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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]

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 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]