Abstract:This article reads Romantic literature through the medium of the commonplace book. It asks how Romantic readers doubly articulated place in this genre, within both the volume and the social world around it. I trace what happens to conceptions of women’s writing and authorship when we reconceptualize reading and writing as blended, inseparable activities that do not terminate in publication but move iteratively through cycles of reading and writing, print and manuscript. The focus is on one of a pair of nineteenth-century commonplace books written by Louisa Wildman and her husband, owners and inhabitants of Byron's former home, Newstead Abbey.
{"title":"Domestic Extracts","authors":"Mai-Lin Cheng","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reads Romantic literature through the medium of the commonplace book. It asks how Romantic readers doubly articulated place in this genre, within both the volume and the social world around it. I trace what happens to conceptions of women’s writing and authorship when we reconceptualize reading and writing as blended, inseparable activities that do not terminate in publication but move iteratively through cycles of reading and writing, print and manuscript. The focus is on one of a pair of nineteenth-century commonplace books written by Louisa Wildman and her husband, owners and inhabitants of Byron's former home, Newstead Abbey.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"467 - 485"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45756281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The Wanderer, Frances Burney’s fourth and final novel, was published in 1814 through a contractual agreement with the publishing firm of Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. I examine Burney’s financial negotiations with Longman, as revealed through the epistolary record from 1813 to 1826, arguing that scholarly attention to women writers’ financial negotiations with the Romantic-era book trade is an essential complement to the study of women’s book history, and that letters revealing these negotiations are important textual artifacts of literary production and dissemination.
{"title":"Frances Burney’s Financial Negotiations for The Wanderer","authors":"Devjani Roy","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Wanderer, Frances Burney’s fourth and final novel, was published in 1814 through a contractual agreement with the publishing firm of Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. I examine Burney’s financial negotiations with Longman, as revealed through the epistolary record from 1813 to 1826, arguing that scholarly attention to women writers’ financial negotiations with the Romantic-era book trade is an essential complement to the study of women’s book history, and that letters revealing these negotiations are important textual artifacts of literary production and dissemination.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"435 - 449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45237357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Quill cutters, dip pens, inks, pencils, and writing papers—these were among the supplies that C19 writers used to compose their novels. Providing a holistic look into the writing desk of Charlotte Brontë, this article calls attention to how the sympathetic imaginations of literary critics have shaped interpretations of Brontë’s authorial practice, and how their Romantic readings have inadvertently undercut the skilled craft, intensive labor, and critical discernment integral to her process. This object-oriented approach to studying Brontë’s manuscripts offers a reassessment of her writing practice, and, by extension, critical-bibliographical methods for interpreting the work of other c19 women writers.
{"title":"Reading the Writing Desk: Charlotte Brontë’s Instruments and Authorial Craft","authors":"Barbara Heritage","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Quill cutters, dip pens, inks, pencils, and writing papers—these were among the supplies that C19 writers used to compose their novels. Providing a holistic look into the writing desk of Charlotte Brontë, this article calls attention to how the sympathetic imaginations of literary critics have shaped interpretations of Brontë’s authorial practice, and how their Romantic readings have inadvertently undercut the skilled craft, intensive labor, and critical discernment integral to her process. This object-oriented approach to studying Brontë’s manuscripts offers a reassessment of her writing practice, and, by extension, critical-bibliographical methods for interpreting the work of other c19 women writers.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"503 - 522"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48918347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Since her death on the Isle of France (Mauritius) in 1812, Harriet Newell has come to us as a martyr to the early nineteenth-century missionary movement and - more than that - as a single book: Memoirs of Mrs. Harriet Newell, published in 1814 by Samuel Armstrong of Boston. Exploring Bewell’s reading and habits of allusion, our essay explores what it would mean to read Newell as her first readers encountered her: as an engaging correspondent and chronicler of missionary work, and as a travel writer.
{"title":"Unpacking Harriet Newell’s Library","authors":"Michael Gamer, K. O’Loughlin","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0037","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Since her death on the Isle of France (Mauritius) in 1812, Harriet Newell has come to us as a martyr to the early nineteenth-century missionary movement and - more than that - as a single book: Memoirs of Mrs. Harriet Newell, published in 1814 by Samuel Armstrong of Boston. Exploring Bewell’s reading and habits of allusion, our essay explores what it would mean to read Newell as her first readers encountered her: as an engaging correspondent and chronicler of missionary work, and as a travel writer.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"419 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66922362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In this essay I survey editions of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs through the nineteenth century, tracking their commercial appeal alongside key developments in the book trades. In so doing, I investigate the bibliographical, book-historical phenomena that accomplished what Clifford Siskin calls “The Great Forgetting” of women writers after the Romantic period. Reprintings of Robinson’s Memoirs encouraged Robinson’s literary obscurity by staging her personal notoriety. Edmund Blunden’s 1930 edition of the Memoirs proves an exception to this rule. To the degree that its bibliographic codes return to those of the first printed edition, Blunden restores materially Robinson’s place within Romantic print culture.
{"title":"The Many Lives of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs","authors":"N. Reynolds","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay I survey editions of Mary Robinson’s Memoirs through the nineteenth century, tracking their commercial appeal alongside key developments in the book trades. In so doing, I investigate the bibliographical, book-historical phenomena that accomplished what Clifford Siskin calls “The Great Forgetting” of women writers after the Romantic period. Reprintings of Robinson’s Memoirs encouraged Robinson’s literary obscurity by staging her personal notoriety. Edmund Blunden’s 1930 edition of the Memoirs proves an exception to this rule. To the degree that its bibliographic codes return to those of the first printed edition, Blunden restores materially Robinson’s place within Romantic print culture.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"383 - 400"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48851358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This special issue of studies in romanticism, “Romantic Women and their Books,” takes its origin from a shared conviction that the intersecting circles of gender studies, book history, and Romanticism should be pushed closer together, creating more overlapping spaces in that Venn diagram. Nearly thirty years ago, Anne Mellor asked, “What difference does gender make to our understanding of literary Romanticism?” The field rose to answer in an outpouring of recovery work and theoretical reframing that profoundly changed the ways we teach and publish on the Romantic era. Around the same time, Jerome McGann was challenging Romanticists with versions of the question, “What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?” In the decades that followed, book history and critical bibliography have assumed new prominence in Romantic studies as methods for investigating literary media cultures. In gathering essays for this issue, we asked authors to consider a hybrid of the Mellor-McGann provocations: what difference does a doubled lens of gender and book history make to our understanding of Romantic writing? Or, as we asked in the call for papers, “What do we gain, and what might we lose, by resituating Romantic women’s writing and their literary labor within new frameworks of material and bibliographic histories?” In 1993, Mellor began to document the different preoccupations of women writers, many of whom did not share the investments of male poets in transcendence and the imagination, but rather advocated for rationality, equality, and an “ethic of care.” Mellor asserted that because scholarly conceptions of the field were based on a small selection of male poets, our “descriptions of that historical phenomenon we call Romanticism are unwittingly gender-biased.” In his 1998 study, The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin developed a theory
{"title":"Romantic Women and their Books","authors":"Michelle Levy, Andrew M. Stauffer","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0034","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of studies in romanticism, “Romantic Women and their Books,” takes its origin from a shared conviction that the intersecting circles of gender studies, book history, and Romanticism should be pushed closer together, creating more overlapping spaces in that Venn diagram. Nearly thirty years ago, Anne Mellor asked, “What difference does gender make to our understanding of literary Romanticism?” The field rose to answer in an outpouring of recovery work and theoretical reframing that profoundly changed the ways we teach and publish on the Romantic era. Around the same time, Jerome McGann was challenging Romanticists with versions of the question, “What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?” In the decades that followed, book history and critical bibliography have assumed new prominence in Romantic studies as methods for investigating literary media cultures. In gathering essays for this issue, we asked authors to consider a hybrid of the Mellor-McGann provocations: what difference does a doubled lens of gender and book history make to our understanding of Romantic writing? Or, as we asked in the call for papers, “What do we gain, and what might we lose, by resituating Romantic women’s writing and their literary labor within new frameworks of material and bibliographic histories?” In 1993, Mellor began to document the different preoccupations of women writers, many of whom did not share the investments of male poets in transcendence and the imagination, but rather advocated for rationality, equality, and an “ethic of care.” Mellor asserted that because scholarly conceptions of the field were based on a small selection of male poets, our “descriptions of that historical phenomenon we call Romanticism are unwittingly gender-biased.” In his 1998 study, The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin developed a theory","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"371 - 381"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46120415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Emily Dickinson’s most important books were the hand-sewn manuscript books she made for her own verse and that no one read or saw before she died. Acts of spiritual testimony, their closest poetic forebear is surely the Bay Psalm Book, which was a conscious effort to deliver a literal translation of the Hebrew language that was the vehicle for making contact with God. Dickinson’s fascicles are thus books of revelation, dramatic performances meant to bear witness rather than deliver messages or solicit interpretation. They are pre-eminently driven by metrics not meanings.
{"title":"Emily Dickinson’s Forbidding Books","authors":"Jerome McGann","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Emily Dickinson’s most important books were the hand-sewn manuscript books she made for her own verse and that no one read or saw before she died. Acts of spiritual testimony, their closest poetic forebear is surely the Bay Psalm Book, which was a conscious effort to deliver a literal translation of the Hebrew language that was the vehicle for making contact with God. Dickinson’s fascicles are thus books of revelation, dramatic performances meant to bear witness rather than deliver messages or solicit interpretation. They are pre-eminently driven by metrics not meanings.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"523 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46375441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The critical conversation regarding the poetic achievement of Letitia Landon has been deformed by the influence of posthumous editions that remake and misrepresent her work. Emma Roberts’s edition of The Zenana and Minor Poems of L.E.L. (1839) and Leman Blanchard’s Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. (1841) have too often been taken by Landon scholars as reliable sources, yet both occlude and alter her poems in serious ways. Landon herself creatively recycled earlier work: much of her originality depends on her manipulation of its changing media contexts. Thinking coherently about Landon’s poetry requires an extensive acquaintance with her textual history.
{"title":"The Remaking of Letitia Elizabeth Landon","authors":"Sarah Storti","doi":"10.1353/srm.2021.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The critical conversation regarding the poetic achievement of Letitia Landon has been deformed by the influence of posthumous editions that remake and misrepresent her work. Emma Roberts’s edition of The Zenana and Minor Poems of L.E.L. (1839) and Leman Blanchard’s Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. (1841) have too often been taken by Landon scholars as reliable sources, yet both occlude and alter her poems in serious ways. Landon herself creatively recycled earlier work: much of her originality depends on her manipulation of its changing media contexts. Thinking coherently about Landon’s poetry requires an extensive acquaintance with her textual history.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"60 1","pages":"487 - 502"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45145537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Romantic poets mythologized Indigenous people but had little interest in their material reality and well-being. This dynamic continues today, and neoliberal diversity efforts in universities do little to benefit actual Indigenous communities. It is time to engage more deeply with Indigenous thought and living communities rather than focus on the vague rhetoric of decolonization, which only serves institutions and individuals and does little to build solidarity.
{"title":"Afterword: The Allure of Indigeneity","authors":"R. Richardson","doi":"10.1353/srm.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Romantic poets mythologized Indigenous people but had little interest in their material reality and well-being. This dynamic continues today, and neoliberal diversity efforts in universities do little to benefit actual Indigenous communities. It is time to engage more deeply with Indigenous thought and living communities rather than focus on the vague rhetoric of decolonization, which only serves institutions and individuals and does little to build solidarity.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"61 1","pages":"531 - 535"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41922620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article explores the poems of three Native American women, identifying resemblances to traditional Romantic poetry in their depiction of lament, but also differences, namely in how land and the poet’s (or their speaker’s) relationship to it is represented through kinship. The mode of female complaint poetry is utilised as a productive frame for attending to these differences, offering a way to access their laments from a Romantic poetics. By exploring the complaint mode and its trope, the echo, this article considers how Indigenous kinship and reciprocity between the poet, speaker, and environment determines these women’s contribution to Romantic poetry.
{"title":"Laments of the Land: Kinship through Echo in Native American Women’s Romantic Complaint Poetry","authors":"Millie Godfery","doi":"10.1353/srm.2022.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2022.0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the poems of three Native American women, identifying resemblances to traditional Romantic poetry in their depiction of lament, but also differences, namely in how land and the poet’s (or their speaker’s) relationship to it is represented through kinship. The mode of female complaint poetry is utilised as a productive frame for attending to these differences, offering a way to access their laments from a Romantic poetics. By exploring the complaint mode and its trope, the echo, this article considers how Indigenous kinship and reciprocity between the poet, speaker, and environment determines these women’s contribution to Romantic poetry.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":"61 1","pages":"505 - 513"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41492100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}