to overindulge in exotic foodstuffs, to surround oneself with filthy foreign goods was also to threaten national identity, to be socially irresponsible, and to jeopardize political stability’ (p. 230). This is a really excellent and engaging book.

Another very interesting publication in this field is Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852. Budge’s chronology deliberately straddles the Romantic and Victorian periods, and his scope also encompasses trans-Atlanticism (and so not all of the chapters of this monograph are covered in this section). Drawing upon Derrida’s reading of spectrality in Marx, Budge finds that ‘The Romantic individual’s claim to possess transcendent vision is haunted by a bodily spectre’ (p. 7). An integral dimension to Budge’s thesis is the permeation of Brunonian medical thinking from the eighteenth century into the long nineteenth century. Budge also consolidates his earlier work in Romantic Empiricism, arguing for the influence of Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophy in nineteenth-century medical discourse. There is throughout Budge’s monograph an insistent tendency towards overstatement. This is exemplified by his claim that medicine is an underdeveloped field within Romantic studies, despite the fact that Budge himself provides a pretty lengthy list of the many contributors within this field. Chapter 1 focuses upon Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Sicilian Romance, and places Radcliffe within the context of the pathology of Methodist enthusiasm. Drawing upon Alan Richardson, Budge aligns Radcliffe with ‘neural Romanticism’, arguing that ‘Radcliffe’s novels represent an important phase in the development of Romanticism, since they are among the literary works in Britain to employ the new late eighteenth-century neurological understanding of imagination for a distinctively aesthetic purpose’ (p. 45).

In chapter 2, Budge argues that ‘Wordsworth’s poetry and its accompanying poetic theory engage in a critical dialogue with [Erasmus] Darwin’s philosophical medicine, adopting many characteristic Darwinian intellectual emphases but also, in some crucial respects, rejecting Darwin’s overall intellectual position’ (p. 53). Most of the readings here revolve around Lyrical Ballads, in particular an analysis of the psychosomatic in ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’. (There is quite a lot of overlap here with critical arguments already established by Richardson, Neil Vickers, and, perhaps especially, Alan Bewell.) Chapter 3 engages with the relationship between Coleridge’s literary sensibilities, his metaphysics, and his own ill health. Here Budge argues against readings of Kantian or transcendental idealist influences over Coleridge until quite far into the nineteenth century. Instead, Budge argues that Coleridge’s interest in such categories as space and time has its origins in his correspondence with his benefactor, Thomas Wedgewood. In addition to overlooking a lot of recent, very rich, scholarship on Kantian influences on Coleridge as early as the mid-1790s, this argument seems rather under-substantiated, predicated largely on a single and singular journal article. Budge perhaps is a little cavalier in approaching the very complicated and hybrid nexus of Coleridge’s gradual intellectual transition from a strong materialist position to something more nuanced. He does, however, provide an interesting discussion on the well-trodden path of Coleridge’s enigmatic concept of ‘double touch’.

Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts’s Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’ is an excellent collection of rich and diverse essays on an overlooked but increasingly popular subject. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was a crucial institution and fixture of second-generation Romantic culture, famed for its savage and vitriolic attacks against political opponents—and, at times, friends. In their introduction, Morrison and Roberts delineate the origins of the Tory magazine, starting rather falteringly, but forming itself as a spry alternative to the rather heavy Tory Quarterly, and in antagonism to the Whig Edinburgh Review and The London Magazine. Despite its notoriety as a scourge of the Cockneys, Morrison and Roberts argue that many merits of Blackwood’s—especially its promotion of British and American novels—have been under-appreciated: ‘Blackwood’s publication of these works played a crucial role in the rise of the serialized novel to such enormous prominence in the Victorian era’ (p. 6). Across these various essays, Blackwood’s emerges as a hybrid entity, riven by internal tensions and contradictions. In chapter 1, Philip Flynn describes the genesis of Blackwood’s, which really came to life following the dismissal of its early editors, and the dynamic editorial collaboration of John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, in the period that saw the attacks on the Cockney School, and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’.

In chapter 2 Thomas Richardson provides a richer portrait of Lockhart, arguing that there was far more to him than his savaging of Keats: ‘His commentary and verse again demonstrate the depth of his scholarship, his critical acumen, and his facility with language, and again remind Blackwood’s readers of the “preponderance of good” in his periodical contributions’ (p. 44). Chapter 3 sees David Higgins engaging with the frequent use of confessional writing at Blackwood’s, as ‘confessional writing self-consciously addresses the authorial duplicity and multiple identities that characterized the magazines of the period’ (p. 47). Robert Morrison explores, in chapter 4, the complicated friendship between Thomas De Quincey and John Wilson. In chapter 5 David Finkelstein elucidates the sales figures and demographics of Blackwood’s readership. Chapter 6 sees Tom Mole grapple with the issue of ‘personality’ and Blackwood’s numerous ad hominem assaults upon members of the literary community. Nicholas Mason deals with Mary Shelley’s equivocal dealings with Blackwood’s, given her parentage and marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the seventh chapter of this volume. Meanwhile, in chapter 8 David Stewart examines the highly mixed tone of Blackwood’s writing, fluctuating between ‘holy water’ and ‘boot polish’ (p. 114). In chapter 9, William Christie approaches Blackwood’s ambivalent attitudes to early nineteenth-century science; while in chapter 10 Duncan Kelly considers the magazine’s relationship to the various arts and sciences, claiming that ‘It combined a broad eighteenth-century concern with the philosophical history of government, and a romantic anti-liberalism expressed in reactionary rhetoric’ (p. 137).

In chapter 11 Jason Camlot explores Blackwood’s concern with the distinction between poetry and prose ‘within the context of the broader trend in the early 1830s to attempt to distinguish poetry from other modes of discourse and to discuss it in terms of its intrinsic value’ (p. 149). In chapter 12, Tim Killick examines Blackwood’s attitude to the short story, finding the two symbiotically entwined. Gillian Hughes pursues the fiction of James Hogg in chapter 13. In chapter 14, Mark Schoenfield expounds upon Blackwood’s curious taste for violence, in a culture of duelling and real fatalities. In chapter 15, Richard Cronin complements the portrait of Lockhart with a detailed impression of John Wilson. This is reinforced in chapter 16, where John Strachan discusses Wilson in the context of late Georgian sport and outdoor pursuits, and regency pugilism and wrestling. David E. Latané Jr. examines William Maggin’s ‘Preface’ of 1826, following the deaths of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the decline of other magazines, with Blackwood’s finding itself often its own worst enemy. Nanora Sweet’s chapter examines the equivocal relationship between the liberal Felicia Hemans, entrusting her works and legacy to the Tory house of Blackwood’s. Finally, in chapters 19 and 20, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts illustrates how Blackwood’s strayed from normative imperialist ideology in its fascination with India; and Anthony Jarrells describes how ‘Maga’s provincialism … did leave a mark on its engagements with the British Empire, a mark which, while not amounting to any full-scale anti-imperialist politics, nevertheless highlights the limitations of a liberalism that failed to comprehend the significance of region, attachment, and territory, both at home and abroad’ (p. 276).

Brian Rejack returns to the subject of Blackwood’s in his article ‘Blackwood’s Magazine and the “Schooling” of Taste’ (ERR 24[2013] 723–42), here to discuss the ways in which Blackwood’s was instrumental in shaping public notions of taste, not only literary, but also gastronomic: ‘Food discourse offers a way to “school” tastes through the logic of naturalized aesthetic standards, even as it also reveals the materially dependent structuring of taste performed in and through periodicals’ (p. 724). In addition to Keats, Hunt, and the Cockney School, Rejack examines Blackwood’s hostility to William Kitchiner and the ‘Leg of Mutton School’. He demonstrates how ‘The Blackwood’s schooling strategy aims to codify the ambiguous signification of taste precisely because the culture of gastronomy was making available a democratized mode of cultural consumption and production that periodicals could help to spread’ (p. 738).

Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji’s co-edited collection Class and Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900 [2012], reviewed in YWES last year but missed in this section, deepens the recent interest in, and understanding of, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century class identity and its relationship to poetic cultural capital: ‘The relationships between labouring class poets and more established writers, their appropriations of form and language, their allusiveness, are important in this critical shift, and are crucial in many of the essays in this collection’ (p. 7). Simon MacDonald’s ‘English-Language Newspapers in Revolutionary France’ (JECS 36:i[2013] 18–33) follows the fortunes of the Paris Mercury, a newspaper written in Jacobin Paris in English for consumption across the Channel, and to arouse interest in the new republic, which emerged with the sudden explosion of press freedoms in 1790s France. MacDonald attributes the ultimate failure of the Paris Mercury (or Magazine of Paris), in part, to ‘the extent to which the dissemination of international news in the British press was subject to discreet and semi-official filtering processes’ (p. 30). Moreover, MacDonald reads this incident as indicative of ‘what kind of British debate about the French Revolution was possible’ (p. 30).

In ‘Edmund Burke in the Tavern’ (ERR 24[2013] 125–48) Ian Newman argues that the distinction between the alehouse as a rather low-status venue and the tavern as a more exalted establishment is important for decoding the political semiotics of Burke’s attack upon Richard Price and his comrades in the Reflections. Following Price’s sermon, he and his friends retired for celebrations at the prestigious London Tavern in Bishopsgate. Newman argues that ‘This observation helps to make sense of a puzzling aspect of Burke’s writing: his seemingly hostile presentation of locations associated with the public sphere—the “licentious and giddy coffee-houses” of the Reflections—despite his own participation in such institutions’ (p. 136). Newman demonstrates how much of Burke’s rancour is tempered with a reactionary fear of the upwardly mobile middle class: ‘By supporting the French Revolution, the “literary men” who frequented the same exclusive London taverns as the wealthy merchant class provided the ideological justification for a capitalist system in which desire for profit untethered government from its moral obligations’ (p. 143). This article contains some very attractive illustrations of London taverns of the era.

Jared McGeough’s ‘ “So variable and inconstant a system”: Rereading the Anarchism of William Godwin’s Political Justice’ (SiR 52[2013] 275–309) is concerned with ‘opening up those “marginal areas” of classical anarchism through a rereading of Godwin’s Political Justice, a text that has itself been marginalized by post-anarchist theory’ (p. 275). Focusing on textual aporia between the various drafts of Political Justice, McGeough searches out those ‘key moments in Godwin’s philosophy [which] provide the conceptual tools by which one might expose the ideological fault lines within classical anarchism’s “essentialist” rhetoric’ (p. 275).

Two chapters of Adam Rounce’s interesting and engaging Fame and Failure, 1720–1800 (also covered in Chapter XII) are of specific interest for Romanticists. The central concerns of Rounce’s study are ‘The inefficacy of apparent literary success, and the forms of vanity and folly often found in failed authorship’ (p. 2) across the long eighteenth century. Chapter 3 addresses the writings and legacy of Anna Seward, opening up ‘intriguing aspects of Seward’s aesthetic … to suggest why her work has always gained attention, and yet never gives the impression of satisfaction, enacting instead a peculiar set of partly self-imposed limitations’ (p. 109). Rounce attributes much of this liminality to the vehement tone of jealous resentment inherent in Seward’s criticism and private letters. Chapter 5 explores Percival Stockdale, a clergyman, poet, and critic whose writing ‘offers an alternative literary history of his own times, contrary to both his contemporaries and posterity. It is a history in which failure accidentally becomes the dominant subject’ (p. 155). Rounce’s very thoughtful conclusion orientates around readings of Boswell, Chatterton, and Isaac D’Israeli, critiquing the ‘Romantic deification of neglected genius’ (p. 205).

Jane Darcy’s Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816 is an intelligent, scholarly volume. While the main thrust of this study is pre-Romantic biography, there are several chapters concerned with Romantic-era writers. For Darcy, Rousseau marks a major turning-point in the history of introspective, melancholic biographical writing: ‘Following Rousseau, literary biography for the first time sought to quarry the “molten ore” of writers’ subjectivity, expressed at its most profound in experiences of melancholic suffering. From this would emerge the Romantic image with which we are familiar: the writer whose creative genius springs from the depths of melancholy’ (p. 1). Part II of Darcy’s study concerns writings circa 1800. Chapter 4 considers the place of biography ‘in the uneasy decade of the 1790s’ where ‘a number of politically radical writers turned to biographical and autobiographical writing with the intention of furthering social reform’ (p. 106). This chapter focuses on Godwin’s ill-fated biography of Wollstonecraft. Drawing upon Pamela Clemit, Darcy argues that Godwin’s model of biography is largely Rousseauvian. She reads Godwin in parallel to Wollstonecraft’s own biographical writing in A Short Residence, arguing that ‘Wollstonecraft presents melancholy throughout A Short Residence as an aesthetic ideal, a marker of sublime feelings very much in the manner of Rousseau’ (p. 131). Chapter 5 engages with James Currie’s Life of Robert Burns [1800], and its reception in the Wordsworth circle. Where Coleridge was enthusiastic, Charles Lamb was unimpressed, and Wordsworth positively upset by the emergence of this volume, as reflected in his open letter defending the memory of Burns: ‘The melancholy previously seen as “black” and corrosive—not the “white” melancholy of aesthetic representations—is declared by Wordsworth the well-spring of true inspiration’ (p. 170). Chapter 6 examines Hayley’s life of Cowper, considering ‘why his posthumous reputations became the centre of bitter controversy in the Romantic period and explor[ing] what happened when a literary biographer, the poet William Hayley, tried to turn back the clock by offering an account of a religious melancholic in eighteenth-century terms’ (p. 172). Darcy concludes her study with some thoughts on Byron presenting a new model of biographical writing, as the celebrity-poet.

Joseph M. Ortiz’s Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism is a most welcome collection of essays which ‘document the myriad ways in which theatre directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century often turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests’ (p. 2). David Chandler demonstrates that although Walter Savage Landor seems to fit the pattern of Romantic bardolatry ‘In fact, though, his attitude to Shakespeare was complicated by the circumstance that, while irresistibly attracted to Romantic Bardolatry, he disliked its tendency to produce an essentially safe, socially conservative version of England’s greatest writer’ (p. 14). In her chapter, Karen Bloom Gevirtz addresses Elizabeth Inchbald’s Shakespeare criticism, arguing that Inchbald’s knowledge of the tradition of Shakespeare criticism has been underestimated, and that ‘her perspective as a woman, an actress, and a playwright give her work a significance and richness of [its] own’ (p. 49). Karen Britland addresses ‘the notion of “intellectual opportunity” and “Genius” as it applied to theatrical productions of Hamlet in the Romantic period’ (p. 53), reading Hamlet as a prototypical man of Romantic genius with his pensive introspection. She focuses on the role of Ophelia as a foil to this masculine ideal. Drawing upon what he terms ‘philosophical historicism’ to compliment materialist historicism, Thomas Festa seeks to correct the traditional view of Romantic writers as inferior egotists to Shakespeare’s imaginative selflessness. He argues that ‘Thinking through Wordsworth’s use of Shakespeare ought to make the idea of Shakespeare’s “aesthetic” more historically intelligible, particularly as this reception history reveals what is at stake in treating the relationship between Wordsworth’s poetry and Shakespeare’s as an emblem of Romantic epistemology’ (p. 78).

In her chapter on Charlotte Smith’s appropriations of Shakespeare, Joy Currie suggests that Smith ‘creates moments of shared emotion between her speakers, Shakespeare, and herself; appropriates his language and metaphors; claims authority for her use of natural history; claims equality with male writers; claims authority for her expression of her political views; and develops extended analogies between Shakespeare’s themes and characters and of her own’ (p. 100). Paola Degli Esposti describes how S.T. Coleridge conceived of Shakespeare as the supreme ideal of dramatic art, and discusses the way in which he grapples with Shakespeare’s superiority in his own play Zapolya. Francesca Saggini’s chapter is concerned with Shakespeare’s ghosts, and their appearance on stage and on canvas in the works of James Boaden, Henry Fuseli, and novelists Lewis and Radcliffe. Ann R. Hawkins sheds light on the role of John Boydell, the owner of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, which participated in ‘the larger Romantic tension we see in poetry between the fragment and the epic, between the coherence of individual instalments and the reshaping of those instalments in a bound collection’ (p. 210). In their co-authored chapter, Marjean D. Purinton and Marliss C. Desens engage with the playwright Joanna Baillie’s dramas The Martyr and The Bride in relation to Shakespeare’s Pericles, arguing that ‘All three plays assert the significance of spiritual, sacred self-determination, as well as an approach to religious values that transcends the doctrinal distinctions of both Renaissance and Romantic culture’ (p. 233). In her chapter on Lady Caroline Lamb, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson depicts Lamb as a Whig who drew upon the Restoration works of John Ford, as a paradigm for legitimizing aristocratic mediation between the monarchy and the people, in opposition to the model of Charles I’s autocracy.

Edward T. Duffy’s Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism is rather a specialist work, which presupposes a detailed knowledge of the works of Cavell. The author’s style of prose isn’t very user-friendly for those not already within the milieu of this form of philosophy or criticism. Duffy’s understanding of Cavell is clearly profound, and he has an impressively detailed and broad knowledge of a swathe of Romantic poetry. But this book does not make a very strong argument for why Cavell should matter to those who aren’t already enthusiasts. In his first chapter Duffy situates Cavell in the linguistic traditions of Wittgenstein and Austin, and explores the notion of ‘redemption’ in Cavell’s philosophy, stating that ‘It is Cavell’s fate as a reader to find himself caring about and letting himself be instructed by texts that are, as eventually he will say, specifically romantic works both “[account-] books of losses” and provocative “texts of recovery” ’ (p. 25). In his second chapter, Duffy argues that, in the effort to philosophize, Cavell finds himself reflexively turning towards Romanticism. Duffy juxtaposes this turn with readings of animism in Wordsworthian and Coleridgean metaphysics in the Intimations Ode, The Prelude, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But given the rather lengthy preamble to these readings, the actual calibre and content of this criticism contribute surprisingly little to the wealth of readings of these texts in this vein. In his third chapter, Duffy parallels Cavell’s approach to the ‘philosophical criticism’ of the New Historicists. Duffy states that:

To Cavell, the English romantic poets are practitioners of conceptual investigations not because they are attracted to the be-all and end-all of some fixed (and fixating) noumenal essence but because, time after time and case by case, they are called to an urgently practical and never finally concluded finding of one’s self in the way we have come to word the world as we do. (p. 88)

He exemplifies this through readings of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which both Cavell and Percy Bysshe Shelley are repulsed by overt didacticism in literature. Considering the motivation behind their writings, Duffy opines: ‘Although for both Shelley and Cavell the one thing clamouring to be unbound and let happen as the truth of our condition is the Promethean fire of desire, they both find provocation, sustenance and ratification in the high culture of (mostly) the West, which Cavell constantly calls over praised and undervalued’ (p. 118). The concluding chapters are also dedicated to Shelley. Chapter 5 explores Shelley’s Epipsychidion and Adonais, and chapter 6 reads Shelley and Cavell in relation to Rousseau. This is a difficult and at times a frustrating book, whose written style is sometimes hard to digest, but it is certainly not without interest, especially for those already captivated by Cavell.

In ‘Reimaging the Romantic Imagination’ (ERR 24[2013] 385–402), Alan Richardson provides an overview of the history of critical responses to the now rather fraught topic of Romantic imagination in literary criticism, from the early 1980s to the present day. Richardson illustrates how rather idealist celebrations of Romantic imagination became an easy target for the New Historicist readings of Romantic ideology, such that by the turn of the millennium, the term ‘imagination’ had almost become a taboo word in Romantic literary criticism. Richardson praises the pioneering work of Richard Sha, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson for pushing Romantic studies, whose works in many respects pre-empt his own espousal of neural Romanticism. He completes this article with some thoughts about Romantic representations of the embodied imagination, through Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt, before finally offering a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria. In conclusion Richardson states that ‘Romantic studies gained considerably from a period of historicist critique and ideological deflation of imagination; they now stand to gain just as much from a critical return to a topic that Romanticists may have been too hasty to dismiss’ (p. 399).

Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons present an edited collection of essays drawn from a conference in 2011 hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, entitled Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and the Remembered Past. Mitchell and Parsons found that ‘By grouping analyses of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts together, it provides a clearer sense of both the shifts and the continuities in the way historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices intersect’ (p. 2). The essays in this volume reappraise the history and form of the historical novel, and several essays will be of interest to Romanticists. In her chapter, Ann H. Stevens ranges across a great variety of extra-canonical historical novels between 1760 and 1800, finding that: ‘In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the modern form of the historical novel began to emerge’ (p. 19). Mary Spongberg’s chapter focuses on domestic history and the feminine past in Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, arguing that ‘By domesticating history … Austen clearly articulates a sense that women and men experience the past in very different ways’ (p. 66). In her chapter, Helen Groth focuses on Byron’s Sardanapalus, and argues that ‘the inter-medial and miscellaneous reading practices encouraged by … various panoramic revisions of Byron constitute far more than a mere accessory to the “aim and purpose of representation” ’ (p. 85). Sophia Lee’s The Recess, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and her posthumous Gaston de Blondeville are the focus of Diana Wallace’s chapter, which addresses the importance of emotion and physicality in Gothic historical fiction. Fiona Price’s chapter examines the historical novel in the context of the aftermath of the French Revolution, focusing on Ellis Cornelia Knight’s novel Marcus Flaminius, and its relation to ‘conjectural history’, as such works ‘experiment historiographically in order to explore the causes of the Revolution’ (p. 189).

In 2013 Romanticism published a special series of articles, edited by John Strachan, on the subject of ‘Romanticism and Sport’. In his introductory ‘Romanticism and Sport’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 233–45) Strachan acknowledges that ‘this pairing of Romanticism and sport might seem an unlikely conjunction’ (p. 233). But very swiftly the prevalence of sporting culture in the Romantic era, entwined with its canonical literature and writers, is persuasively established. This is actually especially so when one recalibrates one’s sense of periodization, to think of sport in ‘late Georgian culture’, in the context of an enhanced emphasis on fitness, physicality, and pugilism. Simon Bainbridge’s ‘Romanticism and the Invention of Rock Climbing’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 246–60) does perhaps somewhat recap material discussed in an earlier article on Romanticism and mountaineering (Wordsworth Circle [2012]). Here, his essay argues that ‘rock climbing had its genesis in the Romantic period and that there was a powerful synergy between the emergent sport and the era’s literature’ (p. 246). Once again, he returns to the figure of the solitary Coleridge climbing the rock faces of the Lake District, as well as to Wordsworth, Byron, and Walter Scott as ardent rock-climbers.

In her ‘Romanticism and Physical Education in the 1820s’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 261–72), Kyle Grimes elucidates the emergence of a craze for gymnasia in London in the 1820s, inculcated by German immigrants. This culminated in 1826 with the inauguration of the London Gymnastic Society. Grimes argues that ‘In effect, the classes in step aerobics, cross-training, and pilates that keep people streaming in to the local gymnasium or fitness centre today are an unlikely product of the Romantic period’ (p. 261). Her essay outlines a general history of the emergence of fitness culture in Britain, which she believes has an implicit connection with ‘the discourses of literary Romanticism, and … an increasingly prominent discourse of English nationalism and a transformation of the political order’ (pp. 261–2).

Jane Moore draws together an unusual pairing of William Hazlitt with Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘Modern Manners: Regency Boxing and Romantic Sociability’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 273–90). She observes that ‘paradoxical as it may seem … Hazlitt’s contribution to sporting literature, specifically that of the hyper-masculine and physically brutal world of boxing, in his great essay ‘The Fight’ … links him to Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment feminist interest in reforming social manners and morals’ (p. 273). In his fascinating ‘The Velocipede, the Dandy, and the Cockney’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 291–309), Brian Rejack sheds light upon the emergence of cycling culture in the early nineteenth century. Keats dismissed the bicycle as ‘the nothing of the day’, which is ironic, as the bicycle soon became associated with Cockneyism as a mark of ridiculous effeminacy. In this vein, Rejack’s study is less concerned ‘the actual history of the velocipede’s use, and more with the ways in which it was represented’ (p. 292). Leigh Hunt mounted a spirited defence of cycling as commingling utility and pleasure. But it was not only the Cockney that was associated with velocipedes, but also dandies like Beau Brummell. Rejack’s article features some wonderful satirical cartoons of cyclists, including William Heath’s Everybody his Hobby which draws upon the legacy of the Sternian hobby-horse. As Rejack observes: ‘Although the velocipede appears to revolve primarily around the dandy, the connection to Cockneys emerges when placed in the context of other attempts to democratize certain aspects of culture like sport and leisure’ (p. 306).

Finally, John Strachan’s article ‘Charles James Apperley (“Nimrod”) and Late Georgian Sporting Biography’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 310–26), explores the life of Charles Apperley, nicknamed ‘Nimrod’ after the great biblical hunter. The recent surge of interest in Romantic pugilism has tended to focus on Pierce Egan’s Boxiana and Hazlitt’s ‘The Fight’. But Strachan’s essay lays the foundation for further interest in and research into Apperley, as a powerful figure of late Georgian masculinity, blood sports, and hunting culture.

Rachel Bowlby’s A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories is a short history of the topic of parenthood, but might be of interest to scholars of the long nineteenth century, as chapter 9 parallels readings of orphanhood in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park with Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and George Eliot’s Silas Marner. Tom Lowenstein’s rather quixotic (not to say self-indulgent) From Culbone Wood—In Xanadu—Notebooks and Fantasias deserves a very brief mention: this work comprises a long prose meditation in the voice of an eighteenth-century poet, who has the previous day composed ‘Kubla Khan’, and is obviously constructed around an impression of S.T. Coleridge.

In ‘Publishers and Lawyers’ (WC 44[2013] 121–6), Gary Dyer describes how publishers in the early nineteenth century were frequently in need of legal advice and guidance, especially in the field of copyright theft, and protection from prosecution for libel. In particular, Dyer focuses on the conservative publisher John Murray, and a surprisingly costly legal war waged against Maria Rundell and her A New System of Domestic Cookery [1805].

2. The Novel

The year 2013 was a particularly good one for Gothic studies. In Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic a range of Romantic-era English-language novels are recovered. The first chapter, ‘Cambria Gothica (1780s–1820s)’ (pp. 13–49), presents an engaging study of Welsh Gothic writing which examines not only visitors’ responses to Wales and the sublime language of their travel accounts, but also the Gothic novels written during the Romantic period and set amidst the splendours of the Welsh scenery, drawing upon and casually constructing aspects of folklore and superstition. Aaron presents novels in which gender dynamics are reversed, and where young unaccompanied men are transported to Wales to experience persecution and pursuit, read as a type of critique of English and Welsh union with the common trope of marriage standing for cultural union. Aaron identifies typically Gothic tensions and anxieties in the Welsh-authored or Welsh-set novels, suggesting that ‘Welsh Gothic historical fiction can be said to follow a similar pattern in terms of the power politics at work within the genre; in it the forgotten or repressed annals of Welsh history are reinserted into British history, and the past rewritten to highlight the exclusion of the Welsh and their concerns’ (p. 49). Among the range of novels introduced and analysed here are Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress: interspersed with anecdotes of a Nabob [1785] by Anna Maria Bennett, the anonymous Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel [1794], Isabella Kelly’s The Abbey of St Asaph [1795], Robert Evans’s The Stranger or Llewellyn Family: A Cambrian Tale [1798], Cambrian Pictures by Ann Julia Hatton [1810], and Nella Stephens’s The Robber Chieftain; or, Dinas Linn [1825].

In a study which calls for ‘a new theory of historical fiction’ (p. vii) which will adequately acknowledge and investigate the relationship between historical and Gothic fiction, Diana Wallace presents a wide-ranging exploration of female writing, voice, and erasure in Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic, a well-informed and theoretically grounded work. Wallace’s argument throughout is that women writers, conscious of their exclusion from legitimate or authoritative (male-authored and male-focused) history, have used the form of the Gothic historical novel as a way of wresting some authority for themselves, and of symbolizing their exclusion from other types of history writing. The form of the Gothic historical novel, and ‘Female Gothic’ writing as a whole, thus becomes charged with importance for what it can tell readers about women’s concerns with inheritance, illegitimacy, and female authorship. The second chapter, ‘The Murder of the Mother: Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5)’ (pp. 25–66), provides a compelling analysis of Lee’s novel in a very detailed and substantial account. Wallace examines the intertextuality of other novels and histories in relation to Lee’s work, with Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves, Prévost’s Cleveland, and Reeve’s The Old English Baron among them. Irigaray’s theories of bodily encounter with the mother are used to interpret the denial and burial of the maternal authority in Lee’s novel and its establishment of the patriarchal. Finally Wallace looks at how Radcliffe rewrites Lee in her first five novels, and in doing so rewrites the female historical novel into Female Gothic: ‘reading Ann Radcliffe’s work as a direct response to Lee’s novel, as I do below, places them both in a matrilineal literary genealogy which reaches back to Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves (1678). Acknowledging this shifts the way in which we think of both the Female Gothic and the historical novel’ (p. 27).

Joseph Crawford’s Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror begins with the problem of the ‘false unity’ of the term ‘Gothic’, and the shortcomings of the general critical explanations for its rise and popularity (p. ix), and argues that instead of the old argument about a rising middle-class critique of an aristocratic or religious authority creating the genre, or forming it as a means of expressing cultural anxiety, ‘the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end’ (p. ix). From this starting point Crawford unfolds his sustained theorization of terror literature arising from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1790s, but not within the framework of the oft-cited De Sadean argument; while acknowledging that the French Revolution was bound up in the development of Gothic, Crawford insists that the existing Gothic mode itself was largely responsible for the ways in which British literary and political representations were made. Crawford traces the rise of the term ‘terrorist’ from 1795 onwards, arguing that ‘the terrorist, like the Gothic villain, is essentially a rhetorical construct, marking the rise not of a new form of political violence, but of a new way of writing and thinking about a very old one’ (p. xi). This is a substantial study containing a wealth of close analysis of Gothic texts within the framework of the author’s focus. The chapters are set out as follows: pre-terror, pre-Gothic vocabulary for crime and evil during the Enlightenment; 1790s terror fiction and the French Revolution in British Gothic; German influences in supernatural and conspiracy theory in British Gothic; popular forms, prints, and melodramas 1790–1820; legacies in nineteenth-century literature from Scott to Dickens. Romantic-era novelists discussed include Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, William Godwin, and Walter Scott.

Angela Wright’s new monograph, Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, is packed with precise textual analysis, clear historical investigation and contextualization, and many a well-turned sentence. Anxiety about French literary and cultural influence during the Seven Years War (1756–63) and then the outbreak of revolutionary war with France (1793), coupled with reviewers’ alacrity at spotting French influences in new writing (or their determination to find them), has meant that the extent of that influence upon the development on British Gothic writing has not been appreciated. Like Crawford, Wright looks to France, and argues that it is impossible to understand the development of the genre without proper knowledge of the literary and historical context, in this case, returning to the Seven Years War between the two countries. Wright discovers a type of troubling ambivalence when it comes to representing British legitimacy, conveyed via authors’ use of French literary traditions. The authors discussed here range from Walpole in chapter 1 to Lewis in chapter 5, with a good chapter on terror and the 1790s which provides a thought-provoking contrast to Crawford’s argument. In chapter 2, ‘The Translator Cloak’d: Sophia Lee, Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith’ (pp. 33–63), Wright uncovers the French source for Reeve’s The Exiles; or, Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt [1788] and situates Reeve’s ‘disguised incursion into the murky territories of translation and adaptation’ (p. 42) within a continuum of nationalist discourse evident in Reeve’s earlier The Progress of Romance [1785] and The Old English Baron [1778]. She also analyses Lee’s The Recess and Warbeck [1786], which Lee translated openly from the French and which overtly interposes itself, and by extension its author, in the contemporary debate surrounding Anglo-French political and historical relations. Furthermore, Smith’s French translations of Manon Lescaut [1785] and The Romance of Real Life [1787] and her positive portrayals of the country are a source of interest here. The next chapter, ‘The Castle Under Threat: Ann Radcliffe’s System and the Romance of Europe’ (pp. 88–119), looks at how Radcliffe revised and rethought her writing as the political climate of the 1790s worsened, but that she maintained a fidelity to France and developed an increasing critique of England, discussing forms of government, tyranny, and justice evident in the continental The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, before returning to an older form of romance in Gaston de Blondeville [1826], which Wright reads as a positive attempt to draw Britain and France together in a climate of paranoia.

Ellen Malenas Ledoux’s study, Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, begins, as so many Gothic studies must, with Horace Walpole and the question of ‘emergent forms’. The author consistently and persuasively debates the notion of conservatism in the Gothic mode, arguing that its transgressive qualities make it a transatlantic, transformative vehicle of social and political reform. Ledoux’s interest in emergence expands most interestingly in her second chapter, which addresses the ‘emerging feminism’ inherent in the Gothic’s usefulness as a genre which allows for the representation of ‘diverse domestic scenarios’ (p. 58), and which Ledoux examines in a range of novels by Charlotte Smith (Emmeline), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho), Eliza Fenwick (Secresy), and the Gothic drama of Joanna Baillie’s Orra [1812]. Especially interesting in this chapter is Ledoux’s analysis of the bluebook genre (a more developed variety of the chapbook) and its engagement with the conventions and morals of the Gothic novel and its aristocratic heroines. Ledoux’s analysis of one rare example, Sarah Wilkinson’s The Castle of Montabino [c.1810] is very detailed, and illuminates the tensions between class and gender in this popular form, which draws sharp distinctions between the resolutions offered to women of higher or lower classes. In the remainder of the study, one chapter apiece is given to Godwin’s St Leon [1799] in a productive analysis of ‘the novel’s embrace of rupture and fragmentation’ (p. 95) and disease, social progress, and the failure of institutionalized and domestic care in relation to Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn [1798–1800]. The final chapter contains a thorough exploration of the work of Matthew Lewis and his complex, contradictory, and often ambivalent attitudes towards slavery and abolition in The Castle Spectre [1797] and Journal of a West India Proprietor [1834].

Concluding with an overview of contemporary Irish cultural politics, and ending with the remark that ‘we have re-entered Gothic Ireland (or perhaps we never really left it)’ (p. 207), Jarlath Killeen’s study, The Emergence of Irish Gothic: History, Origins, Theories traces Gothic emergence on a national scale. The expected authors are present, Regina Maria Roche and Charles Maturin, but also Jonathan Swift, and the texts analysed here include the anonymous The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley [1760] and the novel Longsword: The Earl of Salisbury [1762] by Thomas Leland, in a study which argues that Irish Gothic results from what the author, slightly confusingly, describes as an embattled ‘Irish Anglican’ response to historical and political change from the 1750s onwards (Killeen refers thus to the class more usually termed Anglo-Irish, rather than implying a specifically religious, Church of England grouping). Gender, the ‘monstering’ of Catholicism, where, when, and what Irish Gothic may be, and the horror of history itself comprise the study’s focus. In Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, Gavin Budge addresses the work of Ann Radcliffe, among other writers, in his searching analysis of the spectral, the material, and intuition. His study follows the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ school of philosophical thought widely influential in nineteenth-century Britain and America and, drawing upon the philosophies of Berkeley and Reid, explores the debate surrounding perception and the supernatural, natural, or otherwise. In chapter 1, ‘Radcliffe and the Spectral Scene of Reading’ (pp. 27–47), Budge suggests that a productive way of reading Radcliffe’s novels comes via an exploration of enthusiasm and self-awareness in her writing. In particular, he argues that Radcliffe is one of the first writers in the Romantic period ‘to employ the new late eighteenth-century neurological understanding of imagination for a distinctively aesthetic purpose’ (p. 242) in a detailed analysis of the mind and recuperation in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Kamilla Elliott, ‘Matriarchal Picture Identification in First-Wave British Gothic Fiction’ (in Andeweg and Zlosnik, eds., pp. 12–29), examines Gothic’s critique of aristocratic patriarchy via her analysis of the relatively rare novels The Orphan of the Rhine [1796] by Eleanor Sleath and The Confessional of Valombre [1812] by Louisa Sidney Stanhope, as well as Sophia Lee’s The Recess [1783–5]. Later in the same collection Joanne Watkiss explores the instability of concepts such as linearity, familiarity, and domesticity in ‘Violent Households: The Family Destabilized in The Monk (1796), Zofloya, or the Moor (1818), and Her Fearful Symmetry (2009)’ (pp. 157–73). In an essay entitled ‘Demonizing the Catholic Other: Religion and the Secularization Process in Gothic Literature’ (in Elbert and Marshall, eds., Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 83–96), Diane Long Hoeveler casts her net widely in a reliable account examining the representation of Catholicism and anti-Catholic sentiment in Gothic literature between 1780 and 1829, adopting a ‘ “both/and” method’ rather than an ‘ “either/or” ’ to explain the ideological agendas found in such texts and evaluate whether they nourish Catholic emancipation or guard against it. Novels discussed here include Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In ‘No Place Like Home: From Local to Global (and Back Again) in the Gothic Novel’ (in Gottlieb and Juliet Shields, eds., pp. 85–101), Evan Gottlieb examines Radcliffe’s representation of the local, the national, and the cosmopolitan in her novels, arguing that in works like The Italian Radcliffe actively encourages her readers towards a cosmopolitan outlook, in contrast to the ‘populist xenophobia’ of Lewis’s The Monk (p. 97). In the same collection Deirdre Lynch considers the formation of the reader’s experience of being ‘at home’ in English literature and the ways in which it functions as a form of nationalism in ‘Homes and Haunts: Austen’s and Mitford’s English Idylls’ (pp. 173–84), discussing Emma [1816] and Mitford’s Our Village [1824–32].

A special issue of European Romantic Review dedicated to Gothic curiosities and edited by Diane Long Hoeveler contains three articles: Jeffrey Kahan discusses forgeries, lost novels, and found short stories in ‘The Search for W.H. Ireland’s Bruno’ (ERR 24[2013] 3–22); Dale Townshend examines the life story of a once popular and prolific Gothic novelist in ‘T.I. Horsely Curties, Romance, and the Gift of Death’ (ERR 24[2013] 23–42); and Hoeveler takes up the threads from each of these articles in ‘William Henry Ireland, T.I. Horsely Curties, and the Anti-Catholic Gothic Novel’ (ERR 24[2013] 43–65) to argue that anti-Catholicism in the Gothic renders the form a propagandistic tool for Whig, Protestant, and nationalist ideologies. Elsewhere, in ‘Urban Gothic in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’ (ERR 24[2013] 683–97), Kellie Donovan-Condron draws parallels between the novel’s Venetian setting and its codes of behaviour with contemporary anxieties about London. Deborah Russell examines how the various Gothic themes of history, romance, and nation-building are employed by Smith in her 1793 novel in ‘Domestic Gothic: Genre and Nation in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House’ (LitComp 10[2013] 771–82). Katherine Ding offers a reading of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural, and her concepts of belief, and affect against Enlightenment theories of experience, perception, and reflection in ‘ “Searching after the Splendid Nothing”: Gothic Epistemology and the Rise of Fictionality’ (ELH 80[2013] 543–73). Rudolph Glitz considers Lewis’s manuscript and its editing history in ‘A Case of Authorial Emendation in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk’ (ANQ 26[2013] 24–6). Elsewhere in the journal, Kwinten Van De Walle explores Beckford’s use of architecture to inscribe Vathek’s character upon his surroundings, in ‘The Architectural Theatricalization of Power in William Beckford’s Vathek’ (ANQ 26[2013] 163–8). In a useful companion-piece to Diana Wallace’s chapter on Lee, Matthew J. Rigilano also examines subjectivity within an application of Lacanian theory in ‘The Recess Does Not Exist: Absorption, Liberality, and Feminine Subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s The Recess’ (ERR 25[2013] 209–32). A much-needed analysis of Mary Robinson’s long-neglected novel is offered by Stephanie Russo in ‘ “Where virtue struggles midst a maze of snares”: Mary Robinson’s Vancenza (1792) and the Gothic Novel’ (WW 20[2013] 586–601). Russo unpicks Robinson’s use of narrative displacement and manipulation to condemn the social order in its response to female victimhood and transgression.

Orianne Smith’s Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, is a welcome study which provides a way of reading religious and prophetic writings by Helen Maria Williams, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley among other writers, in a coherent and consistent manner, locating them securely within a tradition, robust if critically neglected, of female prophecy. Smith negotiates the critical arguments relating to revelation, revolution, and millenarian writing and thought by M.H. Abrams and Jerome J. McGann, as well as Anne K. Mellor and Ian Balfour, to argue persuasively that women’s prophetic writing did, in fact, exist, but that the form has been too narrowly theorized as a male-authored one. Drawing upon the speech-act theories of J.L. Austin, Smith reconstructs the threat to church, state, and the Burkean model of tradition posed by the prophetic, performative voice emerging from a very different tradition: ‘Romantic women writers who engaged in political prophecy were, in effect, staging an ethical revolution by positioning themselves as models to emulate and as spiritual leaders, and by bearing witness to the difference between the state of the world and the world as God intended it to be’ (p. 31). Chapter 3, ‘ “I, being the representative of Liberty”: Helen Maria Williams and the Utopian Performative’ (pp. 99–128), examines Williams’s predictions of a new millennium’s peace and prosperity, moving from the unsuccessful attempt to mix prophecy with realism in Julia [1790] to its more successful realization in Letters from France. In chapter 4, ‘The Passion of the Gothic Heroine: Ann Radcliffe and the Origins of Narrative’ (pp. 129–57), Smith appraises the visionary activity of Radcliffe’s heroines in their perception of God’s ordering of the world. She also examines Joanna Southcott’s self-identification with Radcliffe’s heroine Adeline in The Romance of the Forest [1791], which Southcott reads as an account of her own persecution as a prophet. Finally, in chapter 6, ‘Prophesying Tragedy: Mary Shelley and the End of Romanticism’ (pp. 190–219), the pre-Christian model of female prophecy in Valperga [1823] and the correlation between prophecy and the demonic or the rhetorical apocalypse in The Last Man [1826] are analysed, as well as the role of prophecy and monstrosity in Frankenstein and Matilda.

David Simpson’s Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, briefly discusses foreign goods in domestic Austen scenes, but a more substantial analysis of Romantic fiction is provided in chapter 3, ‘Friends and Enemies in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels’ (pp. 82–108), which begins with the quality of ‘mercy’ in The Merchant of Venice via Derrida, before moving into a thoughtful exploration of the representation of Judaism in Ivanhoe and its persecution and exile of Rebecca, and then continuing the exploration of religion in The Betrothed and The Talisman [both 1825]. Simpson deploys the unifying concept of the pharmakon throughout his study, that which represents both the poison and the cure, applied variously to Rebecca by a hostile society which both relies upon her skill as a healer and resents her for it, and by Saladin in The Talisman. A later chapter, ‘Strange Women’ (pp. 209–47), examines the strangeness of women, beginning here with Leslie Fielder’s comment that woman is ‘the original stranger’ (p. 209), which suggests a certain gender bias in his thought. Simpson enjoys demolishing this ‘dreary history of male efforts to preserve power over females’ (p. 209), but finds much fascinating material in it to examine how woman as foreigner and slave has been placed in the threatening category of the stranger, drawing upon Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl [1806] and The Missionary [1811], Madame de Staël’s Corinne [1807], Charlotte Smith’s Desmond [1794], and Burney’s The Wanderer [1824].

In Peter J. Kitson’s ‘Fictions of Slave Resistance and Revolt: Robert Southey’s Poems on the Slave Trade (1797) and Charlotte Smith’s “The Story of Henrietta” (1800)’ (in Youngquist, ed., pp. 107–23), the subject of resistance in Smith’s inset tale about plantation slavery is illuminatingly contrasted to Southey’s radical poetry, and contextualized by a wider exploration of free, white authors’ representation of (and their own resistance to) slave insurrections. In Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation, edited by Cian Duffy, Peter Howell, and Caroline Ruddell, Joseph Crawford examines the mediation of the past via the adaptation of Romance into Gothic in ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Gothic Adaptation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ (pp. 23–39), considering the work of Clara Reeve and Bishop Hurd as well as Radcliffe and Scott. Annika Bautz argues for a recognition of the newness (as opposed to mere novelty or popularity) of the illustrated novel, as a composite text which is a remediation of the original, in ‘ “In perfect volume form, Price Sixpence”: Illustrating Pride and Prejudice for a Late-Victorian Mass-Market’ (pp. 101–24).

In ‘Blackwood’s and the Boundaries of the Short Story’ (in Morrison and Roberts, eds., pp. 163–74), Tim Killick argues for the influence and authority of the magazine in the development of the genre in the early nineteenth century, examining what he calls the magazine’s ‘tendency towards short fiction’ (p. 165). The interconnected arguments, discussions, and generic innovations within the stories in the magazine, but also in engagement with the world of its readers, are considered here. Killick examines the works of James Hogg, John Wilson, William Laidlaw, and Daniel Keyte Sandford in stories and case studies, and medical or natural phenomenon stories by James Braid and Robert Gordon, demonstrating how non-fiction prose forms irrigate and develop the fictional prose form. Elsewhere in the same collection Gillian Hughes, in ‘The Edinburgh of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg’s Fiction’ (pp. 175–266), explores Edinburgh as ‘a site of confusion’, a place of communal literary activity which prose writers contrast to and often deliberately set in opposition to the solitary figure of the poet:

Blackwood’s proclaims itself urban, European, and cosmopolitan in opposition to suburban London and ridicules Constable’s Whigs in a city satire, yet disapproves the city-based internationalizing Enlightenment and values the local and the rural, the specificities of the regional, of Scottish Presbyterianism, and of the lower-class characters of the Waverley novels. The folk not the urban is the nation, and the poet is solitary not social. (p. 179)

Lastly in this collection, Anthony Jarrells, in ‘Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood’s, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad’ (pp. 267–277) examines the attitudes towards region and empire in the periodical’s short fiction by Galt, Hogg, John Wilson, and David Macbeth Moir, as well as the tales of terror by John Howison. In ‘Of Tangled Webs and Busted Sets: Tropologies of Number and Shape in the Fiction of John Galt’ (RCPS [2013] 14 paras.), Matthew Wickman examines Galt’s responses to Scott and historical progress via algebra and geometry in The Annals of the Parish [1822] and ‘The Seamstress’ [1833]. Jeffrey Cass looks at Galt’s unequivocal support of colonialism in a survey of his work in ‘John Galt and the Colonization of Canada’ (WC 44[2013] 136–9).

An essay by Catherine Edwards, ‘The Return to Rome: Desire and Loss in Staël’s Corinne’ (in Saunders, Martindale, Pite, and Skoie, eds., Romans and Romantics, pp. 183–201), examines emotion and erudition within the Romantic streets and the classical weight of Rome as it resists Corinne and de Staël’s attempts to wrest the city from patriarchal to maternal power. Anna M. Fitzer recovers the works of Elizabeth LeFanu, née Sheridan, attributing the anonymous Lucy Osmond [1803] to her and providing an analysis of legacy, inheritance, and LeFanu’s later novels The India Voyage [1804] and The Sister [1810] in ‘Revealing Influence: The Forgotten Daughters of Frances Sheridan’ (WW 20[2013] 64–81). Meghan Burke Hattaway suggests ways of reading Opie’s representations of fallen virtue and recovery as an attack on social ideology that is more radical than has previously been acknowledged, in ‘Amelia Opie’s Fiction: Contagious and Recuperative Texts’ (ERR 24[2013] 555–77). Katherine Watts considers Robinson’s attempts to conflate the public and private spheres in ‘Female Independence in Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter’ (RaVoN 62[2013] 25 paras.). Julie Straight examines cruelty, sympathy and the common good in ‘Promoting Liberty through Universal Benevolence in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah’ (ERR 24[2013] 589–614). Gerd Karin Omdal considers Reeve’s self-fashioning and status as critic within a longer tradition of female literary history in ‘Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance and the Female Critic in the 18th Century’ (LitComp 10[2013] 688–95). Brian Michael Norton uncovers an emerging feminist critique of Enlightenment subjectivity in Mary Hays’s novel in ‘Emma Courtney, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Autonomy’ (EC 54[2013] 297–315). Andrew McInnes looks at the responses by Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Hannah More to Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, and Wollstonecraft’s resurrected self in these polemical texts, in ‘Wollstonecraft’s Legion: Feminism in Crisis, 1799’ (WW 20[2013] 479–95). Finally, Jane Spencer examines narrative sympathy and the development of children’s stories involving animals in ‘Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)’ (ERR 24[2013] 751–74).

Turning to work on individual authors, Olivia Murphy’s Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic sets out to answer the deceptively simple question about Austen as a reader and writer: ‘why, if Austen’s writing is so firmly grounded in the literature of her contemporaries, is her own work so strikingly and consistently different?’ (p. x). Much of the analysis throughout the study is framed by Murphy’s interest in and understanding of the increasing role played by reviewers and literary critics in the period, and throughout her study is weighted by a careful and consistent sense of interpretation of Austen’s writing in the light of Austen’s reading; Murphy suggests Austen wrote good novels because she had read so many of them, good, indifferent, or worse, and had read them carefully, always attentive to form, content, style, and politics. The first chapter, ‘ “From reading to writing it is but one step”: Jane Austen, Criticism and the Novel in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’ (pp. 1–29), explores the juvenilia and the late eighteenth-century literary culture which educated Austen as a reader. Murphy examines the construction of the idea that the author of serious novels is male, and discusses Hazlitt’s critique of Burney, and Austen’s critique of Scott, contrasting them to Clara Reeve’s early formation of a canon of novels in The Progress of Romance [1785] and and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s British Novelists [1810]. The next two chapters address ‘Critical Quixotry’, and Austen’s use of pretext, encompassing a light application of Bakhtinian theory and the exploration of the influence that Madame de Staël’s Delphine [1802] had on Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, as well as the connections between Frances Brooke’s The Excursion [1777], Edgeworth’s Belinda [1801], and Pride and Prejudice, noting how radically Austen engages with the disinheritance plot, always eschewing the traditional reinstatement resolution of Tom Jones, Hermsprong, or Evelina. The final two chapters address the matter of criticism and literary transgression in Mansfield Park, and analysis of Austen’s manipulation and development of the novel genre moves on to her parodic piece ‘Plan of a Novel’ and Emma in the last chapter, a novel which Murphy describes as ‘a text that can be read at once as meta-novelistic and as anti-novelistic. Emma’s multiplicity of subplots, and its preoccupation with the reading, rereading and misreading both of writing and of events internal to the text, render the novel a manifesto for Austen’s approach to novelistic criticism, or, in other words, the “judicious” reading which Austen’s fiction demands’ (pp. 122–3). The study ends with an appendix, ‘What Happened to Jane Austen’s Books?’ (pp. 177–82), examining the catalogue (and contents) of Godmersham library, at Chawton House, and speculating about books that Austen may have bought or possessed herself as an adult.

June Sturrock’s Jane Austen’s Families examines the fictional families in Austen’s novels and the many ways in which they interact via pairings (parent–child, siblings, cousins), collisions, and positive influences. As Sturrock observes, Austen never writes about orphans; immediate and extended family life is central to both plot and moral development in her novels, though she does attend carefully to the individualistic, spoilt child. Austen also allows the children in her novels to develop and improve morally, unlike the novels of inherited faults like those of Amelia Opie where, as Sturrock notes, faults in parenting take three generations to work their way out. For Austen, ‘representations of the family are less pessimistic—and perhaps more realistic’ (p. 13). Part I, ‘Family Dynamics’, contains overlapping analyses of each of Austen’s mature novels and consists of three chapters: ‘The Functions of the Dysfunctional Family: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice’; ‘Spoilt Children: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma’; ‘ “Usefulness and Exertions”: Mothers and Sisters in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion’. Part II, ‘Fathers and Daughters’, offers a further three chapters with a more sustained analysis of a single novel: ‘Money, Morals and Mansfield Park’; ‘Speech and Silence in Emma’; and ‘Dandies and Beauties: The Issue of Good Looks in Persuasion’. The conclusion, ‘Creative Attention’, addresses endings and the idea of continuation in the novels. Throughout, Sturrock’s scholarship is lightly worn, making this an inviting and reliable introductory text with readings of interest to all.

In his chapter ‘The Gentry and Farming in Jane Austen’s Fiction’ (pp. 79–100 in his Romanticism and the Rural Community, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter), Simon J. White examines the role of the gentry in relation to the farming classes in Emma, which he describes as ‘Austen’s novel of community’ (p. 79). White’s concern in his study is with ‘whether everyone in the communities represented in Romantic writing about the countryside shares the same structure of feeling and speaks the same language’ (p. 9). White suggests elsewhere that ‘Austen sensed that the middle classes presented a problem because they had no interest in the practicalities of farming’ (p. 176), and in this chapter he explores the moral and social value contained within acts of rural improvement by landowners in Austen’s novels; John Dashwood, for example, has his act of enclosure repositioned within a narrative of conservative politics and orthodoxy which tends to support agrarian reform rather than ‘our modern-day tendency to equate enclosure, especially when it involves a common or wasteland, with at best a bad character and at worst outright villainy’ (p. 82). Elsewhere, White teases out the subtleties of common land rights as suggested or implied in Mansfield Park, and Austen’s pronounced critique of feckless landowning gentry in Persuasion, but it is the uneasy distinctions between the landed gentry and those gentry whose wealth does not derive from the labour of the classes beneath them on their estates in Emma which receives sustained attention here. Emma’s conception of who the ‘yeoman’ class are and the position they occupy dismisses all layers of ‘status gradations’ in the labouring classes and ‘is reflecting the views of many amongst the gentry who saw cottagers as at best a nuisance and at worst an obstacle to progress’, as well as revealing her ignorance of the structure of the rural community surrounding her and the position held by Robert Martin, Harriet Smith’s erstwhile swain (p. 89). White further demonstrates the importance of the farming classes to the novel’s portrait of rural communities by arguing convincingly that Mr Knightley views himself as a serious farmer, in much the same position as Robert Martin, improving productivity and engaging with the surrounding classes of labourers rather than attending solely to the picturesque qualities of his land, as Mr Rushworth does in Mansfield Park.

The main focus of Barbara K. Seeber’s Jane Austen and Animals is an investigation of the author’s claim that ‘Austen engages in a conversation with her contemporaries about nature and animals, and that she interrogates the human-animal divide from a feminist perspective’ (p. ix). Seeber is concerned with positioning Austen’s works within the developing critical field of animal studies, setting out a brief overview of the field’s main terms and perspectives in her preface. She identifies the animal metaphors used in nineteenth-century criticism on Austen to figure her as domestic, tame, and instinctive, and argues that a more contemporary tendency for some critics to dismiss the importance of nature within Austen’s work occludes ‘how the representation of nature and animals advances Austen’s feminist argument and her critique of the conservative social order’ (p. 6). Seeber sets up a series of thematic chapters to structure her study of objectification and subordination: the sportsmen who claim an appreciation of nature but who exploit and destroy it, all the while exploiting women in their parallel, non-sporting actions; non-sportsmen who gain the moral ascendancy within the novels; heroines, nature, and pets (in which the treatment Fanny Price receives from the Bertrams is persuasively compared to that shown to animals throughout the novel in the form of cruelty, restraint, and teasing), food and politics, and landscape. The opening chapter, ‘The Animal Question and Women’ (pp. 15–31), briefly and helpfully sets out the contextual debate on animal rights, beginning with Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty [1751], Humphrey Primatt’s A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals [1776], animal rights in Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft and Macaulay’s opposition to the ‘natural’ arguments for women’s subordination and the position of animals within a benevolent society.

Janet Todd’s Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels, an enjoyable coffee-table-style book, contains a wealth of period illustrations including the work of Gillray, Rowlandson, Fuseli, and Constable, from portraits to landscapes and seascapes, cartoons, etchings, and photographs, clearly and beautifully reproduced at both full-page and smaller scale. The text consists of an authoritative account of Austen in twenty-two chapters, mixing the biographical and historical explorations with succinct but nuanced examinations of her works. The tone of the book seems aimed at the interested but general reader; the well-balanced content and array of well-observed details will surely inform and amuse experts and amateurs alike. A particularly attractive feature of this book are the five envelopes fixed within its pages; each contains a range of facsimile documents, from fragments of Austen’s manuscripts to maps and period texts, such as the satirical print ‘News from Worthing: In A Letter from a Beast of Burden to her Brother Jack’ [1807] by Robert Bloomfield, complete with bucolic etching of holidaymakers riding the aforementioned donkey.

Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community, edited by Laurence Raw and Robert G. Dryden, is a lively collection of seventeen essays engaging with Austen in multiple ways: dissemination, legacy, time, adaptation and identity (and surely it is a tantalizing printer’s error rather than the editors’ intention to call Austen ‘an early-eighteenth-century English woman’ (pp. 1–2) unless the globetrotting Austen also possesses her own variety of Lost in Austen powers). The title essay, ‘Inventing Jane: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community’, sees Robert G. Dryden examine the role of Bath in readers’ re-creation of Austen’s life, as does Richard Berger in ‘Hang a Right at the Abbey: Jane Austen and the Imagined City’. In ‘Young Jane Austen and the First Canadian Novel: From Emily Montague to “Amelia Webster” and Love and Freindship’ Juliet McMaster examines Frances Brooke’s 1769 novel and its traces in Northanger Abbey, and Sheryl Cornett explores Austen’s stylistic and moral legacy in ‘Jane Austen for Our Time: Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers (1987)’. Lucile Trunel explores the diminution of Austen’s reputation to that of a sentimental romance-writer in France via marketing, in ‘Jane Austen’s French Publications from 1815: A History of a Misunderstanding’ and Laurence Raw turns to US radio adaptations of Pride and Prejudice in ‘Jane Austen on Old-Time Radio: Creating Imaginative Worlds’, with Anette Svensson examining the global reinvention of the same novel in ‘Pleasure and Profit: Re-presentations of Jane Austen’s Ever-Expanding Universe’. In ‘The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen’ six academics review a 2011 BBC documentary by Amanda Vickery. Film is addressed by Jeremy Strong’s consideration of romantic comedy conventions in ‘Sweetening Jane: Equivalence through Genre and the Problem of Class in Austen Adaptations’. James P. Carson’s ‘ “One of Folly’s Puppies”: Austen and Animal Studies’ examines environment and nature, and Elise Barker turns to consumerism in ‘ “Jane Austen is My Homegirl”: American Janeites and the Ironic Postmodern Identity’. The wider reach of global Austen is addressed by Rana Tekcan in ‘Getting to Know Miss Jane Austen: Images of an Author’, in Turkey, Val Horniman’s ‘Teaching Jane Austen in Communist China, 1990–1996’, and ‘Jane Austen in the Classroom: Some Indian Responses’ by Harish Trivedi, Vishala Urivi, Ruth Vanita, Anshoo Sharma, Harsha Kumari Singh, and Ashima Kanwar. Rewritings of Austen are discussed by Marina Cano-López in ‘In Flesh and Blood: Jane Austen as a Postmodern Fictional Character’, and finally Lawrence Raw interviews Juliet Archer and Edward H. Carpenter on the topic of their own efforts as authors in ‘Rewriting Austen’.

The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice, edited by Janet Todd, presents the usual indispensable collection of essays for the new reader approaching the subject of the Companion. This collection offers a thorough contextualization of the novel in relation to its composition, form, and literary influences, reception, and proliferating afterlives. The fifteen essays are accompanied by a chronology and a guide to further reading. ‘Narrative’ by Thomas Keymer analyses epistolarity, authority, and free indirect discourse; ‘Character’ by Robert Miles looks at characterization and also mind, moral philosophy (Scottish school), and the concept of telos, knowing ‘one’s own place, nature, and purpose’ (p. 24). In ‘Philosophy’ Peter Knox-Shaw explores Humean sympathy and the unfortunate Miss Bates, Lockean theory of knowledge, pride and self-interest; ‘Composition and Publication’ by Anthony Mandal traces Austen’s rejections, applications to publishers, the role of Thomas Egerton the publisher, and the novel’s reception and reviews in periodicals British Critic, Critical Review, New Review. In ‘The literary context’ Linda Bree surveys prose fiction in the latter half of the eighteenth century and supplies Austen’s comments and critiques on her reading of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Mackenzie, Robert Bage, Charlotte Lennox, Eaton Stannard Barrett, Mary Brunton, Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, including analyses of Cecilia and Camilla. In ‘The Historical Background’ Bharat Tandon explains the compositional history of the novel, Austen’s own life in memoir, the activities of militiamen in the 1790s, money, and economic conditions. In ‘The Economic Context’ Robert Markley looks as money as well, but from the historical perspective of the individual’s investment and sense of obligation as a wealthy or landed person, including an important corrective to more recent critical accounts which misread the total income earned from estates against the range of their outgoings and dependencies, and an explanation and analysis of entailed estates. A different focus on estates is given in ‘Estates’ by Judith W. Page, where character insights and development in relation to engagement with and responses to environment, landscape, and houses are explored. ‘Austen’s Minimalism’ by Andrew Elfenbein queries Austen’s ‘weird, experimental minimalism’ (p. 109) in a period fascinated with detail, which is often so curiously absent from her writing, and moves on to an exploration of the dynamics of Austen’s space and the use of ‘the room’ as a statement of location and movement in her writing. In ‘Translations’ Gillian Dow examines European and global translations of Austen’s work now and then, and focuses specifically upon the French translations of Pride and Prejudice which were produced during the Romantic period, and the difficulties facing her early translators regarding the ‘Englishness’ of the novels as they attempted to adapt the texts to their own audiences and novelistic standards in the early French, German, or Swiss translations. The instability of the translated text becomes apparent, and Dow finishes with the more recent school—and university—canonization of the novel as a literary classic in translation taught all over the world. ‘Criticism’ by Janet Todd turns to the first critics of Austen’s novel and the development of her fame throughout the nineteenth century, the various coteries of her dedicated male fans, and also the rise of feminist criticism, Marxist critiques, recent adaptations, and our contemporary gender politics. Todd also provides the next essay on ‘The Romantic Hero’, beginning with Elizabeth’s ‘archly’ versus Darcy’s ‘gravely’ and ‘coldly’ (p. 151) and demonstrating how Elizabeth’s character is modified to suit him in a way which ‘subdues her individualistic tendencies in the interest of traditional social harmony’ (p. 152). Todd also provides a run-down of the generic hero from Richardson to Radcliffe, and heroes in mass romances of the twentieth century. In ‘Film and Television’ Laura Carroll and John Wiltshire read the film theory of Stanley Cavell on screwball comedy, marriages and remarriages in relation to the 2005 British film (the main focus of the essay), and the 1980 and 1995 TV adaptations. In ‘The Cult of Pride and Prejudice and Its Author’ Devoney Looser queries why Pride and Prejudice ‘has captured commercial, popular and critical attention from decade to decade, generation to generation’ (p. 175). Finally, in ‘Pride and Proliferation’ Emily Auerbach surveys the adaptations, afterlives, and continuations, and suggests that the ‘global proliferation of Pride and Prejudice spin-offs, mash-ups and knock-offs, though alarming and overwhelming, proves the power of Jane Austen’s sparkling novel to capture the imagination of its readers, again and again’ (p. 197).

Among the many journal articles on Austen this year, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner looks at the development of free indirect discourse and interiority across the novels in ‘Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare’ (SEL 53[2013] 763–92). Jillian Heydt-Stevenson uncovers the presence of Charlotte Smith’s novels in Austen’s work in ‘Northanger Abbey, Desmond, and History’ (WC 44[2013] 140–8). Olivia Murphy looks at the central role of walking in its many varieties in ‘Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism (ERR 25[2013] 121–42). Murphy turns to reading and influence as positive models for Austen in ‘Rethinking Influence by Reading with Austen’ (WW 20[2013] 100–14), and in the same issue Emily C. Friedman examines contrasting treatments of posthumous fragments in the case of Mary Brunton’s Emmeline [1819] and Austen’s Sanditon, in ‘Austen Among the Fragments: Understanding the Fate of Sanditon (1817)’ (WW 20[2013] 115–29). Eric Lindstrom applies tenets from language philosophy to understand subjectivity and the acquisition of knowledge in ‘Sense and Sensibility and Suffering; or, Wittgenstein’s Marianne?’ (ELH 80[2013] 1067–91). A different type of knowledge acquisition is investigated in ‘Sense and Sensibility: Uncertain Knowledge and the Ethics of Everyday Life’ (SiR 52[2013] 253–73) by Deborah Weiss. Yoon Sun Lee’s ‘Austen’s Scale Making’ (SiR 52[2013] 171–95) examines Northanger Abbey as a novel which, rather than existing as a small-scale work, in fact acts as a scale-making device itself. Linda A. Robinson’s ‘Crinolines and Pantalettes: What MGM’s Switch in Time Did to Pride and Prejudice’ (Adaptation 6[2013] 283–304) explores the costume-driven re-setting of the novel in the 1830s–40s, the better to exemplify the film studio’s prestigious tradition of mid-century literary adaptations. Diego Saglia calls for a reappraisal of adaptation studies in Austen, moving from ideas of textual translation to cultural translation, in ‘Austen and Translation: National Characters, Translatable Heroines, and the Heroine as Translator’ (Novel 46[2013] 73–92). Julie Park examines the interiority of landscapes and the role of the imagination in ‘What the Eye Cannot See: Interior Landscapes in Mansfield Park’ (EC 54[2013] 169–81). Elsewhere Park traces interiority in relation to enclosure in ‘The Poetics of Enclosure in Sense and Sensibility’ (SECC 42[2013] 237–69), and Caroline Austin-Bolt looks at self-effacing narrators and the transference of power between reader and narrator in ‘Mediating Happiness: Performances of Jane Austen’s Narrators’ (SECC 42[2013] 271–89). ‘At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility’ by Shawn Lisa Maurer (ERR 24[2013] 721–50) argues for a new appreciation of Austen’s use of adolescence as an in-between space for Marianne Dashwood to err and mature. Nicholas M. Williams explores porous boundaries between the real and the anarchically figurative in ‘ “Literally or Figuratively?”: Embodied Perception and Figurative Prospect in Mansfield Park’ (ERR 24[2013] 317–23). Kathleen E. Urda explores the disruption of the concept of a stable character in ‘Why the Show Must Not Go On: “Real Character” and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park’ (ERR 25[2013] 281–302). Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou analyses Hobbes, Oedipus, and Rousseau in ‘Narratives of Absolutism in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park’ (PLL 49[2013] 116–40).

This year’s Persuasions journal (online only, all articles referenced below are from Persuasions 35[2013]) contains papers from the 2013 AGM of the Jane Austen Society of North America, which had the theme ‘Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice … Timeless’ and contains Deborah J. Knuth Klenck on ‘Raptures and Rationality: Fifty Years of Reading Pride and Prejudice’, John Mullan on ‘Speechlessness in Pride and Prejudice’, Linda Slothouber on ‘Bingley’s Four or Five Thousand, and Other Fortunes from the North’, and finances of a different kind in ‘Pride and Prejudice and Poor Laws’ by Sheryl Craig. Joan Klingel Ray asks ‘Do Elizabeth and Darcy Really Improve “on Acquaintance”?’, Janine Barchas considers ‘How Celebrity Name-Dropping Leads to Another Model for Pemberley’, and Sayre Greenfield ends this section with ‘Measuring Austen’s Condescension’. In the Miscellany the usual wide range of articles returns to Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Beginning with Karenleigh A. Overman’s ‘Cartesian Dualism, Real and Literary Madness in the Regency, and the Mind and Madness in Austen’s Novels’, Stuart Bennett’s ‘Lady Moira and the Austens’, Theresa Kenney’s ‘Why Edward Ferrars Doesn’t Dance’, and Peter W. Graham’s ‘Childe Harold and Fitzwilliam Darcy, or A Tale of Two-Hundred-Year-Old Heroes’, the collection moves on to pairs of essays on the novels, with Laura Vorachek and Stephanie Howard-Smith discussing emotion and animals in Mansfield Park, Toby R. Benis and Kathryn David addressing sailors and Providence in Persuasion, and Carolyn J. Brown and Elizabeth Veisz turning to the quality of vitality, and the prospects facing Lydia Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice. The journal ends with Sally B. Palmer’s ‘An Heir Presumptive: Austen’s Legacy in Downtown Abbey’. In Persuasions On-Line (Persuasions On-Line 34:i[2013]) the same structure appears, of the AGM’s Pride and Prejudice papers and the Miscellany. In the Pride and Prejudice papers, Elaine Bander examines Burney’s Cecilia and morality, Kristen Miller Zohn explores Pemberley, where Jeffrey A. Nigro views the portraits; Susan Allen Ford and Theresa M. Kenney look at Richard Fordyce’s Sermons and Anne De Bourgh’s smiles; and Sarah M. Horowitz and Nora Stovel attend to 1890s illustrated editions of the novel and film adaptations respectively. In the second half, Patricia M. Ard, Christine Grover, and Gill Ballinger discuss the historical figures of George Austen, Edward Knight, and twenty-first-century Bath; Sarah Easton presents a queer reading of Henry Tilney, Linda Robinson Walker reads Sense and Sensibility through a postcolonial perspective, and Brett Bourbon considers Elizabeth Bennet’s powers of reason. Also on Pride and Prejudice, M.W. Brumit examines card games, Sally B. Palmer considers the ‘degeneration’ of Bingley, and Eleanor Hersey Nickel looks at children’s literature. Loris Halvorsen Zerne explores the immensely popular Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Amanda Marie Kubic contrasts Austen and Whit Stillman, and Rosa M. García-Periago turns to Bollywood for an exploration of Emma in Aisha. The journal ends with a bibliography of Austen studies from 2012, compiled by Deborah Barnum.

There were five articles on Burney this year. Tara Czechowski explores ‘racial counterfeiting’ and the development of the correlation between poverty, race and crime in ‘ “Black, Patched and Pennyless”: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer’ (ERR 24[2013] 677–700). Jennifer Locke looks at Burney’s critique of speculation and projection in ‘Dangerous Fortune-Telling in Frances Burney’s Camilla’ (ERR 24[2013] 701–20). Ann Campbell contrasts the double narrative structure of economic plot and courtship plot to discern Burney’s response to political debates about marriage in ‘Clandestine Marriage and Frances Burney’s Critique of Matrimony in Cecilia’ (ECL 37:ii[2013] 85–103). Devoney Looser examines Burney’s Memoirs of Doctor Burney [1832], her refashioning of identity in old age, and the reception history of the memoir in ‘ “Her later works happily forgotten”: Rewriting Frances Burney and Old Age’ (ECL 37:iii[2013] 1–28). Lastly, Kathleen Béres Rogers looks at circulated texts (a letter and a poem) about illness and pain in ‘Public Intimacies: Frances Burney’s and Jane Cave Winscom’s Accounts of Illness’ (RaVoN 62[2013] 30 paras.).

On Edgeworth, Deborah Weiss examines Edgeworth’s choice of economics and education to alleviate class tension and turmoil in ‘The Formation of Social Class and the Reformation of Ireland: Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui’ (SNNTS 45[2013] 1–19). Sharon Smith turns to Belinda for an exploration of anxieties surrounding womanhood, marriage, and domesticity in ‘ “Black Face”/Lady Delacour’s “Mask”: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’ (EC 54[2013] 71–90). May Mullen reads An Essay on Irish Bulls and Castle Rackrent in relation to the use of anachronism for raising political possibilities in ‘Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the “Uses” of History’ (ERR 25[2013] 233–59). James Mulvihill examines a different conception and use of history in ‘Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent as Secret History’ (PLL 49[2013] 339–63). Edgeworth is also discussed in detail in Koditschek’s monograph, reviewed below.

James Hogg was the subject of several articles. Jacqueline George applies the concept of the avatar to Hogg’s character of ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ to produce a new reading of its appearance in his novel and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in ‘Avatars in Edinburgh: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the Second Life of Hogg’s Ettrick Shepherd’ (RaVoN 62[2013] 36 paras.). In Studies in Hogg and His World Douglas Gifford poses the question ‘Hogg, Scottish Literature, and Wuthering Heights, or Was Heathcliff a Brownie?’ (SHW 23[2013] 5–22), the playful title revealing an interesting exploration of the folk traditions common to Emily Brontë and Hogg, and some persuasive speculations about the influence Scottish literature, particularly via Blackwood’s Magazine and Scott’s novels, had upon Brontë’s work, citing three Hogg stories, ‘Mr Adamson of Laverhope’, ‘Mary Burnet’, and ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’, as the most likely influences on her novel. Sarah Sharp, in ‘Hogg’s Murder of Ravens: Storytelling, Community and Posthumous Mutilation’ (SHW 23[2013] 31–40), suggests a link between taboos surrounding the dead body, human memory, and the construction of folk narratives in ‘The Poachers’, ‘Tibby Hyslop’s Dream’, and ‘The Brownie of the Black Haggs’.

Ben P. Robertson continues his diligent work on Elizabeth Inchbald’s life and career, having recently edited her Diaries for Pickering and Chatto, by publishing this year Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History. It is full of interesting details about Inchbald’s eye for an audience, anticipating and responding to their interests and approval, and her responses to more problematic criticism, such as her encounters with George Colman. Robertson is largely concerned with the composition and performance histories of her plays, and contemporary critical responses, as well as Inchbald’s early life and career as an actress. In chapter 3, however, ‘Novels that Masquerade as Simple Stories’ (pp. 125–46), he provides a substantial account of the reception and circulation of Inchbald’s A Simple Story and Nature and Art in Britain, Ireland, North America, and India, including information on the translations (many French, German, and Russian editions among them). Interestingly, Nature and Art, while often regarded as popularly (and critically) eclipsed by the ‘never been out of print’ (p. 146), A Simple Story, boasts a similarly robust reprinting history throughout the nineteenth century, often printed bound in a single volume with A Simple Story such as in Barbauld’s 1810 edition of The British Novelists, published as a single volume again in 1824, and once more in Bentley's Standard Novels series in 1833 which was reissued in 1849. Individually it appeared in the People’s Library in 1834, in The Romancist and Novelist’s Library in 1840, and in Pocket English Classics in 1850. And on it goes: there was no lack of popular success for Inchbald’s novels, in circulating libraries and cheap editions, with or without illustrations, and in serial form too. Throughout Robertson gives sustained attention to the question of Inchbald’s personal respectability as a woman writer in the theatrical world. Given that Inchbald constructed her public and private personae with great care (Robertson invokes Mary Robinson as the cautionary tale par excellence for women in Romantic theatrical culture), Robertson’s attention is valid, though the argument that she revised and edited her works to ‘intentionally cultiv[ate] a conservative stance’ (p. 9) might have benefited from further engagement with the critics who say otherwise.

A literary curiosity emerges this year in the form of The Life of Sir Walter Scott by John Macrone, rediscovered by its editor Daniel Grader in the Galt collection at Guelph in 2005 and published for the first time. The Life itself is a slender document of sixty-eight pages, but this edition is also accompanied by an essay by Gillian Hughes, ‘The Afterglow of Abbotsford: John Macrone, Celebrity Culture, and Commemoration’ (pp. 49–59), a lengthy introduction to the obscure Macrone and his brief career as a publisher, writer, and biographer, and five appendices containing an alternative preface and conclusion, some letters, information on Hogg’s anecdotes, and eyewitness accounts of Scott from Galt, Sir Andrew Halliday, and Thomas Heaphy which were kept with Macrone’s manuscript. Macrone had no direct contact with Scott, and his ambition and eye for a publishing opportunity are enjoyably re-created in Grader’s introduction. The complicated history of cancellation and suppression of the manuscript (Hogg provided some unguarded anecdotes about Scott’s domestic life and Lockhart got involved) is explained, and the biography itself contains new material about Scott which does not appear in other contemporary accounts.

In Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory Evan Gottlieb makes a very persuasive case for the suitability of Scott’s novels as texts to be read, productively and flexibly, through various theoretical perspectives. The introduction sets the study’s overall tone with its title: ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Scott But Were Afraid to Ask: Contemporary Theory (and Vice Versa)’ (pp. 1–10). Choosing Scott’s novels as the ‘convenient material’ for an exploration of contemporary theory, Gottlieb presents his readers with illuminations of ‘the complexities of Scott’s fictions while simultaneously using Scott’s fictions to explain and explore the state of contemporary theory’ (p. 4). A glance at some of Gottlieb’s chosen concepts—performativity, hybridity, hospitality, historicity—makes immediate sense of his decision to discuss these in relation to Scott: if not Scott, than what other writer? Gottlieb suggests Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Rushdie as alternatives to Scott (pp. 4–5), but the sheer range and scale of Scott’s novels, not to mention their unruly and resistant qualities, means that they urge themselves as ideal sites for this theoretical and exploratory work. Gottlieb provides a wide theoretical framework throughout: Badiou, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancière, Baudrillard, and Latour, among others, fill in the spaces between the main theorists engaged with in each chapter. Throughout, Gottlieb traces the connections and contradictions amongst the major late twentieth-century theorists within the wider context of the theorists he selects for each chapter’s exploration of a concept (or two) in relation to the selection of Scott novels which best exemplify it: chapter 1, ‘Subjectivity, or Waverley and Ivanhoe with Žižek’; chapter 2, ‘Historicity, or The Antiquary and Redgauntlet with Koselleck and Delanda’; chapter 3, ‘Hybridity and Peformativity, or Rob Roy and The Talisman with Bhabha and Butler’; chapter 4, ‘Governmentality, or The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Quentin Durward with Foucault and Agamben’; chapter 5, ‘Hospitality and Community, or The Bride of Lammermoor and Chronicles of the Canongate with Habermas, Derrida, and a Multitude of Theorists’; chapter 6, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy, Habermas, Rancière, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’, and the conclusion, ‘Posthuman Scott?’.

Andrew Monnickendam’s The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone takes the work and reputations of three successful Scottish women novelists (unconnected to Scott except via influence) and uncovers a plausible series of models for writing about fiction, nation, religion, character, and gender for Scott. The novels under discussion here, in three chapters devoted to each author in turn, are Brunton’s Self-Control [1811], Discipline [1814], and Emmeline and Other Pieces [1819], posthumous and unfinished; Ferrier’s Marriage [1818], The Inheritance [1824], and Destiny [1831]; and Johnstone’s Clan-Albin [1815] and Elizabeth de Bruce [1827]. Monnickendam contributes to the current re-evaluation of the development of the historical novel ‘before Scott’ by considering in his final chapter what Scott learns from his literary antecedents, and in doing so uncovers a wealth of information about Brunton, Ferrier, and Johnstone and the various ways in which their professional legacies were managed (or obliterated) by their families, most notably the complete erasure of Brunton’s literary character in her husband Alexander’s memoir, and a similar silencing of Ferrier’s voice by her great-nephew, editor and author of a memoir about her. Johnstone fares rather better here, and Monnickendam traces the wide European reach of her novels and also examines her work as a journalist.

Published in 2012 but not previously reviewed here is Theodore Koditschek’s Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain, a wide-ranging study of liberalism and imperialism which takes as its starting point the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, as part of the author’s intention to ‘[focus] each of my chapters on the work of a small group of related individuals, each of whom contributed both to historical writing and to the project of reconstructing the nineteenth-century British Empire along liberal lines’ (p. 6). In chapter 1, ‘Imaging Great Britain: Union, Empire, and the Burden of History, 1800–1830’ (pp. 17–55), Koditschek explores the political and historical differences between Sydney Owenson and Edgeworth, looking at their respective attitudes to acknowledging and engaging with a violent colonial past, and the ways in which the recent Act of Union (1800) could be developed for liberal freedom and progress. Novels discussed here include Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Ennui, The Absentee, and Ormond, as well as Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. The differences between Irish and Scottish union are also examined, and Scott’s romances of Anglo-Scottish Union in Waverley, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, and Rob Roy receive brief discussion, with more attention paid to The Heart of Midlothian. Elsewhere in Scott studies, Elizabeth M. Cuddy looks at Scott’s ambiguous representation of wrecking culture in his 1821 novel in ‘Salvaging Wreckers: Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate, and Morality at Sea’ (SEL 53[2013] 763–92). Natasha Tessone addresses the influence of David Hume and Adam Smith on the development of commercial ethics in ‘Tending to the (National) Household: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and “That Happy Commerce” of the Enlightenment’ (ERR 25[2013] 261–80). Susan Oliver considers the timber trade, commerce and tree planting in ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Transatlantic Ecology’ (WC 44[2013] 115–20). Rick Bowers traces the history of the obscure heraldic term ‘musion’ to Scott’s 1823 novel in ‘Scott’s Quentin Durward and the Cat as Musion in Elizabethan Heraldic Books’ (N&Q 60[2013] 242–5). Elsie Michie reads Scott’s influence on the development of imperial and colonial romance in Oliphant’s Kirsteen [1890] in ‘History After Waterloo: Margaret Oliphant Reads Walter Scott’ (ELH 80[2013] 897–916).

Catherine Redford explores same-sex love and examines the real-life model for the character Idris in ‘ “The till now unseen object of my mad idolatry”: The Presence of Jane Williams in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 89–99). A different type of commemoration is considered by Claire Sheridan, who looks at Mary Shelley’s biographical and memorial work relating to Percy Shelley in ‘Anti-Social Sociability: Mary Shelley and the Posthumous “Pisa Gang” ’ (SiR 52[2013] 415–35). Jonathan Crimmins sets sentimental Gothic against romantic Gothic in his reading of Shelley’s protagonists in ‘Mediation’s Sleight of Hand: The Two Vectors of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (SiR 52[2013] 561–83). Patricia Cove views sublime landscapes and suffering in ‘ “The Earth’s deep entrails”: Gothic Landscapes and Grotesque Bodies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’ (GS 15:ii[2013] 19–38). In the same issue, Manuel Aguirre looks at traditional story-telling patterns and the heroic quest in ‘Gothic Fiction and Folk-Narrative Structure: The Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (GS 15:ii[2013] 1–18). Marie Léger-St-Jean examines the significance of appearances relating to Frankenstein’s creature and also in alterations to Shelley’s manuscript in ‘A Portrait of the Monster as Criminal, or the Criminal as Outcast: Opposing Ætiologies of Crime in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (RaVoN 62[2013] 58 paras.). Siobhan Carroll examines an Arctic expedition controversy in ‘Crusades Against Frost: Frankenstein, Polar Ice, and Climate Change in 1818’ (ERR 24[2013] 211–30).

On Godwin and Wollstonecraft, Jane Darcy’s Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816, also reviewed elsewhere in this chapter, offers a crisp, clearly written, and thoughtful chapter on Wollstonecraft’s melancholy, ‘Philosophical Biography (1): Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ (pp. 105–42), within a study of ‘philosophical biography’ as a short-lived genre in the early Romantic period. (p. 107) She follows on from Pamela Clemit’s argument about the ‘dual focus’ which Godwin saw in biography, via Rousseau’s autobiography, of the narrating self who also exemplifies the self’s intellectual or political principles. Taking this as starting point for Godwin’s Memoir, Darcy argues that ‘to subsume the awkward details of the biographical subject’s private life into a larger philosophical framework’ (p. 112) provides biographers with a way of negotiating the boundary between public and private lives, and shows how Godwin’s work on Wollstonecraft diverges from the new style of biographical and autobiographical writing he undertakes in the late 1790s. Darcy argues persuasively that in his representation of Wollstonecraft’s melancholy Godwin is influenced by David Hartley’s theories of associationism and follows the tradition of Brown rather than that of Richard Burton. Elsewhere, Alan Richardson uses Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman as a test case for a re-evaluation of Romantic theories of imagination in materialist as well as transcendent ways, in ‘Reimagining the Romantic Imagination’ (ERR 24[2013] 385–402). Relating to Godwin’s fiction, Peter Melville considers productive alienation and the desire for refuge in ‘Strangers Among Us: Figures of Refuge in Caleb Williams and St Leon’ (ERR 24[2013] 335–42).

3. Poetry

In this section Christopher Donaldson covers general work on Romantic poetry and work on poets from K to Z; James Robert Wood covers poets from A to J.

Anecdote has it that, during his army days, Ian Watt once tried to trade the latter half of his copy of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works for a pair of pyjamas. Whether true or not, the story sums up the slight regard critics have long shown not only for Wordsworth’s later verse, but also for the late poetry of his fellow ‘Lakers’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. As if complacently generalizing Matthew Arnold’s verdict about the decline of Wordsworth’s creative powers after 1808, an astonishing amount of scholarship about the poetry of the Lake poets has contentedly left their late works unexamined. It is therefore extremely exciting to find Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised amongst this year’s additions to the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series.

Essentially a study in the literary practices and life-writing of three ageing artists, Fulford’s extensively researched and beautifully illustrated book sets out to revise Romanticism by contesting the discipline’s longstanding ‘love affair with youth’ (p. 1). As Fulford observes, whereas the prevailing critical paradigms and canon of Romantic studies have both undergone a series of step-changes over the past hundred years, the ‘idealisation’ of the early works of the major Romantic poets, and the neglect of their late writings, has remained constant (p. 2). As a result, he surmises, notwithstanding all we have learned from New Criticism and New Historicism, our ‘picture of Romanticism’ remains ‘partial’ and our understanding ‘insufficient’ (p. 3). It is this insufficiency that Fulford sets out to amend by undertaking a serious re-examination of Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s, and Southey’s later works, and he warns us that, in the process, our understanding not only of the Lake school, but also of Romanticism itself, may be irrevocably changed.

The scope of this latter assertion distinguishes The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets from other recent studies, such as Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (reviewed YWES 89[2010]) and Steven Gill’s Wordsworth’s Revisitings (reviewed YWES 91[2012]), which anticipate Fulford in considering how retrospection, recollection, and revision informed the later literary practices of key Romantic writers. For Fulford, whose study ranges across the late careers of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, devoting a two-chapter section to each, such activities manifest most conspicuously in the ways these three poets recollected and revised their works and, in turn, reshaped their reputations in later life. As Fulford notes, during the 1820s and 1830s, all three Lake poets produced landmark collected editions of their poetry and contributed to popular publications, such as annuals and gift-books, which enabled them to enhance their celebrity status, to further their commercial gains, and to control the context in which their poems were read. Yet, as Fulford emphasizes, ‘late poetry’ for the Lakers ‘was not all about reworking’ old material (p. 20). It also included the composition of new works distinguished by a ‘conscious avoidance of past methods and subjects’ and the rejection or renegotiation of past allegiances and ideals (p. 20). Thus his first section, which deals with Southey, considers not only the Poet Laureate’s disputes with Francis Jeffrey and Lord Byron, but also, in the process, the composition of experimental works, such as A Tale of Paraguay [1825] and his Colloquies [1829–31], through which he reshaped his reputation as a poet of the Lakes. Similarly, in Section II, Fulford clarifies how Coleridge’s adaptation of the poems he belatedly published in the Christabel volume [1816] and, later, in annuals such as The Keepsake was part of a ‘myth-making exercise’ spurred by an anxious desire to distinguish himself from Wordsworth and Southey by casting off the mantle of the Lake school (p. 110). Finally, in Section III, Fulford offers an insightful examination of Wordsworth’s ‘late re-collectings of his verse’ and how in his creative engagement with antiquarianism, topography, and tourism he discovered, in his old age, new inspirations and applications for his verse (p. 201).

True to Fulford’s word, these readings offer fresh perspectives that, in challenging critical commonplaces about the late writings of the Lakers, enhance our appreciation of the merits of studying their later works. Whether this constitutes the ‘revising’ of Romanticism advertised in Fulford’s subtitle is largely left to the reader, who, given the book’s concentrated assessment of the later verse of three canonical poets, is inclined to disagree: this ambition seems too broad for a book defined by such a concentrated, genre-specific focus. Nevertheless, in eloquently and persuasively advocating the study of late Romanticism The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets opens an avenue of enquiry that one hopes to see extended in the years to come. In this latter respect, the monograph makes for an excellent read alongside the special issue of Romanticism on ‘The Wye Valley’, which Fulford has edited with Damian Walford Davies (reviewed in Section 1 above).

Amongst other revisionary assessments of key aspects of Romanticism published this year is Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys’s Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century. Combining the methods of thematic criticism with perspectives from feminist theory, Łuczyńska-Hołdys’s study ranges across the nineteenth century, considering different thematizations of the figure of the fatal woman in the works of Keats, Percy Shelley, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Swinburne, each of whom is the subject of a chapter. This selection of five canonical, male poets is significant, since, as Łuczyńska-Hołdys explains, her book aims to explore the femme fatale as a projection of the Romantic and Victorian ‘masculine imagination’: an archetype through which male poets both idealized and disparaged the feminine (p. 7). In this respect, Soft-Shed Kisses may seem to offer a less innovative and progressive approach to its topic than the one presented in, for example, Adriana Craciun’s Fatal Women in Romanticism (reviewed YWES 83[2004]). But to dismiss Łuczyńska-Hołdys’s interest in masculine representations of the female as retrograde would be to overlook a more nuanced aspect of her study, namely, its detection of the lack of any ‘strict polarisation of femininity into [the] fatal and [the] ideal’ in the poems it discusses (p. 7). Accordingly, instead of merely cataloguing poetic condemnations of feminine temptation or enumerating moments of misogynist anxiety, her investigations focus on works in which fatal female figures function as sources of inspiration who, though neither maliciously destructive nor necessarily malignant, ultimately drive a male poet, speaker, or character to (deathly) distraction. ‘Usually’, as Łuczyńska-Hołdys insists, ‘it is their absence and elusiveness, and not their presence and conscious wrongdoing, which makes [femmes fatales] fatal’ (p. 9). Thus, in her analysis of Keats and Shelley in chapters 1 and 2, we discover female figures who serve as ‘idealised self-projection[s]’ which inspire, ‘enchant’, and bewitch (p. 8); whereas in her third chapter, on Tennyson, we encounter a poet for whom fatal (and fated) women come to represent ‘agents of uncompromising truth’ (p. 9). In her reading of Rossetti in chapter 4, we find a poet whose treatment of the fatal woman is more ambiguous and ‘conflicted’, comprising muses who enthuse but threaten to emasculate (p. 9). Finally, in her analysis of Swinburne in chapter 5, we are presented with a writer who subversively ‘abolishes’ the distinction between the ideal goddess and the fatal temptress by revealing that ‘these categories are artificially created constructs’ (p. 10). Although, true to Łuczyńska-Hołdys’s own assessment, each of her chapters ‘tells a different story’ (p. 3), as applications of her thesis, they all make informative contributions to the study of the writers they discuss.

An equally informative contribution to Romantic literary studies is Angela Keane’s Revolutionary Women Writers: Charlotte Smith & Helen Maria Williams, which appears this year as a new addition to Northcote’s Writers and Their Work series. Like the other volumes in this series, Keane’s brief book offers a crisp, contoured, and concise introduction to the lives and major works of its twin subjects, making it an ideal addition to university and college reading lists, as well as to the personal collection of the advanced general reader. Structurally, the book is divided into two sections (the first focusing on Smith, the latter on Williams), which are further subdivided into chapter-length discussions of specific poems or collections including Elegiac Sonnets, The Emigrants, Beachy Head, An American Tale, An Ode on the Peace, and Peru. (Other chapters consider novels and prose works such as Desmond, The Old Manner House, Julia, and Letters from France.) Although none of Keane’s readings considerably advances our knowledge of these works, they do offer useful summaries that situate them both within their historical context and within modern literary scholarship. (For instance, her analysis of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets weaves together considerations of the volume’s place within the sonnet revival and the poetry of sensibility while also commenting on the relevance of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and performance studies to the interpretations of Elegiac Sonnets advanced by Judith Hawley and Jacqueline Labbe.) At a broader level, in assessing Smith and Williams alongside one another, Keane’s study draws a number of astute parallels between what might at first seem two rather divergent literary lives. Both Smith and Williams are, for example, shown to have been ‘Broadly liberal in their treatment of key political issues’, and to have made ‘a case for bringing women’s perspectives into public life’. Both, moreover, are portrayed as having ‘become sceptical of the ideal of social transparency that was such a vital force for change at the beginning of the French revolution’ (p. 131). These observations provide an overarching framework for Keane’s book, and in the process help direct the reader to consider Smith’s and Williams’s unique contributions, as women writers, to the literary culture of the early Romantic era.

The students and advanced general readers at whom Keane’s book is aimed will also, no doubt, wish to consult the new critical edition of the 1798 and 1802 versions of Lyrical Ballads, which Fiona Stafford has edited for the Oxford World Classics series. More so than any modern edition of the collection, Stafford’s OWC text seeks to defamiliarize its canonical subject by aiding the modern reader to imagine the experience of the readers who first encountered the collection in 1798. Such readers, as Stafford reminds us, ‘were picking up a slim, anonymous volume’, which promised not poems as such but ‘experiments’ and which offered ‘little guidance as to meaning’ (pp. xiii–xiv). Thus, instead of foregrounding the famous 1802 Preface (a document which, like its 1800 precursor, has come to overdetermine our understanding of the collection), Stafford begins her edition with the full text of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, which the reader follows from the anonymous ‘Advertisement’ through to the final lines of ‘Tintern Abbey’, before proceeding to the full text of the two-volume edition of 1802, including the endnotes and Wordsworth’s essay on ‘Poetic Diction’. This arrangement, while fulfilling Stafford’s editorial objective, also allows the reader to appreciate the extensive revisions made to the collection between its first and third editions and thus to understand Lyrical Ballads not only as a text but also as a project and a process that developed and evolved alongside the creative life of its creators. In addition to an eloquent introduction, in which Stafford traces the history of the collection from its conception and genesis to its contemporary and subsequent reception, the volume also contains a select critical bibliography, explanatory notes, and a series of useful appendices, including the marginal glosses Coleridge made to the 1817 edition of the Ancient Mariner as well as Wordsworth’s famous letter to Charles James Fox of 14 January 1801 and the correspondence he exchanged with John Wilson in the spring of 1802. These appendices, when paired with Stafford’s annotated copy-text, distinguish this volume as a new edition of choice for the college and university classroom. They also pair well with Justin Shepherd’s ‘The Integrity of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads: The Making of a Book’ (covered below) and Patricia Gael’s article ‘Lyrical Ballads in British Periodicals, 1798–1800’ (WC 44[2013] 61–7), which increases our sense of the popularity of individual poems from Lyrical Ballads by describing previously undocumented reprintings of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘The Convict’, ‘The Dungeon’, and ‘We Are Seven’ between 1798 and 1800.

The year 2013 proved a fairly lean one for individual treatments of Romantic women poets; see, however, Curtis-Wendlandt, Gibbard and Green’s Political Ideas of Enlightenment Women and Orianne Smith’s Romantic Women Writers (covered in Section 1 above), as well as Keane’s Revolutionary Women Writers (reviewed above). That said, Letitia Landon’s poetry did receive welcome attention in Jonas Cope’s ‘ “A series of small inconsistencies”: Letitia Landon and the Sewn-Together Subject’ (SiR 52[2013] 363–87). Drawing on selections of L.E.L.’s writings, and especially the verse she produced for Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap-Book, Cope emphasizes the inconsistency of Landon’s authorial voice. As Cope contends, this feature of Landon’s lyrics, connected as it is with the shifting subjectivities one encounters in her poems, both explains the longstanding neglect of her writings and distinguishes her as an exemplary ‘voice of her literary epoch’ (p. 363). Elsewhere, Kirstin M. Girten modelled a new approach for understanding the expression of feeling in Charlotte Smith’s poetry in ‘Charlotte Smith’s Tactile Poetics’ (ECent 54[2013] 215–30), which documents and discusses the ‘recurring depiction of haptic perception’ in, amongst other works, Elegiac Sonnets and Beachy Head (p. 215).

Amongst other significant discussions of matters pertaining to Romantic poetry this year is David Duff’s ‘The Returning of the Sky: Romanticism and the Lyric’ (in Thain, ed., The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations, pp. 135–55), which surveys the rise and diversification of lyric poetry across the period, focusing on examples from Burns and Shelley. Elsewhere, Diego Saglia’s ‘Ottavas and Spenserians in 1820s Britain’ (WC 44[2013] 51–6) considers the popularity of ottava rima and the Spenserian stanza ‘in the context of narratives of cultural identity’ in the post-Waterloo era, commenting on the xenophobic anxieties each form engendered (p. 51). As Saglia explains, whereas the former stanza was seen ‘as problematically associated with foreign traditions’, the latter—ironically the ‘crowning metrical glory of the national poetic tradition’—was nevertheless dogged by doubts ‘about its English or foreign status’ (pp. 51, 54). Finally, John Savarese’s short essay ‘Lyric Mindedness and the “Automaton Poet” ’ (RCPS [2013] 17 paras.) appeared as part of the Romantic Praxis series special number on the subject of Romantic Numbers. Combining readings of different accounts of the nature of poetic inspiration in the works of Coleridge and Scott with a consideration of the phrenological writings of George Combe and Robert Cox, Savarese’s article offers a fresh perspective on the relation of autonomy and agency in Romantic-era conceptions of human cognition.

Steven Goldsmith’s Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions stands forth amongst studies of individual Romantic poets this year. An ambitious project, Goldsmith’s book pursues two projects that could easily make two books in themselves. He examines the role of emotion in Blake’s poetry and prose and he offers a meta-reflection on the role of emotion in the act of writing and reading the criticism of our own time. Goldsmith presents Blake’s works as speaking to the question of how literary criticism—viewed as a variety of cultural critique—might not just analyse existing political and social arrangements but actually work towards changing them. His method of attacking this perennial problem is to begin with the discombobulating and unsettling feelings that attend the act of criticism. Goldsmith prefers the term ‘emotion’ to designate this experience rather than ‘feeling’ or ‘affect’, in part because ‘emotion’ suggests motion: a psychophysical embodiment of change. He does not, however, explain how the disorientating affect that critical contemplation produces might induce changes in the wider arena of public politics. Indeed Goldsmith takes issue with the very idea of a straight line extending from critical to collective agitation, arguing that the expectation that critical work can produce immediate and concrete effects on society mistakes the nature of critique itself, which necessarily takes the form of slow and patient cognitive labour. Yet Goldsmith is not willing to let go entirely of the idea that mental fight—whether Blake’s or our own—might actually change things out there in the world, ultimately leaving the whole question of criticism’s consequences unresolved. Although the inconclusive nature of Goldsmith’s project may make reading his book a frustrating—indeed agitating—experience, it is also a highly rewarding one for the light it shines on Blake and on our own professional identities.

Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker’s William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media explores Blake’s presence in social media technologies. At one point Whitson and Whittaker suggest an unexpected link with Goldsmith’s book: on their research into Blake’s Twitter presence they comment that ‘the agitation in the network caused by posts, disseminations, and disturbances has sometimes provided us with surprising insights and new directions as participants correct errors or realign operations’ (pp. 20–1). They coin the term zoamorphosis to describe the process in which Blake’s images and texts are collaboratively transformed in digital media. They consider how Blake has been reproduced in print-based editions and in online archives, most notably The William Blake Archive, and provide analyses of how Blake’s words and images have been incorporated into platforms like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr. Although they acknowledge that Blakean citations in these forums do not always indicate any deep engagement with Blake’s works on the part of the users, they do uncover evidence of creative reading and appropriation. There is also a chapter on how teachers might use digital tools to teach Blake’s texts, especially the difficult prophetic books. Whitson and Whittaker end on a utopian note, inviting critics to accept and even to embrace the ‘self-annihilation’ of print-based literary studies which, they argue, ‘brings with it new opportunities for experimenting with different kinds of disciplinary organizations: from … connections to the public, to interdisciplinary assemblages, to the very real way that students contribute to disciplinary knowledge in classroom environments’ (p. 174). As in Goldsmith’s book, Blake emerges in William Blake and the Digital Humanities as a figure offering hope for those who want to preserve a role for critical reading in the twenty-first century.

The vortex into which the traveller through eternity passes in Blake’s Milton is at the centre of Andrew M. Cooper’s William Blake and the Productions of Time. Cooper sees Blake as anticipating the counterintuitive concepts of space and time that would be developed in twentieth-century non-Euclidian geometry. Thus Cooper reads Milton itself as an exploration of what it might be like to experience our world from the perspective of a four-dimensional being. Although it draws on twentieth-century mathematics and science, Cooper’s book also places Blake’s works in the context of contemporary developments. A chapter on ‘The Vision of the Last Judgment’, for example, points out intriguing resemblances between Blake’s watercolour and contemporary illustrations of the brain, reading the image as ‘a virtual tour of the brain’s major structures as they were understood at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (p. 229). Like Blake’s Agitation, William Blake and the Productions of Time reflects on poetry’s capacity to alter the world it represents. Cooper writes that ‘Art and poetry are “productions of time” not only in the sense that they are produced by mortals but because their narrative and syntactical re-orderings of cause and effect, before and after, can actually produce new time, instilling both an epiphanic appreciation of fallen existence and a practical awareness of the imagination’s real, if limited, power to effect change’ (p. 20). Thus, for Cooper, Blake changes the world by altering the reader’s perception of it.

Sexy Blake, edited by Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, follows Bruder and Connolly’s earlier collections Blake, Gender and Culture and Queer Blake. Bruder and Connolly’s iconoclastic introduction invites critics to attend better to Blake’s sexiness: his delight, both verbal and visual, in bodies and their couplings. As Bruder and Connolly note, however, the essays that follow often push against the ostensible theme of ‘sexy Blake’, being drawn instead to the more troubling manifestations of sexuality in Blake’s art and poetry. The first essay, by Lucy Cogan, draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender melancholy to interpret Blake’s account of the violent birth of Ahania from Urizen’s divided loins. Ayako Wada’s essay suggests that the love triangle between Los, Enitharmon, and Orc in The Four Zoas may represent Blake’s fictional rewriting of the love triangle between Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Gilbert Imlay. Michelle Leigh Gompf analyses Blake’s problematic association of rape with female enlightenment and Yoko Ima-Izumi explores the sexual significations of blood in Blake’s poetry. Sean David Nelson reads Jerusalem as a poem exposing the ideal of chastity as an instrument of patriarchal power and offering Jerusalem’s Sapphic relationship with Vala as an alternative both to chastity and heteronormativity. Magnus Ankarsjö takes a contrary view to Nelson, questioning the tendency to regard Blake as an advocate for ‘free love’ and finding instead ‘a lurch towards abstinence and celibacy’ in his poems of the early 1790s (p.101). David Shakespeare’s essay focuses on the blurring of gender roles in Milton, whereas Susanne Skar’s essay discusses the mixing of the erotic and the spiritual in Blake’s watercolour The Last Judgement. Kathryn Sullivan Kruger discusses Blake’s debt to Hindu erotic poetry, in particular to the Gitagovinda, translated by William Jones in the third volume of his Asiatick Researches. The last essays collected in Sexy Blake explore Blake’s relationship to the present. Tommy Mayberry’s contribution to the volume is an unusual hybrid of creative writing and literary criticism. It opens with a short story by Mayberry written in the style of internet fan-fiction and loosely inspired by Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’. The essay is accompanied by a series of photos of Mayberry dressed up as its characters in his own story and Mayberry’s reading of his own story in conjunction with the Blake poem that inspired it. Paige Morgan juxtaposes Blake’s poetry with the work of Cypriot Australian performance artist Stelarc, whose pieces explore the relationship between technology and the body. Angus Whitehead and Joel Gwynne speculate on how Catherine Blake’s sexuality may have shaped Blake’s poetry and consider several representations of the Blakes’ sex lives in recent fiction. In ‘Blake and Porn’ Philippa Simpson uses Blake’s erotic engravings to question the divide between pornography and art. Christopher Z. Hobson provides a useful overview of work on Blake and homosexuality since the publication of his own Blake and Homosexuality in 2000. Despite the title, many of the essays in Sexy Blake demonstrate how difficult it is to keep discussions of sex in Blake within the ambit of the ‘sexy’, at least if the word is understood as denoting a basically safe and pleasurable frisson. The collection as a whole is perhaps less about Blake’s sexiness as it is about his deep ambivalence towards human sexuality.

Two essays on Blake this year presented new literary and cultural contexts in which to understand his work. Sarah B. Stein’s ‘The Laocoön and the Book of Job as Micrography: The Influence of Miniature Hebrew Illumination on the Work of William Blake’ (ERR 24[2013] 623–44) argues that Blake adapted the technique of micrography, a specifically Jewish art form in which minute lines of script are used to outline shapes and figures. This opens up a new way of understanding Blake’s relationship to Judaism and a new way of understanding the relationship between word and image in his illuminated books. Tilar J. Mazzeo’s ‘William Blake’s Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry’ (SiR 52[2013] 115–45) places Blake’s Jerusalem in the context of the English textile industry, offering an engaging account of how textile metaphors are woven into the poem and how the techniques of textile printing may have helped shape Jerusalem’s material form as an illuminated book.

David M. Baulch's ‘ “Like a Pillar of Fire above the Alps”: William Blake and the Prospect of Revolution’ (ERR 24[2013] 279–85) traces how the Alps become associated with revolutionary change in The Song of Los and in Jerusalem. In ‘Blake, Joseph Johnson, and The Gates of Paradise’ (WC 44[2013] 131–6) Joseph Byrne argues for Blake’s marginal status in the middle-class Johnson circle from the perspective of the history of the book, pointing out that Blake’s chapbook For Children: The Gates of Paradise was not, pace the title page, actually published by Johnson and that the publisher in any case shunned the chapbook format, which was a cheap form of print usually marketed to lower-class readers. Morton D. Paley’s ‘William Blake’s “Portable Fresco” ’ (ERR 24[2013] 271–7) offers an explanation for why Blake announced his invention of the new genre of ‘portable fresco’ in an advertisement for the 1809 exhibition of his work. Paley argues that Blake coined the term in order to invest his small-scale paintings with the grandeur of the Italian Renaissance.

Two articles in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly were especially timely, in view of the Blake Society’s campaign to raise funds to purchase William Blake’s cottage at Felpham and turn it into a centre for Blake studies. Jonathan Roberts’s ‘William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham’ (Blake 47[2013] 39 paras.) provides evidence that the poem recounting a personal religious vision that Blake addressed to his patron Thomas Butts, usually known as ‘To my Friend Butts’, and his pencil and watercolour sketch Landscape Near Felpham were created on the same morning, and relates these occasional works to Satan’s vision in Milton, arguing for the continuity between the occasional and the transcendent in Blake. Mark Crosby’s ‘The Blake Memorial Window in St. Mary’s Church, Felpham’ (Blake 46[2013] 6 paras.) discusses a stained-glass window installed in 2010 and designed by Meg Whitehead, marking Blake’s connection to the village.

In volume 46 of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly G.E. Bentley shows how Giulio Ferrario appropriated Blake’s disturbing engravings of scenes from the plantations in Surinam for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Year’s Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam [1796] to illustrate the difference between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ dress styles, in his essay ‘Blake and Stedman as Costumiers: Curious Copies of Blake’s Engravings in 1831’ (Blake 46[2013] 21 paras.). Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys, in ‘ “Life exhal’d in milky fondness”: Becoming a Mother in Blake’s The Book of Thel’ (Blake 46[2013] 29 paras.), interprets Thel as a dissenting figure who rejects not so much Experience as the injunction to become a mother. Sarah Eron’s ‘ “Bound … by their narrowing perceptions”: Sympathetic Bondage and Perverse Pity in Blake’s The Book of Urizen’ (Blake 46[2013] 27 paras.) reads The Book of Urizen as dramatizing the paradox implicit in David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s theories of sensibility: that the attempt to sympathize with another person produces the consciousness of division from one’s own feelings. Angus Whitehead’s ‘ “Another, but far more amiable enthusiast”: References to Catherine and William Blake in the Literary Gazette and La Belle Assemblée (1830)’ (Blake 46[2013] 4 paras.) spotlights the discussion of Blake in two magazines in the wake of Allan Cunningham’s life of Blake in 1830, drawing attention to a reader’s letter in the Literary Gazette enquiring about the whereabouts of Catherine Blake and an unrecorded review of Cunningham’s biography La Belle Assemblée.

Volume 47 of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly included Linda Freeman’s ‘Blake, Duncan, and the Politics of Writing From Myth’ (Blake 47[2013] 46 paras.), which reads Blake in conjunction with the twentieth-century American poet Robert Duncan, who was deeply influenced by him. Freeman sees Duncan as sharing with Blake a preoccupation with the sense of touch, which in Duncan’s poetry is both a means of connecting physically with the world (the sense was especially important for Duncan since a childhood accident left him permanently cross-eyed) and a means of exploring personal and political relationships. David W. Ullrich discusses manuscript variants in ‘Deciphering Blake’s “The Angel that presided o’er my Birth” ’ (Blake 47[2013] 25 paras.). Kurt Fosso suggests that the Greek poet Hesiod influenced Blake’s Introduction to the Songs of Innocence in ‘Blake’s “Introduction” and Hesiod’s Theogony’ (Blake 47[2013] 9 paras.). Robert N. Essick surveys the year’s sales of Blake’s works and Blakeana in ‘Blake in the Marketplace, 2012’ (Blake 47[2013] 11 paras.). In ‘William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Publications and Discoveries in 2012’ (Blake 47[2013] 28 paras.) G.E. Bentley, Jr., announces a ‘bumper year for records of previously unrecorded Blake publications’. Amongst the ‘Curious Items’ that Bentley unearths is a 1950s advertisement which uses the visionary poet to advertise Stamina Self-Supporting Trousers.

The ‘Shoemaker Poet’ Robert Bloomfield has become the subject of increasing critical attention in recent years. Andrew Smith, in ‘ “Truth and tradition’s mingled stream”: Robert Bloomfield’s The Banks of Wye’ (SiR 52[2013] 537–60), focuses on the ‘discursive eddies and crosscurrents that pull Bloomfield in various directions when he comes to describe his own experiences’ (p. 538) during his tour of the Wye. Smith argues that Bloomfield does not assume the role of truth-teller about the hard realities of rural life. Neither does he simply reproduce the representations of previous travel-writers and poets to have described the Wye. Instead he engages conversation with tradition, mixing acknowledgement of precursor poet-travellers with subtle questioning of their representations of the Wye and its inhabitants.

Volume 37 of this year’s Studies in Scottish Literature is a special issue devoted to the work and influence of Robert Burns. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Burns scholar G. Ross Roy, who founded and edited the journal. Carol McGuirk’s ‘Burns’s Two Memorials to Fergusson’ (SSL 37[2013] 5–23) shows how Burns learned from Robert Fergusson’s use of the Scots dialect, although the dialect became, in Burns’s hands, a way of connecting his poetry to the voices of the rural poor. In ‘Footnoted Folklore: Robert Burns’s “Halloween” ’ (SSL 37[2013] 24–37) Corey E. Andrews shows how Burns’s neglected poem ‘Halloween’ engages a knowing metropolitan audience, simultaneously anticipating their condescension towards folk beliefs distancing this audience from the pleasures of the festival. R.D.S. Jack’s ‘Robert Burns as Dramatic Poet’ (SSL 37[2013] 38–46) reflects on the ways Burns’s poetry issues invitations to readers to read the words aloud and enter into the spirit of dramatic performance. Gerard Carruthers, in ‘ “Tongues turn’d inside out”: The Reception of “Tam o’ Shanter” ’ (SSL 37[2013] 47–57), focuses on a textual crux in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’: Burns’s decision to erase four lines from the poem on the lawyers’ tongues and priests’ hearts that Tam sees on the ‘haly table’. Kenneth Simpson, in ‘ “Epistolary Performances”: Burns and the Arts of the Letter’ (SSL 37[2013] 58–67), shows how the letters are ‘works of conscious artistry as much as the poems are’ (p. 58). Kirsteen McCue’s ‘ “O my Luve’s like a red red rose”: Does Burns's Melody Really Matter?’ (SSL 37[2013] 68–82) argues on both musical and cultural grounds that Burns’s choice of ‘Major Graham’s Strathspey’ as the melody for ‘O my Luve’s like a red red rose’ is crucial to our appreciation of the song. Fred Freeman urges that contemporary Scottish culture follow Burns’s example in re-engaging with Scottish traditional song in ‘Back to Burns’ (SSL 37[2013] 83–94). Valentina Bold discusses some of the problems of preparing a new edition of The Merry Muses of Caledonia in ‘On Editing the Merry Muses’ (SSL 37[2013] 95–107), while Marco Fazzini explains the dilemmas of translating Burns into Italian in ‘On Translating Burns: A Heavenly Paradise and Two Versions of “A Red, Red, Rose” ’ (SSL 37[2013] 150–4). Douglas S. Mack reads James Hogg’s account of his ecstatic first reading of Burns’s poetry as a piece of Romantic self-fashioning in ‘James Hogg’s First Encounter with Burns’s Poetry’ (SSL 37[2013] 122–30). Edward J. Cowan discusses the Scottish-born Canadian poet Alexander McLachlan’s relationship to Burns in ‘Alexander McLachlan: The “Robert Burns” of Canada’ (SSL 37[2013] 131–49). Together, the essays make a fitting tribute to G. Ross Roy.

Also in this year’s Studies in Scottish Literature Gerard Carruthers and Pauline Mackay announce the discovery of the manuscript of a Burns letter in ‘The Missing Manuscript of Robert Burns’s “Patriarch” Letter’ (SSL 39[2013] 227–32), and Patrick Scott reports on the discovery of a manuscript in Burns’s hand of a Scottish air in ‘Robert Burns, James Johnson, and the Manuscript of “The German Lairdie” ’ (SSL 39[2013] 239–44). Kenneth Starr, in ‘Wraiths, Rhetoric, and “The Sin of Rhyme”: The Shaping of the Burns of the Kilmarnock Edition’, explores the conscious rhetorical patterning of the Kilmarnock poems (SSL 39[2013] 104–14). David E. Shuttleton’s article, ‘ “Nae Hottentots”: Thomas Blacklock, Robert Burns, and the Scottish Vernacular Revival’ (ECLife 37[2013] 21–50), considers the role played by the Scottish poet Thomas Blacklock in establishing Burns’s early reputation.

Roderick Beaton’s Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution is a major contribution to Byron scholarship. Beaton follows a single strand in Byron’s life, moving from his early travels in Greece and his later self-dedication to the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman empire. Beaton, a professor of Greek history, has drawn on archival material that brings Byron’s relations with Alexandros Mavrokordatos and other Greek leaders into sharp focus. Beaton shows how Byron became embroiled in the internal disputes in the Greek movement for independence, which was divided between modernizers like Mavrokordatos, who wanted a modern, centralized state after independence, and warlords like Theodoros Kolokotronis, who envisaged a future in which power would be devolved to the traditional familial networks. The central contribution of the study is to dispel any idea of Byron as a naive idealist, besotted with the idea of resurrecting Greece’s past glory. ‘It was not any sympathy for the Greeks, as people, that drove him’, writes Beaton; rather, Byron was trying ‘to create, in Greece, political conditions that could then be emulated by the rest of the continent’ (p. 266). Byron thus looks, not back to the past, but to the future, in which Europe would be remade on the model of an independent and sovereign Greece. Beaton’s writing on Byron can be rather hagiographic at times, but his study is invaluable both for the new information it provides about Byron’s involvement in Greek politics and the light it shines on Byron’s writings about Greece and the Orient.

Much of this year’s work on Byron set out to correct any tendency to stereotype him as a poet uninterested in anything beyond the immediate sensory and sensual realm. In Byron and the Forms of Thought, Anthony Howe argues that an ongoing reflection on bases of human knowledge is immanent in Byron’s poetry. Rather than identify Byron with any particular philosophical school, Howe’s method is to find an engagement with philosophy in Byron’s play with literary form and language. This style of reading often finds Byron pushing against the conclusions that a less attentive reading of the verse might draw. On the passage in Don Juan in which Byron links Newton’s apple with the fall of man and ends with an apprehension of the unfathomable vastness of the universe, for example, Howe observes that the language of the poem ‘rather than supporting a sceptical, anti-Enlightenment reading, is in fact strikingly non-antagonistic; it tends rather towards inclusiveness and an imaginative breaking down of the dichotomies upon which oppositional readings depend. The poetry conjures an act of negotiation and enlargement that depends upon and celebrates the plasticity of words’ (pp. 124–5). Howe’s book shares with Simon Jarvis’s Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song an interest in reading Romantic poetry philosophically without reducing the poetry to a particular school or programme.

Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural, edited by Gavin Hopps, collects essays exploring the theme of spectrality in Byron’s poetry and considering Byron’s own ghostly afterlife. In his introduction, Gavin Hopps offers the volume as a corrective to the stereotype of Byron as a materialist uninterested in anything as insubstantial as a ghost. Instead Hopps sees Byron as invested in the spiritual realm not despite but because of his disbelief in it, in ways that speak to our own postmodern times. Many of the essays invoke Jacques Derrida’s extensive writings on the topic of spectrality, showing the way Derrida continues to haunt the practice of literary criticism a decade after his death. Bernard Beatty provides a helpful survey of ghosts in Byron’s poetry, pointing out a split between the relatively ghost-free lyric poetry and the spectre-filled narrative verse. Gavin Hopps’s essay relates Byron’s concern with spectrality with his proto-deconstructive fascination with ‘ “unhomely” in-between phenomena that are irreducible to classical ontological categories’ (p. 74). Mary Hurst discusses Byron’s haunting by the ‘noonday demons’ of ennui and melancholy. Dale Townshend’s contribution opens with the pseudonymous Quevedo Redivivus’s 1880 account of his interview with the dead Byron and then tracks Byron’s sense of his own fame as a spectral phenomenon. Piya Pal-Lapinski considers how the ruins in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage attest to the after-presence of historical violence. Philip Shaw sees Byron as drawn to moments of sublime nothingness, where the suspension of the Symbolic over the abyss of the Real becomes vertiginously apparent, which attest to ‘a yearning for the divine, both on his part and on ours’ (p. 161). Alison Milbank’s essay suggests that Byron has deeper affinities with the ‘female gothic’ of Ann Radcliffe than with the Gothicism of Matthew Lewis or Horace Walpole. Peter W. Graham sees Byron’s Don Juan not only as a poem about haunting but a poem haunted by prior recountings of the Don Juan story and by episodes in recent history and Byron’s own personal past. Corin Throsby stretches the concept of spectrality to include Byron’s flirtations with the reader: tracing the poetry’s characteristic flittering between self-concealment and self-revelation.

Carla Pomarè’s Byron and the Discourses of History explores how Byron drew on historical material in his poetry and plays and how his writings interrogate the very practice of history itself. An especially interesting chapter argues that Byron appropriated paratextual techniques from Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire, where the footnotes comment ironically on the main text. Rather than attempting an overview of Byron’s engagement with history, Pomarè focuses on a select number of texts, fastening in particular onto the verse plays. Pomarè reads Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari for their concern with what is left out of the historical record. She explores the relationship between autobiography and history in The Deformed Transformed and the relationship between prophecy and history in Byron’s poem The Prophecy of Dante. Pomarè sees Byron’s texts as evincing a more sophisticated view of history than a cursory reading would suggest, writing that ‘Byron’s is actually a faux-naïve insistence on facts, which is increasingly contradicted by many of his writing practices, signalling a striking awareness of the ambiguities of history and its discourses’ (p. 5). Surprisingly perhaps, Pomarè does not cite James Chandler’s England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. In contrast with Chandler, however, Pomarè does not argue for a single, large-scale shift in the Romantic understanding of history, emphasizing instead the diversity of historical practices and understandings of history in the literary milieu in which Byron wrote. Mirosława Modrzewska’s Byron and the Baroque is a short book that suggests that Byron’s writings, in particular poems like Don Juan, The Vision of Judgment, and Beppo, belong to the aesthetic of the baroque with their frequent digressions and ‘mannerist’ style. This provides an alternative to the usual tendency to see Byron as looking back to the work of ‘Augustan’ satirists like Alexander Pope.

Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, in ‘Byron and Oriental Love’ (NCLE 68[2013] 1–32), suggests ‘Oriental Love’ as an alternative for ‘Greek Love’ as a label for the diversity of queer desires evoked in Byron’s poetry, focusing on the oriental tale Lara. Cohen-Vrignaud places the relationship between Lara and his servant Kaled in the context of orientalist descriptions of the relationship between pageboys and the men they served as one that could but did not necessarily include a sexual component. The ambiguous nature of Lara and Kaled’s bond disrupts the very binary between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In ‘Listening for Leila: The Re-direction of Desire in Byron’s The Giaour’ (ERR 24[2013] 699–721) Shahidha Bari builds on Eve Sedgwick’s influential account of homosocial desire as a form of desire between men mediated by a woman. In Bari’s reading, the silencing of Leila marks not simply a failure to represent women’s voices but a renunciation of human relationships in general. This breakdown of the classic triangle between two men and one woman also underlies the poem’s failure to stabilize its own oppositions between Christianity and Islam and the Occident and the Orient.

The first number of this year’s Byron Journal featured Gavin Hopps’s ‘Gaiety and Grace: Bryon and the Tone of Catholicism’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 1–14). The essay echoes the arguments that Hopps advanced in his contributions to Byron’s Ghosts, arguing against the view that the levity that follows the prayer to the Virgin Mary in Don Juan cancels out the prayer. Anne Falloon, in ‘Byron’s Week in Middleton’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 15–26), collects evidence of Byron’s social and literary activities during his one-week visit to Hopwood Hall near Middleton in Lancashire. In ‘Don Juan and the Dirty Scythe of Time’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 27–34) N.E. Gayle points out the discrepancy between Don Juan’s age at the beginning and end of the published poem (16 and 21) and the poem’s time scheme (it takes place over five and a half years). Marita Mathijsen, in ‘The Taming of Byron in the Netherlands’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 35–48), shows how the Dutch translators of Don Juan turned Byron’s work into a more innocuous poem. In ‘The Phantom Byron Book Sale Catalogue’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 49–55) Peter Cochran provides evidence that a sale catalogue entitled ‘Library of a GENTLEMAN DECEASED’ lists theological and philosophical works from Byron’s library and constitutes a fourth sale catalogue in addition to the three already known to exist.

The first essay in the second number of this year’s Byron Journal, Bernard Beatty’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Cantos I and II in 1812’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 101–14), sets out to answer the question of why the poem caught the public’s imagination in 1812, when so many other poems on the Peninsular War did not. The answer, Beatty proposes, lies in the way Byron’s poem balances between the onward rush of travel and the calm of lyric repose, allowing the poem to apprehend both the speed of historical change and the need to examine it reflectively. Also focusing on the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is Michael O’Neill’s ‘ “Without a sigh he left”: Byron’s Poetry of Departure in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 115–25), which arrives at similar conclusions to Beatty’s article, noting how the tension between progress and rest in Byron’s poetic travelogue is connected to its use of rhyme, which O’Neill describes as ‘both a departure and a detaining’ (p. 116). Timothy Webb, in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Annotating the Second Canto’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 127–44), discusses how the annotations and other paratextual material that Byron appended to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage help contextualize the poem’s philhellenism. Michael Simpson’s essay ‘On Byron’s Fanes: Ruined Temples’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 145–57) connects Byron’s theatrical addresses Address, Spoken at the Opening of Drury-lane Theatre Saturday, October 10th, 1812 and his Monody on the Death of The Right Honourable R.B. Sheridan to his poem The Curse of Minerva, describing how the two addresses map out strategies for redeeming British drama. Mary O’Connell’s ‘ “[T]he natural antipathy of author & bookseller”: Byron and John Murray’ (ByronJ 41[2013] 157–72) considers the reasons why the relationship between Byron and his bookseller John Murray flourished in the 1810s and subsequently broke down in the early 1820s.

Daniel Cook’s Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius uses the posthumous reception of the ‘Marvelous boy’ as a window onto the internal debates and changing concerns of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century criticism. The most obvious source of conflict engendered by Chatterton’s poetry was the debate over whether the poems Chatterton attributed to the fifteenth-century priest Thomas Rowley were written by Chatterton himself or were forgeries. The Rowley controversy is covered in a single chapter in which Cook characteristically looks behind the arguments marshalled by the disputants to the deep assumptions about critics and criticism that informed them. Cook shows how, in the years after his death, Chatterton became entwined in a series of controversies whose stakes went far beyond the authorship question, becoming a convenient test case for the question of whether poetic genius was learned or natural and a proxy for the rivalry between tasteful amateurs versus philologically trained experts. His faux-medieval texts also stimulated debates over whether the editor’s responsibility was to reflect authorial intention by reproducing the text as closely as possible to the original manuscripts or to assist the general reader’s comprehension of the text by modernizing. Although Cook’s book is rooted in the late eighteenth century, the last chapter explores Chatterton’s afterlife as a touchstone for Romantic poets from Robert Southey to John Keats. Against a popular view that it was the Romantics who elevated Chatterton into a tragic figure of wayward genius, Cook sees them instead as rehashing an established myth, which was itself a ‘legacy of a phantom war between so-called unfeeling antiquaries and the self-appointed rescuers of Chatterton in the sentimental tradition’ (p. 11). Cook’s book thus helps resituate the question of Chatterton’s relationship to the Romantics in the late eighteenth-century controversies over the role of the literary critic and the nature of genius. It also makes the case that considering the reception of anomalous figures like Chatterton rather than that of those authors who have persisted longer in critical esteem can sometimes shine more light on the processes of canon formation.

John Goodridge’s John Clare and Community divides neatly into two parts. The first part traces the poetic community that Clare formed with his eighteenth-century precursors, including Thomas Gray and Thomas Chatterton, and with contemporary poets like Robert Bloomfield and John Keats, who also felt themselves alienated from elite literary culture. As Goodridge points out, the relationships that Clare formed with all these poets were textual in nature: Clare knew Bloomfield and Keats only through letters and their poetry, even though he came very close to meeting both of them in person. Intertextual influence thus becomes an alternative means of creating a community. Goodridge argues that this virtual community embraced genteel poets as well: whereas critics have often seen Clare’s relationship with much of the eighteenth-century poetic tradition as agonistic in nature, Goodridge emphasizes instead how much Clare learnt from poets like Gray. Useful as this part of the book is, perhaps the most exciting readings are to be found in its second half, where Goodridge moves to Clare’s evocations of rural communities at a time when enclosure and ecological degradation were placing the very idea of community itself under strain. Two chapters on Clare’s ‘enclosure elegies’ and his poems on the sport of bird-nesting are followed by two chapters on how Clare integrates so-called ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ and other forms of traditional storytelling into his poetry. John Clare and Community largely sidesteps the theoretical debate on the idea of community itself, whose participants include Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Instead Goodridge draws on the best traditions of practical criticism, alert to the ways in which Clare re-creates a sense of community through diction, metre, and allusion.

Eric Robinson discusses a subject that is also taken up in Goodridge’s book in ‘John Clare: Games, Pastimes, Sports and Customs’ (WC 44[2013] 56–60), surveying depictions of folk entertainments in Clare’s poetry, while Adam White, in ‘The Love Songs and Love Lyrics of Robert Burns’ (ScotLR 5[2013] 61–80), takes up Goodridge’s concern with Clare’s relationship to other labouring-class poets, showing how Clare reworked the love songs of Robert Burns in his later verse. In ‘Invitations and Withdrawals: Queer Romantic Ecologies in William Blake’s The Book of Thel and John Clare’s “The Nightingale’s Nest” ’ (EiR 20[2013] 1–18) Daniel Hannah makes unexpected connections between poems by Blake and Clare and between queer theory and ecocriticism. Simon Kövesi’s ‘John Clare’s Horizons’ (EIC 63[2013] 375–92) offers a reflection on how Clare has been fictionalized in contemporary literature. Kövesi’s interview with David Morley, whose recent sonnet sequence The Gipsy and the Poet turns on the actual encounter between Clare and Wisdom Smith, is printed in this year’s John Clare Society Journal (JCSJ 32[2013] 49–72). Another essay on Clare this year with strong resonances with Goodridge’s book is Tim Fulford’s ‘Personating Poets on the Page: John Clare in his Asylum Notebooks’ (JCSJ 32[2013] 27–48), which details how Clare’s notebook poems are in textual conversation with quotations from William Cowper and transcriptions from the Bible. Scott McEathron uses the history of Hilton’s painting of Clare as an index to Hilton’s reputation in the Victorian art market in ‘John Clare, William Hilton, and the National Portrait Gallery’ (JCSJ 32[2013] 5–26). Gerard Carruthers and Pauline Mackay, in ‘Re-reading James Currie: Robert Burns’ First Editor’ (JCSJ 32[2013] 73–84), direct critics to the importance of editors like Currie in promoting the idea of the labouring-class poet, which would subsequently help shape the careers of writers including Clare and James Hogg.

J.C.C. Mays, the editor of the poems and co-editor of the plays for the Bollingen edition of Coleridge’s collected works, draws, in Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics, on years of close engagement with Coleridge’s poetry. Mays positions his book to the side of most current criticism on Coleridge, situating his argument in relation to the long tradition of commentary on Coleridge’s poetry and with the poetic practices of modern figures like Seamus Heaney. The task Mays sets himself is to see Coleridge’s poetic output as a whole and to place the less familiar poetry into an intelligible relationship with the hyper-canonical masterpieces The Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘Christabel’. Mays suggests that developmental metaphors do not really work in Coleridge’s case. If Coleridge’s poetic development is compared to the growth of a tree then, May writes, ‘it is as if the trunk divided into three branches at the moment it surged into its maturity, each going in its own direction, while the main trunk … self-destructed’ (p.98). Exchanging the metaphor of the tree for that of the scientific laboratory, Mays regards Coleridge’s poems instead as a series of experiments in poetic form. Mays points out the unexpected interrelations between the minor and major poems, and places Coleridge’s experiments in prosody at the centre of his achievement as a poet. With its many references to Coleridge’s less familiar poems, Mays’s book should ideally be read with a copy of the Bollingen edition close to hand.

In Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature, Samantha C. Harvey makes the case for Coleridge as the crucial influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendental movement more generally. Although Emerson’s and Coleridge’s meeting in 1832 was inauspicious (Emerson had to endure both Coleridge’s diatribe against Unitarianism and the sight of Coleridge soiling his cravat and suit while taking snuff), the younger Coleridge’s works, especially The Friend, Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, and ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’, exercised a formative influence on Emerson. Harvey suggests that Coleridge did not supply Emerson with a coherent philosophy. What he did provide was a model for thinking through what she calls the ‘Romantic triad’ of nature, spirit, and humanity. Harvey is thus less interested in Emerson’s direct borrowings of ideas and passages from Coleridge than she is in Emerson’s adaptation of Coleridge’s intellectual method to his own purposes. The book ends with a discussion of how Coleridge became central to Vermont Transcendentalism. Harvey suggests that earlier works like Patrick Keane’s Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason and David Greenham’s Emerson’s Transatlantic Romanticism underestimate Coleridge’s central importance as an influence on Emerson and on the Transcendentalists more generally by reading him as part of a web of transatlantic influences. It might be argued that Harvey goes too far in the other direction in positioning Coleridge as the conduit between European Romanticism and the Boston and Vermont Transcendentalists. The book’s single focus on Coleridge does, however, make for a deeply researched account of his transatlantic influence, one that makes good use of the marginalia in Emerson’s and other Transcendentalists’ personal copies of Coleridge’s works.

David Ward’s Coleridge and the Nature of the Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry suggests that Coleridge’s poetry, with its characteristic distortions and interruptions of perception, comes close to the models of the mind that have been devised by modern cognitive scientists, who understand the apparently unitary mind as an epiphenomenon arising from an array of mental pathways and events. Ward understands modern neuroscience as furnishing empirically verifiable insights into the processes underlying the mind that it developed in response to the evolutionary pressures on early humans and the earlier species from which they descended. This leads Ward to insist on the uniformity of cognition across periods and cultures. We do not, however, have to assume that the mind is determined by evolution to appreciate the usefulness of concepts drawn from modern neuroscience to readings of Romantic poetry. Alan Richardson’s The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts has shown that criticism that does draw on the findings of modern cognitive science need not ignore the influence of specific historical and cultural contexts on mental experience and its artistic representations. For me, the best parts of Ward’s book were the neo-phenomenological close readings, especially the chapter on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where Ward shows how Coleridge breaks down apparently seamless mental processes into their constitutive parts, as when the ghost ship is perceived successively as ‘a speck, a shape, a mist’. I was less convinced by Ward’s diagnoses of the mental pathologies that supposedly underlie Coleridge’s poetry, as when he speculates that ‘Kubla Khan’ may have been ‘the result of a manic episode complicated by opiates’ (p. 134).

Chris Murray’s Tragic Coleridge attempts to reconstruct Coleridge’s theory of tragedy from his critical writings and to show how Coleridge’s poetry is inflected by his idiosyncratic sense of the tragic. He argues that Coleridge sees tragedy as a positive mode. Coleridge claimed, for example, that Greek tragedies all originally appeared as trilogies, like Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ultimately conclude with healing and rapprochement. Murray considers how tragedy—understood broadly as a concern with suffering and pathos—inflects poems including The Ancient Mariner and ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, and the plays Remorse and Zapolya: A Christmas Tale. He also devotes a chapter to Coleridge’s literary and philosophical responses to real-life suffering, and another that relates Coleridge’s tragic vision to the fragmentary form that so many of his works take. Murray ends by tracing how Coleridge’s sense of the tragic shifted as he adopted more orthodox religious beliefs and began to doubt the compatibility of tragic suffering with Christian doctrine. Murray sees this concern about the compatibility of tragedy and Christianity as recurring throughout his career in the form of the problem of the ‘failed sacrifice’: suffering that serves no positive or redemptive purpose. The final chapter points to internal problems in Coleridge’s tragic vision that might have been made more central to the book. Nevertheless, Murray’s book is a useful account of Coleridge’s literary and philosophical engagements with tragedy.

Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi, and Seamus Perry, presents new contributions from both established and emerging scholars to the now extensive body of scholarship on Romantic orientalism. Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient also includes essays on the reception of the Romantics in Japan and China, thus allowing the collection to register the two-way exchange of texts and ideas between the Orient and the Occident. Peter J. Kitson offers a wide-ranging essay on how British writers in the Romantic period used the kowtow ceremony to embody ‘a clash between an open, brave and manly British character and a haughty, arrogant and insolent Chinese “character” ’ (p. 26). Deirdre Coleman reads Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ alongside artist and traveller William Hodges’s Travels in India. Tim Fulford’s essay shows how Coleridge’s and Robert Southey’s joint interest in orientalism underpinned their literary partnership and how their different methods of appropriating oriental material anticipated their later divergence from one another as poets. Seamus Perry suggests that William Empson may have taken inspiration for his famous reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from the Buddhist thought he encountered during his time teaching in Japan. Kaz Oishi provides a fascinating overview of Coleridge’s reception in Japan. He argues that the same associations with self-indulgence and lassitude that made Coleridge unpopular in the late nineteenth century, when Japan was undergoing rapid modernization, made Coleridge an attractive figure through which to articulate anxieties about rapid industrialism and militarism in the early twentieth century. Andrew Warren explains how Coleridge deliberately rejected an Eastern origin for philosophy, nominating Pythagoras as the ‘first’ philosopher, but then sought in Eastern thought a means of reconciling the division of ‘spiritual Will and material Nature’ (p. 112). David Vallins similarly sees Coleridge as finding in the Orient an imaginative means of transcending the dualism of mind and the world. Natalie Tal Harries describes Coleridge’s engagement with Hinduism through his reading of Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad-Gita from Sanskrit into English, while Setsuko Wake-Naota discusses connections between Coleridge’s thought and Buddhism. Heidi Thomson argues for the importance of the preface to ‘Kubla Khan’, which she suggests forms an integral whole with the poem to which it stands in an apparently paratextual relationship. Dometa Wiegand Brothers analyses how ‘Kubla Khan’ erases the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ landscapes by describing both in terms of geometrical form, and Kuri Katsuyama sees the oriental garden of ‘Kubla Khan’ as embodying a Western idea of Chinese despotism.

Several essays on Coleridge this year focused on questions of orality and public performance. Christopher Laxer’s ‘ “The Lantern of Typography”: “Christabel”, “Kubla Khan”, and Poetic Mediation’ (ERR 24[2013] 167–84) argues that the exposure of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ to what Charles Lamb called ‘the lantern of typography’ hurt the reception of poems that were originally read aloud ‘by separating the animating presence of Coleridge from its performances’ (p. 169). Jonathan Shears’s ‘Listening to Christabel: Sound, Silence and the Contingencies of Voice’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 44–56) is also concerned with the question of voice, though where Laxer sees orality disappearing from the poems after their publication, Shears emphasizes the persistence of oral and auditory effects in the published version of ‘Christabel’, which he proposes makes ‘the reader a listener too: one who is unsettled by, but participates in, the way that the meaning of Coleridge’s words becomes contingent on the way that they sound’ (p. 45). Like J.C.C. Mays, whose book is reviewed above, Ewan James Jones, in ‘ “Earth Worm Wit Lies Under the Ground”: The Compositional Genesis of Coleridge’s “Limbo” Constellation’ (MP 110[2013] 513–35), focuses on Coleridge’s experiments with poetic form, and in particular with his use of paronomasia or punning. Jones suggests, for example, that Coleridge’s line ‘Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing’ contains a buried pun on ‘flea’, which connects ‘Limbo’ with Coleridge’s notebook poem on Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and with the wider tradition of verse satire from Donne to Pope. Michael Raiger’s ‘Fancy, Dreams, and Paradise: Miltonic and Baconian Garden Imagery in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan’ (MP 110[2013] 637–65) argues against readings of Coleridge’s poem as an expression of the ideal of imagination that is presented in Biographia Literaria. For Raiger, the poem instead enacts the fall and failure of Coleridge’s earlier empirically inflected model of poetic creation, which underlay his 1796 collection of poems, through its intertextual allusions to works by Francis Bacon and to Milton’s Paradise Lost. In ‘Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge’ (ERR 24[2013] 403–19) Richard C. Sha seeks to explain why Coleridge invokes the work of the physiologist Richard Saumarez before developing his theory of the imagination in Biographia Literaria. Sha argues that Coleridge draws on physiological methodology, which kept a role for the imagination as a means of developing explanations for the workings of the body and the mind. Matthias Rudolf’s ‘Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ’ (ERR 24[2013] 185–210) reflects on the centrality of discovery in Coleridge’s Rime. Although the poem’s indebtedness to the narratives of Captain Cook and George Shelvocke is a familiar theme in Coleridge criticism, the originality of Rudolf’s essay is in its reflection on the ways in which literary criticism devoted to unearthing the poem’s historical contexts is itself caught up in the ethical and intellectual dilemmas that characterize eighteenth-century voyage literature.

Volume 41 of The Coleridge Bulletin contained some especially fine essays. Emma Mason’s ‘ “Grace and metrical movement”: Coleridge and Wordsworth on Grace’ (ColB 41[2013] 29–45), for example, illuminatingly links Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s different understandings of divine grace to their divergent understandings of the role of poetic metre. The difference in both cases is between an understanding of grace and metre as templates that mark religious life and poetry off from ordinary experience and language (Coleridge) and grace and metre as affective and rhythmic phenomena that are contiguous with ordinary experience (Wordsworth). Richard Cronin’s ‘Words of Love: The Erotics of Romantic Writing’ (ColB 41[2013] 1–12) aligns ideals of love (marital, libertine, and companionate) with figurative language or its absence (metaphor, simile, and ‘plain speech’ respectively) and uses this scheme to analyse the writings of Coleridge and other Romantic-era writers. John Beer’s ‘How Big Was the Albatross?’ (ColB 41[2013] 13–20) uses the travel narratives by Shelvocke and Cook that provided the source material for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to argue that, in Coleridge’s original conception of the poem, the albatross was not the hulking avian that many later readers imagined. Justin Shepherd’s ‘The Integrity of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads: The Making of a Book’ (ColB 41[2013] 57–74) revisits the circumstances attendant on the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that, despite the immediate financial motive for the volume and its miscellaneous appearance, the collection was carefully planned both in terms of content and in terms of presentation. In ‘Romantic Britons: National Identity in the Writings of Coleridge and Southey’ (ColB 41[2013] 75–84) Chine Sonoi provides an overview of how Coleridge and Southey moved from Godwinian universalism to British patriotism after the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

Several essays in volume 42 of the Coleridge Bulletin took a markedly biographical approach. Tim Fulford’s ‘Coleridge’s Visions of 1816: The Political Unconscious and the Poetic Fragment’ (ColB 42[2013] 1–14) takes inspiration from Marjorie Levinson’s reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘political unconscious’, arguing that the 1816 ‘The Pains of Sleep’ is a fragment because it represses the specific circumstances that attended the first sketches for the poem of 1803, when Coleridge witnessed poverty, depopulation, and political unrest amongst the Highlanders during his tour of Scotland. Helen Boyles’s ‘Visions of Fatherhood in Coleridge’s Early and Late Poetry’ (ColB 42[2013] 15–26) surveys Coleridge’s poetic evocations of the experience of fatherhood across his career, showing how the growing Hartley becomes intertwined with Coleridge’s own ambitions and disappointments. ‘Coleridge being Coleridge, or the Poet Is the Visionary’ (ColB 42[2013] 27–37), by Linda L. Reesman, begins with an odd comparison of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the baseball player Manny Ramirez, known for his inconsistent performances on and off the field, leading to sports announcers habitually describing his behaviour as ‘Manny being Manny’. Reesman goes on to associate the idiosyncrasies of Coleridge’s poetry with the personal peculiarities that made it difficult for him to form relationships with men and women. Stacey McDowell’s ‘Coleridge and Tipsy Joy’ (ColB 42[2013] 47–56) investigates how the ‘tipsy joy’ that the bird feels in Coleridge’s poem ‘The Nightingale’ opens a problem about the representability of joy in poetry: ‘If the bird’s song represents an unalloyed, unselfconscious mode of expression, Coleridge’s poem questions how the self-consciousness of lyric expression negotiates extremes of passion’ (p. 47). Gavin Davidson’s ‘Work without Hope’ (ColB 42[2013] 59–77) is a close reading of Coleridge’s 1825 sonnet, noting the unusual rhyme scheme, its allusions to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Coleridge’s own ‘Kubla Khan’. Davidson ends by suggesting that the poem may obliquely reflect on a quarrel between Coleridge and Anne Gillman.

The poetry of Sara Coleridge is receiving renewed attention in the wake of Peter Swaab’s 2007 edition of her poems and his 2012 book on her literary criticism. Two essays in the Coleridge Bulletin explored her work this year. Anna Mercer’s ‘ “What aspect wears the soul within?”: Sara Coleridge and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Connections, and the Image of Childhood’ (ColB 41[2013] 85–95) analyses Sara Coleridge’s poems addressed to her children alongside her father’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ with its famous apostrophe to her brother Hartley. In place of the desire to conquer and supersede the father that is at the heart of Harold Bloom’s model of poetic influence, Mercer reads Sara Coleridge’s children’s poems as an attempt to form a bond with her father that did not exist in reality. In ‘The Structure of Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion, A Fairy Tale’ (ColB 42[2013] 39–48) Hilary Newman argues against critics who see Sara Coleridge’s fantastic poem as lacking form, arguing that its series of love triangles structures a poem that celebrates the ideal of companionate marriage.

Martin Priestman’s The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times is a full-length study of a figure usually treated more as an influence on the Romantics than as a poet in his own right. Priestman provides extended readings of Darwin’s often derided long poems in heroic couplets, viewing The Loves of the Plants, The Economy of Vegetation, and The Temple of Nature not simply as popularizations of contemporary life science and moral philosophy but as highly wrought literary artefacts. A useful first chapter places the enthusiastically networking Darwin in a series of overlapping circles of scientists, philosophers, and radicals. Although Darwin’s poetry has often been criticized for being gaudy and artificial, Priestman suggests that Darwin’s self-conscious play with couplets, chiasmus, and synecdoche is central to the view of nature propounded in the poems: ‘Darwin’s fondness for extended similes, the synecdochic implying of a group from a single instance, even perhaps his reliance on rhyme and the symmetrical pairings of chiasmus, all rest chiefly on the notion of spatially stable sets or “tribes” of pre-related ideas; whereas the winding self-analyses of Romantic lyrics depend on a more fluid commitment to the links thrown up by “trains of thought” in time’ (p. 40). The transition from a synchronic and systematic understanding of nature and human beings to a fluid and historical one provides the main structuring principle of the book, though Priestman emphasizes the connections between Darwin and the poets who followed him. Building on the pioneering work of Desmond King-Hele, Priestman ends his study by devoting two chapters to Darwin’s influence on the Romantic poets.

The last four years have been momentous ones for Keats studies, having ushered in no fewer than three major literary biographies and a wealth of new critical assessments. Topping the list this year is a work that, while combining elements of both biography and criticism, is reducible to neither: Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Brighter Word than Bright: Keats at Work, which appears as part of the University of Iowa’s Muse Books series in creativity and writing. The ambition of the series is to present writerly meditations on the creative practice of major literary figures. A Brighter Word than Bright fulfils this brief, offering the reader a daringly unrestrained aesthetic appreciation of the letters and poetry Keats composed between the publication of his first poem in 1816 and his departure for Italy in 1820. Structurally, Beachy-Quick’s book frames its presentation of these four momentous years around five brief biographical tableaux (or ‘portraits’), each of which provides a point of departure for a series of suggestive, insightful, and, at times, inspiring readings of particular works. (Two further ‘portraits’, concerning Keats’s final sickness and death, are placed at the end of the book, where they function as a coda.) More essayistic than analytic, Beachy-Quick’s readings follow the form of the short prose sketch, a format which seems well suited to his stated aim of offering ‘not a work of criticism’, but ‘a mimetic tribute’ to his subject (p. xviii). Indeed, if anything, the short prose commentaries that populate his book might be said to resemble Keats’s letters both in the suggestiveness of their sudden flashes of insight and their peculiar lyrical power. At times, this lyricism leads Beachy-Quick too far (consider, for instance, his commentary on Charles Armitage Brown’s pained remark about the ‘fact’ of Keats’s ‘spitting of blood’: ‘The fact of blood is that it unfolds from the mouth, as does a poem’, p. 147). Yet, sparing such moments of poetic self-indulgence, A Brighter Word than Bright is both a rich and rewarding study and a testament to the enduring influence of Keats’s poetry and aesthetics amongst writers of the present day.

Elsewhere in Keats studies this year Marcello Giovanelli’s Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares applies methods from stylistics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and literary theory to account for the ways that Keats’s poetry communicates different states of consciousness to the reader. Focusing on the three title poems from Keats’s last collection—Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St Agnes—as well as ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and the posthumously published ‘This living hand’, Giovanelli’s study develops the ‘text world theory’ model proposed by Paul Werth in order to map out how we, as readers, make sense of the dream, desire, and nightmare states we encounter in these works. Innovative as it is for the study of Romantic poetry, as Giovanelli explains, the multidisciplinary approach modelled in this book is of special significance for the field of cognitive poetics, to which it makes its principal contribution, since ‘the current text world theory model ha[s] yet to be developed to account … for both the complex phenomenon of the dream and its associated states and the notion of desire’ (p. 205). Yet although this study is principally targeted towards stylisticians, it will be of great interest to scholars with interests in Romantic poetry, dream theory, and linguistic-oriented literary analysis.

A handful of articles on matters relating to Keats’s life and biography appeared in 2013. Foremost amongst these is Oliver Herford’s ‘John Keats by Joseph Severn: On Likeness and Life-Writing’ (CQ 42[2013] 318–41), which presents a persuasive reconsideration of the iconic, full-length portrait Severn painted of Keats from memory after the poet’s death. Dispelling the distrust that scholars and biographers have shown towards the ‘image’s retrospective orientation’ (p. 318), Herford demonstrates the merits of reading Severn’s portrait alongside the other posthumous ‘memoirs and recollections’ that Keats’s friends composed about him (p. 319). Within this context, as Herford suggests, the pose in which Severn chose to capture Keats—‘poised and unaware’ (p. 325)—can be appreciated as a visualization of a recurrent trope in ‘Keatsian life-writing’ (p. 322), where time and again we see the poet either asleep or daydreaming from the perspective of a ‘friend who watches over him’ (p. 325). Issues of biographical interest are also discussed in Christine Harding’s ‘Derrynaculen Connections: John Keats and Mull in the Twentieth Century’ (KSR 27[2013] 69–75), one of the trove of pieces published in this year in the Keats-Shelley Review. Combining fieldwork and genealogical research, Harding’s article provides a brief history of the farmhouse in which Keats and Charles Brown took their breakfast on 23 July 1818, during their Scottish tour. Keats and Brown’s Scottish tour is also considered in R.S. White’s ‘Emotional Landscapes: Romantic Travels in Scotland’ (KSR 27[2013] 76–90), which compares Keats and Brown’s experiences with Coleridge’s and Dorothy Wordsworth’s accounts of their walking tour of 1803.

Other important critical discussions of Keats’s poetry this year include John Barnard’s ‘The Date of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Song of Four Fairies” ’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 1–5), which assesses the different dates that Hyder Rollins and Jack Stillinger assigned to the drafting of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and concludes that, although arriving at a ‘definitive answer’ is ‘impossible’ (p. 4), the way the poem’s provenance is linked by Keats to his ‘Song of Four Fairies’ favours Rollins’s date of 21 April 1819. Dean Dempsey’s ‘ “Blank Splendour”: Keats, Romantic Visuality, and Wonder’ (SiR 52[2013] 85–113) considers the ‘kaleidoscopic climax’ (p. 110) of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ in light of the wider culture of spectatorship evinced by, amongst other works, Book VII of The Prelude and the essays of Hazlitt and Baudelaire. Bo Earle’s ‘Ranking and Romantic Lyric’ (RCPS [2013] 20 paras.), which appears as part of the Romantic Praxis series special number on Romantic Numbers, situates Keats alongside Baudelaire as an exponent of ‘sympathetic ranking’, which Earle characterizes as a response to the ethical violence of capitalism.

Keats’s odes, a subject of perennial scholarly interest, elicited several new critical appreciations this year, perhaps most notably Paul Bentley’s ‘Keats’s Odes, Socratic Irony, and Regency Reviewers’ (KSJ 62[2013] 114–32). Bentley’s article offers a sweeping rereading of all five of the ‘Spring’ odes, which he interprets as ‘part of a disguised Socratic dialogue’ that Keats staged between himself and his critics (p. 115). Ellen Oliensis’s ‘Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Horace’s Epodes’ (KSJ 62[2013] 32–6), which appears amongst the news and notes in the front matter of this year’s instalment of the Keats–Shelley Review, provides an insightful analysis of the Horatian subtext of Keats’s nightingale ode, commenting particularly on the poem’s intertextual echoes of Epode 14. John Sieker’s ‘Confrontation with Mortality: Keats, Nightingales, and Prelapsarian Garden Symbols in Stoppard’s Arcadia’ (in Baker and Smothers, eds., ‘The Real Thing’: Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of His 75th Birthday, pp. 262–77) draws on Keats’s ode to explore the tragic plight of Stoppard’s protagonist Septimus, whose flight into the garden of Sidley Park after the loss of his beloved contrasts with Keats’s speaker, who ‘lives to face his mortality outside the bower’ (p. 263). Joshua Gonsalves’s ‘The Encrypted Prospect: Existentialist Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Speculative Realism in “To Autumn” ’ (ERR 24[2013] 287–95) combines post-structuralist theory and close textual analysis, suggesting that Keats’s adaptation of the prospect poem in ‘To Autumn’ undermines the mode’s characteristically imperialist perspective—its exultation in the spectator’s rational command over nature—by foregrounding both the speaker’s ‘encrypted’ viewpoint and the ode’s status as an ‘encased’ work of verbal art (p. 288). ‘To Autumn’ also figures prominently in Jonathan P.A. Sell’s ‘Terminal Aposiopesis and Sublime Communication: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 and Keats’s “To Autumn” ’ (in Sell, Borch, and Lindgren, eds., The Ethics of Literary Communication: Genuineness, Directness, Indirectness, pp. 167–88), which explores the artistic resistance to the formal closure of literary communication, arguing that ‘To Autumn’—like Shakespeare’s formally imperfect envoi, Sonnet 126—‘textualize[s] temporal suspension through diegetic … abeyance’ (p. 179). As evidence, Sell directs attention to Keats’s holograph manuscript of ‘To Autumn’, wherein the final line of the ode terminates ‘not with a full stop, but a dash’ (p. 180), arguing that this syntactic irresolution imbues the poem with a sense of timelessness and transcendence. Other readings of Keats’s poetry this year include Octavia Cox’s ‘ “[T]hen the veil was rent”: Homeric Insight and Keats’s Material Sublime’ (PostEng 27[2013] 2–24), which presents a nuanced reading of Keats’s posthumously published sonnet ‘To Homer’ and which, as Cox contends, not only gathers many of the ideas and preoccupations of Keats’s later writings ‘into splendid unity’ (p. 3), but also typifies his treatment of the themes of vision, blindness, and insight. Finally, Mary Anne Myers’s ‘Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura’ (KSJ 62[2013] 99–113) examines the ‘subtle but pervasive Petrarchan affects’ in Keats’s poetry, paying particular attention to the ambivalent treatment of gender roles and stereotypes in the ‘Ode on Indolence’ and the late fragment ‘This living hand’ (p. 100).

Two articles appeared this year assessing Keats’s influence on the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The first of these, Ryan Cull’s ‘Interrogating the “Egotistical Sublime”: Keats and Dickinson Near the Dawn of Lyricization’ (EDJ 22[2013] 55–73), pursues a comparative assessment of the poets by differentiating their responses to egotism, suggesting that Dickinson excels her Romantic precursor in ‘formulat[ing] … a more generous model of lyric personhood’ (p. 56). The second article, Michelle Kohler’s ‘The Ode Unfamiliar: Dickinson, Keats, and the (Battle)fields of Autumn’ (EDJ 22[2013] 30–54), traces intertextual echoes of ‘To Autumn’ in the six poems Dickinson composed around the time of the battle of Antietam in the autumn of 1862. As Kohler contends, the ‘placid lines’ of Keats’s ode resonate eerily in Dickinson’s poems, which juxtapose the latter’s descriptions of harvest with images of battle and death in their response to the American Civil War (p. 31). Additionally, Stanislav Shvabrin’s ‘Vladimir Nabokov’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: A Study in the Ethics and Effects of Literary Adaptation’ (CL 65[2031] 101–22) considers Nabokov’s little-known early adaptation of Keats’s ballad (composed a century after the Romantic poet’s death), explaining its significance within the context of the development of the Russian writer’s experiments with literary translation and adaptation.

Finally, three essays this year offered insights into Keats’s legacy in modern poetry and culture. The first of these, David Havird’s ‘ “Passion before we die”: James Dickey and Keats’ (SLJ 45[2013] 90–102), explores the influence of Keats’s works—and especially his ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter—to Dickey’s poetry between 1957 and 1967, the ‘productive’ decade, Havird asserts, ‘that secured Dickey’s critical reputation’ (p. 90). The second, Eric Eisner’s ‘Disaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary American Poetry’ (WC 44[2013] 153–8), discusses how the poet’s language and biography have influenced, and continue to influence, contemporary literary responses to environmental catastrophe. Similarly, the third, Deborah Lilley’s ‘Theories of Certain Uncertainty: Climate Change and Negative Capability’ (Symploke 21[2013] 97–108), applies the notion of negative capability to explore the concept of uncertainty in the rhetoric of responses to climate change.

In addition to commemorating Charles Lamb’s birthday, the toast that Duncan Wu gave at the Lamb Society’s annual luncheon this year (ChLB 158[2013] 94–7) drew on the bicentenary of Leigh and John Hunt’s incarceration for political libel to reflect on the Lambs’ tireless friendship with the former. Recalling both Lamb’s ‘The Triumph of the Whale’ and Hunt’s dedicatory lay ‘To Charles Lamb’, Wu celebrated the ‘good humour’ and ‘spirit of fellowship’ that drew the two writers to one another. In addition to Wu’s toast, two other pieces on Lamb’s poetry appeared this year. The first of these, Richard Gaskin’s ‘Lamb and Horace’ (ChLB 158[2013] 111–25), opens a new area of enquiry for Lamb studies in considering the similarities between the poet and essayist and his ancient Roman precursor. While noting general traits and tastes common to both writers—‘their love of books and literature’, ‘their nostalgia’, and ‘their reliance on autobiography’ (p. 111)—Gaskin also digs deeper to make some perceptive claims about the Horatian elements in Lamb’s life and works. The second piece, Tom Lockwood’s ‘ “Sweet is thy sunny hair”: New Readings of an Old Source’ (ChLB 157[2013] 32–6), revisits Lamb’s early manuscript lyric (first published in 2004), offering new conjectural readings of the illegible script in the poem’s final stanza and commenting on its allusion to the final lines of Paradise Lost.

Jeffrey W. Vail’s The Unpublished Letters of Thomas Moore makes a major contribution to Moore studies this year. The culmination of a decade of painstaking detective work, this handsome two-volume edition, which presents over 700 letters from an array of archives and collections, fills several gaps in the record of Moore’s prolific correspondence, and in the process brings much more of the poet’s long life and literary career into focus. Of particular note amongst the various items of interest herein are hundreds of excerpts from Moore’s letters to his publisher, James Power, which contain useful information about the making and marketing of the Irish Melodies, as well as a good number of amusing biographical titbits, including insights into Moore’s sartorial tastes (vol. 2, p. 3). Although these excerpts have, in fact, already appeared elsewhere, their publication here—alongside previously unpublished letters to, amongst others, John Murray and Thomas Longman—makes this volume a particularly valuable source for researchers interested in the development of Moore’s dealings with his publishers. Other letters, especially those addressed to Moore’s friends, including Byron, offer further insights into his personal passions and his hobbyhorses, including his fascination with Napoleon and his lifelong love of music. At a more general level, Vail’s two volumes help one appreciate just how diverse—and how extensive—Moore’s circle of correspondents was. One finds herein not only letters to fellow authors and littérateurs, including Washington Irving and Isaac D’Israeli, but also statesmen such as John Wilson Croker, Sir Benjamin Brodie, and Henry Richard Vassall, Lord Holland. Vail’s editorial materials, including his introduction and his precise and insightful explanatory notes, excel in showcasing this collection, which will stand alongside Wilfred S. Dowden’s two-volume edition of Moore’s correspondence as an authoritative resource for students and scholars for generations to come.

As chance would have it, the publication of Vail’s volumes coincides with D.M.R. Bentley’s report on ‘An Uncollected Poem by Thomas Moore’ (N&Q 60[2013] 226–7). The poem in question, which Bentley transcribes, was written during Moore’s tour of Canada in 1804 and subsequently published in the Quebec Mercury on 3 November 1806. It was, however, left out of Moore’s Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems and has yet to be collected in any subsequent edition of his poems. Elsewhere this year, Moore’s relationship to the classical past and to the contemporary literature of his countrymen is the subject of Jane Moore’s ‘Nineteenth-Century Irish Anacreontics: The Literary Relationship of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore’ (ISR 21[2013] 387–405). Her article traces the rising popularity of anacreontic poetry in nineteenth-century Ireland, distinguishing Moore’s early collection Odes of Anacreon as the catalyst of this trend and examining his influence on the drinking songs of James Clarence Mangan, a poet with whom Moore has traditionally been held to have little in common.

Although by no means a thing unprecedented, it is remarkable that a figure who cast a long shadow over his own era should be suffered to linger in the shadows by the scholars of a later age. Yet such has been the fate of Samuel Rogers, whose long life and influential career are the subject of a new biography this year by Martin Blocksidge. Blocksidge’s The Banker Poet: The Rise and Fall of Samuel Rogers, 1763–1855 is the first systematic study of the author’s life to be published in the past 100 years. It is also an engrossing and eminently readable book, which—though painstakingly researched—wears its erudition lightly while helping the reader both to situate Rogers within his immediate historical context and to appreciate the magnitude of his influence on the literary culture of his era. Particularly noteworthy in this latter regard are Blocksidge’s accounts of the critical success of Rogers’s early blockbuster poem The Pleasures of Memory and the commercial success of the grand, illustrated editions of his later masterpiece Italy (p. 270). Whereas, in Blocksidge’s reading, the former is shown to be an essentially Augustan poem, whose embrace of ‘an established literary tradition’ (p. 62), so crucial to its contemporary acclaim, stands at variance with many of our received notions about the literature of the 1790s, the latter is revealed to have set a new standard for artistic and technical excellence in the publication of poetry. In addition to consolidating and advancing scholarship on such topics, Blocksidge’s biography also contributes manifestly to our understanding of his subject’s life, shedding light not only on his family’s place within the dissenting community of Newington Green but also on some dark and complex aspects of Rogers’s character, such as his troubling attraction to little girls, which the poet’s Victorian and Edwardian biographers understandably chose to pass over. As with Blocksidge’s readings of particular poems, the conclusions he draws about such aspects of Rogers’s character are as balanced and reasonable as the evidence is ever likely to permit. With reference to Rogers’s suspected paedophilia, for example, Blocksidge surmises that the poet ‘was fortunate to live in a less prurient age than our own’ and was thus ‘allowed to survive with, to all intents and purposes, his reputation intact’ (p. 128). This is a rewarding biography that in shedding new light on Rogers will hopefully inform new critical appreciations of his life and works in years to come.

Ian Brown’s interdisciplinary collection Literary Tourism, the Trossachs, and Walter Scott emerges out of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies’ 2010 conference, which marked the 200th anniversary of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. A phenomenal bestseller in its era, as this slim volume shows, Scott’s poem has continued to shape the cultural geography of the Trossachs unto the present day. Drawing on contributions from a group of historians, literary scholars, and film and media specialists, the collection ranges over an array of topics relating to the history of tourism in the Trossachs both before and after the publication of Scott’s poem. Accordingly, although it is manifestly concerned with the exemplary role played by the Trossachs in general, and Loch Katrine in particular, in the nineteenth-century shaping of ‘Scott land’, the collection helpfully contextualizes this development by documenting how it drew momentum from other, earlier forms of tourism in the region. This latter point is broached in different ways in the chapters contributed by Tom Furniss, Alastair Durie, Michael Newton, Murdo MacDonald, and Dorothy McMillan, each of whom reminds us that whereas Scott has done much to place the Trossachs within the popular imagination, the local scenery (so appealing to the cult of the picturesque) and its association with the poems of Ossian and the legend of Rob Roy began attracting visitors as early as the 1780s. Set against this background, the other chapters in the collection can be seen to explore both the special nature of Scott’s creative engagement with the region and why the portrayals of it one finds in poems like The Lady of the Lake (and, to a lesser extent, in his fiction) obtained such longstanding cultural currency. Of particular interest, in this later respect, is Nicola Watson’s chapter, which argues that inasmuch as Scott’s poem was read onto the Trossachs, the Trossachs were gradually read back onto the poem: ‘the poem … was elaborated by and for readers through contemporary practices of visual depiction, performance-adaptation, and tourism itself, all of which worked to bind poem and place together’ (p. 56). The other chapters in the collection, contributed by Jim Alison, David Hewitt, Ian Thompson, and David Manderson, explore similar themes.

Elsewhere in Scott studies, Ian D. Kane has shed new light on the Wizard of the North’s cautious response to a request for support from John Clare’s aspiring patron, Captain Markham E. Shirwill. Kane’s short article, ‘Sir Walter Scott and John Clare: An Unpublished Letter’ (SSL 39[2013] 231–6), reports on a previously undocumented letter from Scott to Shirwill, dated 31 May 1820, and now in the G. Ross Roy Collection at the University of South Carolina. As Kane’s commentary clarifies, this letter fills a gap in the scholarly record of Scott’s dealings with Clare, then a newcomer on the scene, and a poet whose literary ambitions Scott was reluctant to support. The article includes a transcription and facsimile of the letter. Finally, Sigrid Rieuwerts’s ‘ “We are all becoming Scotish [sic] again”: (Cultural) Nationalism and Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ (in Müller, Reitz, and Rieuwerts, eds., Scotland’s Cultural Identity and Standing, pp. 125–38) situates Scott’s Minstrelsy in the context of other contemporary songbooks and ballad collections, including Allan Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, and Thomas Percy’s Reliques, arguing that Scott’s collection should be read not as a document of nationalist sentiment, but as an expression of cultural patriotism and of the poet’s abiding love for the ‘poetry, life, lore and history’ of Scotland’s border country (p. 134).

Shelleyans will no doubt have been pleased by the recent publication of both Michael O’Neill, Anthony Howe, and Madeleine Callaghan’s The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (reviewed YWES 93[2014]) and the fourth volume of the projected five-volume Longman Annotated English Poets edition of The Poems of Shelley: 1804–1822, which will be covered next year. In the interim, students and researchers looking for a quick-reference resource on Shelley will wish to turn to Martin Garrett’s The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Shelley, a new addition to the Palgrave Literary Dictionary series. Like Garrett’s previous contribution to the series, The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Byron (reviewed in YWES 91[2012]), the Dictionary of Shelley is an excellent, compact resource. Following the format of the Palgrave series, Garrett’s book comprises alphabetically arranged entries, of varying length, on individual poems and works and on an array of key and marginal people, places, and events in Shelley’s life. Complementing the composite biography constructed by the work are a number of thematic entries (on topics ranging from ‘Animals’ and ‘Atheism’ to ‘Vegetarianism’), as well as entries that detail Shelley’s influences, critical reception, and cultural legacy. (Thus, for example, in addition to entries on Volney, Voltaire, and Plato, one finds others on Swinburne, Orwell, and Brecht.) Certain scholars and editors, including A.C. Bradley, F.R. Leavis, and Henry Buxton Forman, also find a place in Garrett’s pages. The entries devoted to Shelley’s works provide summaries of provenance and composition history, as well as a brief précis and commentaries on content and form. Most, moreover, contain references to relevant scholarship and further reading, and are accompanied by an up-to-date and well-researched bibliography. In sum, Garrett’s Dictionary succeeds in providing a convenient desk-reference that will be of service to Shelley scholars while remaining accessible to an advanced general audience.

Ross Wilson’s Shelley and the Apprehension of Life takes its title and its point of departure from the existential conundrum adumbrated in Shelley’s 1819 fragment ‘On Life’: namely, that ‘in living we lose the apprehension of life’. Treating this assertion as an expression of the abiding concern of Shelley’s career, Wilson’s study attends to the ‘internally riven’ relation of ‘living’ and ‘life’ in the poet’s thinking, arguing that Shelley’s sense of his vocation was informed by his conviction of poetry’s power for ‘fostering … the apprehension of life’ and his contempt for the life unobserved or, in other words, ‘mere life’: ‘life that does not live’ (pp. 2, 8, 14). Wilson develops this argument over the course of six chapters, which can be broadly divided into two sequential parts: the first part (chapters 1, 2, and 3) focusing on Shelley’s critique of ‘mere life’, the second part (chapters 4, 5, and 6) on his sense of poetry as a ‘response to that critiqued life’ which is uniquely capable of awakening the human mind to the ‘wonder of our being’ (pp. 19, 53). Essentially essays in philosophical literary criticism, Wilson’s chapters combine perceptive close readings with analyses of modern and historical works of philosophy and theory. In chapter 2, for example, passages from ‘On Life’, Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, and the projected poem ‘Otho’ are read in relation to the writings of David Hume and John Locke in order to clarify the source of Shelley’s sense of ‘self-determination’ as ‘fundamental to human emancipation from the sway of mere custom’ (p. 64). Similarly, in chapter 4, Hegel’s aesthetic theory provides a point of contrast for Wilson’s readings of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’ as poems that evince Shelley’s sense of the vital ‘relation between animating agent, natural material, and artistic work’ (p. 112). Other major works treated in the study include Queen Mab, The Witch of Atlas, and, of course, The Triumph of Life, a poem that, in Wilson’s reading, is shown to share in the concerns expressed in ‘On Life’: namely, propounding the importance of ‘apprehension’—understood as ‘the hopeful yet fragile anticipation of things auspicious’ (p. 172)—as a force capable of bringing us more fully to life.

Shelley also figures prominently this year in Kathleen Kerr-Koch’s Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley, which brings the theories of allegory developed by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man to bear in readings of several instances of allegory in Shelley’s poetry, including ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, Alastor, and The Triumph of Life. Crucial to these readings is Kerr-Koch’s differentiation between Shelley’s neoclassical conception of allegory ‘as an act of reading’ or an ‘extended figure’ that ‘presupposes … interpretive integrity’, and Benjamin’s and de Man’s ‘modern’ sense of allegory as ‘a performative apparatus that inscribes and erases’ and ‘gives face to and defaces … the human sensorium’ (p. xi). This difference, though it might seem to set Shelley at variance with Benjamin and de Man, is shown not to have hindered the latter two critics in their appreciation of their Romantic precursor. As Kerr-Koch explains, although Shelley’s ‘poetics are shaped [by] the early nineteenth century confidence that mimesis can aesthetically recover a classical idealism’, for Benjamin, and especially for de Man, he is a poet whose works can be seen to reflect an ‘understanding of the predicament of modernity’ through their engagement with, and entanglement within, questions of ‘time, history, and ultimately death’ (p. 11). In this way, while applying Benjamin and de Man to interpret Shelley’s poetry Kerr-Koch’s study also explores Shelley’s influence on these two thinkers, with whom the Romantic poet is shown to hold much in common, not only as major contributors to theories of postmodernism, but also as individuals whose experience of alienation drove them ‘to think about the question of progress in modernity’s claim to historical advancement’ and to ‘formulate a unique critical response to the enlightenment legacy’ (p. 9).

Foremost amongst this year’s crop of articles on specific Shelley poems is Richard Adelman’s ‘Idleness and Vacancy in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” ’ (KSJ 62[2013] 62–79), which establishes a new critical context for appreciating Shelley’s poem by teasing out its formal and thematic links to Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’. Reading ‘Mont Blanc’ as a ‘sustained conversation’ (p. 63) with these two canonical conversation poems, Adelman places Shelley within a tradition of ‘poetic inquiry’ about the creative capacity of the idle mind that he explores at length in his Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750–1830 (reviewed in YWES 92[2013]). In a similar manner, Matthew C. Borushko’s ‘The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” ’ (SiR 52[2013] 225–52) reads ‘Mont Blanc’ into the tradition of aesthetic philosophy manifested in the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Here, however, Shelley is shown not to assimilate but to stand apart. For, as Borushko suggests, far from passively rehearsing the well-worn conceits of the sublime, Shelley’s poem is marked by its wariness of the ‘political implications’ of the violent ‘power’, ‘dominance’, and ‘concealment’ that the ideal of the sublime entails (p. 225). Seth T. Reno also explores themes of violence in ‘The Violence of Form in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy’ (KSJ 62[2013] 80–98), wherein he offers a critical counterpoint to the conventional reading of the Mask as a ‘powerful assertion of the necessity of nonviolence’, and argues that the poem ‘presents an alternative to Shelley’s poetics and politics of love’ through its advocacy of violent resistance (pp. 81, 83).

Two articles appeared this year about aspects of Prometheus Unbound. The first of these, Colin Carman’s ‘ “Freedom leads it forth”: Queering the Epithalamium in Prometheus Unbound’ (ERR 24[2013] 579–602), revisits the final act of Shelley’s 1819 verse drama in order to read the play in the light of modern debates about the redefinition of marriage, praising its forward-looking ‘vision of wedlock … unchained by the reigning norms of sexuality and temporality’ (p. 597). By contrast, the second article, Michelle Geric’s ‘Shelley’s “Cancelled Cycles”: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound (1820)’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 31–41) introduces a contemporaneous context for a discussion of the play. Although acknowledging that Shelley seems not to have read the geological theories of James Hutton at first hand, Geric argues for their popular influence on the play’s representation of revolution.

Geological and geographical symbolism is also the concern of Mandy Swann’s ‘Shelley’s Utopian Seascapes’ (SiR 52[2013] 389–414). Swann examines the use of sea isles as imaginative sites of utopia in poems including Queen Mab, ‘Lines Written amongst the Euganean Hills’, Prometheus Unbound, and ‘A Vision of the Sea’, which are able to encapsulate both his ideals of perfection and also of cyclical history. Moving from the geological to the botanical, Rowan Boyson’s ‘Shelley’s Republic of Odours: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Scent in “The Sensitive Plant” ’ (KSR 27[2013] 105–20) elucidates the ‘affective dimensions of scent’ in Shelley’s poetry, focusing on connections forged between the sensory experience of smell and pleasure and connectedness in ‘The Sensitive Plant’, which Boyson reads in relation to the aesthetic theories of Humphry Davy and Henry Reid. A second essay on the same poem, János V. Barcsák’s ‘Marking, Consciousness, Fabulation: The Lady’s Presence in Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” ’ (HJEAS 19[2013] 31–59), follows the example of Earl Wassermann to offer ‘an intensive metaphysical reading’ (p. 33), focusing on how the poem deals with the paradox of attempting to signify qualities—such as purity and innocence—which are, for Barcsák, ‘defiled’ by the very act of signification. Paradox is likewise taken up in Tilottama Rajan’s ‘The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel’ (SiR 52[2013] 3–32), which examines the disruptive presence of the Gothic across Shelley’s oeuvre, with particular reference to St Irvyne, A Defence of Poetry, and The Triumph of Life, in the light of Hegel’s interpretation of the symbolic as inclusive of failure in art. Philosophical themes are also the focus of Ruth Vanita’s ‘Lamb Unslain: Nonhuman Animals and Shelley’s Panentheism’ (in DiPaolo, ed., Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture, pp. 98–113), which explores the influence of Christian theology and Hindu philosophy on Shelley’s ethical regard for—and opposition to the killing of—nonhuman animals. Finally, Leila Walker’s ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Ekphrasis of Hair’ (ERR 24[2013] 231–50) considers the representational function of hair in Shelley’s ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci’ and The Cenci, contending that these two ‘overtly ekphrastic’ (p. 232) works are marked by their exploration of ‘hair’s dual signification’ as a spectacle and a ‘site’ of social contact (p. 241).

A strong vein of comparative reading is more generally detectable in this year’s crop of essays on Shelley. Youssef M. Choueiri’s ‘The Romantic Discourse of Ameen Rihani and Percy Shelley’ (JArabL 44[2013] 1–20) traces lines of influence and intertextual connections between The Revolt of Islam and Rihani’s novel The Book of Khalid, arguing that the former provides the pattern for the world-view presented in the latter. János V. Barcsák’s ‘ “A voice is wanting”: The Unspeakable on Shelley and the Case of Browning’s Duke’ (in Pellérdi and Reuss, eds., Reverberations of Silence: Silenced Texts, Sub-Texts and Authors in Literature, Language and Translation, pp. 98–130) considers Shelley’s influence on Robert Browning by way of a comparative assessment of the thematization of silence in Prometheus Unbound and ‘My Last Duchess’. David N. Wells’s ‘Shelley in the Translation to Russian Formalism: Three Versions of “Ozymandias” ’ (MLR 108[2013] 1221–36) also explores the inheritance of Shelley, this time in fin-de-siècle Russia, when the rise of symbolism coincided with a surge in interest in the poet’s work. Focusing on three different translations of ‘Ozymandias’, Wells demonstrates the ways in which Shelley was variously interpreted across the political and aesthetic spectrum of Russian literature in the late nineteenth century. Turning to more contemporary comparisons, Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s insightful essay, ‘A Brotherhood of Misfits: The Literary Anarchism of Dambudzo Marechera & Percy Bysshe Shelley’ (in Hamilton, ed., Reading Marechera, pp. 11–24), reads Shelley’s life and poetry alongside the life and works of the great Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera. In bringing these two writers together, Mushakavanhu’s comparative analysis not only places both of their works ‘in a larger, global context’, but also, in doing so, suggests how their works are informed by a common goal of ‘revolutionary praxis’ (pp. 22, 23). Shelley’s legacy in twentieth-century literature again received attention, in Robert Vork’s ‘Things That No One Can Say: The Unspeakable in Artaud’s Les Cenci’ (MD 56[2013] 306–26), which reflects on the portrayal of violent trauma in Antonin Artaud’s adaptation of Shelley’s 1819 tragedy.

The memorialization and editing of Shelley are taken up in two articles. Claire Sheridan’s ‘Anti-Social Mobility: Mary Shelley and the Posthumous “Pisa Gang” ’ (SiR 52[2013] 415–35) provides a revaluation of Mary Shelley’s commemoration of her brother in the context of their coterie. Meanwhile, Mark Anderson’s ‘ “Straining after impossibilities”: Textual Presentation and the Scrope Davies Find’ (KSR 27[2013] 91–104) comments on the editorial challenges of working with the alternative versions of ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ found in the Scrope Davies notebook, comparing the approaches taken in Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook’s The Complete Poetry of Percy Shelley, Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, and Timothy Webb’s Shelley: Poems and Prose.

Four significant articles about Robert Southey’s works and career appeared this year. The first of these, Laurie Langbauer’s ‘Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey’ (PMLA 128[2013] 888–906), focuses on Southey’s role as literary patron and editor. Although a lesser-known figure today, as Langbauer affirms, in his era Kirke White (1785–1806) stood shoulder to shoulder with Thomas Chatterton as an exemplar of literary precocity and youthful poetic genius. Focusing on the trope of prolepsis, which Langbauer defines as the yoking of immediacy to futurity (p. 888), the essay suggests how Southey’s edition of White’s Remains, undertaken just four years after the elder poet’s edition of Chatterton’s Works, ‘consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition’ (p. 890), and, in the process, ‘opened possibilities for [the] young poets’ of his era (p. 894). The second article, Juliet Shields’s ‘Robert Southey’s Madoc in America’ (WC 44[2013] 97–101), reads Southey’s epic alongside Iolo Morganwg’s 1794 ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Wales’, arguing that whereas the latter drew on Madoc in order to exhort his fellow Welshmen to seek their freedom from Britain in the New World, the former used the same mythical figure to ‘serve the ideological interests of Anglo-British expansion’ both in Wales and abroad (p. 99). The third article, Tom Duggett’s ‘Southey’s Colloquies and Romantic History’ (WC 44[2013] 87–92), joins Fulford’s Late Poetry of the Lake Poets in offering new reflections on Southey’s long-neglected and maligned Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, which Duggett read as a ‘ghostly text’ that ‘inscribes Lake School high Romanticism into English Historiography’ (pp. 87, 92). Finally, the fourth article, Stuart Andrews’s ‘Wordsworth, Southey, and the English Church’ (WC 44[2013] 30–6), offers an insightful comparative assessment of Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets and Southey’s Book of the Church, explaining the composition history of each and exploring the many ‘striking’ correlations in their defence of the Anglican faith.

Foremost amongst the various books published on the Wordsworths this year is Lucy Newlyn’s biographical study William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’, which offers a profound reassessment of the literary partnership of Romanticism’s most famous siblings. Taking her point of departure from a comment Coleridge made to his friends in 1798 (‘You have all in each other’), Newlyn’s study traces the history of William and Dorothy’s creative relationship—from their separation in childhood to their reunion in adulthood to their deaths and interment in their family plot in Grasmere—documenting their ‘intense emotional and spiritual need’ for each other and arguing for ‘the equality and intrinsic value of their partnership’ as writers (pp. xi, xiii). Beyond merely accounting for the personal foundations of this ‘partnership’, however, Newlyn’s biography also emphasizes how it was informed by the Wordsworths' deeply rooted attachment to their local environment, commenting, for example, on how the pair’s decision to settle in Grasmere represented not only a homecoming but also an effort to repair the ‘damage caused by the trauma of their early separation’ by reaffirming ‘their sense of regional belonging’ (pp. xii, 311). Such intuitions are compelling, and they pair well with Newlyn’s persuasive readings of, amongst other works, the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’ and ‘Home at Grasmere’. But what truly sets Newlyn’s book apart from previous accounts of the Wordsworths is how she carries her narrative well beyond the period of their residence in Alfoxden and Town End, considering not only their adventures abroad in Scotland, southern England, and on the Continent, but also the mutual joy and sorrow they shared during their later life. Newlyn’s concluding chapters, which portray the Wordsworths’ final years together at Rydal Mount, are particularly noteworthy in the latter regard. Here, as she explains, the practices of remembering and poetic recitation took on new significance, especially after the onset of Dorothy’s dementia. Noting that William continued to read and recite his poems to his sister in her sick-room at Rydal Mount, Newlyn remarks: ‘After losing her capacity to walk, write, and retrieve short-term memories, the recital of poems served as a restorative way of “keeping time” ’ (p. 304). Even in this sadder, later phase of their relationship, poetry continued to serve a communal creative function. For, Newlyn suggests, inasmuch as ‘Dorothy’s dementia prompted William to make therapeutic use of their lifelong habit of remembering’, she can be seen as having continued to influence his development as a poet, encouraging him in ‘his late poems’ to return ‘to familiar places and themes, commemorating their lives together’ (p. 306). This revealing observation about the Wordsworths’ relationship in the autumn of their lives is but one of a number of insights afforded by this splendid study, which one hopes will shape the study of the Wordsworths and of Romantic creativity in years to come.

The Wordsworths’ first years in Grasmere also figure significantly in Heidi J. Snow’s monograph William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty, which offers a welcome reconsideration of the significance of Christian theology in William’s (and to a lesser extent Dorothy’s) writings about poverty, charity, and compassion. Pushing back against the problematic assumption that Wordsworth only turned to Christianity in later life and that, thereafter, the poet’s faith was monolithically Anglican, Snow’s study instead reveals the multiplicity of Christian beliefs—both Anglican and Dissenting—that Wordsworth, as a writer and moralist, drew from his cultural milieu. Poverty, as Snow explains, is an ideal topic for exploring this multiplicity, since, as a ‘pressing concern in Wordsworth’s England’, it provoked ‘various theologies’ that ‘differed significantly’ from one denomination to another (p. 3). In seeking to capture something of this multiplicity of perspectives, Snow sets out ‘to reconstruct the theological landscape of poverty in which William Wordsworth lived and to uncover the rich and complex attitudes towards poverty in his poetry’ (p. 8). Following her introductory chapter, which examines the Wordsworths’ household economy during their first two years in Town End (commenting on their frugal living and their encounters with the poor of the region), Snow proceeds to map out this ‘landscape’ with three chapters devoted, respectively, to exploring the Anglican, Methodist, and Quaker perspectives on poverty that Wordsworth encountered. The fifth and final chapter of Snow’s study then applies these perspectives to reassess The Excursion. Here she argues that the poet’s most famously (some would say notoriously) conservative Anglican poem is a work modelled on Rousseau’s Émile and one ‘that tries to honestly explore the problems of life and to do so utilizing the multiple religious perspectives Wordsworth was exposed to during his early life’ (p. 109). The portrait of the poet that emerges from Snow’s study is not that of the stolid Anglican bard so famously championed by Christopher Wordsworth and William Knight, but a figure whose faith, though grounded in the Established Church, drew power from his ‘sympathies with some Methodist and Quaker views’ on the necessity of charity and compassion (p. 134).

Wordsworth’s notes, glosses, introductions, and prefatory essays figure prominently in Brian R. Bates’s Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writings and Parodic Reception (published in 2012, but unavailable for review last year), a book that, in attending to the power of the paratext, succeeds in shining new light both on Wordsworth’s assertions of authorial control over his writings and on the parodies these assertions of authority inspired. As Bates explains in his introduction, this twin interest—in the prose works that pepper Wordsworth’s poetical works and in the parodies they provoked—informs the ‘Two intertwined stories’ that ‘govern’ his book (p. 1). The first of these ‘stories’, which is about Wordsworth’s use of ‘supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections’ (p. 1), is chiefly told in chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7, which proceed chronologically, assessing in turn the revisions, renovations, and additions made to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads; the ‘Prospectus’ and Preface to The Excursion; the ‘organising apparatus’ (p. 91) at work within the two-volume Poems of 1815; and the confluence of poetry and prose that flows into the River Duddon collection. Bates unfolds his second story, about ‘how Wordsworth’s critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the designs of those collections’ (p. 1), in chapters 3 and 6, which consider Richard Mant’s The Simpliciad and J.H. Reynolds’s infamously proleptic parody ‘Peter Bell’. Although this latter narrative is, at best, only loosely woven into the discussions of paratexts that surround it, Bates’s book shows admirable ambition in its attempt to combine textual- and reception-studies approaches in a critical assessment of Wordsworth’s early and mid-career works. In this sense, the book can be enjoyed this year alongside studies such as Tracy Ware’s ‘Wordsworth’s Canadian Ministries’ (JCSR 47[2013] 197–220), which considers Wordsworth’s uneasy place within Canadian literary history and examines modern imitations, parodies, and adaptations of poems including ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’.

Wordsworth’s influence on twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh literature forms the subject of James Prothero’s William Wordsworth and Welsh Romanticism, which traces the contours of the Romantic poet’s long shadow over the works of six Welsh writers: Huw Menai, Idris Davies, R.S. Thomas, W.H. Davies, Leslie Norris, and John Cowper Powys. (Powys being Welsh by ancestry, residence, and self-fashioning, but English by birth, is ordained a Welshman here ‘on the criterion of desire’, p. 43.) For Prothero, the receptivity of each of these writers to Wordsworth can be seen to stem from a common ‘affinity’ or ‘latent’ Romanticism which is detectable in each of their works (p. 3). This ‘affinity’, he suggests, may have a general socio-cultural basis, especially amongst writers who are imaginatively drawn to North Wales, which has obtained a symbolic significance not unlike the one Wordsworth assigned to the Lake District upon his removal there in 1799. As Prothero explains: ‘Just as Wordsworth reacted to the failure of the French Revolution and the stillborn nature of English political change in his time by returning to the rural countryside away from the increasing industrialization of England, so might these Welsh writers respond to the industrialization of South Wales and the dehumanization of the miners with a returning to the rural countryside of Wales’ (p. 4). Such claims are thought-provoking, but Prothero does not pursue them further, not systematically at any rate. Instead, his book is arranged as a series of author studies. Following a short introductory chapter, which surveys the Welsh landscapes in and Welsh influences on Wordsworth’s poetry, he proceeds writer by writer over the span of six chapters, sketching biographies, summarizing works, and exploring creative engagements and affinities with Wordsworth. In this sense, his book is a work that will be of interest to students of Wordsworth’s literary legacy and of Welsh writing in English, both of whom will wish to take note of the appendices at the end of Prothero’s book, which contain transcripts of his interviews with Leslie Norris and R.S. Thomas and transcribed letters from Leslie Norris and Arfom Menai Williams, Huw Menai’s son.

Issues of place and landscape are likewise discussed in several of the essays on Wordsworth this year. Suzanne Stewart’s ‘Roads, Rivers, Railways and Pedestrian Rambles: The Space and Place of Travel in William Wordsworth’s Poems and J.M.W. Turner’s Paintings’ (NCC 34[2012] 159–84) offers a comparative assessment of Wordsworth and Turner that reads both artists as representative of a broader shift in the spatial consciousness of the early nineteenth century. Similarly, Christopher Donaldson’s ‘Evoking the Local: Wordsworth, Martineau, and Early Victorian Fiction’ (RES 64[2013] 819–37) considers the circumstances underlying the increasing popularity and commercial viability of Wordsworth’s poetry during the 1830s and 1840s, arguing that this upswing in Wordsworth’s fortunes can be associated with a ‘broader shift in literary tastes towards … works representative of human life in its most particularized and locally distinctive forms’ (p. 836). Elsewhere, Donaldson’s article ‘Down the Duddon: Wordsworth and His Literary Pilgrims’ (LI 15[2013] 186–209) traced the publication and reception of the River Duddon sonnets, remarking on the crucial role played by the sequence in the shaping of ‘Wordsworth’s reputation as the pre-eminent poet of the Lake District’ (p. 189). Lisa Ottum’s ‘Discriminating Vision: Rereading Place in Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes’ (PSt 34[2012] 167–84) pushes back against ecocritical readings of Wordsworth’s writings, arguing that the sense of place conjured up in the poet’s Lake District guidebook is not one based on a binary opposition between the rural and the urban, but one based on a fundamentally ‘relational’ geography that links ‘the Lakes within an imaginary network of global natures’ (p. 168). Jessica Fay’s ‘Prospects of Contemplation: Wordsworth’s Winter Garden at Coleorton, 1806–1811’ (ERR 24[2013] 307–15) elucidates the centrality of the work Wordsworth put into designing the Beaumont’s Winter Garden at Coleorton to several of his major mid-career compositions. As Fay explains, the poet’s research for the Winter Garden project helped to fan the flames of his increasing fascination not only with ornamental gardening, but also with antiquarianism and ‘the study of monasticism’ (p. 308), a topic that Fay also addresses in her short article ‘Wordsworth’s Visit to James Raine and Finchale Priory, July 1838’ (N&Q 60[2013] 248–51). Another influential place for Wordsworth is explored in Ian M. Emberson’s short essay ‘Inversnaid: “The genius of the place” ’ (ChLB 158[2013] 147–51), which explores the poetic associations of the region around Loch Lomond, culminating in a comparative appreciation of Wordsworth’s ‘To a Highland Girl at Inversnaid’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Inversnaid’.

Timothy Michaels’s ‘Wordsworth’s Boswellian Life-Writing’ (WC 44[2013] 37–40) adopts a comparable comparative approach to consider the influence of Boswell’s Life of Johnson on the design and development of the 1805 Prelude, arguing for the recovery of the former ‘as a seminal text in 1790s literary culture and Romantic life-writing’ (p. 37). Susan Valladares’s ‘ “For the sake of illustrating principles”: Wordsworth, the Convention of Cintra, and Satirical Prints’ (ERR 24[2013] 531–54) taps into a previously overlooked resource for appreciating the journalistic thrust of Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra by reading the pamphlet alongside contemporary satirical prints. As Valladares convincingly demonstrates—with references to caricatures and cartoons by James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Charles Williams, and George and Isaac Cruikshank—much of Wordsworth’s Cintra reflects its author’s active pursuit of up-to-date information about current developments in the Iberian peninsula and his acute awareness of the public mood and opinion at home. Paige Tovey’s ‘Wordsworth and Shelley in the Alps’ (ChLB 157[2013] 70–82) offers a comparative assessment of Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s differing ‘approaches to mountains as symbols of the imagination’, contending that whereas the former ‘identifies mountains as locations where revelation is granted’ (p. 71), the latter ‘sees mountainous landscapes as locations where revelation is denied’ (p. 75). Marjorie Levinson and James Brooke-Smith both contributed essays on Wordsworth to the Romantic Praxis series special number on Romantic Numbers. Levinson’s essay, ‘Notes and Queries on Names and Numbers’ (RCPS [2013] 35 paras.), draws on the writings of Gottlob Frege and John Stuart Mill, as well as Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Poetry and Grammar’, to raise new questions about number patterns and problems of reference in ‘She dwelt amongst th’ untrodden ways’. Brooke-Smith’s essay, ‘Number, Medium, Nature: Wordsworth and Babbage Compose the Universe’ (RCPS [2013] 31 paras.), compares Wordsworth’s use of ‘mathematical analogies’ (para. 2) with that of his contemporary, the polymath Charles Babbage, and in the process offers a compelling assessment of the enigmatic dream vision in Book V of The Prelude.

A handful of essays dealing with matters of textuality and language also appeared this year. John Beer’s ‘Equably Seeking Lucy’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 6–18) ranges across manuscript and published versions of the ‘Lucy’ poems, investigating the origins of and inspiration behind this most perplexing clutch of lyrics. Taking seriously the supposition that the poems ‘were written about a real person’ (p. 7), Beer weighs up the available evidence and offers a ‘complex solution’ (p. 18) that traces the origins of the poems to the possible existence of a young woman in Broughton with whom the young Wordsworth had been in love. Owen Boyton’s ‘Wordsworth’s Perplexed Punctuation in “Michael” and “Resolution and Independence” ’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 77–88) offers close readings of two canonical poems to provide an illuminating account of how ‘punctuation’ furnished Wordsworth with a ‘non-verbal tool of poetic expression’ (p. 77). Mark J. Bruhn’s ‘Mind Out of Time: Wordsworth and Neurophenomenology’ (ERR 24[2013] 421–36) reports on exploratory research into the cognitive poetics of Wordsworth’s poetry. Combining the neurophenomenological theories of Francisco Varela and the cognitive linguistic models of Wallace Chafe, Bruhn unpicks the discursive structure of the ‘visionary dreariness’ spot of time in the 1805 Prelude and reveals the intricate correspondence between the syntactic and semantic features of Wordsworth’s verse and its ‘cognitive impact’ on the reader (p. 433).

Philosophical themes are explored in several essays this year. Matthew Bevis’s ‘Wordsworth’s Folly’ (WC 43[2012] 146–51) provides an astute commentary on the relation of idiocy, humour, and wisdom in Wordsworth’s verse, suggesting that the comic simplicity of many of the poet’s most canonical works proceeds from a serious philosophical objective. Phil Michael Goss’s ‘Wordsworth, Loss and the Numinous’ (WC 43[2012] 152–8) offers a Jungian meditation on Wordsworth’s poetry, focusing on its treatment of the themes of loss, mourning, and human grief. Meanwhile, Wordsworth’s The Borderers receives welcome attention this year in Alexandra Boyer’s ‘ “To paint the sorrows of mankind”: Consciousness and Catharsis in The Borderers’ (ERR 24[2013] 149–66). Treating the drama as a transitional work, written between the ‘landmark’ achievements of Adventures on Salisbury Plain and Lyrical Ballads, Boyer’s essay illuminates how The Borderers manifests a shift in the ethical focus of Wordsworth’s poetry from ‘narcissistic self-concern to disinterested compassion for others’ (p. 189). Emily B. Stanback’s ‘Wordsworthian Admonishment’ (WC 44[2013] 159–63) offers a perceptive commentary on ‘scenes of admonishment’ in Wordsworth’s poetry, arguing that to the degree that the ‘admonitory figures’ one finds in Wordsworth’s verse are characterized by ‘disabilities’, the ‘disabled body’ can be seen to function as a ‘specific source of … aesthetic and ethical crises’ in the poet’s works (p. 159). Michael Kindallen’s ‘Responsibility in Verse: William Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne’ (in Reynier and Ganteau, eds., Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation, and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, pp. 231–49) reads ‘Tintern Abbey’ alongside Prynne’s ‘Responsibility’, meditating on the continuities between these two poems and their treatment of the ethics of care that binds the self and the Other. Hyun Sohn’s ‘Wordsworth, London, and the Real: Sexual Difference and “Splitting the Race of Man in Twain” ’ (SiR 52[2013] 35–60) surveys the evolution of gender criticism in Romantic studies while offering a reconsideration of ‘the relationship between gender and subjectivity’ in Book VII of The Prelude (p. 35). Irina Strout’s ‘ “She who dwelt alone … ”: Mad Mothers, Old Spinsters, and Hysterical Women in William Wordsworth’s Poetry of 1798’ (in Florescu, ed., Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood, pp. 155–69) explores representations of motherhood and female madness in Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads. Combining close readings of ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’, ‘The Mad Mother’, and ‘The Ruined Cottage’, her essay characterizes Wordsworth’s ambivalence towards women, noting that although he seems at pains to differentiate himself from women writers in the 1800 Preface, ‘the figure of the female provides’ him with a way to explore ‘the borderline between the supernatural and domesticated spheres of imagination’ (p. 165). Lily Gurton-Watcher’s ‘ “Ever on the watch”: Wordsworth and Attention’ (SiR 52[2013] 511–35) explores Wordsworth’s ‘contribution to [contemporary] discourses of attention’, suggesting that some of his most powerful poetry is characterized by its portrayal of the ‘perception’ one achieves through ‘the relaxation of the organs of attention’ (p. 513).

Finally, Thomas Owens made two additions to the series of articles he has published about the astronomical interests of the Wordsworth circle over the past two years. The first of these, ‘ “Form one consciousness”: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Milton, and the Origins of the “Optic-Tube” in Poetry’ (N&Q 60[2013] 227–8), traces the origins of the phrase ‘optic tube’ in one of Coleridge’s annotations through Paradise Lost and The Prelude. The second, ‘Did the Wordsworths Own a Telescope?’ (N&Q 60[2013] 232–5), ranges across the letters, notebooks, and journals of William, Dorothy, John, and Coleridge to speculate about whether the ‘happy band’ had a telescope to assist them in their stargazing. Turning from astronomy to astrology, Michael Ferber’s ‘Wordsworth, Jupiter, and Annotation’ (WC 44[2013] 164–5) corrects an error in one of Jonathan Wordsworth’s oft-reprinted footnotes from the Norton Critical Edition of The Prelude. As Ferber explains, contrary to the claim that Wordsworth was born under Jupiter, the giant planet was, in fact, in Sagittarius on 7 April 1770. This correction, however, is more than a mere piece of pedantry, but a point of departure for Ferber’s reflections on Wordsworth’s invocations of the planets in his poetry, and in conclusion a word of caution about the editorial ‘temptation to explain something that doesn’t need explaining’ (p. 165).

4. Drama

This year’s review covers a range of texts that examine the impact of the theatre, dramatists, and revolution in the Romantic period, as well as the continuing deployment of Shakespeare as a mechanism to examine issues as diverse as political, artistic, commercial, and also metaphysical questions.

David Worrall’s excellent and meticulously researched monograph, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage, is a wide-ranging study of the role and impact of Georgian theatre and its audiences. Worrall states that a key premise for his work is that ‘there existed a recoverable economy of cultural difference perpetuated through theatrical performance’ (p. 16) and therefore the scale of Georgian theatre needs to be explored. Worrall situates his argument within a framework of ‘social assemblage theory, a theory of social networks and social complexity principally developed by Manuel DeLanda’ (p. 1), which is brought to life by archival material such as prompters’ records, theatre ledger books and performance schedules, news articles and anecdotes. To support his theory that ‘Georgian theatre was the nation’s dominant culturally expressive form in the long eighteenth century’ (p. 1), Worrall’s study is wide-ranging with topics as diverse as sociability and networks; representations of naval conflict and the Turkish ambassador’s visits to London playhouses; dramas performed on the London stage or ‘de-centred models’ (p. 37) such as plays that are read, performed to provincial or small audiences, private theatricals, the Pic-Nic clubs and amateur reading groups which all construct ‘the shape and topography of the national distribution of Georgian theatricality’ (p. 37). Moreover, Worrall’s research into the scale, reach, and revenues of Georgian theatres demonstrates ‘the labour intensity of the theatrical employment market [which] generated important social developments around actor welfare’ (p. 42), not least the gender equality in the Theatrical Funds of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres, which supported performers and their families if they could no longer work. Finally, Worrall’s inclusion of the actress Elizabeth Pope (née Younge), ‘whose career stretched back to Garrick’s Drury Lane’ (p.184) and who was the highest-paid actress of the 1793–4 season is a welcome addition to theatre scholarship, where Mrs Siddons has reigned supreme for so long.

A second discussion of the Theatre Fund is offered in Danielle Spratt’s ‘ “Genius Thus Munificently Employed!!!”: Philanthropy and Celebrity in the Theaters of Garrick and Siddons’ (ECLife [2013] 55–84), which examines Garrick’s and Siddons’s participation in this fund, lauded by some, but severely criticized by others. Spratt examines the anonymous play Garrick in the Shades; or, a Peep into Elysium, A Farce [1799], published shortly after Garrick’s death, to ‘describe the hostility with which some audience members viewed the theatrical benefit system’ (p. 56). She suggests that the play in ‘its indictment of the theatrical fund … finds that both actors and managers are complicit in multiple levels of financial and ethical abuse’ (p. 56). Although the play criticizes Garrick’s role in the fund, Spratt argues that Siddons becomes implicated by association ‘in the “scam” of theatrical fund-raising’ in two ways, as perpetuator and recipient (p. 57). However, it was not unusual for either Siddons or Garrick to be criticized about money—Garrick for his shrewdness and business acumen and Siddons for her oft-portrayed penny-pinching and miserliness. Through her analysis of caricatures, polemical poems, articles, and theatrical columns, Spratt examines how ‘the theatrical benefit system, like the fame that it helped construct, was fraught with contradictions in its reception by critics, audiences, and actors alike’ (p. 57). Moreover, as she points out, it has long been recognized that Garrick and Siddons used print culture to help form and sustain their public image: she suggests that their involvement in ‘benefit performances was yet another way of shaping, reinforcing, and rendering legible the images that appeared in portraits, in print, and in their on-and off-stage appearances’ (p. 60). The more famous Garrick and Siddons became, however, the more clearly ‘the irony of the benefit system to which Garrick in the Shades bitterly alludes’ was revealed, ‘that the performers who needed the benefits the least often reaped the most substantial rewards’ (p. 62).

Continuing the theme of celebrity is Selena Couture’s ‘Siddons’s Ghost: Celebrity and Gender in Sheridan’s Pizarro’ (TJ 65[2013] 183–96), which examines Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1799 financial problems, including his inability to pay his lead actors and his need of a successful production to enable the theatre to become financially solvent (p. 184). Sheridan’s Pizarro was adapted from ‘August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru, a popular German melodrama’ (p.184), with John Philip Kemble playing the Peruvian hero Rolla and Sarah Siddons playing the role of Pizarro’s Spanish mistress Elvira (p. 184). Interestingly, as Couture points out, the play also has a political dimension to it as Sheridan included one of his own parliamentary speeches on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor general of India in 1787, to elicit moral sentiment from an audience who would have made the links between the play and the harsh treatment of the Begum family by the British government. While the play was a commercial success, ‘it is remembered for its melodramatic plot and bombastic style … [and] is often judged an embarrassment’ (p. 184). As part of her analysis of the play, Couture aims to ‘correct a considerable oversight [in criticism] in all except [David Francis] Taylor that results from a primary focus on Rolla’s speech as the main performative act being broadcast in the play’ (p. 184). In particular, past criticism ‘consequently disregards the influence of a powerful combination of gender and celebrity in the performance’ (p. 184). Therefore, to support her argument, Couture examines Sarah Siddons’s role in the production and suggests that Sheridan used her ‘celebrity as an actor and her status as a national icon and symbol of British womanhood to … articulate a more complex, self-reflexive understanding of British responsibility for colonial abuses’ (p. 184). Couture situates her argument in ‘Carlson’s concept of celebrity-actor ghosting [to] argue that, in creating the role of Elvira for Siddons, Sheridan decided to make the character more congruent with Siddons’s fame, using that fame to enhance not only the commercial success of his play but also its political resonance’ (p. 187). Finally, and linking to the title of the article, Couture suggests that the ‘1799 performance of Pizarro was a haunted one … Siddons’s celebrity was congruent with Elvira’s character in the dignity and honor that she develops over the course of the play’ (p. 195).

Many of the reviews in the eighteenth-century drama section are concerned with appropriations and interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, also the theme of Joseph M. Ortiz’s edited collection Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism, which examines the ‘ways in which theatre directors, authors, poets, political philosophers … often turn to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic and commercial aims’ (p. 2). The most relevant chapters for this review are chapters 7 and 8, in Part III, which covers ‘The Romantic Stage’. Firstly, Paola Degli Esposti’s chapter, ‘ “The translucence of eternity in time”: Shakespeare and Coleridge’s Zapolya’ examines Coleridge’s 1815 drama, and identifies three of Shakespeare’s plays, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Twelfth Night, that ‘can be identified as the major “authority” underlying the composition of the Zapolya’ (p. 144). However, Esposti argues that it is not just the ‘intertextual relationship’ (p. 152) between these plays that is important; to fully appreciate Zapolya requires an understanding of the interplay between Coleridge’s source texts for his play as well as his lectures, articles, and letters that reflect his views ‘of the theatre as the place where political, moral, metaphysical and aesthetic issues’ interlink (p. 139). Esposti concludes that Coleridge incorporates Shakespearian elements in order to create a play which shows that ‘a just, universal, divine design is the driving force of human history’ (p. 160). The second chapter relevant to this section is Francesca Saggini’s essay ‘Contextual Hauntings: Shakespearean Ghosts on the Gothic Stage’. In her examination of James Boaden’s Fountainville Forest [1794], a theatrical adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s novel, The Romance of the Forest [1791], Saggini argues that Boaden ‘may be considered the first and, arguably the most sensitive of a long line of Gothic appropriators’ (p. 165). To fully appreciate Boaden’s skill and understand the’ ‘Gothic textual plurality’ (p.167) in the play, we should ‘investigate not only the generic contexts of Boaden’s play, but also what the audience and the critics … actually saw and heard on stage’ (p. 167). Saggini argues that Boaden’s use of Romantic visual culture as well as Shakespeare for his production of Fountainville Forest means that the Phantom becomes ‘the embodiment of Boaden’s own poetics and his “Romantic” stage appropriations’ (p. 182).

Another text that examines Shakespeare’s influence is Judith Bailey Slagle’s online article ‘Joanna Baillie and the Anxiety of Shakespeare’s Influence’ (BandL 8[2013]). For those unfamiliar with Baillie’s oeuvre—she was a poet, playwright, and theatre theorist, who ‘taught herself the fundamentals of drama by reading indiscriminately, acting out parts, and attending plays’—this is an excellent introduction. The article discusses Baillie’s place within the Romantic circle and states that ‘the term “closet dramatist” has often been misused in relation to Baillie; while she focuses on passions that men might display in their “closet,” that is, in private, she clearly intended her plays for the stage and repeatedly noted her disappointment at seldom being represented there’. Further, as Slagle points out, Baillie combines ‘Shakespeare’s genius with the psychological and neurological studies of her day to create volatile characters often destroyed by their own unhealthy minds—not only by their external circumstances’. However, her work was not always well received by the critics, not least because of her ‘ “unfeminine” independence’ and foray into tragedy. Slagle offers close readings of a number of Baillie’s Zaploya plays, including possibly the best-known, De Monfort: A Tragedy. She concludes by stating that although Baillie does reinvent Shakespeare in many of her plays, she ‘breathes new life into formulaic characters, especially women characters, often dismissing cultural myths and reassigning control’.

The final article for review in this section is Michelle Geric’s ‘Shelley’s “Cancelled Cycles”: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound (1820)’ (Romanticism 19[2013] 31–43). Geric examines Shelley’s closet drama Prometheus Unbound [1820] within the framework of Scottish geologist James Hutton’s ‘Theory of the Earth’ [1788]. Geric suggests ‘that the structural mechanism through which Shelley figures this transformation has not been fully identified’ (p. 31) and argues that the play can only be understood once the drama is ‘framed within the wider cycles of Huttonian geological theory’ (p. 31). In order to support her thesis, Geric states that Shelley’s drama uses ‘geological catastrophe to conjure what is seen as an archaic and regressive view of both geological change and human history’ (p. 31). That sustained reform can only succeed once the shock of ‘violent political revolution is replaced by a gradual melioration’ (p. 32). Geric further argues that ‘Hutton’s geomorphology not only fits Shelley’s vision of reform, it also fits his notion of human potentiality (p. 41).

Books Reviewed