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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

Coleridge's investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood as an attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world is gained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement that understanding by recasting the stakes of Kant's critical philosophy in terms of a conflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporary accounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essay explores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as a textual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism, which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues, allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of the romantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even as critics emphasize the transnational contexts of British identities during the Romantic era, the nation-state remains an important context for understanding both political movements and identity formation in the period. In this paper, I set the arguments of my British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism in the context of recent work on British nationalism. I argue that accounts of Romantic-era nationalism need to pay greater attention to the role of state administration in developing national identity. I contend that late Romantic authors reconceived their own aesthetic models to allow themselves to carry the message of the British state and participate in its work of spreading British identity to the populace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes reading and judging the character of Oswald in Madame de Staël's Corinne as a (albeit failed) Kantian. Whereas it has been customary to read Oswald as having failed morally because he did not appreciate the importance of sentiment to moral deliberation, the author proposes that his tragic fate is depicted within the novel as having been by and large due to a deliberate misinterpretation on his part of the distinction between maxims and laws, a distinction that is so central to Kant's moral philosophy and with which Oswald is portrayed as having been familiar. In so doing, this paper argues that, whereas Staël's reading of Kant as presented in De l'Allemagne is admittedly riddled with inaccuracies, the less propagandist Corinne testifies to the fact that Staël did in fact understand many of the intricacies – and possible limitations – of Kant's moral philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article begins as an improvisation on terms developed in Hannah Arendt's collection Men in Dark Times. Dark times for Arendt signal disastrous conditions under which life and the ideas about such a life remain invisible or obscure. Lives led under dark times are marked by a resistance to public declaration and display, and they are intelligible only in terms of privation. Dark times are thus hopeless and intransigent; while they are a state of emergency for Arendt, this paper aims to think differently about the non-pathological and transformative effects produced by disaster - that is to say, how catastrophic events in texts by De Quincey and Byron are denatured or flattened out to the point where disaster expresses new relational forms of non-destructive dark life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses various Romantic contributions to the theory of natural and artistic form within the context of a threefold typology that distinguishes eidetic, endogenous, and constructivist concepts of form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1788 saw the first legislative victory for the campaign to abolish the British slave trade. Writing as part of a wider movement to generate support for the Bill about to go through parliament, both Hannah More and Ann Yearsley published poetry describing the horrors of slavery. However, this paper will argue that what lay behind More and Yearsley's decision to become involved with the campaign was an intense and bitter rivalry, the consequence of their failed patronage relationship. The essay will argue that a rivalry between the two was known to exist, and that the two poems published by More and Yearsley in 1788 were seen partially in terms of that rivalry. In order to demonstrate this the essay will discuss a previously unknown poem by Yearsley's friend and patron Eliza Dawson which directly compares Yearsley with More. Their poems, Slavery: A Poem and A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade are then discussed in detail in order to suggest that at their hearts is not a concern for the African slaves they are nominally supposed to be helping, but a fiercely contested poetic battle to determine who has the right to speak for the city of Bristol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]