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This essay explores the economy of Romantic-period paper circa 1790s to 1810s. The material history of paper preoccupied writers in the period, not only because of its volatile role in mediation. I discuss articles from British and Caribbean newspapers, economic histories of the paper trade, and essays on papermaking by Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld. These contemporary sources demonstrate that, in times of scarcity consequent on war and economic isolation, British writers used figural discourses of whiteness to promote paper conservation. At the same time, these writers glanced uneasily at the complexly racialized, mobile history of paper, including the participation of Jews in rag gathering and the use of cast-off clothes from enslaved people of color, sailors, and condemned prisoners in the making of paper furnish. Paper’s whiteness suffered continual threat from the traces of this history (materialized by writing and print) and from the instability of its figurations. The precarious whiteness of paper and its dependency on rags link the paper trade practically and figurally with the Atlantic slave economy. I argue that Jane Austen’s novels metonymically address the racialized economy of paper, querying the dependency of the industry—and Romantic literate culture—on racialized networks of injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including paper conservation during a time of rag shortages; Shelly and sculpture; and Shelly's novel "Frankenstein."

Romantic-period studies have been keenly sensitive to the notion of mobility across borders, both in literal and figurative terms, investigating it in relation to issues of personal and national identity. This essay discusses Byron's various forms of border-crossing with specific reference to his Italian years, starting with the most immediate loco-geographic meaning of the term, that is, Byron's traversing the many frontiers that marked the Italian territory, partitioned in a plurality of states. The focus is on Byron's experience of the technologies of control which were set into place in the early nineteenth century, testified by his traveling papers and registered, often with a touch of humor, in his correspondence. Byron's musings on the practices and implications of the documentary control of mobility and identity spilled over, in a more serious key, into the concerns of his poetic output, notably in the lines of his 1819 lyric "To the Po." Translating the notion of borders and border-crossing onto the page, here Byron resisted the crystallizing of identity at work in the biopolitical domain by making the fluidity of the history-laden river Po the locus of his rebirth as transnational subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1826, melting snows revealed a man frozen nearly 200 years, reanimated by a passing doctor. Reports of Roger Dodsworth, formerly deceased, spread from the French papers to launch a flurry of essays in the English periodicals. While the summer of 1816 has been central to discussions of climate, global politics, and Romantic literature, the thaw of 1826 has been relatively neglected. In this paper, I examine how Shelley's treatment of nature in "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" presents climate changes as plural and contingent, simultaneously disrupting historical narrative and entangling natural history with human embodiment. As scientists grapple with evolutionary records revealed by our own "great thaw," "Roger Dodsworth" offers a philosophical model for grappling with changes that cannot be overcome through human intervention. At the conclusion to the essay, as Shelley speculates that Dodsworth may have died a second time, finding "his ancient clay could not thrive on the harvests of these latter days," she suggests a fundamental incompatibility of past and present, even as she collapses the distinction between the two. A changed world, she suggests, cannot support the past as it was, but only as it has become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person's identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long's The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall's The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This panel opens up innovative ways of thinking about Romanticism and "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures." Over the last couple of decades, the crisis in human relations with animals has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Like the climate crisis, the "animal crisis" originates with the emergence of the industrial form of capitalism in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. Appreciation of this historical constellation can and should become the basis of a renewed Romantic animal studies. However, reading Romanticism as a reflection of and on the historical origins of the contemporary crisis in human-animal relations in turn requires rethinking and openly debating topics, archive, and method. To indicate the initial results and style of our efforts, we have chosen not to summarize the papers presented, but rather to pose ten collectively formulated questions and to briefly answer as individuals a selection of three of those questions. Overall, we hope not just to make an argument for what we regard as a vital area of research in Romantic studies, but to encourage more research on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the house during the Romantic period as a site of intercultural transfer of knowledge. Hosting decentralized networks, the house functioned as a significant conduit in disseminating knowledge or creating new productions. The first part of the paper examines the opening of mummies by Professor Blumenbach as an example of how private collections were curated in several houses of the Fellows of the Royal Society. The second part presents an analysis of the role of the professorial house in Göttingen in transferring knowledge of Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination in Germany. The final example takes a closer look at a confluence of Anglo-Franco-German literature converging on Villa Diodati in 1816, showing how the famous villa is not a site of solitary creation as illustrated in prints of Byron and Villa Diodati, but the site of communal reading inspiring creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now "lost" to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to "read" the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical's presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers' perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper recovers the conservative ecological protest contained in the sketches of rural scenery featured in Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village. By framing these sketches through Gilbert White's History and Antiquities of Selborne, and deploying an anonymous narrator who mediates her natural encounters through her shifting affective responses, Mitford articulates a critique of liberal improvement practices, with their grounding in the propertied self, in the wake of Parliamentary enclosures. I examine Mitford's representations of tree-fellings and forest spaces in several sketches that she revised from The Lady's Magazine versions for Our Village: "Wood-Cutting," "The Copse," and "The Wood." In these sketches, the destroyed trees are described with the precision and attention of a naturalist, but also figuratively, affectively, and theatrically, with Burkean resonances of fallen nobility. Such figurations enable Mitford to direct attention toward the trees themselves as well as toward the fragile ecological communities they shelter, and so to stage the loss of common lands as a tragedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the early printings of Bloomfield's works in the USA, of which there were very many. Some tried to duplicate the British illustrations; others did not. Some were illustrated anew by American printmakers. All of the efforts show an effort to domesticate Bloomfield, the working-class poet, to the American landscape, or to an idea of America as a society in which the class distinctions that marked Bloomfield's life and career would be erased. The paper concentrates on the early American editions of The Farmer's Boy and Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, with particular attention to the paratextual matter, especially where it modifies information in the British editions, to the illustrations (if any), and to reviews and advertisements for Bloomfield's poems in American journals and newspapers. The aim is to lay the groundwork for an examination of the ways in which Bloomfield's poetry served as an inspiration for young American poets, a subject almost entirely unexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas scholarship on London literary tourism has tended to focus on the Victorian Age and early twentieth century, this essay locates the origins of the practice in the Romantic period, linking it specifically to the Cockney familiar essay as cultivated by Leigh Hunt. Beginning in the 1820s but continuing throughout his career, Hunt published numerous essays on London's literary and memorial charms. Recognizing a persistent demand for Londoniana in the marketplace, he depicted the metropolis as a realm of friendly literary ghosts and endless associative layers. In doing so, he helped create the expandable yet walkable London (still with us) of the literary tourist. This essay aims to provide a sense of how Hunt as a Romantic essayist and virtual tour guide came to be read by Victorians and by Anglophiles across the Atlantic. Hunt emerges from this discussion as an early and influential theorist of the intersections between real and imaginary travel, a proponent of literary tourism as a means to self-culture, and an under-acknowledged influence on one of Britain's principal heritage industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Blake printed and re-printed his illuminated books many times over his lifetime, using watercolors to make both slight and significant alterations to each of his plates. Built by the Yale DHLab, BlakeTint is a new digital humanities tool that traces changes in color across Blake's oeuvre, using color quantization to extract proportional color palettes for each of his plates and producing several visualizations of this data. Resting at the intersection of book history and digital humanities, this paper studies Blake's color theory from multiple angles—comparing his theoretical writings on color to his actual practice, scrutinizing color-terms in his poetry, and analyzing BlakeTint's data to understand Blake's evolving relationship with and mythology of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Mary Shelley's The Last Man advances a mode of citation that re-writes the past as an always already-extinct anteriority that wastes the present that summons it. The novel's figuring of citation by way of fossils, unbounded libraries, and fatalistic prophecies indicates Shelley's and the period's sense of the archive as a death-driven space for marking history's unremarked, catastrophic tipping points. Citation's divesting of the present and future of their promissory capital yields for Shelley a Romanticism with no future—a backward-looking Romanticism that finds a minimal redemption in the past's disastrous constellations with the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to a question posed by the organizers of the 2019 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism: how might A. O. Lovejoy's 1941 essay "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas" have something new to say now, especially in relation to our current institutional circumstances as Romanticists? I focus on Lovejoy's treatment of Romantic Eigentümlichkeit, or "diversitarianism," as a contributing factor in the rise of twentieth-century fascist movements. Pairing Lovejoy's essay with Rey Chow's "The Fascist Longings in Our Midst," I suggest that Romantic-era diversitarianism already exhibited forms of desire that characterize fascism. By way of conclusion, I warn that a fascism at the heart of liberal multiculturalism threatens uncritical efforts to diversify Romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelley's poetry can be said to anticipate its own participation in the rhetoric of left internationalism in the way it calls attention to the figure of voice as agent and medium of transmission. In "Mont Blanc," the poet-speaker aims to transmit the voice of the eponymous mountain. In "Ode to the West Wind," the poet implores the Wind to be through his lips the trumpet of a prophecy. In The Mask of Anarchy, the speaker recalls being addressed by a "voice from over the Sea." Shelley's voice seems to reverberate in a programmatic 1908 essay by Lu Xun, often considered twentieth-century China's most important writer. In "On the Power of Mara Poetry," Lu Xun implicitly situates himself in a left-internationalist network of poets beginning with Byron and Shelley and including, in a geographically eastward movement, Pushkin, Lermontov, Mickiewicz, and Petöfi. This paper examines the continuity and discontinuity in the transmission of Shelley's tropings of voice by scrutinizing Lu Xun's own figurations of voice in this essay. The juxtaposition of Shelley's and Lu Xun's poetics and politics of voice prompts reflections on the structure of solidarity and the limits of internationalism in the global legacy of Romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to recent scholarly interest in the cognitive and perceptual ideas that informed Romantic interest in transcendence, this paper argues for a common self-experimental method underlying Humphry Davy's medical experiments with nitrous oxide and the composition of lyric poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romantic poets and scientists adopted the formal method of self-experimentation to intentionally test the repeated effects of an independent variable (whether a psychoactive chemical or natural scenery) on the experimenter's body, mind, and overall wellbeing, and each subsequently packaged these variables in a format capable of disseminating ecstatic states to others for the purposes of physical and psychological healing. In tracing these common aims and methodologies across Romantic science and poetry, I argue that Davy's nitrous oxide research contributed to the development of an "ecstatic paradigm" in the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn: an intellectual framework for perceiving, interpreting, and generating states of ecstasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While matters of animal rights, religious freedom, and the rights of women in writings by Anna Letitia Barbauld have received a good deal of critical attention, this paper extends these discussions to natural rights. Her witty blank verse poem “Inscription for an Ice-House” mixes Classical reference with technology in portraying a struggle between the human and natural realms. Barbauld’s exploration of natural rights through notions of inscription and domestic economy forms the subject of this paper. Consumption of the exotic frozen ices and chilled wines, no matter how pleasurable, goes against a larger domesticity and economy provided by nature that extends the notion of rights to the natural realm. Barbauld’s poem offers a reminder about perspectives on the natural world that offer a thoughtful engagement with rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking Kant’s well-known refusal of the “right of resistance” as a point of departure, this paper outlines an alternative approach to the Kantian theory of revolution by investigating the aesthetic dimension of his reception of global insurrectionary movements, particularly his interest in the world spectator’s “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution. Like the experience of the sublime, where the subject confronts instances of nature’s immensity and power that exceed the imagination’s capacity for presentation, revolution confronts us with formless events of human history. The sublime, however, occasions a second moment of recovery. Following the painful experience of the imagination’s impotence, the judging subject is enlivened by the discovery of what Kant calls “a capacity for resistance,” that is, our ability to transcend forces that produce feelings of futility and powerlessness. This paper argues that Kant’ssublime right to resistnot only anticipates the revolutionary imperative of Romanticism, but also foregrounds the way in which aesthetics defies the law’s efforts to prohibit disobedience and dissent. But it concludes with a note of caution towards the sublime’s tendency to suppress the rights of nature, a suppression that could be overturned by what Kant calls “a second epoch of natural revolution” that pushes aside the human species altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On his first trip to Greece from 1809 to 1811, Lord Byron became intensely preoccupied with Modern Greek language, literature, and print culture. This paper probes that interest by examining Byron's response to an 1810 Edinburgh Review article that begins as an even-handed analysis of Modern Greek literature but ends up disparaging Modern Greek writers and making the common claim that Modern Greek is a degenerated form of Ancient Greek. Although Byron's interest in Modern Greek literature and language remains a neglected aspect of the poet's work, this paper argues that his championing of Modern Greek literature gestures toward his broader support for a stronger intercultural relationship between Greece and Britain. Further, this paper contends that Byron's defense of Romaic (vernacular) Greek, which comes during a period when a Hellenic model of Greece is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe, represents the poet's attempt to move away from solely classical conceptions of Greece and to familiarize British readers with a contemporary culture with which they were very little acquainted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was an experiment presented on the “Organizing Care” panel of the 2014 conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. It deals with a variety of kinds of blindness, not least those of the literary critic. It reflects upon an overlooked episode in the annals of British medical history, illustrating substantive changes in the understanding of eye disease and eye care, as well as the discrepancy in visual health between rural areas and the metropolis. Additionally, the episode raises important questions about seeing and its relationship to reading – or what we care to read. The partial or “pur”-blindness of readers haunts literary criticism. In advocating “surface reading,” for instance, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus suggest “that what lies in plain sight has been overlooked or cannot easily be seen” by scholars of literature. The oral presentation of this paper shifted the terms from visual to aural: sections of the audience heard distinctly different papers and understood questions and answers according to disparate sets of concerns. They did not see (or hear) the parenthetical references or footnotes of the printed paper: this experiment would work best if the reader also could ignore these additions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that the neglected writer Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) develops a model of personhood and a related conception of agency that add to post-Kantian Idealist and German Romantic attempts to understand the relations between self and world and between freedom and determinism. In this paper, I locate the outline of this model in Günderrode's conception of death as metamorphosis. The paper begins from the claim that Günderrode rethinks the Kantian sublime to construct a non-dualistic cosmology and a unique model of personhood. I suggest that Günderrode's account of the self and its world informs a conception of agency that is grounded in the basic vulnerability and finitude of human beings and that denies that autonomy is a condition of freedom. I argue that Günderrode's notion of death as metamorphosis allows her to avoid overemphasizing consciousness and autonomy on the one hand and, on the other, affirming self-annihilation or accepting determinism. The result is a conception of individuality and freedom that reflects the dependency and vulnerability of human existence. The last part of the paper uses Günderrode's play “Hildgund” as an example of how this model of agency emerges in her work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Salt has a commanding metaphorical and material presence in the history of Western culture and proves an ideal substance for the study of a wide variety of interlocking phenomena. This paper explores salt’s role in The History of Mary Prince and in the broader historical circumstances in which this narrative is set. The relationship between salt, slavery, and capitalism’s growth is discussed in terms of the Lacanian concept of extimacy, or intimate exteriority, in order to bring into focus the relevance of Prince’s experience over ten years in the salt ponds. Through close readings of Prince’s narrative, this extimate relationship is investigated in the light of the historiography of race and the contemporary epidemic of hypertension among members of the African diaspora. The essay then considers the use of salt mines today as archival spaces and concludes by examining salt production in Britain during the Romantic period and its connection to West Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the varying cultural treatments of three famously fat individuals: the Prince Regent, the actor-manager Stephen Kemble, and Daniel Lambert, who was known simply for his weight. It also examines how the Romantics appropriated Shakespeare’s beloved “whoreson round man,” Sir John Falstaff, to express their hopes and fears for the Prince Regent’s reign as George IV. In political cartoons and criticism of the period, the Prince Regent incarnated both Prince Hal and Falstaff. Other literary texts, such as the anonymous 1808 novel, The Royal Legend, treat Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays, medieval history, and Romantic realpolitik as contiguous with each other and interchangeable. Contributing to the growing academic and literary field of “fat studies,” I bring insights from fat studies to bear on Romantic lives, writing, visual culture, and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s Othello became a site of tension as the previously uncontested blackness of the titular hero sat uneasily with critics, actors, and audiences under the sway of contemporary racial politics, science, and philosophy. In this paper, I explore that historical moment and how the visual and emotional impact of a black Othello on stage led to Edmund Kean’s groundbreaking “tawny” Othello. I argue that a whitened Othello is the result of affective anxiety and that this Romantic rejection of the affective power of blackness gave birth to a tradition that even today limits the roles black bodies can assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads a recurrent motif of Hogg’s fiction—the unnatural—in relation to the “organic” cultural science propounded by some of Hogg’s contemporaries. For many Romantic commentators, social organizations like the rustic community, the ethnic group, and the nation bore the imprint of a symbiotic relationship between laws in ethnography and those of organic life. Hogg’s writing evokes scenarios in which such laws lose durability and fail to generate connections between land and community, self and other. In these moments, Hogg evokes the incongruous and fragmentary qualities of a native cultural experience, an otherness often erased from more dominant ethnographic and aesthetic depictions of Scotland’s cultural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term “double touch” occurs only once in the published work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fact which belies the notable philosophical attention it is shown in his notebooks and letters. This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of double touch, examining the concept alongside the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This analysis frames double touch as a concept which engages with the lived experience of embodied consciousness and cognition, operating at the threshold between affective sensation and active practical volition. In this capacity, it will be shown how Coleridge makes use of the concept to challenge the deterministic model of human volition put forward by necessitarianism. The overall aim is to show how the concept of double touch functions as a bridge between Coleridge’s epistemic interests in sense experience and his moral philosophical concerns about the notion of human free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to poetry when it is reframed within a work of prose? This paper analyzes William Hazlitt's prose style, with particular attention to moments in which he reframes poetry by extracting it from the patterns of rhyme and meter and placing it within the rhythms of his essays. In doing so, Hazlitt stylistically challenged the boundaries of genre; simultaneously, the content of his essays defined prose as a hybrid form, built through a process of mining other texts for quotations. This paper also makes an argument for the crucial role material culture played in Hazlitt's writing style. It demonstrates how Hazlitt's participation in friendship albums and commonplace books informed what he called a “familiar style” of writing. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on understudied manuscripts and analyzes their role in shaping the Romantic-essay form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I compare four travel reports that resulted from the Prussian expedition of Egypt undertaken between 1820 and 1821 under Heinrich von Minutoli, but the main focus of my analysis is concerned with Minutoli’s travel account as well as the one by his wife, Wolfradine von Minutoli. These illustrate not only the division of the genre into the “scientific” and the “subjective” travel account but also the divergent strategies for constructing knowledge, which lead to highly gendered sets of knowledge. For Heinrich von Minutoli, the production of data has central importance and his preference for abstracted visualization is one strategy of “scientization” used in order to ensure clarity and verifiability. But his travel account is also characterized by constant fissures between his efforts to achieve objectivity and the various manifestations of non-knowledge, as well as by the tensions between solely illustrative visualization and independent imagery. Whereas his text primarily documents knowledge generation and the evolution of archaeology, Wolfradine von Minutoli works to enliven these knowledge sets within the dimension of individual experience; hence she not only refers to aesthetic notions of Romanticism and to the Romantic pattern of perception but she also develops a female version of the sublime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While early reviewers of Joanna Baillie's De Monfort complained of a lack of cause for De Monfort's hatred, modern readers have offered various interpretations of the source and nature of the drama's focal passion. The search for a proper motivation for hatred may be misguided, however, as Baillie's Introductory Discourse makes clear that strong passions stir the heart independent of external circumstance or offense. This essay argues that Baillie is concerned not with the origin of De Monfort's hatred, but rather with the origin of hatred itself, turning to a biblical understanding of hatred and its manifestation. Examining God's curse on Adam and Eve as the defining inheritance dictating the condition of fallen human nature, this paper follows Baillie's tracing of the history of opposition and struggle to God's establishment of enmity between man and the serpent. The Cain-Abel sibling rivalry serves as the primal precedent for De Monfort's hatred of Rezenvelt, while Eve's fated striving with Adam illuminates Jane's powerful struggle to contain and restrain her brother. Finally, the paper discusses the importance of the struggle between the passions and sympathetic curiosity for the successful working of Baillie's conception of theater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition is a novel by Maria Anna Princess Czartoryska, Duchess von Württemberg-Montbéliard (traditionally referred to as Maria Wirtemberska), written in 1812–1813, first published in 1816. Until now, Wirtemberska's Malvina has been studied for its Sternean sentimentality, Ossianic inspirations, Gypsy characters and technicalities of the early novel. One aspect of the novel which has however escaped critical attention is its persistent referencing of floriography, or the language of flowers—a coded language of meanings attributed to plants. This paper argues, for the first time, that the novelist used floriographic references and plant symbolism as part of the novel's intricate design. Wirtemberska herself dropped a hint to that effect in an authorial footnote, suggesting that more coded allusions are to be sought within the text. To locate them, three contemporary manuals of the language of flowers are referenced and the different meanings of plants important for the novel are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly tradition has consistently regarded Ellena Rosalba, the heroine of British novelist Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796), as the passive and naïve victim to the Gothic tyrannies of that novel's patriarchal class system. Reading her first and foremost as an assailed heroine and tractable object of masculine desire, scholars have overlooked the subtle material tactics which Ellena deploys in order to participate in the Neapolitan market and define her subjectivity, despite her social marginality as an unmarried, orphaned, and “friendless” young woman of only moderate economic means. The present paper considers the ways in which Ellena's relation to and creation of material culture and, particularly, art objects offer her means to economic independence, personal agency, and self-expression as a working artist. This paper argues that Ellena's active engagement with art and, in particular, domestic arts such as needlework, sketching, painting, and music, disrupt the gendered hierarchies implied by Burkean aesthetic categorizations of the sublime and the beautiful. Ellena's relation to the domestic arts and the material economies of daily life, the author suggests, here affords the female-gendered subject access to a decidedly democratized mode of transcendental experience which partakes equally of the sublime and the beautiful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the outstanding German authors between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Christoph Martin Wieland was the author of fundamental and celebrated works such as "Agathon" (1767-73) and "Oberon" (1780). He also wrote a large number of literary fairy-tales (Kunstmarchen) and translated the works of William Shakespeare into German. The whole of his career as a novelist, poet, and playwright shows evidence of his interest in the English literary tradition and of his efforts to act as a mediator between the German and the British cultural context. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the influence that the works of a German author so deeply influenced by English literature reciprocally had on some British writers, by focusing on two important aspects of the Romantic re-shaping and re-definition of the distinctive character of German and English national identities: Shakespeare's work and the “fairy way of writing.” The paper will show how Wieland's treatment of these elements, defying the “nationalization” of the imaginary, transforms them in the currency of a truly transnational cultural exchange that moves across national boundaries, and undermines the very categories on which the Romantic attempt to shape national identity is based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the white silk handkerchief that washes up after a storm with the wreckage of the ship that was taking Euthanasia to her exile at the end of Mary Shelley's historical romance, "Valperga." Thinking about the representation of history as a history of representation, I explore the persistence and the opacity of objects, images, and visual phenomena as agents of historical understanding. With a few golden hairs still in its knot, the handkerchief is a relic of an individual body, but it also remembers other pasts as well, as its allusion to the famous handkerchief in Othello suggests. At once an ontological fact and a spectral sign, the handkerchief marks the turn in Shelley's conclusion from “private chronicles” (subjectivity, fantasy) to “public histories” (objectivity, the actual), or, rather, it marks the incompleteness of that turn. As residue, an extraneous yet tangible trace in the text, Euthanasia's handkerchief cannot by definition be assimilated into a logic of identity, but neither does it provide unobstructed access to a communal meaning or reality beyond or in opposition to such a logic. At the unstable boundary between presence and the past, memory and forgetting, this transitional object gestures towards history as an aesthetics of the uncanny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads Mary Shelley's "Matilda" within the context of the rise of psychiatry, or what was termed “moral management,” in England in the Romantic period. The paper traces some of historical and social parameters of this Romantic psychiatry in terms of the desire for community and communal well-being. On one hand, this desire reflects early psychiatry's democratic and empathic spirit. On the other, it reflects a way of foisting well-being upon populations in order better to manage their unwieldy psychological life. Romantic literature stages these two poles as a psychiatric consciousness whose two halves are at once in conflict with and uncannily related to one another. The paper briefly examines Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage as an early case history of how this divided consciousness plays itself out in the 1790s, commensurate with the first emergence of psychiatry. It then ends with a reading of Shelley's novella as a response to the kind of social efficiencies psychiatry had come to represent by the time of the Regency. In the figure of Matilda Shelley writes a character who is aware of the demands for transparent happiness necessary to form well-developed and self-fulfilled citizens required to run the Empire. By remaining resistant to such cures, Matilda's “depression” thus refuses to fit itself back into society, an alternate state of (not) belonging that the paper reads in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy's idea of “community.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider Wordsworth's blank verse and Lake District tours and guides in the context of debates about meter. Neo-classical critiques had cast blank verse as a visual trick of the typographical page: as prose posing as verse by appearing in lines. In this paper I argue that the transformed textual conditions made possible by an expanded print culture contributed to the Romantic revaluation of the blank-verse measure and the valorization of its lyric form. In effect, blank verse's visual aspects were naturalized and nationalized. I isolate a particular kind of Romantic-era page on which blank verses frequently appeared, that of the tour and guidebook, exploring the effects of this print format on the verse. Tours and guidebooks celebrated visual features of specifically English landscapes and quoted national poets to do so. In works published between 1774 and 1835, Gilpin, Hutchinson, Housman, and Wordsworth supplemented landscapes plotted in prose with extracts from Paradise Lost, Night Thoughts, The Seasons, Mason's English Garden, and, in Wordsworth's case, his own unpublished manuscripts. The guides cast blank-verse excerpts both as agents of affective finish and visual coherence and as national textual heritage that illuminated Britain's native forms and contours. Wordsworth's Guide through the District of the Lakes formalized blank-verse lyric by making salient its more minute graphic lines of emphasis and aligning these with nature's marks in land and sky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the vexed relation between hospitality and hostility is a central, though much overlooked, concern of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It argues that the novel's animation scene presents an object lesson on how hospitality marks the sign of the subject's inadequate and often abusive anticipation of the stranger. The paper then reads this lesson into the center of the monster's tale where Shelley implicitly compares the monster's troubled reception in De Lacey's cottage with De Lacey's equally conflicted treatment of Safie's diasporic, Turkish father. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on temporality, memory, and agency in Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and De Quincey'sConfessions of an English Opium EaterandSuspiria de Profundis, considering the texts in terms of their respective modes of resistance to contemporary theories of associative memory. Both writers merge archival and spatial models of memory in ways that speak – albeit to vastly divergent ends – to a later cognitive theory of memory, one that was explicitly framed as a corrective to the materialist reductionism commonly perceived as being inherent in associative thought: Henri Bergson's concept of durational memory. Through remarkably similar means, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Bergson sought out alternative models of memory to address the concerns surrounding associationism, striving to posit the mind as a holistically governed unity rather than a mere system of memories that are localized in specific regions of the brain. Ironically, in their respective models of memory, all three writers rehearse certain processes of associationism at the same time that they resist them; in the anti-materialist proto-Bergsonism of Coleridge and De Quincey, attempts to assert unified theories of mindrematerialize consciousness in unexpected ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Lis Moller on the Mark Stig Ballads, one by Gunilla Hermansson on poetry in Swidish and Danish Romanticism, and one by Gry Hedin on Johan Thomas Lundbye as mediator between art and science.

In his later prophecies, Blake laid out his system as a geography mapped onto the human body. But in the Lambeth books, Urizen is ejected out of order as a body in bits and pieces that is neither plant nor human. This paper explores Urizen's body as a figure for Blake's own corpus and the disfiguration of its idealistic ambitions. Blake's later mapping of his system in a striated space with clear coordinates can be compared with Kant's equation of system with “architectonic,” which he compares with a body whose parts form a whole. But what if the body is not the anatomical body Kant imagines but is composed of systems irreducible to phenomenal cognition: circulatory, digestive, nervous? The contemporaneous work of John Hunter marks the first disclosure in Romanticism of a body without organs that is “flesh and nerve” and that Deleuze finds in Bacon and Artaud. Played out in Blake's theatre of cruelty Hunter's physiology lets us think of systems in a new, if traumatic, way: as enabled precisely by obstructions and blockages, as proceeding through involutions and convolutions that are in effect feedback loops, in short as functionally autoimmune. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper compares Emanuel Swedenborg's account of how bodies ought to be organized with the radical revision of his thought developed by William Blake. As I will suggest, the debate between these figures is not exhausted by the contest between reason and imagination; it is also about “hard” and “soft” systems, which organ-ize bodies, passions, and arguably the imagination itself in ways radically different from each other. These differences are nowhere more evident than in the sexual politics they imply and in the radically different roles they reserve for creation and “emergence.” My argument begins with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, the at-first-sight unlikely points of departure for Blake's own thought on organization, and it concludes with a discussion of the 33rd plate of Blake'sMilton, which echoes in order radically to revise the machine at the heart of the Swedenborgian world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I propose a reading of Coleridge and Hölderlin using Stanley Cavell’s philosophical theory of acknowledgment and avoidance as an interpretive rubric. I argue that recognition (acknowledgment) of the skeptical limits of reason and the imagination allow Hölderlin, through his poetical theory, philosophy and practice, to overcome the epistemological limits of the romantic imagination; this factor is instanced in his poetry. On the other hand, Coleridge's work remains trapped within skeptical limits because of his “avoidance” of this ontological recognition, which is due to his continued desire for an intellectual intuition. I further my argument by using the hermeneutics of Heidegger as a secondary tool in reading both poets and in helping to illuminate their relative poetic and philosophical positions. Both poets ultimately recognize the limits of our imaginative autonomy; however, they articulate these limits in very different ways – ways that are useful keys in unlocking the work of Coleridge and Hölderlin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the romantic period, various authors expressed the belief thatthrough creativity, we can directly access truth. To modern ears, this claim sounds strange. In this paper, I attempt to render the position comprehensible, and to show how it came to seem plausible to the romantics. I begin by offering examples of this position as found in the work of the British romantics. Each thinks that the deepest knowledge can only be gained by an act of creativity. I suggest the belief should be seen in the context of the post-Kantian embrace of “intellectual intuition.” Unresolved tensions in Kant's philosophy had encouraged a belief that creation and discovery were not distinct categories. The post-Kantians held that in certain cases of knowledge (for Fichte, knowledge of self and world; for Schelling, knowledge of the Absolute) the distinction between discovering a truth and creating that truth dissolves. In this context, the cognitive role assigned to acts of creativity is not without its own appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay explores how Shelley's distinctive deployments of “vitality” – as an immaterial force that is essential to life – punctuate the poetry and the essays, from the “mockery of vital hues” on Alastor's “cheek of death” to the “bright shape of vital stone that drew the life out of Pygmalion” in The Witch of Atlas. The most illuminating account of Shelley's investment in vitality appears in A Defence of Poetry, where the language of poets is said to be “vitally metaphorical,”marking the before “unapprehended relations of things.” In this paper, I examine how this “vitality of disappearance” is in play in “To a Skylark,” where what Gilles Deleuze might have called the bird's literal and figurative “lines of overflight” mark the “vital” conjunction between a sensory disappearance and aesthetic vitality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reads Thomas De Quincey's “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” in light of its author's lifelong interest in figures and images of motion. It specifically analyzes that this interest is rooted in an attempt to construct an aesthetic ideology, to create an English nation on the basis of the aesthetic principle of sympathy. The paper demonstrates that “The Glory of Motion” is atypically regressive with regard to De Quincey's earlier work on these questions, and it accounts for this fact by arguing that the essay functions as a critical re-reading. It traces the grounds for this re-reading to De Quincey's work on political-economic figures of motion and their strong dependence on Adam Smith's theories of circulation, which evince moments of re-reading similar in structure to that of De Quincey's. A final movement in the argument leads to Paul de Man's work on metaphor and rhetorical movement, and argues that De Quincey's and Smith's re-readings find their cause in a prescient, proto-theoretical awareness of the potentially dehumanizing effects of figures, and that they are countering these effects by gesturing at an alternative, materially determined concept of motion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man explores ideas about biopolitical modernity that she had begun to advance in her earlier 1823 novel Valperga. Valperga presents a remarkably modern understanding of the function of individual life for the state that anticipates Giorgio Agamben's theory of the “state of exception” that produces political life as an inclusive but also fundamentally exclusive non-relation of the state with what lies outside of its law. My reading of The Last Man with Valperga reveals that the Plague enacts this process of biopoliticization through contagion, an apt way of figuring Agamben's “zone of irreducible indistinction” that is crucial to maintaining the modern political order.The Last Man also registers the growing mechanism of biopolitics through the relationship between Adrian, the seemingly democratic monarch, and Lionel. The portrayal of this relationship along with the main relationship in Valperga, between Castruccio and his lover Euthanasia, together animate Shelley's awareness of the trajectory of political modernity in her writing. Moreover, the landscape of The Last Man, singularly focused on the enumeration of bodies, speaks to the centrality of zoē (bare life) tobios (politicized life) as the structural principle of sovereignty in modern political life. Finally, Lionel Verney's consistent foregrounding of his linguistic difficulties in composing his historical memoirs replicates the process of creating biopolitical bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scholarly commentary on Elizabeth Inchbald's drama The Massacre has tended to value the work for its immediacy. The play does respond viscerally to the early days of the Terror, while it also offers a significant opportunity to think about what it means to associate violence with immediacy. Finally, an examination of the play allows us to assess how the author encountered her distance from events in Paris in 1792. Placing her work within the context of recent considerations of sublime violence, the paper asks, can ethical engagement with pressing events also challenge the complexity of violence rather than assume its immediate intelligibility, a challenge that lengthens and foreshortens our imagined distance from terror? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If literary art evokes extraordinary forms of cognition in principled ways, then theories and distinctive practices of poetics should prove illuminating for cognitive science. The question is, how to operationalize such theories and practices for controlled experimental study? This paper proposes an answer in terms of the neurophenomenological paradigm developed by Francisco Varela and his students, which seeks to correlate first-person (subjective, introspective) accounts of cognitive experience with third-person (objective, neurophysiological) measures. Given striking correspondences between the neurophenomenological theory of cognitive “transparency” and “breakdown” and the Romantic poetics of defamiliarization, I adopt the Wordsworthian “spot of time” as a test case and use standing literary-critical description to formulate specific neurophenomenological predictions about its defamiliarizing effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]