Nineteenth-Century Literature

Henderson, Andrea Kelly

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.81

Andrea Kelly Henderson, “Harriet Martineau’s Realized Abstractions” (pp. 81–105)Critics have long noted—and often lamented—the formal incoherence of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34). This essay argues that the tales’ formal bifurcations can be understood not as a failing but as a conscious response to the absence of a contemporary consensus regarding the groundedness of economic abstractions. Martineau’s aesthetic of what I call “realized abstraction” offers a solution of sorts to this epistemological problem: unable to mediate between abstractions and particulars, she simply insists on the importance of both. Berkeley the Banker, her tale devoted to banking and currency, vividly dramatizes this dichotomizing logic. In this work, the relationship of concrete value to its abstract representation in paper money is analogized to a troubled marriage, one in which the husband forces his virtuous wife to subscribe to his false representations. Martineau’s story will explicitly argue for the usefulness of economic theory and paper money, but she resists the tendency of abstractions to render the concrete invisible in an act of metaphoric coverture; instead, she presents the abstract and the particular as autonomous realms. Martineau’s aesthetic of juxtaposition thus aspires to virtues quite different from those of Romantic organic wholeness or realist transparency: her tales aim not only to educate readers in abstract principles and historical particulars but also to train them to discriminate between the two. In subsequent decades, philosophers of science would formulate compelling new ways to bind abstractions to particulars, and the success of that project would mean that despite the Illustrations’s enormous popularity during the 1830s, they would seem to later generations to be marred by formal fragmentation.

Cox, Jeffrey N.

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.106

Jeffrey N. Cox, “Wordsworth’s The Borderers, Early and Late” (pp. 106–133)William Wordsworth’s sole tragedy, while written in the late 1790s, did not appear until 1842, in his last volume of new poetry, Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years; including the Borderers, A Tragedy. In the back matter are two series of advertisements: one for the other six volumes in the newest edition of Wordsworth’s poetry and the other for his publisher Edward Moxon’s “Dramatic Library,” which includes volumes of plays by key playwrights from Shakespeare to Congreve, with the editors spanning the Romantic movement. One set of these print paratexts places Wordsworth’s play within his life’s work, but another group relates the play to the dramatic tradition from the early modern to the Romantic periods. While scholars have mainly been interested in The Borderers for what it tells us about Wordsworth’s intellectual and aesthetic development as a poet at its point of composition, this essay is more interested in thinking about it, first, in relation to the drama and theater of the 1790s and then, more briefly, as a cultural act in 1842, as Wordsworth seeks to define his place one more time on the literary scene. This essay explores The Borderers as an intervention in the theatrical world of the 1790s, particularly as Wordsworth responds to the contemporary melodrama, and as a bid late in his life to establish himself as a dramatic precursor to younger writers, particularly Byron.

Lesjak, Carolyn

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.134

Ortiz, Ivan

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.140

Sussman, Matthew

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.144

Wright, Daniel

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.147

Hallock, Thomas

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.150

2024 Nineteenth-Century Literature

doi: 10.1525/ncl.2024.79.2.154