TY - JOUR
AU - Kiek,, Miranda
AB - Abstract This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell; section 2 is by Barbara Leonardi; section 3 is by Michael Falk and Elias Greig; section 4 is by Miranda Kiek. 1. General and Prose The works reviewed for the Romantic General and Prose section this year reveal an ongoing and sustained interest in travel writing, and particularly women’s travel writing, with the publication of a special issue of Women’s Writing on the subject and Ingrid Horrocks’s Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility 1784–1814. The publication of Cian Duffy’s Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges 1770–1842 also further highlights this attentiveness to travel writing and cultural exchanges in the period. There was also a continued interest in women’s writing, particularly that of Mary Wollstonecraft. A concern with the spaces and places of Romantic-period sociability is also evident, most clearly in the publication of Kevin Gilmarton’s edited volume Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain but also in a focus on spas and health in articles published in JECS. Also predominating in 2017, as last year, was work on periodicals, particularly Blackwood’s Magazine, with the publication of a special issue on the early years of the magazine in the journal Romanticism. This section then moves on to focus on shorter essays on historical writing, language, and dictionaries before dealing with, finally, three longer volumes on prose writings and work on philosophy, including Peter Cheyne’s Coleridge and Contemplation (with some chapters covered in the Romantic Poetry section) and a number of shorter essays on philosophy in prose writings. Work on women’s writing forms the largest portion of this year’s section, and so it is fitting to begin with this. First focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft: Andrew McInnes’s Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period looks at ‘the romanticising of Wollstonecraft’s life and writing in print’ and the ‘female philosopher as a literary construct’ in a variety of Romantic-period examples (pp. 1–2), tracing ‘the manifold ways in which women writers make Wollstonecraft’s life and writing freshly available both to themselves and new readers’ (p. 174). Divided into five chapters, this work explores various literary representations of the figure of the female philosopher. The first chapter deals with the writing of Mary Hays and the way in which she draws on ‘Enlightenment and pro-revolutionary ideals to shape both her self-representation as a writer and the idealization of Mary Wollstonecraft’, arguing that this model ‘came under stress as the 1790s progressed’ (p. 2). The second chapter explores nineteenth-century representations of the female philosopher in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray [1804], Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers [1800], and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda [1801]. McInnes argues here that the responses of these women writers to Mary Wollstonecraft and ‘feminist thought’ are ‘filtered through both Mary Hays’s and Godwin’s memorialising of Wollstonecraft as well as through Wollstonecraft’s own unfinished novel’ (p. 61). The third chapter explores Frances Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park [1814], arguing that ‘Austen and Burney both utilize and disavow Wollstonecraft’s radical analysis of the cultural forces which shape individual character in society in order to create a space in their texts for societal critique’ and exploring the importance of 1814 as a year of ‘literary and historical significance’ (p. 98). Chapter 4 examines women’s writing after 1815, when ‘the tremendous influence that the figure of the female philosopher exerted on both the self-representations of women writers and their female characters in the early nineteenth century began to wane’ (p. 132), focusing on Mary Shelley’s writing. Finally, McInnes concludes in chapter 5 with a brief look at the figure of the female philosopher in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre [1847]. McInnes argues overall that ‘contrasting female philosopher figures allow the woman writer to access and develop Wollstonecraft’s feminist arguments’ (pp. 169–70). Other new scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft in 2017 includes two articles by Rachel Seiler-Smith and Catherine Packham. Rachel Seiler-Smith’s essay, ‘Bearing/Barren Life: The Conditions of Wollstonecraft’s Morbid Maternity’ (ERR 28[2017] 163–83), argues that Wollstonecraft ‘continues to develop the conditional terms of her morbid politics across her literary endeavours’ (p. 163). By examining Wollstonecraft’s representations of motherhood and maternity in her letters, Mary [1788], A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], and Maria; or the Wrongs of Women [1797] as a ‘delicate condition’, she argues that this also reflects the ‘delicate conditions motherhood poses to a state that relies on her compliance to nourish potential citizens’ (p. 164) as well as the violence of contemporary politics in the representation of morbid elements of motherhood. In ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Cottage Economics: Property, Political Economy, and the European Future’ (ELH 84[2017] 453–74), Catherine Packham explores Wollstonecraft’s representations of cottage and farm life in her writings to argue that she returns to these images in order to intervene in debates about ‘the future of commercial society’ and the agricultural system of the eighteenth century (p. 455). She situates Wollstonecraft’s representations of the cottage scene in a wider discourse of economics, with Wollstonecraft focusing on ‘sufficiency’ (p. 462) and ‘comfort’ rather than a ‘constant pursuit of betterment’ (p. 463). However, Packham goes on to argue that ‘the cottage for Wollstonecraft ultimately acquires a negative significance as a blueprint of what is no longer possible’ as ‘[t]he contentment of cottage life is only obtainable through an ignorance which the capacities of human nature itself are constituted to counter’ (p. 470). Moving to other women writers, Elizabeth Weybright’s essay, ‘The Everyday Soundscape: Sound and Mixed Aesthetic Modes in Dorothy Wordsworth’ (ERR 28[2017] 325–32), analyses shifts in Dorothy Wordsworth’s observational stance in the Grasmere Journal and Alfoxden Journal from one of a distanced observer to one of an active listener; noticing and recording the soundscape around her. Weybright argues that these episodes of sound ‘[create] a site for Wordsworth to transgress distinct categories of Romantic landscape aesthetics in order to allow the natural musics, noises otherwise muted by conventional aesthetic categories, that punctuated her lived experience to resound poetically in her writing’ (p. 330). Ashley Cross’s Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821 focuses on Robinson’s poetry, fiction, and newspaper and book publications as well as her relationships with other writers, both men and women. In so doing, Cross argues that her work ‘tells a different story about the development of early Romantic writing, one that is intersubjective rather than based in the isolated achievements of individual genius’ (p. 3). Cross’s work is divided into eight chapters, each focusing on an individual from the Romantic period and Robinson’s intertextual engagement with each of them, namely, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Robert Southey, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Dacre, and John Keats. These chapters offer not only a close reading of Mary Robinson’s works but also an in-depth analysis of points where her work informs, and is informed by, other writers. Cross’s chapter, ‘Vindicating the Writing Woman’, is particularly pertinent to readers of this section. Cross argues here that ‘Robinson’s intertextual dialogue with Wollstonecraft in her 1799 prose texts was … an act of retaliation that intended to ensure posthumous reputation for herself, Wollstonecraft, and other female writers, and thereby to vindicate writing women’ (pp. 139–40). Evident in the publications of 2017 is a sustained interest, particularly, in women’s travel writing and the figure of the woman traveller or ‘wanderer’. Ingrid Horrocks’s Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility 1784–1814 explores representations of ‘women wanderers’, particularly in the works of women writers. Horrocks’s work focuses on travel narratives in poetry, novels and travel writing and contextualizes these broader representations of the ‘valuable metaphorical figure’ of the wanderer in eighteenth-century writing (p. 1). This section will discuss the chapter on Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘‘‘Take, O World! Thy Much Indebted Tear!”: Mary Wollstonecraft Travels’ (pp 140–68), in greatest depth, as the other chapters focus predominantly on poetry and novels. Horrocks’s opening chapter (pp. 39–78) introduces the poetic figure of the wanderer more broadly, before the other chapters look more specifically at the image of the traveller and the idea of movement in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (pp. 79–109), and the novels of Ann Radcliffe (pp. 110–39) and Frances Burney (pp. 169–200). Horrocks’s chapter on Wollstonecraft deals with her epistolary travel narrative Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark [1796]. Here Horrocks states that, unusually in comparison to the other works discussed in her monograph, ‘Wollstonecraft’s wanderer escapes the constraints of the domestic space altogether and becomes a self-directed traveller’ (p. 140). Horrocks argues that A Short Residence is ‘significant not only for understanding Wollstonecraft’s development as a thinker and writer but also for understanding the important connections between imaginings of mobility and sympathy that emerged in this period’ (p. 146). The journal Women’s Writing published a special issue on women’s travel writing in 2017. This included three essays covering the Romantic period. Carl Thompson’s introduction to the issue, ‘Journeys to Authority: Reassessing Women’s Travel Writing, 1763–1862’ (WW 24[2017] 131–50), begins by acknowledging the ‘sustained attention to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing’ since the 1980s, which ‘has not only extended our knowledge, but also greatly nuanced our understanding of women’s contribution to the genre’ (p. 131). The collection of essays, which stems from an international conference held at Chawton House Library in June 2014, ‘seeks collectively to convey the public influence and agency that women might garner from travel writing, and the genre’s importance as a stepping stone to wider recognition as intellectuals, “women of letters” and cultural commentators’ (p. 133). Benjamin Colbert’s ‘British Women’s Travel Writing, 1780–1840: Bibliographical Reflections’ (WW 24[2017] 151–69) begins the collection with an analysis of the bibliographical records from the Women’s Travel Writing database. This database, as Colbert describes, was launched at the New Horizons conference mentioned above and ‘provides full and accurate bibliographical records for 204 titles—all the known books of travel published in Britain and Ireland by women between 1740 and 1840’ (p. 152). Colbert’s article therefore provides some reflections on the titles and authors of these works and the broader patterns and trends suggested by them. Colbert shows that there was ‘a sharp upward trend’ in the production of women’s travel writing between the 1780s and 1830s (p. 160) and argues that the database can clarify ‘how women inserted themselves into a genre that previously had been almost exclusively male territory’ and ‘will allow scholars of women’s travel writing, for the first time perhaps, to recognize, quantify and describe trends that reinforce or problematize the conclusions we are tempted to draw from smaller samples’ (p. 164). In ‘ “News from Scotland”: Female Networks in the Travel Narratives of Elizabeth Isabella Spence’ (WW 24[2017] 170–84), Pam Perkins discusses Elizabeth Isabella Spence’s last book of travels, Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland [1817], arguing that what makes her work unusual is that ‘the social network that she draws on (and addresses in her published work) is female’ (p. 171). Drawing on Walter Scott’s comments in 1809 on Scottish tours in the wake of a large number of publications that ‘it would be “somewhat difficult” for any subsequent visitors to “bring us news from Scotland” ’ (p. 171), Perkins argues that ‘the news that Spence brings from Scotland is that it is a world of remarkably feminocentric social, aesthetic and cultural pleasures’ (p. 171). Finally, Carl Thompson’s ‘Sentiment and Scholarship: Hybrid Historiography and Historical Authority in Maria Graham’s South American Journals’ (WW 24[2017] 185–206) analyses Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil [1824] and Journal of a Residence in Chile [1824] as forms of historical discourse, which were ‘widely received … as useful historical contributions which fed in diverse ways into contemporary circuits of knowledge production … which therefore garnered Graham considerable critical respect and intellectual authority’ (p. 186). Thompson argues that Graham’s work pushes ‘travel writing in the direction of outright historiography’ (p. 203). Still considered ‘an important resource for historians’ of Chile, Graham’s work ought to be given more credit as a ‘significant contribution to Romantic historical discourse’ and ‘a noteworthy experiment in the melding of genres and historiographical modes’ (p. 203). Also dealing with Maria Graham’s work is Kent Linthicum’s ‘Stretching Beyond Anthropocentric Thinking: Maria Graham and the 1822 Chilean Earthquake’ (ERR 28[2017] 679–99). Here Linthicum discusses Maria Graham’s observations of the 1822 Valparaíso earthquake, which were published in the Transactions of the Geological Society in 1824. Taking into consideration contemporary criticism of Graham’s report, in particular that of George Bellas Greenough, the president of the Geological Society, and the other reports of the earthquake, Linthicum argues that, though the sources all show ‘a range of observers grappling with devastating and complex phenomena’ (pp. 680–1), Graham’s report is the most geologically successful as it observes the earthquake ‘through a lens that stretches beyond a human frame of reference, seeing the quake not as a force affecting civilization but rather a force affecting the earth’ (p. 681). Influenced by literature, particularly the works of Lord Byron, Graham, Linthicum argues, ‘helped to shift notions of deep time and geological process with her observations and analysis of the 1822 Valparaíso earthquake’ through her ‘controversial’ analysis which suggested that ‘seemingly local actions over a vast stretch of years might be one of the forces shaping the globe’ (p. 680). The final essay on Romantic-period travel writing in 2017 is Ulrike Stamm’s ‘A German Expedition to Egypt in 1821: Between Scientific Endeavour and Literary Vivification’ (ERR 28[2017] 65–80). This offers an exploration of four travel reports from the Prussian expedition to Egypt between 1820 and 1821, with a detailed comparison between Heinrich von Minutoli’s account and that of his wife, Wolfradine von Minutoli. In so doing, Stamm argues that these accounts, while ‘mutually influenc[ing] each other’ (p. 77) exemplify ‘specific knowledge sets’ of ancient Egyptian culture which, Stamm states, are ‘highly gendered’ (p. 66), with Heinrich’s account focusing on scientific knowledge, and Wolfradine’s ‘vivif[ying] Egyptian antiquity in accordance with Romantic aesthetic ideals’ (p. 76). Cian Duffy’s edited volume Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges 1770–1842 also suggests a sustained interest in travel writing, in this instance writing related to Scandinavia and northern Europe. This collection of essays ‘explores the relationship between romanticism and romantic nationalism in Britain and the Nordic countries during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (p. 1) through a range of ‘transnational cultural exchanges’ (p. 18) in travel writing, art, poetry, and fiction. Focusing here on the chapters which deal with travel writings, beginning with Christoph Bode’s chapter on Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark [1796], Bode argues, like Ingrid Horrocks in the volume discussed above, that Wollstonecraft ‘devises and constructs a persona’—‘a most successful self-fashioning’ (p. 31). Bode goes on to argue that there is a ‘conspicuous contradiction’ in Wollstonecraft’s Letters: ‘On the one hand “objectivity” and the refusal to open up. On the other, a subjectivity that, in its extremes, reduces the landscape of “the North” to a mere canvas for the illustration of the states of mind of the traveller’ (p. 48). Leena Eilittä’s chapter ‘examines patterns of cultural exchange’ in the accounts of British travellers to Finland in the period (p. 53). She also argues that the travellers within these narratives are constructed and can therefore tell us ‘as much about proto-Romantic British understandings of Britishness’ as they can about ‘contemporary British attitudes to “the North” ’ (p. 54). Turning now to focus on the British Isles, Kevin Gilmarton’s edited volume Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain brings together a collection of essays exploring ‘the range of places in which Romantic-period sociability took place’ (p. 2). The volume questions how ‘sociability was shaped by place, by the rooms and buildings, landscapes and seascapes, where people gathered to converse, eat and drink, and to work and find entertainment’ and how ‘sociability in turn shaped place’ (p. 2). As Gilmarton explains in his introduction, the essays are ‘not restricted to literary expression and literary evidence, developing instead a broader cultural history of sociability’ (p. 3). I will here offer an overview of the chapter which does deal predominantly with readings of prose texts, namely Ina Ferris’s opening chapter, which looks at satirical representations of country book clubs. However, the other chapters in this volume would definitely be of interest in terms of gaining a wider perspective on sociability and place in the Romantic period. Ina Ferris’s chapter, ‘Recovering the Country Book Club’, focuses on circulating book clubs in rural communities. Through a reading of accounts and representations of the country book club in the contemporary periodical press, Ferris argues that ‘[i]n a literary culture shaped in metropolitan and urban centers, country book clubs appeared either an incongruity (the subject of satire) or simply did not appear at all’ (p. 45). The study of the Romantic-period country book club, she argues, provides an opportunity to ‘shift attention from the formation of a reading public (a question much agitated over in the period and since) to the making of reading cultures’ (p. 34). The Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies published a special issue on ‘Fashion and Illness’, with one of these essays falling under the remit of this section. Carolyn A. Day’s article ‘Dying To Be Beautiful: Fragile Fashionistas and Consumptive Dress in England, 1780–1820’ (JECS 40[2017] 603–20) addresses the interaction between fashion and disease in popular magazines and medical journals, looking specifically at tuberculosis (consumption) and the ways in which the effects of the illness came to be presented in an ‘aesthetically pleasing light’ (p. 603), as ‘its symptomology operated within established parameters of attractiveness. Rosy cheeks and lips coupled with pale skin were qualities with an established degree in the definitions of beauty’ (p. 604). Moreover, fashion ideals in the period meant that ‘[w]omen were placing themselves firmly in the path of tuberculosis by their choice of dress’ (p. 615). The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies also published Peter Collinge’s ‘ “I swim like a frog that has lost the use of its hind legs”: The Pursuit of Health and Leisure in Buxton, 1781–90’ (JECS 40[2017] 381–98). Focusing on accounts and correspondence relating to visits to Buxton, Derbyshire, by Lady Hester Newdigate and Lady Jane McCartney, Collinge argues that ‘[t]he desirability of being regarded as fashionable … often obscures a principal and enduring motivation for many spa visitors: the prospect of a cure’ (p. 381), concluding that ‘the search for health … remained a primary consideration for many late eighteenth-century spa visitors’ (p. 392). Turning now to work on periodicals, Romanticism’s special issue on Blackwood’s brought together a range of essays focusing on the first years of William Blackwood’s role as a magazine publisher and editor, looking at both the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine and its successor, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. I have offered here a summary of all the articles in this special issue with the exception of the essays by Pam Perkins, Robert Morrison, and Daniel S. Roberts, reviewed in Section 3 below. Thomas C. Richardson’s article ‘James Hogg, “the beginner, and almost sole instigator” of Blackwood’s—Not Once, but Twice’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 205–14), investigates James Hogg’s role in the beginnings of both of the Edinburgh Monthly and Blackwood’s. Richardson focuses both on Hogg’s works which were not accepted for publication by Blackwood, particularly his unsuccessful attempt to join the attacks on the Cockney school, and his works published in these magazines, namely ‘Tales and Anecdotes of Pastoral Life’ and ‘Shakespeare Club of Alloa’ in the Edinburgh Monthly and the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ and ‘Elegy’ in Blackwood’s, in order to argue for Hogg’s important role both as an ‘instigator’ of Blackwood’s and his significant contribution to ‘the magazine’s long-term success’ (p. 213). Alison Lumsden focuses on Walter’s Scott’s contributions to Blackwood’s as a literary and cultural critic in ‘Walter Scott and Blackwood’s: Writing for the Adventurers’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 215–23). Through an exploration of Scott’s essay on Scottish gypsy populations, his satirical piece ‘Alarming Increase of Depravity among Animals’, his ‘sensitive and acute review’ (p. 221) of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and his later fictional works which appear in Blackwood’s, Lumsden argues the magazine offered Scott a ‘space for the multifaceted artist to display himself’ (p. 221). The earlier works that Scott chose to publish in Blackwood’s, Lumsden concludes, ‘capture within them Scott’s multiplicity and the complex nexus of ideas which was rapidly beginning to epitomize both his fictional and non-fictional writing’ (pp. 222–3). Gregory Dart’s ‘Blackwood’s and the Cockney School of Prose’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 224–33) looks at the changing attitude to the Cockney prose writers (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, and Ollier) by John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart. Dart argues that in the first issues of the magazine there was a tendency to target criticism at these writers as a group who lacked ‘true learning’ (p. 226), rather than at the individual writers, with ‘Cockney prose … at least as much in Lockhart and Wilson’s sights as Cockney poetry, and … critiqued in the same terms’ (p. 226). However, Dart goes on to argue that Blackwood’s softened its critique of Coleridge and Lamb, but not Hunt and Hazlitt, in later issues. He concludes that ‘politics played a part in the eventual discrimination that Lockhart and Wilson made between Coleridge and Lamb, on the one hand, and the rest of the “Cockney School” on the other … in a more complex sense than might initially appear’ (p. 232). In ‘ “The malignity of reviewers”: Coleridge, Wilson, and Blackwood’s’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 234–42), Charles Mahoney explores the debates surrounding reviewing practices in the early years of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Discussing John Wilson’s review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Mahoney emphasizes that, ‘as one of the most savage attacks in the history of periodical reviewing’, Wilson’s review ‘raised (or, rather, lowered) the bar’ (p. 235) for early nineteenth-century periodical reviewing practices and ‘set the tone for the new Blackwood’s’ (p. 236). He goes on to argue that Wilson’s review acts as a defence of the Edinburgh Review and its editor, Francis Jeffrey (p. 236), whom Coleridge criticizes in a long footnote of his Biographia, and concludes that Wilson’s review ‘was a review of contemporary reviewing practices and culture, exemplified for Wilson in the hypocritical figure of Coleridge, the erstwhile reviewer who wanted to profit monetarily from reviewing but who could not countenance his own works being reviewed according to any criteria but his own’ (p. 241). John Strachan’s ‘The “Chaldee Manuscript”, William Hone, and Late Georgian Religious Parody’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 243–52) analyses Blackwood’s ‘Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’ [1817] and examines the publication, publicity, and purpose of the text as a ‘modern manifestation of religious parody’, which he argues ‘should be viewed in the light of the marketing techniques and ideological stratagems of the Regency magazine market’ (p. 245). Strachan goes on to argue that the Chaldee Manuscript consciously imitated techniques used by William Hone and, ‘in lampooning its local enemies and rivals, and in espousing the cause of a satirical high Toryism, saw Blackwood’s setting the course for the first, remarkable decades of its existence’ (p. 251). Alongside this special issue on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism published two articles focusing on periodicals. Mark Parker’s article ‘Repurposing the Literary Magazine’ (SiR 56[2017] 479–97) examines the relationship between literary magazines and the literary works they discuss. He argues that the relationship between these two literary forms is ‘dialectical, not simply mimetic’, with the literary magazines often remediating material from novels and poetry in their reviews, rather than simply critiquing them (p. 480), the use of personas throughout the magazine, and the interaction between the serialized fiction and the surrounding material of the magazines, using the example of John Galt’s work in Blackwood’s. Brecht de Groote’s essay ‘ “A revolution in the republic of letters”: The News from Waterloo and the Post-Waterloo Media State’ (SiR 56[2017] 399–418), part of a special issue on Waterloo in Studies in Romanticism, explores how the memory of the battle of Waterloo was ‘shaped by the emergent media state’ (p. 400) through an examination of testimonials and retrospective accounts, arguing that personal letters played a major role in bringing news of the war to Britain, alongside national media accounts. De Groote argues that the predominance of epistolary accounts of the war ‘came to determine all other genres of mediation’ (p. 408), and concludes by arguing that the literature produced on Waterloo defines two insights into the ‘post-Romantic media state’, namely ‘the specificity of modern mediation to be its capacity to exercise performative power not by inviting conscious acts of participation, but by unleashing an entirely irresistible emotive force, designed to trigger a branching sequence of highly infectious collapses of private into public conversation’ (p. 415). Finally, the literature, De Groote argues, ‘establishes an ambivalent view of the media state’, with both a positive view of its efficiency and concerns over governmental encroachment on personal correspondence and ‘the potential for mediation to spiral out of control as it attains ever more to the ambition of immediate and total communication’ (p. 416). Work on language and dictionaries published in 2017 comprises two articles. In addition to the article by Daniel E. White reviewed in Section 3 below, J. Mark Smith’s ‘De Quincey, Dictionaries, and Casuistry’ (ELH 84[2017] 689–713) explores Thomas De Quincey’s essays on dictionaries and other linguistic questions such as pronunciation and conversation, focusing specifically on De Quincey’s use of the term ‘casuistry’. By exploring theories of evolution contemporary with De Quincey’s essays on linguistics, Smith argues that De Quincey rejects the linguistic discipline of etymology in favour of an approach which would ‘display a history of each word through “an exact succession of its meanings” ’ (p. 697), an approach focused on the ‘evolution’ of a word which would ‘settle the question often agitated of how to ascertain the true meanings of a word—by etymology (“derivation”) or by “present use and acceptation” ’ (p. 698). Focusing now on historical writing in the Romantic period, Ina Ferris’s ‘Taking on Authorship: William Hutton’s Testy Relationship to Literary Authority’ (ERR 28[2017] 289–95) looks at William Hutton’s historical writing: An History of Birmingham [1781], History of Bosworth Field [1788], and History of the Roman Wall [1802]. Here, Ferris argues that Hutton’s work came from ‘an unorthodox understanding of what it meant to do history’, that is, that he ‘approaches the task of the historian in terms more convergent with those of contemporary literary genres such as the novel than with those of historical writing’ (p. 290). Also focusing on Romantic-period historical writing is Lucian Robinson’s ‘Accounts of Early Christian History in the Thought of Francois Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Stael 1800–c.1833’ (HEI 43[2017] 628–48). This essay compares historical accounts of early Christianity by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant, and Madame de Staël, showing that these played a major role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty. Robinson argues that these writers ‘were all thinking in different but inter-connected ways about both the historical role of Christianity in the development of European civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire and the differences and similarities between ancient and modern conceptions of liberty’ (p. 629). Suzanne Barnett’s Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle explores ‘paganism’ in the works of the ‘younger Romantics’, which she defines as the ‘reclamation of the mythology and imagery of the classical world characterized not only by philosophy and reason (as it was for many of their eighteenth-century predecessors), but also by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences—all of which registered as decidedly un-Christian (even anti-Christian) and potentially subversive’, and how this paganism ‘was read as both tasteless and dangerous by their critics’ (p. 2). Each of Barnett’s chapters addresses an aspect of this paganism in the works of the second-generation Romantics, from 1812 until the deaths of Keats and Percy Shelley in 1821 and 1822 respectively. Barnett argues that, for these writers, their ‘idiosyncratic but purposeful transformation of ancient religion, art, and literature formed a fundamental feature of their aesthetic and ideological agendas’ (p. 280). For them, paganism ‘was a simultaneously a looking-backward to a pre-Christian, multivalenced, and less hierarchical world-view … and a looking-forward to a revolutionary future in which joyous, celebratory, and inherently sexual paganism might overthrow its gloomy and prudish Christian oppressors’ (p. 280). Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins’s edited volume Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism: Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation brings together essays focusing on the ways in which ‘Rousseau’s writing permeated British Romantic discourse’ (p. 4), ranging ‘across the topics of gender, politics, nation and selfhood, reflecting the fluidity of Rousseau’s thought’ (p. 5). The essays in the volume focus on a range of genres. Those which focus specifically on prose writings, rather than novels, plays, or poetry, include Stephen C. Behrendt’s opening chapter (pp. 11–31), which examines Rousseau’s impact, both direct and indirect, on Romantic-period women writers, focusing specifically on Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, Catherine Macaulay, and Charlotte Smith. Behrendt argues that ‘women turned away from Rousseau’s essentialist notions about gender and conduct, dismissing them out of hand or appropriating and reformulating them for their own rhetorical purposes’ (p. 27). Simon Bainbridge’s chapter, ‘ “The Columbus of the Alps”: Rousseau and the Writing of Mountain Experience in British Literature of the Romantic Period’ (pp. 51–73), looks at Romantic-period ‘mountain literature’ by Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, arguing that ‘so powerful was Rousseau’s influence on the understanding of elevated experiences in the period that many of the most famous accounts of ascents can be seen as being in dialogue with the Genevan philosopher’ (p. 52). Heather Williams’s chapter, ‘Rousseau and Romanticism in Wales’ (pp. 75–90), contrasts ‘Rousseau’s direct impact on the lives of the cultural and social elite in Wales with his indirect, mediated influence on Welsh radicalism’ (p. 75). Patrick Vincent’s ‘Enchanted Ground? Rousseau, Republicanism and Switzerland’ (pp. 91–111) discusses the Swiss travel narratives of Mary and Percy Shelley and Thomas Hookham Jr. in order to argue that ‘we see [a] complex post-revolutionary legacy of Rousseau’ in these works (p. 92). Rowan Boyson’s ‘Rousseau’s Boat: The “Fifth Walk” Romanticism and Idleness’ (pp. 167–86) takes as its focus Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker [1782] and examines its influence on works by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and William Wordsworth. The chapter argues that Rousseau’s account of his stay on the Île de Saint-Pierre ‘appealed especially to first-generation Romantic writers for the way it suggested key ethical and political questions about human passivity’ (p. 170). Frances Ferguson’s chapter, ‘Rousseau, Émile and Britain’ (pp. 187–207), examines Rousseau’s views on education and their impact on Romantic-period writers, particularly Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose work, Ferguson argues, ‘constitutes an assimilation of and response to Rousseau’s writing’ (p. 201). Finally, Gregory Dart’s ‘Rousseau and the Romantic Essayist’ (pp. 209–31) analyses Rousseau’s influence on the writing of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, arguing that these writers turned to Rousseau’s Confessions when they began ‘to see sensibility as a utopian force that could break down obstacles and dissolve social distinctions’ (p. 219). A number of chapters of Peter Cheyne’s edited volume, Coleridge and Contemplation are covered below in Section 3. Rather than offer a detailed overview of the remaining chapters of this extensive volume, I focus on the chapters which deal specifically with Coleridge’s prose writings, specifically James Kirwan’s ‘Coleridge on Beauty: Aesthetic Contemplation as Revelation’ (pp. 47–59), Dillon Struwig’s ‘Coleridge’s Two-Level Theory of Metaphysical Knowledge and the Order of the Mental Powers in the Logic’ (pp. 193–210), Suzanne E. Webster’s ‘Coleridge, Contemplation, and the “Triple Ichheit” ’ (pp. 293–308), and J. Gerard Janzen’s ‘Notebook 55 as Contemplative Coda to Coleridge’s Work and Life’ (pp. 309–20). Kirwan’s chapter examines Coleridge’s analysis of beauty in Principles of Genial Criticism [1814], arguing that Coleridge’s ‘direct appeal to the nature of beauty made in this series of essays is unique within his prose works’, and that he ‘uses this phenomenology of beauty to reassert a transcendental significance for the contemplation of beauty that he, and others at this time, felt was in danger of being lost’ (p. 48). Struwig’s chapter, which focuses on Coleridge’s Logic and Opus Maximum, argues that Coleridge offers ‘an account of the hierarchical division of both (a) metaphysical knowledge and (b) the mental powers (or cognitive capacities)’ which underpin many of his later arguments (p. 194). Webster’s chapter focuses on Coleridge’s later key works, including his notebooks, and concentrates on his theological reflections therein. It explores ‘the ‘Order of the Mental Powers’ as Coleridge saw them within the context of the ‘triple Ichheit’; and it explains how this ordering related to his thought on God, the hypostases of the Trinity, and the relationships between ‘Will’, ‘Reason’, and ‘faith’ (p. 293). Finally, Janzen’s chapter reads Coleridge’s last notebook, which he titled ‘Faith, Prayer, Meditation’, ‘to form a coda to his “Fly-Catcher” notebooks of 1827–34, and more generally to his work and his life’ (p. 309), as ‘a life of contemplation grounded in simple faith, however “splintered”, awaiting its final end in delight, awe, and thanksgiving’ (p. 318). Also looking at philosophy in prose works are three articles published in various journals in 2017. Rei Terada’s ‘The Racial Grammar of Kantian Time’ (ERR 28[2017] 267–78) discusses Kant’s ‘Analogies of Experience’ in the Critique of Pure Reason. Terada argues that ‘romantic and post-romantic organizations of spacetime are racialized and excluded from being political’ and that ‘Kant’s grounding of a past/present distinction reflects an already existing analytic of race determining what can count as political space’ (p. 268). Blake Smith’s ‘Colonial Emulation: Sinophobia, Ethnic Stereotypes and Imperial Anxieties in Late Eighteenth-Century Economic Thought’ (HEI 43[2017] 914–28) analyses Dirk van Hogendorp’s Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies [1799], reading it as both a criticism of the Dutch East India Company and an attack on Java’s Chinese minority population. Smith focuses specifically on van Hogendorp’s use of the term ijver, or ‘emulation’, ‘a keyword in the economic thought of eighteenth-century Europe’ (p. 916), which was ‘marked with concern about the relationship between beneficent and destructive forms of economic agency’ (p. 917). Smith argues that ‘the ambivalence of emulation was … [a] means by which European imperialism in Asia could be understood, justified and changed’ (p. 917). Finally, John-Erik Hansson’s ‘The Genre of Radical Thought and the Practices of Equality: The Trajectories of William Godwin and John Thelwall in the Mid-1790s’ (HEI 43[2017] 776–90) discusses the political and philosophical similarities and difference between William Godwin and John Thelwall. By examining the intended audiences of the two writers, Hansson argues that, although they both begin in the early 1790s by addressing ‘a middle class, well-educated audience’, they both move on to experiment with different political and literary traditions in order to appeal to a broader audience, with the purpose of being more inclusive and of rethinking the relationship between authors and their audiences (p. 777). Though they have similar aims, Hansson argues, the writers attempt this in different ways, with Godwin making use of forms of fiction and ‘the controversial essay’ and Thelwall appealing to popular, specifically oral, culture (p. 778). 2. The Novel As this reviewer has noticed in the course of the last three years, the greatest number of publications on the Romantic novel are again mostly focused on Jane Austen and the adaptation of her works to various modern media, as well as on the legacy of Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein and The Last Man on recent literary studies. The authors and themes addressed in this section are in the following order: Jane Austen; Frances Burney; Maria Edgeworth; William Godwin; James Hogg; the military novel; the Minerva Press; Amelia Opie; Sydney Owenson; Walter Scott; Mary Shelley; Ann Radcliffe; and Mary Wollstonecraft. The criticism on Jane Austen is always vast and compelling. This section will first deal with a new biography, monographs and edited volumes on Austen; then with chapters in edited collections; and finally with articles in various journals, after reviewing Persuasions On-Line, the series of essays published every year by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), following its annual conference. In her engaging biography of Jane Austen, Jane Austen: A Brief Life, Fiona Stafford remarks that, similarly to her novels, where ‘Austen’s narration is at once intimate and elusive, inviting and retreating’ (p. 2), so details about her life in her letters show ‘an extraordinary elusiveness’ leaving ‘our knowledge of Austen … minimal in the areas that really matter—her methods of composition, literary opinions, political views, religious beliefs and, above all, emotional attachments’ (p. 3). The ‘surviving details’ relating to these matters, Stafford explains, increase the mysterious aura around Austen rather than solving the puzzle. Considering that Austen’s life spanned a period that encompassed some of the most compelling historical events such as the storming of the Bastille, Waterloo, and the ‘almost uninterrupted’ war between Britain and France during her adult life, the silence about these matters in her novels is quite astonishing (p. 5). Stafford shapes Austen’s biography in accordance with her six novels, ‘all published in the space of six years, between 1811 and 1817’ (p. 9), with the aim of placing Austen in the company of other contemporary Romantic talents such ‘as Keats, Burns, Shelley or Byron’ with whom she shared a ‘youthful exuberance’ (p. 9). Juliette Wells’s Reading Austen in America focuses on the 1816 Philadelphia edition of Austen’s Emma, the only novel published in America during Austen’s life, in order to explore ‘Austen’s earliest transatlantic readers’ (p. 1). Wells contends that scholars have engaged very little with Austen’s reception in North America, and her book is meant to cover this gap. With a view to mapping out how the early nineteenth-century American audience contributed to Austen’s international fame, Wells uses different approaches: book history, to trace the reception of individual owners of Austen’s Emma in America; the history of the book trade, to explain how the Philadelphia edition of Emma was ‘created’, ‘advertised and distributed to readers by booksellers and libraries’ (pp. 2–3); and reception studies together with the history of reading to account for the reception of Austen’s novel ‘beyond professional critics’ (p. 3). Wells’s book is aimed at both an academic and a non-academic audience; for this reason the author has kept ‘data’ ‘to a minimum’ and has included historical context ‘only as necessary to illuminate specific encounters between readers and books’ (p. 3). As Wells argues in her Introduction to the book, the first chapter, ‘The Origin of the First Austen Novel Printed in America’, centres on Philadelphia’s publisher Mathew Carey and the risk he took in publishing an unknown author who had started to receive positive reviews in Britain, particularly by Walter Scott in the Quarterly Review. In chapter 2, ‘Tales of Three Copies: Books, Owners, and Readers’, Wells examine some surviving copies of the Philadelphia edition, two of which she discovered. The copy owned by Chief Justice Jeremiah Smith of New Hampshire is of particular interest for the plethora of enthusiastic annotations referring ‘to articles about Austen from the 1810s to 1830s’ introduction (pp. 1–12), while the copy owned by a circulating library in Rhode Island shows a few negative responses annotated by American readers. Chapter 3, ‘An Accomplished Scotswoman Reads Austen Abroad: Christian, Countess of Dalhousie in British North America’, deals with the countess’s response to Austen’s novel: her reading of Emma contributes a ‘multi-dimensional treatment … of one of Austen’s contemporary readers of any nationality’ (p. 5). Chapter 4, ‘Enthusiasts Connected through the “Electric Telegraph of Genius”: The Quincy Sisters of Boston and the Francis W. Austen Family of Portsmouth’, discusses Austen’s reception in America after a subsequent Philadelphia edition of her work was published, which ‘brought her writings to a much larger audience in the US’ (p. 5). The final chapter, ‘Collectors and Bibliographers: Alberta H. Burke of Baltimore and David J. Gilson of Oxford’, on the other hand, engages with Austen’s American reception in the twentieth century by considering Alberta H. Burke of Baltimore, an ‘ “Austen omnivore” and forerunner of today’s Austen fans’ (p. 5). As argued in the Introduction (pp. xvii–xxi), Jocelyn Harris’s Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen contends that, in her novels, Austen alludes satirically to specific ‘celebrities, scandals, and controversies’ of her time which were ‘significant for her creativity’. Harris points out that, contrary to Austen’s nephew and biographer James Edward Austen-Leigh’s opinion about her disengagement from the political matters of her time, Austen’s novels show ‘allusions to events such as the Regency Crises, the war with France, the slave trade, and the court-martial of Sir Home Popham', hence revealing her ‘to be fully engaged with the politics of the day’ (pp. xvii–xxviii). In chapter 1, ‘ “Ungossiping Authority”: Fanny Burney, Cassandra Cooke, and Jane Austen’, Harris points out that ‘the Cookes of Great Bookham provided information about Burney’s private journals and letters that went straight into her novels’ (p. xviii). In chapter 2, ‘ “He swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross”: Lieutenant Price, Lieutenant Phillips’, Harris contends that in Mansfield Park, ‘Fanny Price’s father, Lieutenant of Marines’ is based on the real life of ‘Lieutenant Molesworth Phillips of the Royal Marines’, whose unfair behaviour may have caused ‘the death of the mentor-by-proxy to Austen’s sailor brothers, James Cook’ (p. xix). In chapter 3, ‘ “Everybody is cross and teasing”: The Mansfield Theatricals’ (discussed in greater detail in Section 4 below), Harris points out that Austen may have revised Mansfield Park after reading Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage, which ‘satirizes the craze for private theatricals’ (p. xix). In chapter 4, ‘ “Censure in common use”: Women, Politics, and Satire’, Harris remarks that similarly to Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, and Edgeworth, in her novels ‘Austen commented critically on the real world’ (p. xix). In chapter 5, ‘ “Carried home, dead drunk”: Satires on the Royal Family’, Harris traces Austen’s ‘satiric allusions to royalty from the juvenilia to Sanditon, especially her lacerating portrait of Prince George as John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey’ (p. xix). In chapter 6, ‘ “Hair so untidy, so blowsy!”: Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothy Jordan, and the Duke of Clarence’, Harris examines Austen’s ‘allusions to Prince George’s equally self-indulgent brother’ (p. xix). In her final chapter, ‘ “Half mulatto, chilly & tender”: Sanditon, the Duke of Clarence, and Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus” ’, Harris concludes that, for her West Indian heiress, Austen might have drawn on ‘a South African woman exhibited in London as if she were a wild beast’ (p. xx). Harris’s book highly contributes to a more nuanced perception of Austen, revealing her subtle engagement with pivotal issues of her historical moment. Devoney Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen explores Austen’s fame in popular culture, from the first Victorian illustrations by Ferdinand Pickering that sensationalized Austen’s myth to the first theatrical adaptations of Austen’s novels, hinting at her political influence on suffragist activism. It then discusses the first dissertation ever written on her by George Pellew in 1883, and concludes with a coda on the legacy of Austen in the twenty-first century. The paradox of Jane Austen’s reputation, Looser contends, lies in the fact that she ‘has been and remains a figure at the vanguard of reinforcing tradition and promoting social change … presented as gloriously conservative [as well as] unflinchingly progressive’ (p. 3; emphasis original). Looser’s book highlights the significance of the publication by Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, of the Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870, as well as the edition of Letters by Jane Austen curated by her grand-nephew Edward, Lord Brabourne, in 1884, as these works contributed to promoting Austen as ‘the cheerful, pious, domestic, polite, maiden aunt’ (p. 7). Another important landmark in Austen reception at the beginning of the twentieth century, Looser observes, was the publication by the sisters Constance and Ellen Hill of Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends [1902], which ‘move[d] Aunt Jane, the author, beyond the safe modesty of Austen-Leigh’s Aunt Jane’ (p. 9). Looser points out that in the sisters’ ‘formulation, Austen’s reputation gains a public service dimension’, as ‘[h]er novels are reimagined as acts of charity that improved the life of many’ (p. 9). She was now ‘a people’s aunt, a public figure, and an agent of change’ (p. 10). Looser’s book encompasses ‘a century and a half of Jane Austen’s legacy’, from the republication of her novel in 1833 until 1975, which marked the bicentenary of her birth, arguing that the fact that Austen’s ‘stories and characters have been rediscovered with each new generation suggests their amazing adaptability, if not universality’ (p. 12). Lynda A. Hall’s Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity remarks that, although Austen’s aim was not to write ‘novels about the political economy per se, the world she created within those novels mirrors the social and economic experiences she was observing around her’ (p. 2). Through her fiction, Austen was able to portray the ‘struggle’ women experienced regarding their ‘expressed and intrinsic value’ ‘on the marriage market’ (p. 3), mirroring in some ways the contemporary debate between the high value attributed to gold and silver coins and the doubtful value attributed to paper money, too abstract a concept at the time. While, on the one hand, Austen privileges the intrinsic value of ‘companionate marriage based on affection’, on the other hand she acknowledges ‘the marriage of convenience (to increase expressed value) … as the practical reality for many of the other women who represent the norm’ (p. 5). Hall’s book explores the effects of the dynamics of the marriage market on women’s behaviour. Even though Austen’s heroines find suitable marriages that lead them to a happy life, other female characters voice the complex issues arising from the politics of the marketplace, and as ‘their stories are not always satisfactorily resolved’ (p. 3), they ‘best represent problematic facets of the marriage market system on which the plots are based’ (p. 3) These secondary female characters, Hall maintains, also expose how a woman’s value was strictly ‘determined by her behaviour’ so that ‘her credit’ would be ‘damaged with transgressive or immoral behaviour’ (p. 6). Insightfully, Hall points out that the vanishing of secondary female characters from the narrative signals the ‘fluctuation in expressed and intrinsic value within the society the novel represents’ (p. 7). Hall’s study focuses on specific secondary characters of Austen’s oeuvre, noticing how they ‘survive and make the best of life in a difficult world’ (p. 8). Marina Cano’s Jane Austen and Performance notes that ‘as the Austen myth was taking shape during the nineteenth century, the ludic, theatrical and performative force behind her work was downplayed’ (pp. 2–3) because of the image of domestic simplicity and of the ‘morally irreproachable spinster’ (p. 2) that her brother’s and nephew’s biographies had circulated. On the other hand, Cano points out that Austen wrote scenically, with a ‘capacity to rapidly transport readers to the scenes she created’ (p. 3). Cano contends that the ‘performative force’ of Austen’s novels ‘explains her long-standing popularity’ (p. 3). Yet, Cano continues, it is only in recent years that scholars have started to explore ‘the theatrical quality of Austen’s novels’ (p. 3). Drawing on J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory, which describes the performative nature of language, Cano contends that the various adaptations of Austen’s novels in diverse modes have reiterated her stories and generated ‘the cult figure of Jane Austen’ (p. 5). Cano’s book explores the reappropriation of Austen’s works by the suffrage movement ‘in the form of pageants, parades, histories, novels and memoirs’ (p. 12), by promoters of Englishness in the inter-war period, and by feminist rewritings such as Angela Carter’s that ‘proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s’, besides noticing how ‘her work [also] helped define modern Scottish identity’ (p. 13). What Cano remarks is the flexibility of such adaptations in gender politics terms, as at times they interpret Austen’s work as progressive, and at other times as conservative, or even ‘as a complex mix’ (p. 13). Cheryl A. Wilson’s Jane Austen and the Victorian Heroine explains that Charlotte Brontë’s negative comment on Austen’s lack of vitality in a letter to George Henry Lewis, who had positively reviewed Brontë’s Jane Eyre, also ‘define[s] the relationship between Austen and the Victorians’ (p. 1), where Brontë represents the ones who did not enjoy Austen’s works and Lewis ‘a handful of mid-Victorian intellectuals who [instead] celebrated’ her (p. 3). What Lewis loved in Austen’s narratives, Wilson observes, was her ‘quality of form and the ability to control that form’ (p. 2), reflecting a typical Victorian attitude towards Austen’s fiction in order to answer ‘questions about genre, history, and the value and impact of literary works’ (p. 3). Wilson’s book investigates ‘the relationship between Austen and the Victorians through the lens of the heroine’, as this figure engaged them in ‘conversations about gender, literature, and national identity’ as well as in debates ‘about the responsibilities of the novelist and the ability of fiction to shape social and cultural norms’ (p. 5). Austen herself, Wilson argues, ‘became a kind of heroine’ that the Victorians ‘deployed in a range of arguments about gender, nationalism, and the future of the novel’ (p. 11). Michael Kramp’s edited volume Jane Austen and Masculinity contends that Austen does not provide ‘a simplistic understanding of men’ (p. 1), as the eponymous heroine of Emma superficially seems to imply. Rather, Kramp remarks, Austen’s novels ‘are filled with a diversity of men who engage with complicated historical events such as the political debates of the 1790s, the Regency crisis, and the post-Revolutionary Wars’ (p. 1). Quite ahead of her time, Austen ‘does not treat masculinity as a fixed social ideal, but as a contested and shifting cultural concept that men negotiate and revise’ (pp. 1–2). In other words, Kramp points out, ‘while Emma confidently asserts the simplicity of men, Austen shows the opposite’ (p. 2). This is why, according to Kramp, when studying men in Austen’s fiction we necessarily need to work out a ‘shifting manifestation’ of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, ‘its disruptions and reaffirmations’, as well as ‘its diverse effects on women and men alike’ (p. 6). The volume as a whole treats a wide range of approaches to and adaptations of Austen’s six novels, taking into account ‘meta-critical considerations of Austen’s legacy’ (p. 13). It is divided into five sections. Part I, ‘Men, Domesticity, and the Family’, explores masculinity in ‘a space traditionally associated with women and femininity’ (p. 14). It comprises three chapters. Jan Fergus’s ‘Sketches of Men’s Kvetches: Domestic Masculinities in Emma and Persuasion’ posits John Knightley and Mr Woodhouse as men who strive to exercise their authority in the domestic space, pointing to ‘Austen’s comic critique of their domestic masculinity’ (p. 14). Kit Kinkade’s ‘Failures of the Patriarchy: Fathers as Role Models in Jane Austen’ provides an overview of Austen’s representation of ‘fictional fathers’, exposing their ‘ineptitude’ and ‘the detrimental effect of patriarchy for men and women alike’ (p. 14). Joanne Wilkes’s ‘The Paradox of Masculine Agency in Jane Austen’s Early Works’ explores male figures in Austen’s juvenilia, remarking ‘how young men in these works display passivity and expose their lack of readiness to operate as patriarchal men in society’ (p. 14). Part II, ‘Masculinity, Honor, and Feeling’, consists of three chapters. Megan A. Woodworth’s ‘ “I could meet him in no other way”: Duelling, the Culture of Honor, and Modern Masculinity in Sense and Sensibility’ contends that Austen critiques this practice as ‘an antiquated yet extant patriarchal system … that allows men to use women as a mechanism for constructing their honor’ (p. 14). Natasha Duquette’s ‘The Sensibility of Captain Benwick in Literary and Historical Context’ explores ‘changing historical expectations for the naval officer’ which she also ‘identifies in Austen’s sailor siblings’ (p. 15). Enit K. Steiner’s’ ‘ “Till he began to stagger her”: Literary Men and Melancholia’ explores the ‘trope of the literary man’, ‘highlight[ing] the effects of reading on masculinity and … the male lover’ (p. 15). Part III, ‘Male Sexualities and Desires’, has only two chapters. Carol Siegel and Bryce Campbell’s ‘Empire of the Sensible: Disciplining Love and the 1990s Austen Craze’ investigates the role of Austen as ‘romantic advisor’ at the end of the twentieth century, ‘evaluat[ing] women’s search for a proper husband in a variety of novels and film adaptations (p. 15). Zachary Snider’s ‘Austen’s Dandies: Frank Churchill and Henry Crawford Play Dress Up’ contends that ‘the fin-de-siècle period associated with Oscar Wilde’ has been overemphasized, obscuring antecedents of the dandy figure that are visible in Austen’s novels. Part IV, ‘The Men of Austen’s Afterlives’, gathers together three chapters that analyse male figures in Austen’s adaptations in ‘contemporary culture’ (p. 15). Lisa Hopkins’s ‘Waltzing with Wellington, Biting with Byron: Heroes in Austen’s Tribute Texts’ contends that spin-off novels ‘repeatedly revert to two male icons—Lord Byron and the Duke of Wellington’ (p. 15). Rebecca White’s “What a man should be”: (Re-)Imagining Austenian Masculinity in Film and YouTube Fanvids’ points out that Internet adaptations ‘accentuate the sexuality and eroticism of Austen’s men, complicating her fictional representation of masculinity’ (p. 16). Jason Solinger’s ‘Virginia Woolf and the Gentlemen Janeites, or the Origins of Modern Austen Criticism, 1870–1929’ focuses on ‘a definite tradition of Austenolatry’ and on Virginia Woolf’s way of ‘approaching her writing’ (p. 16). Finally, Part V, ‘Film, Music and Masculinity’, comprises two chapters. Gayle Magee’s ‘Performing to Strangers: Masculinity, Adaptation, and Music in Pride and Prejudice (1995)’ illustrates ‘the role of music in developing Darcy’s character and his relationship with Elizabeth’ (p. 16). Linda Zionkowski and Miriam Hart’s ‘Austen, Music, and Manhood’ concludes the volume, arguing that ‘a sincere appreciation of music is vital to the development of mature masculinity’ (p. 16). They explore in particular the characters of Mr Collins, Edmund Bertram, and Frank Churchill. The achievement of this collection of essays lies not only in the analysis of masculinities in Austen’s six novels, but also in its emphasis on ‘the wealth of popular representations of Austen’s male figures in contemporary culture’ (p. 17). Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind, edited by Beth Lau, explores Austen’s six novels and juvenile works under the lens of cognitive literary studies, viewing her novelistic mode as particularly apt to be scrutinized under this theoretical frame. Austen’s character construction shows a profoundly perceptive awareness of how the human mind acts and reacts to others, both in successful and awry situations. Lau also contends that cognitive and historicist literary approaches can be used productively together. The volume comprises ten chapters. William Nelles’s ‘Austen’s Juvenilia and Science of the Mind’ explores Austen’s representation of characters’ consciousness in her early works, which she then developed into a feature of greater complexity in her mature novels. Beth Lau’s ‘Catherine’s Education in Mindreading in Northanger Abbey’ maintains that, for Austen, the most important trait of a young lady entering the world is her capacity to understand other people’s intentions. Alan Richardson’s ‘Jane Austen and the Perils of Mental Time Travel’ evaluates Austen’s overlapping of memory and imagination, which anticipated current discoveries in the field of brain science. Wendy Jones’s ‘Mapping Love in Mansfield Park’ investigates the experience of love, differentiating between attachment, romance, and sexual desire though also noticing that these systems rarely operate singularly but rather overlap, though one may dominate the others. Kate Singer’s ‘Austen Agitated: Feeling Emotions in Mixed Media’ differentiates between emotions, which are expressed physically by changes in heart palpitations and facial expressions, and feelings, which represent a more conscious expression of one’s emotions. Austen, Singer explains, pauses the narrative when characters still have to translate their emotions into feelings. Matt Lorenz’s ‘Pride and Prejudice and Social Identity Theory’ draws on social identity theory to distinguish between characters that strongly identify with the group to which they belong and those who feel a low level of group identity. In Pride and Prejudice, Lorenz remarks, Elizabeth Bennet, on the one hand, seems to be a low identifier and willing to express her individuality, but at other times she also reacts against high-status members, defending her family group. Bethany Wong’s ‘ “My Fanny”: The Price of Play’ considers Fanny Price’s inability to play as due to her experience of deprivation during childhood, as the urge to play is inhibited when an individual does not feel nurtured and safe. Natalie Phillips et al.’s ‘Patterns of Attention and Memory in Jane Austen’ draws on literary neuroscience using functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate differences in the brain activity of individuals who read selected parts of Mansfield Park. This study brings attention to two different modes of reading: close reading and pleasure reading. Patrick Colm Hogan’s ‘Persuasion: Lessons in Sociocognitive Understanding’ uses theory of mind to explore the reason of error either for emotional or information-processing biases which, Hogan explains, combine in Austen’s novel. Kay Young’s concluding chapter, ‘Resilience and Jane Austen’, explores what Anne Elliot in Persuasion defines as ‘elasticity of mind’. Young contends that, though addressed directly only in her last novel, this trait is a feature that characterizes all Austen’s heroines, as they appear to grow in response to a moment of crisis through self-reflection. This trait, Young points out, is what contemporary mind-brain science identifies as resilience. Jonathan Farina’s ‘Inductive “Attention”: Jane Austen in “Particular” and in “General” ’ (pp. 38–93), in his monograph Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain, contends that, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet acknowledges a growing interest during the Romantic period in complex characters that do not necessarily show a correspondence between action and moral interiority. In a dialogue with Mr Bingley, Farina explains, Elizabeth actually admits that intricate and complex characters whose actions do not match a noble soul are more entertaining and fascinating. Countering Charlotte Brontë’s famous opinion that Austen did not engage in the construction of deep characters as she was apparently more preoccupied with aligning with a general consensus of polite behaviour and manners, Farina contends that ‘Austen’s prose habitually induces particularities or particulars to adapt to or correct a general consensus, always with a sense that meaning, truth, or moral value originate in abstract collectives external to individuals’ (p. 40). William H. Galperin’s ‘Histories of the Present and the Historicity of the Present: Mansfield Park, Emma, Jane Austen’s Letters’ (pp. 73–99), in his The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, focuses on the ‘difference between Austen’s version of history … and the more traditional view in which only great actions and events stand in palpable relief’ (p. 74). Galperin contends that ‘the “history” that ordinary women are capable of making’ in Austen’s novels reflects her ‘view of history as something made everyday’ (pp. 74–5). Stuart Burrows’s ‘The Privatization of Public Life: Free Direct Discourse in Persuasion’ (Romantic Circles Praxis Series (RCPS) [Feb. 2017]), in ‘The Prose of Romanticism’, edited by Yoon Sun Lee, argues against the idea that free indirect discourse is ‘a means of making public what should ideally remain private’, as Franco Moretti contends in his recent study on the bourgeoisie, who views Austen’s use of this narrative technique in Foucauldian terms as ‘stylistic Panopticon’ (para. 2). Burrows remarks that this view misrepresents Austen’s ideas of society, as ‘public and private life in Austen’s fiction are less easily opposed than the surveillance model of criticism suggests’ (para. 2). Burrows contends that Austen’s characters are actually ‘less on display in public than we might imagine, since they may be said to be under the protection of the narrative itself’ (para. 2). The Jane Austen journal Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]), edited by Susan Allen Ford, focuses on the impact that Jane Austen is still exercising on the second decade of the twenty-first century, visible in the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of her death with a ten-pound note. The theme that led the annual gathering JASNA, Allen Ford explains, was ‘Jane Austen in Paradise: Intimation of Immortality’, a title alluding to both Rudyard Kipling’s comic poem ‘Jane’s Marriage’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (‘Editor’s Note’, para. 1). Specifically, Allen Ford points out that the series of essays presented has a major focus on ‘pain and redemption, death and afterlife, time and timelessness, not only on Austen’s fiction but also on her literary predecessors and the transforming energies of her readers and adapters’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017] para. 4). In the same ‘Editor’s Note’, Ford observes that the issue of Persuasions On-Line ‘also shows how Jane’s fame has expanded beyond boundaries of drawing room or country village or nation or even language’ (para. 5). In ‘An Early Reader of Austen in North America: Christian, Countess of Dalhousie’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]), Juliette Wells discusses her latest discoveries regarding the Philadelphia edition of Emma published in 1816, during Austen’s lifetime, of which only six copies have survived. Wells remarks that while some copies only bear evidence of the owner’s identity, others ‘shed light on the responses of Austen’s early American readers’ (para. 2), and she focuses in particular on the copy owned by the countess of Dalhousie. Beth Lau’s ‘Northanger Abbey and Sexual Selection: Genetic Immortality’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) explores how the plain, not-so-appealing, naive female protagonist Catherine Morland manages to marry Henry Tilney, ‘a man of superior wealth and status’ (para. 1). Lau maintains that evolutionary psychology, namely how ‘the human mind evolved via natural and sexual selection to solve problems our ancestors faced in order to ensure our survival and pass on our genes to subsequent generations’ (para. 2) can explain ‘the rationale for the courtship behaviour depicted in Austen’s novels’ (para. 2). Lau remarks that even though Catherine appears to have some difficulties in seeing through others’ deception and dishonesty, she ‘displays unerring good sense in her evaluation of potential mates’ (para. 8). Wendy Jones’s ‘Marianne in Therapy’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) contends that the popularity of Austen’s novels is due to the author’s ability to portray characters that resemble ‘psychological states and interpersonal relationships that her readers easily recognise’ (para. 1). Jones notes that, in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood is one instance, as she ‘suffers and recovers from a bout of major depression, brought on by her beloved suitor Willoughby’s heartless rejection’ (para. 2). Jackie Mijares’s ‘Mrs. Jennings and “The Comfortable Estate of Widowhood,” or The Benefits of Being a Widow with a Handsome Jointure’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) argues that Austen was well aware of the potential financial comfort a woman could derive from being a widow with property. Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility is one such example, ‘a well-off widow who is free to act on her own behalf and on the behalf of others in her fictional world’ (para. 1). Mijares contends that Austen’s widowed characters show ‘a degree of feminine authority and freedom’ that would not have been considered ‘appropriate in married women’ (para. 2). Esther Moon’s ‘ “Almost too good for me”: The Seasoning of Anne Elliot’s Idealism’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) contends that, in Persuasions, Austen depicts a female protagonist who has to surmount the errors committed when 19 years old in order to become the mature heroine she is at the end of the novel, thus ‘offering the reader insight into both Anne’s growth and the means by which the reader can grow towards her seasoned idealism’ (para. 1). Even though Anne was influenced by Lady Russell not to marry Wentworth, Moon explains, it was still Anne’s choice, ‘a self-interest she must give up in order to be equal to her happy ending’ (para. 2). Maureen B. Collins’s ‘The Law of Jane: Legal Issues in Austen’s Life and Novels’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) observes that Austen’s novels mirror the legal questions of her time, portraying issues related to ‘[m]arriage, property, inheritance, adoption, contracts, and crime … [thereby] reflect[ing] the legal conventions of the day’ as well as Austen’s ‘own experience’ (para. 1), as ‘Austen’s own brush with the criminal justice system came in the form of an aunt’s trial for the theft of a card lace’ (para. 12). Austen’s novels also depict the law of primogeniture, according to which property had to pass ‘to the eldest son on the death of the father’ (para. 22). When the line of inheritance ‘failed to produce descendants or descendants were not of the right sex … the land would pass to another more distant line of the family’ (para. 22). This procedure was called ‘entailment’ and ‘the Bennet family’s Longbourn estate in Pride and Prejudice’, Collins contends, is one of the ‘most famous entailment[s] in literature’ (para. 23). In ‘Before It Was All About Mr. Darcy: Nineteenth-Century Views of Austen’s Characters’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]), Sayre N. Greenfield and Linda V. Troost point out that ‘[w]hat people thought and wrote about Jane Austen in the nineteenth century may … help expand our understanding of the novels’ (para. 1). In fact, at that time, Greenfield and Troost remark, Austen was ‘valued not for her romantic heroes and heroines but for her comic creations’ (para. 1), while our modern appreciation of Austen’s ‘romantic protagonists’ has been in part influenced ‘by the television and film adaptations’ (paras 2–3). Peter W. Graham’s ‘ “I Want to Be a Scavenger”: A Conversation with Whit Stillman’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) arises from Graham’s interviewing ‘the acclaimed director and screenwriter’ at the JASNA AGM on Friday, 6 October 2017, ‘before a showing of Love & Friendship, Stillman’s 2016 film version of Jane Austen’s edgy epistolary novella, Lady Susan’ (para. 1). In the interview, which is here transcribed, they discuss Stillman’s fascination of Austen’s novels as well as ‘manners, morals, sense, and style of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture’ (para. 1). Susan Allen Ford’s ‘The Immortality of Sense and Sensibility: Margaret’s Tree House, Edward’s Handkerchief, Marianne’s Rescue’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) takes William Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ as a starting point for her analysis of Austen’s novel. According to Allen Ford, Wordsworth’s poem deplores the loss of the celestial vision through which we see the world when we come into this life and which we lose when growing into adulthood. Wordsworth’s Ode, Allen Ford continues, ‘also celebrates our compensatory ability to remember’, thereby proving to be an ideal tool for mapping out ‘the prehistory as well as the afterlife of Sense and Sensibility’ (para. 1). Specifically, two recent theatrical adaptations as well as ‘Emma Thompson’s 1995 film version’ of Austen’s novel, Allen Ford explains, show elements not present in the novel which, nonetheless, have ‘become attached to our collective memory of what constitutes Sense and Sensibility’ (para. 2). Monica Alvarez’s ‘Deciphering Mr. Darcy: Gendered Receptions through Time’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) questions whether Austen’s Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is the same hero after 200 years or whether he has, ‘chameleon-like, changed with time’s passing’ (para. 1). Alvarez speculates on whether feminism has impacted on our current understanding of this male character, as well as whether it has ‘taught us to delight in and/or deplore him’ (para. 2). Alvarez contends that ‘Austen firmly anchors Darcy’s masculinity in female needs and desires’ (para. 3), reflected in her ‘laconic textual version’ closer to ‘the rugged yet genteel Victorian man more than the polished, polite gentleman of the eighteenth century’. The nineteenth-century hero, Alvarez explains, is reflected in ‘the inscrutable hero of contemporary movie adaptations’ (para. 3). Maria Clara Pivato Biajoli’s ‘Jane Austen, Heroine: Looking for Love’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) points out that Austen’s popularity as a romantic novelist has contributed to erase in the public’s mind Austen’s acute social criticism of her time as well as her ‘acute perception of gender roles in her society’ (para. 1). Biajoli remarks that modern adaptations tend to include Austen as a character in need of experiencing a romance on the assumption that ‘she couldn’t have written her novels without having experienced a love story’ (para. 2). Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim’s ‘Sex, Love, and Austen: Was It Good for You?’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) contends that since Colin Firth’s interpretation of Darcy, wearing a wet shirt, in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, ‘fiction inspired by Austen’s third novel has banked on its ability to depict sexual tension and romantic desire’ (para. 2). In their essay, Nachumi and Oppenheim explore ‘sex and desire in Pride and Prejudice, in the 1995 BBC adaptation, and in a selection of novels written in the wake of Colin Firth’s dive’ (para. 4). Their aim is to investigate how ‘Austen’s narrative style incites the libido’ which is mirrored in the traces of Austen’s original as well as in the traces of Austen’s adaptations in subsequent texts (para. 4). Mary Gaither Marshall’s ‘Jane Austen’s Sanditon: Inspiring Continuations, Adaptations, and Spinoffs for 200 Years’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) remarks that Austen’s change of literary style and the slow unfolding of her last, uncompleted, novel might explain the reason why until 1975 there have been only three adaptations or continuations of the novel. Even if Austen wrote twelve chapters, Gaither Marshall remarks that ‘the direction of the plot was not clear, thus making it difficult for any future writer to conclude the work’ (para. 4). In her essay, Gaither Marshall explores the incomplete continuation of the novel by Austen’s niece, Jane Anna Austen Lefroy, Alice Cobbett’s Somehow Lengthened. A Development of ‘Sanditon’ [1932], and Sanditon by Jane Austen and Another Lady [1975]. Jocelyn Harris’s ‘ “Behold me immortal”: Jane Austen on the Internet’ (Persuasions On-Line 38[2017]) maintains that the digital age is certainly contributing to making Jane Austen eternal through the wide range of resources available on the Internet. Harris points out that ‘databases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers and journals, digitized manuscripts, online books, blogs, and search engines all open up cultural and historical contexts that bring her to life’ (para. 1). Most importantly, Harris continues, digital resources open up a plethora of new knowledge on Austen that was unthinkable with research carried out in physical archives until very recently and that ‘we do indeed inhabit a golden age of scholarship about the immortal Jane Austen’ (last para.). In the ‘Miscellany’ section of Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) there are a few essays on the eponymous novel, an article concerned with two recent exhibitions that have taken place at Austen’s Chawton House Library, and a few more essays dealing with Austen’s heroes and heroines and their gender roles in the Regency period. In ‘Reimagining Reputations: 2017 at Chawton House Library’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]), Gillian Dow, Kim Simpson, and Catriona Seth offer an overview of two exhibitions: the first on Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) ‘one of the most infamous writers of the early eighteenth century’ (para. 5); the second on Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), who died in the same year as Austen. This exhibition in particular, the authors argue, ‘re-established often neglected, but vital cross-channel links and correspondences between women writers at the end of the long eighteenth century’ (para. 6). Karen Thomson’s ‘Mrs. Musgrave of Newton Priors? Jane Austen and Sir Isaac Newton’s Library’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) explores a joke about the name of a character, ‘Newton Priors’, in a novel written by Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy, herself an aspiring writer who enjoyed her aunt’s epistolary feedback on her writing. Thomson proposes ‘an explanation for this levity’ by ‘uncovering unexplored material relating to Jane Austen’s early life’, ‘at the same time suggest[ing] possible sources for some of the characters in the novels’ (para. 2). Christopher O’Brien’s ‘Jane Austen’s Early Death in the Context of Austen Family Mortality’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) establishes whether Austen’s death at 41 years is ‘what we would expect for the time (late eighteenth and early nineteenth century) and place (England)’ or whether her ‘early death’ was ‘an exception to the usual experience of the family’ (para. 1). O’Brien contends that a middle-class family like the Austens, who avoided living in the city where the rate of mortality was high, ‘would have lower mortality than average’ (para. 9). The cause of Austen’s death remains unsolved, O’Brien explains; nonetheless, ‘[w]hat is unknown is whether there was some link between Jane’s poor health and early death and the rest of the Austen family’ (para. 10). Sara Tavela’s ‘ “I have unpacked the gloves”: Accessories and the Austen Sisters’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) contends that, unlike the portrayal as a recluse offered ‘in the biographical notice’ of ‘her final publication’ by her brother Henry and in the memoir written by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen ‘was present and interested in what the world, and especially the world of fashion had to offer’ (para. 1). Tavela remarks that Austen’s knowledge of the world is evident in both her fiction and letters, where she appears to fill various roles, from ‘fashion critic’ to ‘seamstress and embroiderer, a consumer of fashion and accessories, a social commentator, and, most importantly, a sister who illuminates the world and its intricacies in the way that only she can’ (para. 1). Juliet McMaster’s ‘ “Destined … for the sea”: The Hero of “Catherine, or the Bower”?’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) speculates on how the young Jane Austen may have thought of completing the love story of this unfinished novel. Esra Melikoğlu’s ‘James Rushworth as the Fop of Uncertain Origin on and off Stage in Austen’s Mansfield Park’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) suggests that ‘Austen uses the political figure of the fop and fop-as-pretender to show that the notion of the born gentleman and his inherent prerogative is ultimately not tenable’ as neither of them could at the time verify ‘their claims to birth and/or fortune’ (para. 2). Melikoğlu points out that, in Mansfield Park, Rushworth’s ‘reliance on ostentatious appearance’ to prove his birth exposes him ‘to be a product of discourse and performance’ (para. 2). Furthermore, Melikoğlu explains, Rushworth’s theatrical activities in Austen’s novel support ‘the idea that the identity of the gentleman is not naturally given but the product of role-playing’ (para. 2). Gillian Dooley’s ‘ “My Fanny” and “A heroine whom no one but myself will much like”: Jane Austen and Her Heroines in the Chawton Novels’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) explores the strategies that Austen exploits to highlight ‘the distance between her own authorial persona and her heroines’ perspectives in the three Chawton novels’, adding Sanditon to the list (para. 2). Dooley remarks that there is a stark contrast between the confident, sharp, and witty Austen in the letters to her sister Cassandra and the ‘pious’ and ‘unambitious’ lady depicted by her brother Henry and nephew James, arguing that for most readers the real Austen lies in the voices of her narrators. Rosetta Young’s ‘A Robert Martin, a Jane Fairfax, and an Anne Cox: Miss Woodhouse’s Indefinite Logic in Emma’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) contends that the titular character of Austen’s Emma exploits the rhetorical device of ‘putting an indefinite article in front of another person’s name’ such as ‘a Mrs. Weston’ or ‘a Miss Taylor’ in order ‘to consider abstractly the social identities of others’ (para. 1). Yet, Young explains, ‘Emma’s indefinite logic does not lead her to a deeper understanding of personhood and subjectivity but instead signals to the reader Emma’s incoherent conception of identity’ (para. 1). Aubrey Lively’s ‘Fancy the Errors: Friendship Dramatized through the Intersubjectivity of Free Indirect Discourse’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) counters some modernist writers’ underestimation of Austen’s literary achievements such as, for example, D.W. Harding and Henry James, who collocated Austen at the ‘feminine, easy-to-read’ end of a spectrum of novels, with ‘the high modernists’ at the top (para. 1). Kailey Rhone’s ‘ “I wanted to be doing something”: Freudian Sublimation and Regency Gender Roles in Persuasion’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) notes that after ending her engagement with Frederick Wentworth, Anne Elliot represses her love for the hero by ‘sublimating her sexual longing in a societally approved way’ (para. 4) since, as an unmarried woman in her late twenties, Regency society demanded that ‘her primary concern … be caring for her family’ (para. 4). Paul Wray’s ‘Persuasion: Why the Revised Ending Works So Well’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) concurs with the majority of critics on the superiority of Austen’s revised end to Persuasion, arguing that the original manuscript ‘reverses the confidence that Anne Elliot’s character has been gaining since the accident at Lyme’ (para. 2). Juliette Wells’s ‘A Note on Henry Austen’s Authorship of the “Biographical Notice” ’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) questions the assumed authorship of the ‘Biographical Note’ by Austen’s brother in both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, arguing that in actuality there is no evidence that he wrote it. Ashley Harbers’s ‘The Sympathetic Impulse: Duty and Morality in Emma and North and South’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) compares Jane Austen’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s views of sympathy in these novels, written respectively in 1816 and 1854, ‘as a means of engaging broader social questions’ (para. 2). Harbers contends that while Emma ‘invites readers to contemplate how individuals should and could respond to their changing world’, North and South illuminates the impact of such social transitions on both the individual and wider society’ (para. 2). Shao Yi’s ‘Misinterpreting Jane Austen? A Feminist Perspective on the Chinese Versions of Pride and Prejudice’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) discusses four version of Austen’s most popular novel in China since its first appearance in 1935: Wang Keyi’s version of 1954; Sun Zhili’s of 1990; Zhang Ling and Zhang Yang’s of 1993; and Zhang Jinghao’s of 2005, contending that Keyi’s 1954 and Zhili’s 1990 versions are the most reputable in China, having been praised academically as well as republished ‘over the past years’ (para. 3). Sarah Schaefer Walton’s ‘iAnne: Rethinking Persuasion in the Age of Transmedia Adaptation’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) focuses on the online versions of Austen’s novels following the success of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved. Walton remarks that the most recent Project Persuasion, ‘featuring as its central text the blog “Half Hope,” raises a number of questions regarding primarily textual transmedia adaptations and their ability to bring Austen’s world and characters closer to modern day readers’ (para. 1). The blog’s power to decrease the distance between author and reader, Walton explains, ‘improves’ as ‘a consequence … of the interactivity of the epistolary-like transmedia form, which lends itself to adapting Austen’s Persuasion in ways that other media (film, for example) do not’ (para. 1). Misty Krueger’s ‘The Sitting with Jane Art Trail: Celebrating Jane Austen, Basingstoke, and Literary Tourism’ (Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) describes the artistic initiative of the ‘non-profit company Destination Basingstoke’, which commissioned a few artists to design a series of book-shaped benches to be placed around the area before being sold at auction in September 2017 ‘to raise money for charity’ (para. 1). The book bench series, Krueger contends, ‘artistically captured the joys of reading Austen’s works’ while ‘temporarily reshap[ing] the Austen tourist landscape’ (para. 2). The last work in the Miscellany section of Persuasions On-Line (38[2017]) is Deborah Barnum’s ‘Jane Austen Bibliography, 2016’, which gathers in five sections Austen’s novel editions, biographical and critical works, dissertations, sequels, and adaptations published in 2016. One special issue dedicated to Austen also appeared in 2017: Textus: English Studies in Italy 30[2017] presented an issue entitled ‘Subversive Austen: From the Critic to the Reader’, edited by Serena Baiesi, Carlotta Farese, and Katie Halsey. In the introduction (Textus 30[2017] 7–18), the editors describe the special issue as representing ‘the ongoing need to challenge the still influential critical paradigm depicting Austen as a conservative author’, and the essays contained within it ‘examine aspects of Austen’s subversiveness and exemplify the ways in which her work challenges established moral and social conventions through the means of irony, parody and satire’ (p. 7). In her preface (Textus 30[2017] 19–29), Beatrice Battaglia considers the ‘Subversive Austen’ critical tradition, and reviews key milestones of this tradition. She sees Austen’s subversiveness as primarily located in the novelist’s use of parody and irony, a theme also taken up in the essays by Olivia Murphy, Massimiliano Morini, Anne Toner, Katie Halsey, and Diego Saglia later on in the special issue. In ‘The “Queerness and the Fun”: Reading Jane Austen’s Volume the First’ (Textus 30[2017] 31–51), Olivia Murphy discusses some of Austen’s earliest works as epitomizing her lifelong subversive project. In Austen’s juvenile writings, Murphy suggests, we can hear her authentic riotous, anarchic, and subversive voice. Murphy’s intelligent analysis shows us a mischievous Austen who is nonetheless ‘radically antagonistic to all preconceived rules upon which fiction operates’ (p. 32). In addition, Murphy argues, Austen’s parodic reworkings of the fictional genres she knew are political: they ‘demand, insistently, that women be permitted a greater degree of power, and a broader range of experience’ (p. 49). Katie Halsey’s article, ‘The Books Sir Edward Denham Doesn’t Read: Jane Austen’s Literary Jokes’ (Textus 30[2017] 53–69), also considers Austen’s treatment of gender, power, and writing in the unfinished Sanditon. Through a discussion of Austen’s literary jokes and allusions, Halsey argues that Austen’s literary allusions represent some of her most comical and subversive moments. She demonstrates that Austen frequently re-genders reading stereotypes to make the subversive point that ‘women may well be the intellectual superiors of the men who patronize them’ (p. 65) and that Austen’s allusions to the circulating-library novel and to histories reveal her resistant and oppositional attitudes towards the hierarchies of gender and genre of her period. Rachel M. Brownstein, too, in ‘Caricatures and Characters: James Gillray and Jane Austen’ (Textus 30[2017] 71–93), focuses on Austen as satirist, and her essay discusses Austen and the caricatures of James Gillray. Brownstein argues that part of Austen’s artistic achievement was to convince her readers that the subversive activity of laughing at the neighbours has a moral and civilizing function, and that this aspect of her work has much in common with Gillray’s. Through a discussion of Sense and Sensibility, Brownstein considers the function of Austen’s caricatures, and comes to the conclusion that ‘artists like James Gillray and Jane Austen teach you to see things—and people—as you might not have seen them otherwise’ (p. 91). Diego Saglia explores Austen’s depictions of Englishness and English national manners. He argues that Englishness in Austen’s period was not a stable concept; instead, national identity was a multifaceted and mutable category. Saglia’s article, ‘Revisions of Englishness: Jane Austen and the Discourse of National Characters’ (Textus 30[2017] 95–112), examines the ways in which Austen questioned constructions of national manners, and, especially, ideas of a monolithic and regimented Englishness, through discussion of Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. In Saglia’s analysis, Austen’s fiction represents Englishness as both cohesive and multiple. Austen treats Englishness ‘as a locus for the definition of identity through comparison and contrast’ (p. 110), and hence provides a subversive ‘plurality of opportunities for imagining the manners of the nation’ (p. 110) in contrast to the notion of a fixed, essential Englishness that she is more commonly thought to embody. In ‘Genre-Bending at Mansfield Park: The Remediation of Austen’s Female Characters across Novel, Theatre and Film’ (Textus 30[2017] 113–28), Carlotta Farese examines the complex intertextual relationships between Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows, Mansfield Park, and Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film version of the novel, arguing that Austen’s novel is much bleaker and more complicated than its two intertexts. Where Mansfield Park shows us the ‘dark side’ (p. 119) of Jane Austen, Rozema’s controversial film paradoxically returns us to the lighter mode of the sentimental comedy of Lovers’ Vows, even while it highlights the slavery question. Farese suggests that Austen’s text subverts both generic and societal expectations, and reveals the impositions of patriarchal authority. In ‘Jane Austen’s Irony: Lost in the Italian Versions of Pride and Prejudice’ (Textus 30[2017] 188–217), Massimiliano Morini considers Italian translations of Austen’s novels and concludes that Italian readerships are presented with an Austen from whom the ironic subversiveness has been largely stripped away. Film and television adaptations of Pride and Prejudice become doubly tame when dubbed into Italian, he contends. It is no wonder, then, that in Italy readers encountering such translations in conjunction with the offerings of the Austen industry (tea-sets, cushions, jewellery), continue to perceive Austen as ‘an inoffensive spinster, drawing delicate portraits of the society of her time’ (p. 206). Similarly, Roberta Grandi’s investigation of three non-Hollywood filmic adaptations suggests that these adaptations tend to highlight the preservation of traditional values in Austen’s work, rather than its subversive, oppositional, or rebellious qualities. In ‘World Austen: Tradition and Empowerment on the Screen’ (Textus 30[2017] 129–45), Grandi argues that these films do nonetheless foreground female empowerment, hence to some extent recognizing Austen’s potential for insubordination. These films, Grandi argues, are ‘polymorphic’, made up of ‘a call for the rediscovery of traditional and moral values’ at the same time as they present a seemingly incompatible invitation to women to ‘experiment independently with new ways to achieve happiness and self-realization both in their love and working life’ (p. 142). Serena Baiesi turns to the subject of spin-offs, examining Michael Thomas Ford’s 2010 vampire novel Jane Bites Back as an example of modern subversive re-mediations of Austen. In her article, ‘New Performances of the Past: Jane Austen as Subversive Vampire in New York’ (Textus 30[2017] 147–66), Baiesi argues that Ford’s novel presents an ‘oppositional’ (p. 162) Austen, including intertextual references which ‘wink at Austen’s more famous critics’ (p. 162) in order to make fun of ideas of Austen’s conservatism or propriety. In her essay, ‘Free Speech: Jane Austen, Robert Bage, and the Subversive Shapes of Dialogue’ (Textus 30[2017] 167–87), Anne Toner explores Austen’s experimental use of free direct speech alongside the work of Robert Bage, the Radical Jacobin novelist, to suggest that elements of Austen’s style could be considered politically radical. Toner argues that Austen’s use of free direct speech aligns her with political subversives such as Bage. ‘Austen may, in the end, disallow unambiguous political messages to be drawn from her fiction’, Toner concludes, but nonetheless, ‘she dramatizes a freedom of mind and purpose that is undoubtedly, and with immense subtlety, endorsed by the layout of her page’ (p. 181). A number of articles on Austen have appeared in various other journals, providing subtle analyses of her narrative techniques, modern adaptations, use of Shakespeare, and financial issues. Helena Kelly’s ‘Another Early Comparison between Jane Austen and Harriet Martineau’ (N&Q 64[2017] 613) maintains that the reviews of Martineau’s novel Deerbrook, published in 1839, compared this fictional work to Austen’s oeuvre very favourably. Kelly argues that that the review that appeared in Bell’s Weekly Messenger of Saturday, 13 April depicted Miss Austen ‘as “a writer of the very first class of genius” ’, and contends that ‘[t]his review offers additional information on the reception of Austen’s novels in the years after the publication of her six major works in Bentley’s cheap Standard Novels series in 1833’. Brian Boyd’s ‘Does Austen Need Narrators? Does Anyone?’ (NLH 48[2017] 285–308) disputes the accepted dogma that ‘all narratives must have a narrator distinct from the author … endors[ing] instead the Optional Narrator thesis’ (p. 285). Boyd argues that ‘without a purpose for introducing a character who narrates, readers, critics, and theorists have no reason to suppose a fiction has any narrator other than its author’ (p. 285). Boyd sets as an example Austen’s Emma to demonstrate that the insistence on distinguishing between narrator and author ‘obscures how fiction works’ as well as ‘the inextricable link between the invention and the presentation of a story’ (p. 287). In the case of Emma, Boyd explains, Austen appears as both ‘inventor and narrator of the novel’, as she invites the reader ‘to engage fully’ with ‘the characters and their situations’, without precluding the reader’s ‘engagement with her in creating the characters’ (p. 291). Olivia Murphy’s ‘ “A future to look forward to”? Extinction and Evolution in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ (ECLife 41[2017] 154–70) contends that ‘works by [Charles] Darwin and Austen betray their shared interest in the ideas of romantic-era geologists and biologists’ (p. 154). Darwin admired Austen’s works, and the characters of her novels are often cited in his correspondence to refer hilariously to real persons in his life. On the other hand, Murphy remarks that even though Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, in the early nineteenth century Austen too was influenced by contemporary scientific discoveries, as this was ‘a time in which the sciences in general, and geography and natural history in particular, were beginning to be stressed as important and valuable to the education of young ladies’ (p. 157). Murphy points out that Austen’s interest in evolutionary theory is shown by her ‘extensive use of Lyme Regis as a setting’ (p. 159) in Persuasion, which at the time when Austen wrote her novel was ‘a noted source of fossilized organisms’ with a local ‘industry’ selling such items ‘to the tourists’ (p. 159). Sydney Miller’s ‘How Not to Improve the Estate: Lopping and Cropping Jane Austen’ (SNNTS 49[2017] 431–52) considers the array of contemporary zombie and monster sequels of Austen’s novel, arguing that such texts ‘fail to contribute anything to the original texts’ (p. 432). Miller remarks that ‘the campy extremity of the monstrous mash-ups works to illuminate Austen’s own Camp sensibility; but in calling attention to the inherent campiness of Austen’s prose, the derivative texts only further signal their own inferiority’ (p. 432). Christopher Toner’s ‘Jane Austen on Practical Wisdom, Constancy, and Unreserve’ (P&L 41[2017] A178–94) draws on Aristotle’s claim of the unity of the virtues, according to which ‘practical wisdom depends upon moral virtue’ and vice versa (p. A179). Toner contends that ‘defects of character can corrupt … the ability to judge correctly … what relationships with which people are worthwhile’ (p. A180). In the particular case of Austen, Toner points out that in her novels ‘what is worthwhile centrally involves understanding what a good home is … an enduring place in a relationship, or in a network of relationships, founded on love and respect’; Toner remarks that ‘Austen’s characters typically secure such a place through a good marriage’ (p. A180) which, however, in Austen’s mind does not equal a choice ‘influenced by avarice, vanity, or pride’ (p. (A 180) which she critiques through the character of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. Chris Mounsey’s ‘Henry Crawford as Master Betty: Jane Austen on the “Disabling” of Shakespeare’ (ECF 30[2017] 265–86) maintains that, in Mansfield Park, Austen ‘ironizes’ ‘the contemporary sentimental attitude to both acting and theatre’, ‘offering instead Shakespeare’s tale of Lear in a less sentimental and therefore more believable version to guide readers’ morals’ (p. 268). In particular, Mounsey explains, Fanny Price’s weak body stands for Cordelia’s, ‘which suffers for refusing to say the words expected of her’ (p. 268), shown in Fanny’s refusal to join the players in Mansfield Park. Fanny also stands for Catherine of Aragon, ‘condemned by people with false motives’ (p. 268), when she refuses to marry Henry Crawford. Mounsey argues that Fanny Price’s determination to keep her moral values, ‘despite her enfeebled body’, is a trait that makes her a true heroine. Erin Stackle’s ‘Jane Austen Aristotelian Proposal: Sometimes Falling in Love Is Better than a Beating’ (P&L 41[2017] A195–212) counters the Aristotelian argument according to which beating improves the wrong behaviour of the offender through feeling pain. Stackle contends that only virtuous friendship contributes to change but vice might not allow one to recognize virtuous friends. Only falling in love, Stackle explains, can really enlarge one’s improvement because finding an appropriate partner is rare and one would thus feel motivated to change for the better in order to retain the person found. Stackle contends that this is what Austen promotes in Pride and Prejudice, as here she shows that ‘falling in love can convert to virtuous friendships characters otherwise likely to remain blinded in vice’ (p. A202). Stackle maintains that both Elizabeth and Darcy have character flaws, vanity and arrogance respectively, that prevent them from building a true friendship, and that both need to overcome them in order to build a safe and sound marriage. Janine Barchas and Elizabeth Picherit’s ‘Speculations on Spectacles: Jane Austen’s Eyeglasses, Mrs. Bates’s Spectacles, and John Saunders in Emma’ (MP 115[2017] 131–43) points out that the John Saunders Miss Bates mentions, when talking to Frank Churchill about her mother’s spectacles in need of repair, was a real ophthalmic surgeon active in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century at St Thomas’s and Guy’s hospitals in Southwark, who, in addition, opened the Infirmary for Curing Diseases of the Eye in Bloomfield Street, Moorfield, a charity that treated the poor. Barchas and Picherit contend that Austen herself might have met the famous surgeon as she was affected by conjunctivitis from her early twenties. As Austen ‘so memorably asserted [that] “an artist cannot do anything slovenly” ’, Barchas and Picherit explain, ‘her mention of a prominent medical name in Emma during a conversation about eyeglasses must be a knowing nod, not an accident’ (p. 133). Drawing on Irene Collins’s Jane Austen and the Clergy, Azar Hussain’s ‘Mrs Austen’s Finances—A Reassessment’ (N&Q 64[2017] 594–602) points out that, in Austen’s time, ‘[t]he church made no provision, financial or otherwise, for clergy widows’ (p. 594). Hussain explains that ‘[a] clergyman’s wife would be uneasily aware of the fact that should her husband die before her, she may well find herself without an income and indeed perhaps without anywhere to live, as her husband’s home would be the property of his successor’ (pp. 594–5). This was the fate that Jane Austen’s mother and her daughters had to deal with on 21 January 1805, when the Revd George Austen died. Hussain points out that the Austen women’s lot is mirrored in the Dashwood ladies of Sense and Sensibility as well as in Miss Bates’s fate in Emma who, as Mr Knightley points out, ‘is poor … has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she lives to old age, must probably sink more’ (p. 602). Megan Quinn’s ‘The Sensation of Language in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ (ECF 30[2017] 243–63) argues that Austen’s novel promotes a strong link between language and the body, contrary to the majority of critics who view her as pristine and traditionally detached ‘from the body except in its tidiest forms’ (p. 243). Quinn observes that, according to D.A. Miller, one of such critics, the apparent ‘secret’ of Austen’s ‘style’ ‘comes from Austen’s abjection from the marriage plot … “the injured utterance of a woman and spinster” ’ (p. 244). On the contrary, Quinn maintains that Austen was aware of the gamble that marriage represented for most women, ‘who risked death with every pregnancy and who became dissolved in their husbands’ bodies under coverture’ (p. 244). In a letter, Austen advices her niece Fanny Knight to delay mothering if she wants to keep her youth, as for Austen, ‘marriage is synonymous with bodily decline, and being single, at least for a time, is synonymous with bodily vigour’ (p. 244). Mary Beth Tegan’s ‘Training the Picturesque Eye: The Point of Views in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ (ECent 58[2017] 39–59) remarks that very few critics have explored ‘the relationship between landscape representation and narrative point of view’ in Austen’s novels, ‘despite the suggestive confluence between visual spectatorship and the narrative voice that observe and comments’ (p. 39). Considering the unusually long description of Lyme Regis in Persuasion, Tegan’s essay explores ‘Austen’s persuasive use of focalization and free indirect discourse … by considering the various spectatorial stances eighteenth-century seers might take, and what those stances suggest about knowledge, cultural authority, and feeling’ (p. 40). Tegan explains that, in this scene, Austen acquaints the eye of the reader with a picturesque depiction of Lyme, highlighting the sights that a stranger’s eye would seek. Yet Tegan points out that in the Lyme Regis scene the heroine is not the default focalizer, and that ‘Austen’s strangely felt presence … is a function of the “sentimental look” with which she regards it’ (p. 46). Gillian Dooley’s ‘A Most Luxurious State: Men and Music in Jane Austen’s Novels’ (ES 98[2017] 598–607) observes that in Austen’s fiction the art of playing music is in women’s hands, while men are appreciative listeners who often fall in love with the lady they admire performing. In the period when Austen published her work, English masculinity was undergoing a crisis related to various historical circumstances such as the ascendancy of the merchant class and the European wars. Dooley investigates the interactions between music and masculinity which Austen’s novels show. Simone Broders’s ‘The Fast and the Curious: The Role of Curiosity in the Gothic Heroine’s “Grand Tour of the Mind” ’ (ES 98[2017] 917–30) contends that in the eighteenth century, female curiosity was stigmatized as gossip. Broders’s article places Radcliffe’s novels in the discourse of knowledge, thereby offering a new reading of female curiosity as a positive consequence of the heroine’s mobility in the novel, either by way of invitation, escape, or abduction. Broders contends that the female Gothic never satisfies the implied reader’s curiosity, a technique that produces a self-reflection which is ridiculed in Catherine, the reader of Gothic stories in Northanger Abbey. Daniela Garofalo’s ‘Doating on Faults in Jane Austen’s Emma’ (ERR 28[2017] 227–40) contends that this novel explores powerless women in order to trigger a sense of communal loss in the audience. The titular character tries to help dispossessed women by matching them with potential wealthy husbands. Garofalo particularly focuses on the psychological concepts of fantasy and drive, suggesting that Emma’s wedding with Knightley at the end of the novel is triggered by her wish to experience loss and the recognition that social authority cannot be justified. Frances Burney has attracted the criticism of two scholars. Lisa Zunshine’s ‘Bakhtin, Theory of Mind, and Pedagogy: Cognitive Construction of Social Class’ (ECF 30[2017] 109–26) discusses the ideological formation of class in Frances Burney’s Evelina [1778] by drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, according to which the representation of a character’s dialogue whose language is distant from what is conventionally considered the norm exposes the author’s critical attitude towards forms of social hegemony. Zunshine uses Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination in combination with cognitive literary theory, engaging in close reading of selected extracts of Burney’s novel in order to expose the dynamics of social class in the eighteenth century. Kandice Sharren’s ‘The Texture of Sympathy: Narrating Sympathetic Failure in Frances Burney’s Camilla and The Wanderer’ (ERR 28[2017] 701–27) re-evaluates the experimental narrative mode of Burney’s two final novels, which were not received enthusiastically by the readers of her time. Sharren contends that Burney’s narrative techniques in Camilla and The Wanderer show the influence of a shifting discourse at the time about the nature of sympathy. Burney’s experimentalism, Sharren explains, was a way to push the reader’s capacity to sympathize with the heroines in order to critique the main and restrictive type of sympathetic engagement of the time. Maria Edgeworth has been the focus of a few book chapters and articles. Matthew L. Reznicek’s ‘He Should Go to the Théâtre: Paris, the Theater, and Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond’ (in Corporaal and Morin, eds., Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 141–62) observes that Edgeworth’s representation of Paris in her last novel, published in 1817, was fundamentally influenced by her period in the city between 1772 and 1773, when she was there with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who enjoyed the circle of the philosophes, particularly the Abbé André Morellet, as well as Rousseau and d’Alembert. Reznicek contends that ‘the philosophes and Ormond share a significant and unexplored relationship with the French theater of the Enlightenment that sought to form a moral community which would extend into the broader cityscape’ (p. 142). Michael Falk’s ‘Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman and the World of The Absentee’ (JLLC 63[2016] 107–22) applies the innovative digital technique of ‘character network analysis’ to Edgeworth’s great Irish novel, The Absentee [1812]. Recently scholars have debated the relative importance of the ‘domestic novel’ and the ‘network novel’ in fiction of the period. By modelling The Absentee as a network graph of character interactions, Falk attempts to show that in fact these two kinds of novel are really aspects of a single genre, the Bildungsroman. Edgeworth’s protagonist, Colambre, is a ‘network’ hero, who reduces the distance between other characters in the graph, binding people together across class lines and national borders. At the same time, he is a ‘domestic’ hero, who undergoes a learning process and achieves a superior understanding of society’s true structure. Victoria Warren’s ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda: A Dialogue with Alexander Pope’ (ECF 30[2017] 539–69) explores the intertextualities with Pope’s long poems The Rape of the Lock [1712, 1714, 1717], An Epistle to a Lady [1735], and An Essay on Man [1733–4] in Edgeworth’s novel in order to counter what some critics have defined as Edgeworth’s ‘unquestioning’ adoption of ‘patriarchal views’ (p. 540). Instead, Warren remarks that Pope is a real presence in Belinda and that in this novel Edgeworth ‘does not simply reflect Pope’s ideas, but actively responds to them, sometimes agreeing, but also correcting, clarifying, and critiquing his theories’ (p. 540). Katherine Gustafson’s ‘Assimilation and Indeterminacy: Moral Tales for Young People, Belinda, and Edgeworth’s Destabilizing Fictions of Maturity’ (ECF 29[2017] 635–61) remarks that, contrary to scholars who argue that Belinda inhabits domestic femininity, the eponymous heroine actually engages with early nineteenth-century discourses and forms of the novel and moral tale in order to experiment with different ‘modes of conduct’ and then find her own voice and identity within those educational modes. Finally, Andrea Selleri’s ‘Possible Echoes of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in Oscar Wilde’s Works’ (N&Q 64[2017] 137–9) suggests that, although there is no evidence that Wilde ever read Edgeworth’s works, The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890–1] shows ‘some verbal and thematic echoes’ (p. 137) of Belinda. Selleri finds a few similarities between the character of Lady Delacour in Belinda and that of Henry Wootton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, as both engage in a sort of ‘melodrama and society comedy’ (p. 137). Selleri notices how some ‘thematic oppositions’ such as ‘cynical light-heartedness versus deep anguish, youth and beauty versus corruption and death’ are shared by the two novels. Three articles on William Godwin are also worthy of attention. Adam Sneed’s ‘Caleb’s Unreasonable Doubt’ in ‘Romanticism and the Rights of the Negative’, edited by Tilottama Rajan (RCPS [June 2017]), explores the legal ramifications of doubt and desire as addressed by William Godwin in his novel Caleb Williams [1794]. Sneed argues that Godwin’s novel explores how doubt arranges legal investigation, informing contemporary notions about the concept ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ in anglophone law, when dealing with legal judgement under uncertainty. Rowland Weston’s ‘Chivalry, Commerce, and Generosity: Godwin on Economic Equality’ (ECLife 41[2017] 43–58) explores Godwin’s ‘vehement objection to private property and economic inequality’ (p. 43) in his historical novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century [1799]. Weston maintains that Godwin engages in contemporary discourses on commercial society as the ultimate phase of social development, which usually represent medieval culture as backward. Weston contends that for Godwin commercial society too had failed its democratic ambitions, inherent in what was considered to be one of chivalry’s pivotal qualities: namely, the exercise of ‘generosity’. A final essay, Tilottama Rajan’s ‘ “Something not yet made good”: The Tropology of the Negative in Godwin’s Mandeville’ (RCPS [June 2017]), investigates the excessive sense of negativity that Godwin’s fourth novel, Mandeville [1817], exhibits. Set in the seventeenth century at the time between the Civil Wars and the English Revolution, Godwin’s work is ‘a novel of stalled revolution and psychic war’ (para. 1). Through Mandeville, Rajan explains, Godwin draws a parallel in ‘the similarities between the time of the novel and Godwin’s own period … includ[ing] the parallel politics of the Restoration and Regency as simulations of settlements’ (para. 5). Two essays on Scottish author James Hogg (1770–1832) have appeared in ‘The Prose of Romanticism’, edited by Yoon Sun Lee. The first is Matthew Wickman’s ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Hogg’s Art’ (RCPS [Feb. 2017]), which explores how Hogg engaged with the notion of spiritual in his long poem The Queen’s Wake [1815] and his supernatural novel The Three Perils of Man [1822]. Wickman argues that Hogg did not downgrade the experience of ‘spiritual intensity’ to cultural difference as his mentor and rival, Walter Scott, did. On the contrary, Wickman remarks, in his works Hogg invokes ‘the presence of spirits’ (para. 4), and he ‘did so from under the aegis of both religion (whether fanatical or moderate)’ as in the case of his experimental novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824], and ‘folk culture’ (para. 4). In The Three Perils of Man, Wickman explains, ‘by way of traffic with spirits … it is not civil society that Hogg places on trial as much as literature itself, specifically the modern concept of the literary as a species of imaginative writing set against a normative sphere of everyday life’ (para. 5). The second essay, Anthony Jarrels’s ‘James Hogg and the Medium of Romantic Prose’ (RCPS [Feb. 2017]), foregrounds prose rather than poetry in the recent media turn of Romantic studies as a ‘privileged site for understanding how questions about medium and mediality feature in the writing of the period’, and he does so by focusing on Hogg’s tales, as this author not only recognized a profound ‘affinity between metrical and prose composition, but also understood ballads and tales to be versions—interchangeable, in a sense—of one another’ (para. 4). An essay on the importance of the military novel within ideals of the modern nation is also worth attention. Neil Ramsay’s ‘ “To die as a soldier”: The Vital Romance of the Military Novel’ (JECS 40[2017] 579–96) re-values this novelistic genre, usually considered by critics as a subset of the historical novel. Ramsay explores Thomas Hamilton’s Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton [1827], arguing that though he shaped it on Scott’s historical novelistic mode, Hamilton created a new genre which gave emphasis to the soldier’s afflicted and distressed body, thereby promoting an alternative version of military honour for the nation. Two essays discuss the importance of the Minerva Press during the Romantic period. Minerva was a popular publishing house which was denigrated by contemporary critics as the promoter of a type of low-quality literature for an uneducated, emerging readership. Christina Morin’s ‘Irish Gothic Goes Abroad: Cultural Migration, Materiality, and the Minerva Press’ (in Corporaal and Morin, eds., pp. 185–204), re-values this popular printing house as, between 1790 and 1826, it contributed to publishing a wide range of Irish fiction by Irish émigré authors, whose writing was thus disseminated in Britain, Europe, North America, and the British colonies at a time when the Irish print industry had been weakened by the application of English copyright law after the Anglo-Irish Union in 1801. Morin points out that, although contemporary critics dismissed this publishing house as promoting low-quality Gothic literature aimed at undiscriminating middle- and lower-class readers, today’s critics view the Minerva Press as pivotal for the study of literary historiography at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Christina Morin’s ‘ “At a distance from [my] country”: Henrietta Rouvière Mosse, the Minerva Press, and the Negotiation of Irishness in the Romantic Literary Marketplace’ (ERR 28[2017] 447–60) likewise engages in the particular case of this female Irish author, who emigrated to London when faced by the death of her literary patron which put her career under serious threat. Morin explains that similar circumstances were experienced by many other Irish authors, who felt compelled to share the same migratory destiny in order to be able to publish. An essay on Amelia Opie is also illuminating with regard to the representation of unconventional female agencies in the Romantic period. Teresa M. Pershing’s ‘Unbecoming: Desire and Futurity in Amelia Alderson Opie’s Dangers of Coquetry’ (ERR 28[2017] 571–84) explores an alternative femininity in Opie’s novel, contending that the portrayal of Louisa’s coquetry exposes a type of woman which threatened the political agenda of the family and the nation in planning the future. Louisa is given the opportunity to marry, but the institution of marriage, Pershing remarks, fails to contain her emotional and erotic desires, thereby challenging the eighteenth-century myth that marriage would limit female agency. In Opie’s novel, Louisa’s death, Pershing argues, represents the supreme rejection of heteronormativity. Two essays on Sydney Owenson reposition this female author within contemporary philosophical and nationalistic discourses. Patrick R. O’Malley’s ‘Owenson’s “Sacred Union”: Paramnesiac History in The Wild Irish Girl’ (pp. 59–80), in his monograph Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland, remarks that Horatio’s epistolary account of Ireland in Owenson’s novel ‘interweave[s] personal and national history through the lens of an incipient ethnology’ (p. 60). O’Malley explains that ‘Horatio views the Irish through the eye of one who has become a historicist through the approach of the ethnologist’ (p. 60; emphasis original). Horatio’s ‘historio-ethnological account’, however, is influenced by the memory of a description he learnt during his childhood that shows a ‘false misrepresentation of Ireland’ and that Horatio needs ‘to forget’ in order ‘to construct a new historiography’ (p. 60). Miranda Burgess’s ‘Sydney Owenson’s Strange Phenomenality’ (RCPS [Feb. 2017]) analyses Owenson’s complex syntax, both in her essays and in her novels, as a way through which the author explored philosophical questions of sensation and life, distancing herself from the assumption of a common-sense philosophy of perception, according to which life’s events need to be related to reality and show a definite structure. On the contrary, Burgess contends that Owenson’s syntax reflects her idea of life as continuous, unstructured movement of discovery of the self. Three essays on Ann Radcliffe focus on this author’s engagement with the urban space, transgressive female sexualities, and her legacy to the Victorians. Adam Edward Watkins’s ‘Environmental Self-Making and the Urbanism of Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho’ (ERR 28[2017] 585–600) stresses the importance of the influence of the urban environment on Radcliffe’s novel not so much as a place of dissipation but, rather, as a necessary catalyst for the subjectivity of her characters and their mental life based on medical, educational, and travel writing of the period. Stephanie Russo’s ‘Rewriting Radcliffe in the Age of Victoria: Sarah Harriet Burney’s The Romance of Private Life’ (GS 19[2017] 73–90) notices that Burney’s work shares more traits with the novels of the 1790s than those of the early Victorian period, as Burney constantly remarks on its deviance from the typical Gothic plot on the one hand, while relying on this plot to structure the two stories in her volume. ‘The Hermitage’ is a murder mystery while ‘The Renunciation’ highlights the thinking process typical of later Gothic modes, more characteristic of the works of the Brontës and Dickens. Russo contends that Burney’s story reframes the fiction of the late eighteenth century for the Victorian period. Jeremy Chow’s ‘Mellifluent Sexuality: Female Intimacy in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest’ (ECF 30[2017] 195–221) engages in the possibility of a covert transgressive sexuality in Radcliffe’s novel, which is hinted at by the metonymic use of the lute, a musical instrument that in the eighteenth century symbolized eroticism, female intimacy, and sexual pleasure. Chow contends that in Radcliffe’s novel the lute symbolizes what was then considered transgressive sexuality between the two female characters, Clara and Adeline, even though the end of the novel resettles them within the boundaries of heteronormative discourse. Walter Scott has attracted a large number of critics with a monograph, a collection of essays, and various articles and book chapters. Robert Mayer’s Walter Scott and Fame: Authors and Readers in the Romantic Age discusses important themes which were pivotal to Scott’s career as a writer of the Romantic period. These are ‘relations between an author and his readers, the nature of authorship, the claims of the reader, and the nature and meaning of fame’ (p. 2). In his exploration of Scott’s public fame, Mayer focuses particularly on ‘his literary correspondence, specifically the collection of letters written to Scott that are held in the national Library of Scotland (NLS), as well as Scott’s own letters’ (p. 3; emphasis original). These letters, Mayers explains, ‘allow us to see how various individuals understood authorship and authority at the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (p. 3). Mayer remarks that ‘Scott understood literary greatness not only in terms of creative achievement but also in terms of the capacity of a writer to manage, even command, the prodigious literary marketplace of his day’ (p. 4). Most importantly, Mayer explains, the Scott’s correspondents viewed him as a ‘model, for what it meant to produce and consume literary art in the modern world’ (p. 4). Scott corresponded with people both in Britain and around the world who might be his ‘intimates’, examined in chapter 2, ‘colleagues’, dealt with in chapter 3, ‘clients’, treated in chapter 4, or ‘fans’, discussed in chapter 5 (pp. 21–4). Mayer points out that of particular interest are the women writers with whom Scott corresponded, such as Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, and Anna Seward, as well as the reflections on contemporary dynamics between author and reader that Scott’s rich archive provides. David Buchanan’s The Historical Novel and Effective Communication, 1814–1901 is relevant to studies on Walter Scott and Christobel Johnson, a Scottish author contemporary with Scott. Here, significant for the Romantic novel and its legacy in North America in the period between the 1820s and the 1830s, are the introduction and the first four chapters. In the introduction, Buchanan remarks that Walter Scott’s Waverley [1814] was able to offer what his contemporary readership craved, romance, and what Robert Alves encouraged in his Sketches of a History of Literature [1794], that is, the value of history in fiction. This combination, Buchanan contends, is what made Waverley particularly successful among early critics. Considering the fact that the genre of the historical novel is rather difficult to define, Buchanan focuses instead on how this genre has contributed to answering the question of what it means to be modern. The writers that Buchanan explores describe both the effects of modernization and how people responded to such changes. Drawing on theories of semiotics and linguistics according to which meaning is dependent on use, Buchanan views the historical novel as a flexible and reflective novelistic genre. As readerships constantly change, so publishers have to adapt to a new market. This is why Buchanan concentrates on how writers reshaped the historical novel and how publishers responded to new demands. Chapter 1, ‘Meaning-Making: A History of Reading Practices’, provides a history of reading from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the present. Chapter 2, ‘The Heart of the Matter: Consequences of Modernity in Clan Albin and Tales of My Landlord’, evaluates how Christian Isobel Johnstone and Walter Scott responded to the effects of modernity in Scotland. Chapter 3, ‘Nation of Readers: Chapbook Versions of The Heart of Midlothian’, explores how chapbooks readapted this expensive text for a less privileged audience in Britain. Chapter 4, ‘How the West Was One: Historification from Waverley to The Pathfinder’, explores how British Waverley-esque novels were transformed for a North American audience during the 1820s and 1830s by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms. Unavailable for review but of pivotal importance to new perspectives on Scott studies is Walter Scott: New Interpretations, edited by Susan Oliver (YES 47[2017]). The book groups the essays in five sections: Section I, ‘Walter Scott: Transmission and Afterlives’, gathers Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s ‘Six Degrees from Walter Scott: Separation, Connection and the Abbotsford Visitor Books’, Annika Bautz’s ‘The “Universal Favourite”: Daniel Terry’s Guy Mannering; or, The Gipsey Prophecy (1816)’, and Céline Sabiron’s ‘Handing Over Walter Scott? The Writer’s Hand on the English and French Marketplace’. Section II, ‘Theoretical Approaches and Genre’, clusters Evan Gottlieb’s ‘Vanishing Mediators and Modes of Existence in Walter Scott’s The Monastery’, Matthew Wickman’s ‘ “In contrast to those whom we have called materialists, Mr. [Scott] is spiritual”: On Scott and Woolf, Romance and “Fullness of Life” ’, and Fiona Price’s ‘The Politics of Fear: Gothic Histories, the English Civil War and Walter Scott’s Woodstock’. For Section III, ‘Scott’s Poetry’, see Section 3 below. Section IV, ‘History and Sites of Conflicts’, joins together Nigel Leask’s ‘Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and the Ossian Controversy’, Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s ‘ “The right of mercy”: The Royal Pardon in The Heart of Midlothian’, and Carla Sassi’s ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Caribbean: Unravelling the Silences’. The last part, Section V, ‘Literary Geographies and Ecocriticism’, groups together Penny Fielding’s ‘ “All that is curious on continent and isle”: Time, Place, and Modernity in Scott’s “Vacation 1814” and The Pirate’, Graham Tulloch’s ‘Scott, India and Australia’, and Susan Oliver’s ‘Trees, Rivers, and Stories: Walter Scott Writing the Land’. A few articles reposition the complex role of Scott within a British ideology of nationalism. Patrick Thomas Henry’s ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Transgression of Anachronistic Borders: The Ideological Fantasy of Westphalian Sovereignty in The Talisman’ (ERR 28[2017] 203–25) points out that Scott’s works reveal that Scottishness was an essential element in the project of Great Britain. Henry contends that the problems arising from the British Union derived from Westphalian visions of sovereignty, as the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia supported the idea that the power of a state was only limited by its geographical borders. Contrary to this vision, Scott’s novel The Talisman, by imposing the nation-state model on a Crusaders’ camp in Palestine during the twelfth century, exposes the porous borders of such a camp, thereby revealing the failure of Westphalian views of nation-state and sovereignty. Dani Napton and A.D. Cousins’s ‘Corporeality and the Corporate in Walter Scott’s Characterization of James VI and I in The Fortunes of Nigel’ (Expl 75[2017] 59–61) points out that Scott’s representation of this monarch emphasizes his physicality. In this novel, Scott presents the king as both an individual person and as the representation of the body politic. Scott does not portray James in positive terms, putting the focus on the king’s indecorum. Yet, Napton and Cousins contend, Scott conveys a realistic portrait of James which, though not flattering, ‘cautiously rehabilitates both his person and his reign’ (p. 59). Luke Terlaak Poot’s ‘Scott’s Momentaneousness: Bad Timing in The Bride of Lammermoor’ (NCL 72[2017] 283–310) engages with a secondary character in Scott’s novel, Dick Tinto, the painter who suggests the narrator should use less dialogue and more description. Poot highlights the fact that Tinto articulates a painting technique devised by Henry Fuseli, an artist who was very popular at the time when Scott’s novel was published, in 1819. Poot explains that Fuseli worked out a painting mode called ‘momentaneous’, representative of a specific moment between a clear past and future, from which the narrative can be inferred. Poot maintains that this technique is visible in Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and that it helps to explain the novel’s pessimistic vision of history as well as its fatalistic narrative mode. Mary Shelley always attracts a good number of critics who engage in the legacy of her two most popular novels, Frankenstein [1818] and The Last Man [1826], for current scientific and environmental debates. Of great relevance to Mary Shelley studies are the introduction and chapters 4 and 5 of Robert K. Weninger’s Sublime Conclusions: Last Man Narratives from Apocalypse to Death of God. Weninger’s introduction (pp. 1–41) traces apocalyptic narratives from the Bible to the supreme device of mankind’s self-annihilation, ‘the atomic bomb’ (p. 41), passing through Shelley’s novels The Last Man [1826] and Frankenstein [1818], in order to question ‘whether the human species will survive on planet Earth or annihilate itself through technologies of its own contriving’ (p. 1). Weninger’s book engages with three types of ‘terminal narratives’: one where mankind is shown to be eradicated by ‘man-made technologies’; another where the end of the world is determined by ‘some cataclysmic natural event such as a lethal pandemic or a devastating comet strike’ (p. 1); and a third where humankind survives such apocalyptic scenarios, at the cost, however, of ‘existing in a state of perpetual anxiety and apprehension, awaiting our possible terminal extinction without knowing when or even whether it will occur’ (p. 2). Weninger discusses the ultimate example of man’s annihilation by nature in chapter 4, ‘Atheism, Science and Religion 1811/1826: The Shelleys and the Death of Man’ (pp. 252–357), contending that Shelley’s novel The Last Man ‘creat[ed] the blueprint for nature’s paradigm’, while Frankenstein represents the expression of man’s ‘self-eradication through the technological machinery he himself has concocted’ (p. 3). In chapter 5, ‘ “The Earth void of man”: Variations on a Theme 1945 and Beyond Sublime(?) Conclusions’ (pp. 358–469), Weninger discusses ‘literary portrayals of Victor Frankenstein’s descendants as they cope specifically with the twentieth century’s discovery of the ultimate tool of mankind’s self-eradication, the atomic bomb’ (p. 41). David Higgins’s ‘Geohistory, Epistemology, and Extinction: Byron and the Shelleys in 1816’ (in his British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene, pp. 55–108), explores Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein together with Byron’s and P.B. Shelley’s poems, letters, and journals in order to analyse ‘their reflections on the vulnerability of human communities living with uncontrollable geophysical and climatic forces, the entanglement of human and nonhuman nature, and the possibility of human extinction’ (p. 55). Byron and the Shelleys, Higgins points out, experienced the unusual climatic conditions brought about by the eruption of Tambora in the summer of 1816, during which time they were at Villa Diodati in Geneva. This event contributed in important ways to their creativity, generating reflections on contemporary scientific debates that challenged anthropocentrism, such as, for example, cataclysmic events that could destroy human existence or ideas about deep time in which non-humans were present. Higgins explains that ‘the writing of Byron and the Shelleys show a profound attempt to make sense of a universe in which the human species seemed to be in danger of moving from the centre to the margins’ (p. 61). Beatrice Turner’s ‘Mary Shelley’s “Beloved Lessons”: Performing and Deforming Family Feeling’ (in her Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820–1850, pp. 135–80) offers an overview of Shelley’s less well-known fiction: her novella Matilda [1820]; her children’s story Maurice; or, The Fisher’s Cot [1820]; and her two late novels, Lodore [1835] and Falkner [1837]. Turner contends that these works provide ‘a form of resolution to the reproductive failures of the earlier works’, offering ‘a restaging of the relationship between fathers and daughters both within, and without, the limits of the family unit’ (p. 137). Jenifer Buckley’s ‘Romantic Imagination and Maternal Guilt in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (in her Gender, Pregnancy and Power in Eighteenth-Century Literature, pp. 241–75) contends that in her novel Shelley draws on the seventeenth-century discourse of maternal imagination, according to which a pregnant woman had the ability to alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Buckley contends that, in Frankenstein, Shelley draws on this discourse in order ‘to critique the concept of maternal imagination and to censure the associated culture of maternal guilt’ (p. 242). Buckley remarks that ‘Victor’s mistake’ in creating the monster by selecting ‘features for the creature that should be “beautiful”, but prove [instead] to be distorted visions of his original vision’ (p. 242) appears to be similar to ‘the mistake of an overly imaginative mother, who has been captivated by a beautiful image only to transmit that image, in flawed form, to her developing foetus’ (p. 243). A few articles focus on Shelley’s legacy and adaptations of her works. John Robbins’s ‘ “It Lives!”: Frankenstein, Presumption, and the Staging of Romantic Science’ (ERR 28[2017] 185–201), reviewed in Section 4 below, explores the stage adaptation of Shelley’s novel, considering the influence of contemporary scientific developments. Katherine Bowers’s ‘Haunted Ice, Fearful Sounds, and the Arctic Sublime: Exploring Nineteenth-Century Polar Gothic Space’ (GS 19[2017] 71–84) investigates the allure of polar spaces in Gothic texts set in Arctic and Antarctic space. Bowers engages with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, setting a framework for polar Gothic that ‘includes liminal spaces, the supernatural, the Gothic sublime and imperial Gothic anxiety about the degradation of “civilization” ’ (p. 71). Jennifer Deren’s ‘Revolting Sympathies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’ (NCL 72[2017] 135–60) maintains that, in her novel, Shelley portrays a type of sympathy that ends up being revolting rather than beneficial, in order to expose a type of human closeness as out of control, unprincipled, and contagious. Deren contends that in the portrayal of the novel’s plague, Shelley critiques the fact that the sympathy that infuses nineteenth-century politics of nation-formation and community can also generate violence alongside beneficial relationships. Fuson Wang’s ‘The Historicist Turn of Romantic-Era Disability Studies, or Frankenstein in the Dark’ (LitComp 14[2017]) repositions Shelley’s use of blindness in her novel. While literary critics interpret this as symbolic of deeper insight, disability studies critics consider it an exploitative plot device. Positioning Frankenstein within Enlightenment theories of blindness, Wang provides a more nuanced analysis of Shelley’s use of this form of impairment in her novel, both literally and metaphorically. Wang points out that ‘Frankenstein shuts his eyes against the creature’s potential beauty, and the creature gropes in the dark for an account of his perceived ugliness’ (p. 5). Yet at the centre of the novel lies ‘an actual blind man’ who is set in dialogue with both Frankenstein’s and ‘the creature’s abstract Enlightenment blindness’ (p. 6). The creature is profoundly disappointed because ‘De Lacey’s sighted family members return and chase the creature away’, thus thwarting any possible tolerance in the novel. Yasmin Solomonescu’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Fascinations: The Last Man’ (MP 114[2017] 702–25) contends that contemporary reviewers critiqued Shelley’s failure to keep the reader’s interest. They suggested that the novel was characterized by rare moments during which time the spell of verisimilitude was unbroken. Solomonescu remarks that these reviewers might have unwittingly pointed out one of the novel’s ‘significant achievements’ (p. 705). The novel in fact reaches out to some of the most intriguing themes of the Romantic period, namely ‘fascination’, a ‘trancelike condition’ with which Shelley engages in order to think about emotions. In The Last Man, Solomonescu explains, ‘plague … follows closely on a series of devastating fascinations that occupy the first part of the novel, almost as their apotheosis’ (p. 707). J.E. Young’s ‘Perdita’s Cottage: Mary Robinson in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s The Last Man’ (N&Q 64[2017] 83–6) argues that in addition to her stepsister Claire Clairmont, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley also drew on her contemporary Mary Robinson, particularly for the character Perdita. Hyewon Shin’s ‘The Spectre of Orality in Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl’ (SNNTS 49[2017] 538–58) engages with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster [1995], ‘a hypertext rewriting’ of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shin notices that while Frankenstein represents the ‘Romantic individualistic Promethean self’, Patchwork Girl evokes the postmodern ‘fragmentary’ and ‘hybrid’ identity of the self (p. 538). In her essay, Shin explores a Gothic element shared by both works, as ‘the two texts conjure up the specter of the old: the residual orality that haunts literature and disrupts writing technology, both print and electronic’ (p. 538). Shin explains that while ‘Frankenstein is the paradoxical product of Shelley’s anachronistic desire to be a storyteller at the height of print technology’ (p. 539), as shown by the epistolary mode of the novel with embedded tales, in Patchwork Girl ‘the computer becomes a prosthetic storytelling device enabling man-machine collaboration … occur[ring] not through spontaneous communication but as a result of computer programming’ (p. 539). An article on Charlotte Smith is also relevant to studies in the Romantic novel. Derek T. Leuenberger’s ‘ “Their only protector and support”: Protection and Dependency in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House’ (ERR 28[2017] 139–61) suggests that the American adventures of the male protagonist, Orlando Somerive, voice Smith’s preoccupation with the economic and social dependency experienced by the financially and politically vulnerable in eighteenth-century Britain. Leuenberger explains that the unstable situation experienced by Orlando in North America, when captured by a group of Iroquois warriors, mirrors feminine dependence. Mary Wollstonecraft is the final author considered in this section on the Romantic novel. An important monograph on Wollstonecraft appeared in 2017. Deborah Weiss’s The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformation of Feminism, 1796–1811 explores Wollstonecraft’s influence on four contemporary female writers: Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, arguing that ‘Wollstonecraft’s generation responded in finely differentiated ways to her work as a whole and to her legacy, and that in doing so, they used the resources of the novel to construct a more politically moderate and pragmatic form of feminism’ (p. 2). Weiss points out that Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Right of Woman [1792] does not really propose any particular rights for women to be observed, apart from their right to be enfranchised or to enter the professions, focusing instead on women’s ‘education, manners, and moral character’ (p. 3). Yet what was revolutionary in Wollstonecraft’s writing, Weiss explains, was her conception ‘of women as an unjustly underdeveloped segment of mankind’ (p. 3). Wollstonecraft’s book, Weiss notices, created the figure of the ‘female philosopher’, ‘an intellectual radical, dedicated to facilitating rapid, far-reaching social change’ (p. 4). Yet Weiss explains that Wollstonecraft’s notorious biography, published by her husband William Godwin after she died, by revealing her sexual affairs and attempts at suicide, contributed to the negative reception of Wollstonecraft in the years to come, transforming her ‘into the personification of an English Jacobinism that threatened the home and the wider society’ (p. 5). Most importantly, Weiss points out, Wollstonecraft was ‘[r]esurrected in anti-Jacobin fiction’ and transformed into a ‘caricature’ symbolizing ‘reprehensible conduct born of ungovernable passions and unforgivable principles’ (p. 5). Weiss’s book, however, does not explore the writers who countered Wollstonecraft, nor does it investigate those who outspokenly supported her idea. Rather, Weiss analyses Wollstonecraft’s more moderate contemporaries, who ‘developed an accommodating, pragmatic form of feminism, better suited to the post-Enlightenment, post-Revolutionary age’ (p. 7). These writers, Weiss explains, developed a ‘non-parodic female philosopher—an alternative literary figure that allowed them to refurbish feminist thought for a more conservative age’ (p. 8). This figure, Weiss argues, appeared in the novels written by Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen. The heroines of such novels are characterized by ‘their conviction that their intellectual lives are important to their own moral development and to social progress more broadly’ (p. 9). These writers chose the novel as the literary mode through which to explore the moral, philosophical and psychological implications of this moderate type of feminism through the outcome of characters’ actions and reactions. Weiss maintains that these female writers contributed to transforming the novel from a minor genre to ‘the dominant form of moral investigation in the nineteenth century’ (p. 10). Two articles also engage with Wollstonecraft’s novelistic creations. Rachel Seiler-Smith’s ‘Bearing/Barren Life: The Conditions of Wollstonecraft Morbid Maternity’ (ERR 28[2017] 163–83) is reviewed in Section 1 above. Kathryn Temple’s ‘Heart of Agitation: Mary Wollstonecraft, Emotion, and Legal Subjectivity’ (ECent 58[2017] 371–82) considers the notion of ‘agitation’ in Wollstonecraft’s non-fiction writing, with which the author engaged to describe her private emotions in her love letters to Gilbert Imlay as well as to articulate her sense of outrage at women’s inequality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]. Temple points out that Wollstonecraft transposed the same ‘discourse in which agitation made a political (and critical) statement of its own’ onto ‘the legal context of her final novella, Maria, where emotional and political agitation were bound together to create a new form of legal subjectivity’ (p. 374). 3. Poetry The last forty years have seen a significant expansion of Romantic studies, as new authors, genres, and national traditions have entered the scholarly consciousness. Julia Wright takes stock of these developments in ‘Irish Romanticism: “Whence and What are Ye?” ’ (ERR 28[2017] 421–30). Wright argues that studies of Romanticism have been dominated by English practices, as English practices have dominated much else in world civilization over ‘most of the last millennium’ (p. 425). This claim may be somewhat overstated, but her description of a different Romantic chronology, in which that annus mirabilis of Irish literature, 1811, is at the centre, is intriguing and well argued. We still have a way to go, she suggests, before our university curricula offer students a truly global Romantic poetry. The opening essay in this year’s volume of Studies in Romanticism aims to critique another limitation of academic Romanticism. ‘Black Romanticism: A Manifesto’ (SiR 56[2017] 3–14) is Paul Youngquist’s call for a new kind of academic activism: ‘what can we do?’ (p. 3), he asks, having sketched the brutal context of black deaths in the contemporary USA. What Romanticists can offer, he argues, is a radical critique of ‘the ethnoclass Man’ (p. 5). Romantic literature itself is implicated in the creation of this monolithic concept that rules out alternative ‘genres of the human’ (p. 5). Through a reading of ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ [1803], Youngquist sets out to demonstrate how the ‘weapons’ and ‘strategies’ of ‘black Romanticism’ (p. 14) can be used to stage a radical critique of Romantic poetry’s implicit racial biases. Pam Perkins takes a practical approach to widening the scholarship in ‘ “She has her ladies too”: Women and Scottish Periodical Culture in Blackwood’s Early Years’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 253–61). Women were essential to Maga’s development, both as subjects of the essays—for example Mary Shelley and Germaine de Staël—and as writers in its pages—for example Felicia Hemans and Anne Grant. In this detailed essay, Perkins demonstrates how complex were the magazine’s engagements with women writers and readers. A series of articles in 2017 continued the old tradition of interpreting canonical Romantic poets within their literary coteries. Madeleine Callaghan offers a piece on ‘Byron and Shelley’s Poetry of 1816’ (WC 48[2017] 26–32). This was a crucial year in both poets’ development, as they met, dissented, and found fertile soil in their differences. Shelley found a new ‘artistic direction center[ed] on transforming experience into poetry’ (p. 26), while Byron clarified his sense of ‘the singularity of the mind which experiences’ (p. 29). For Callaghan, these two friends model a particular kind of literary coterie, united in creative disagreement rather than common purpose. Byron was also capable of artistic agreement with his friends, as Justin Tonra shows in ‘Pagan Angles and a Moral Law: Byron and Moore’s Blasphemous Publications’ (ERR 28[2017] 789–811). Since Jeffrey Vail’s pathbreaking study of The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (JHUP[2001]), scholars have paid increasing attention to the close, creative, and harmonious partnership of Byron and Moore. Tonra offers a close comparison of Moore’s Loves of the Angels [1822] and Byron’s Cain [1821], supplementing Vail’s analysis of Loves with Byron’s Heaven and Earth [1821]. Tonra analyses his examples in their legal and publishing contexts. As poets who pushed the bounds of taste, Moore and Byron were enmeshed in the same ‘complex matrix of legal and commercial perspectives’, a matrix that ‘b[ore] very directly on questions of authorship and notions of authorial identity, autonomy, and stability’ (p. 798). To evade the guardians of good taste, they had to reinvent themselves ceaselessly. Tim Fulford focuses on the other great canonical literary coterie in ‘Southey’s Christabel; Coleridge’s Thalaba’ (ERR 28[2017] 659–77). This fine article is not an essay, but rather an edition of an obscure manuscript by Robert Southey. It turns out that, in 1800, Southey wrote a few hundred lines of verse responding to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ [1797, 1800], lines he intended for Thalaba [1801]. Fulford reproduces the lines, carefully explicates their textual history, and then concludes with a reflection on Southey and Coleridge’s creative partnership. Though their friendship ebbed and flowed, Southey and Coleridge retained a shared purpose of ‘metrical innovation’ (p. 670). Fulford carefully analyses this project in their letters and poems, and offers a fresh interpretation of the Lake school’s poetic theory, which is so often interpreted in terms of Wordsworth’s call for the democratization of poetic diction in Lyrical Ballads [1798]. Fulford’s concern with prosody continues in the next two articles, both of which focus on the creativity of Romantic rhyme. In ‘Romantic Rhyme and the Airs that Stray’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 111–22), Oliver Clarkson and Andrew Hodgson uncover the Romantics’ ‘special enthusiasm for rhyme’ (p. 111). They consider a whole host of examples from numerous poets, in each case demonstrating that Romantic poets used rhyme in an inventive, questioning, and spontaneous manner. Michael O’Neill makes fundamentally similar arguments in the following essay of the issue, ‘Gleams and Dreams: Reflections on Romantic Rhyme’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 123–32). He begins wittily with an analysis of some poems that rhyme ‘gleam’ with ‘dream’ in what he claims is a ‘quintessentially Romantic’ way. His theme is the ‘awryness’ of Romantic rhyme, particularly in Wordsworth (p. 129). Like Clarkson and Hodgson, he affirms the imaginative and inventive aspects of Romantic rhyme. By warping the traditional forms of English verse, Romantic poets explored both the ‘comforts’ and ‘discomforts’ offered by the structuring force of rhyme (p. 129). Science and literature remained a fruitful interdisciplinary paradigm in 2017. In ‘Linnaeus’s Botanical Clocks: Chronobiological Mechanisms in the Scientific Poetry of Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans’ (SiR 56[2017] 223–52), Melissa Bailes analyses the period’s wide-ranging debate over the ‘movements, sentiency, and timekeeping mechanisms’ of plants (p. 224). Her three poets engaged with the debate in different ways. Erasmus Darwin is often seen as a ‘mechanical’ poet, but Bailes shows that in The Loves of the Plants [1789] he actually ‘struggles to harmonize mechanism and animism’ (p. 228). Charlotte Smith, by contrast, draws a clear distinction between the ‘artificial’ realm of clocks and chimes, and the ‘natural’ realm of flowers and the seasons (pp. 236–8). Writing some decades later, Felicia Hemans addressed a different context, in which science and poetry were separating into different spheres. Her flower-poetry was more obviously mythical and religious (p. 244). Ivan Orvitz moves the focus from science to technology in ‘Fancy’s Eye: Poetic Vision and the Romantic Air Balloon’ (SiR 56[2017] 253–84). He sees the air balloon as a ‘technology of fancy’ (p. 255). It was an invention that ‘facilitated fancy’s signature movement: embodied wandering’ (p. 257). By drawing together a wide range of examples—anonymous newspaper poets, canonical writers like Keats, less well-known ones like Philip Freneau and Mark Alcock, and philosophers like Beattie, Coleridge, and Duff—Orvitz is able to show how the advent of the balloon changed what Romantic writers understood fancy to be. While the poets lauded the balloon as a material means of taking a ‘flight of fancy’, actual balloonists had to confront the ‘hyperrealism’ of the world seen from the sky (p. 270). Marcus Tomalin offers 2017’s final major reflection on Romantic science and poetry in ‘ “An invaluable acquisition”: Sandglasses in Romantic Literature’ (ERR 28[2017] 729–49). The sandglass was of course an old technology by the time the Romantics were writing, but it remained a potent image of time. This is partly because, as Tomalin argues, the newer technology of the clock had yet to homogenize time in European society (p. 733). Tomalin brings into sharp relief the hourglass’s connotations of ‘anachronism’ (p. 732) and ‘atomism’ (pp. 733, 738) in the period, considering quite a dazzling array of different poets in the process. There were three major articles in 2017 on the poetic response to Waterloo. In ‘First as Farce, then as Tragedy: Waterloo in British Song’ (SiR 56[2017] 341–59), Oskar Cox Jensen shows how music, poetry, and politics can intertwine in subtle and unexpected ways. He begins with a bravura analysis of a series of texts that juxtapose waltzing and the battle of Waterloo, culminating in his analysis of Robert Shorter’s ‘plebeian response’ to the event, ‘On Seeing in a List of New Music, The Waterloo Waltz’ [1817]. He then takes the reader on a tour of popular song in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, revealing how the different traditions of patrician and plebeian music remembered the conflict. The article is supplemented by free online recordings of more than fifty such songs, available from the author’s soundcloud: <https://soundcloud.com/napoleonandbritishsong>. Like Jensen, Jeffrey Cox also focuses on popular culture in ‘From Pantomime to Poetry: Wordsworth, Byron, and Harlequin Read Waterloo’ (SiR 56[2017] 321–40), also discussed in Section 4 below. Both popular and literary writers, he argues, struggled with the same question in the wake of the battle: how to represent such a sublime scene? How to honour the fallen while celebrating the victory? In his pantomimes on the topic, Charles Dibdin ‘seem[ed] to want to draw attention to the difficulties in dramatizing monumental historical events like Waterloo’ (p. 329). Cox shows how this tension also runs through Wordsworth’s and Byron’s poetry. In his ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ volume [1816], Wordsworth struggles to determine ‘what sort of poet’ could adequately address the event (p. 330). Byron turns Wordsworth’s anxiety on its head in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III [1816]. He wallows in the grubby and difficult realities of the battle in a way that Dibdin and Wordsworth find difficult, but ‘urg[es] resistance’ and the preservation of revolutionary hopes (p. 337). The final Waterloo essay for 2017 is Stuart Andrews’s ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo: Lake Poets and the Duke’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 53–61). The essay is a fine work of careful scholarship. Combing through letters, articles, and poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, Andrews reveals the shifting and complex opinions the three poets held of the duke of Wellington. They were all appalled by the Convention of Cintra, not so much because of the French escape, as because it tarnished the noble cause of Spanish liberty. But by the 1820s, looking back on Waterloo, all three of the Lakers had turned Wellington into a hero. Like Orvitz and Cox, Daniel White takes us off the beaten track of canonical verse in his essay on ‘ “The slangwhangery of the jargonists”: Writing, Speech, and the Character of Romanticism’ (SiR 56[2017] 453–78), though he does so in a different manner. Where Orvitz and Cox introduce a multitude of non-canonical authors into their essays, Cox focuses on how canonical figures Wordsworth and Hazlitt theorized the informal writing they encountered. ‘Slang’, he argues, ‘reveals a meaningful gap … between Romantic theory and practice’ (p. 454). He uses ‘The Gaberlunzie Man’, a popular ballad frequently reprinted through the period, as a key example of a text where slang terms shimmer and crack, supporting radically opposed readings of the story. Cox then turns back to Wordsworth and Hazlitt, showing how they forestalled this disobedience of language by striving for a kind of middle style, what Wordsworth called the ‘common’ (p. 446), or Hazlitt called the ‘familiar’ (p. 469). This is one way in which they buttressed their claims to universality. Nine monographs and edited collections were published in 2017 that considered Romantic poets or poetry in general. They demonstrate that historicism, women’s writing, and critical theories of selfhood continue to dominate scholarship in Romantic poetry. Romantic poetry was once seen as resolutely anti-urban, as a revolutionary and revolted response to the growth of the stinking metropolis. In recent years, however, scholars have discovered that Romantic poets actually responded to the city in a range of ways. In Urbanization and English Romantic Poetry, Simon Tedeschi sets out to synthesize and develop this rich vein of scholarship. He claims that in the eighteenth century, a ‘dominant discourse’ took hold, in which urbanization was equated with progress; in the Romantic period, an ‘alternative discourse’ arose that questioned its assumptions (p. 17). Chapter 1 is a study of the earlier discourse, which for Tedeschi is exemplified by John Gay’s Trivia [1716] and William Cowper’s The Task [1785]. Gay’s poem described a new moral code for the city, which amounted to ‘the urbanization of the gentry, and the gentrification of the urban’ (pp. 27, 29, 32, 38). Cowper, by contrast, found the bustle of city life unbearable and promoted rural retirement instead. The final section of the chapter revisits the most canonical representations of the city in Romantic poetry, Blake’s ‘London’ [1796] and the London episode from Wordsworth’s The Prelude [1805]. The following four chapters present four different case studies. Chapter 2 traces the evolution of Coleridge’s views on urbanization from his Pantisocratic youth to his theological age. Coleridge’s aim throughout his life was to find a space of autonomy in an increasingly busy modern world. Eventually he ‘recasts autonomy as an epistemological or theological quality … One may live in the city, hold a job, and still write and read poetry’ (p. 101). Chapter 3 revisits Wordsworth. Tedeschi argues that the city looms large even in Wordsworth’s most pastoral poems. Urbanization, for Wordsworth, is not merely a matter of city living—it betokens a fundamental change in the entire national mentality. Chapter 4 is a study of Percy Shelley, who criticized British urbanization from a republican perspective. For him, the growth of cities was undermining Parliament’s already suspect claim to represent the people as a whole. The final chapter considers Mary Robinson and Anna Barbauld together, as poets who saw urbanization through feminist and political-economic lenses. Urbanization betokened commercialization, luxury, and economic inequality, all of which threatened the morality of polite society and the harmony of the social order. In his conclusion, Tedeschi stresses once more the variety and complexity of Romantic responses to urbanization, and bewails the way Romantic poetry has been turned into a ‘fetish’ in much modern writing on urban life (p. 213). Debate has raged for hundreds of years over how fictional biographies ought to be. Should biographies idealize and entertain, or should they restrict themselves to documentation of fact? Are these aims indeed opposed? Is mere documentation in any way possible? With her collection, Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century, Brenda Ayres adds a new layer of empirical richness to these issues. As she explains in her introduction (pp. 1–16), the aim of the collection is ‘to expose the distortions, gaps, inconsistencies, biases, contradictions, mistakes, misconceptions, and misappropriation of information on several key women writers … [of] the long nineteenth century’ (p. 4). Two of these writers are Romantic poets: Laetitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans. In her essay on ‘Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838): Whose Poetess?’ (pp. 93–110), Katherine Montwieler shows how a sophisticated poet can evade the biographer’s gaze. Her opening pages show how approaches to Landon’s life have transformed over the last two centuries. Her contemporaries were fascinated by her mysterious and potentially transgressive sexuality: ‘If Landon’s verse was fast and easy, so was she’ (p. 94). When her work was rediscovered by feminists in the 1970s, Landon’s life was analysed under a completely new paradigm. Victorian readers had fretted that the poet was immoral and unconventional. Now readers felt that she was in fact too ‘willingly submissive to cultural codes in both her life and work’ (p. 95). In the following discussion of Landon’s life, Montwieler does a fine job of revealing that in fact Landon was more complex and changeable than either of these simple narratives suggests. Through a series of examples, she shows how Landon cannily deployed poetic and social conventions, shifting her pose to adapt to an altering cultural landscape. Landon is in fact so ‘elusive’, concludes Montwieler, that when we examine her life and work ‘we see our own critical preoccupations more clearly than we see the ostensible subject herself’ (p. 106). Helen Luu takes a different approach in her essay, ‘The After-Lives of Felicia Hemans (1793–1835): Biographical Misconstructions’ (pp. 111–28). She focuses primarily on two early biographies of her subject, Henry F. Chorley’s series of expanding memoirs from 1835–6, and Harriet Hughes’s beautiful one-volume Life of 1840. Luu demonstrates that Chorley was a sophisticated biographer, whose work is characterized by a ‘tension between “history” and “character” ’ (p. 113), between the desire to explain Hemans’s poetic, public persona and her private person, which could be wicked and wry. In the latter part of the essay, Luu shows how Hughes strove to present Hemans in a more conventional way. Where Chorley had striven to achieve an ‘authentic’ portrait of the poet (p. 115), Hughes strove for a ‘correct’ picture (p. 125), with all the connotations of moral rectitude the word implies. In their immense, groundbreaking edited collection, A History of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry, Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides set themselves the daunting task of ‘narrating an emerging history of American poetry in which women writers play a vital role’ (p. 3). What follows is an extraordinary collection of essays on almost every aspect of women’s poetry in nineteenth-century America, from 1800 to 1900. Of interest to scholars of the Romantic period, the first section, ‘1800–1840, American Poesis and the National Imaginary’, begins with Mary Louise Kete’s sharp, insightful essay on the only two women ‘of the millions … stolen from Africa and sold into slavery in British colonial America’ to be ‘remembered as poets’ (p. 17), Lucy Terry Prince and Phillis Wheatley. Having beaten ‘the odds by being remembered at all’, Prince and Wheatley, in Kete’s reckoning, pose ‘an ongoing challenge to the ongoing project of tracing an African American literary tradition’ (p. 17), resisting easy incorporation into developmental or foundational narratives of literary history. This challenge turns out to be an opportunity to reflect on the ‘inherently hybrid and protean cultural formation’ of the ‘Black Atlantic’, pre-dating ‘social formations, such as that of an American or African American national identity, that had not yet come into being’ (p. 18), and associated questions of posthumous reputation, race, historicity, and canonical status. Tamara Harvey’s essay, ‘Before the Poetess: Women’s Poetry in the Early Republic’, wittily considers the distinct but related problem of women’s status, authority, and identity as poets through The Massachusetts Magazine’s ‘embarrassing excess of Constantias’, the much-coveted pseudonym of Sarah Wentworth Murray, who suddenly faced a ‘prior claim’ from Judith Sergeant Murray, a pile-up the magazine solved by adding an asterisk to Murray’s ‘Constantia*’ (p. 37). Kerry Larson, meanwhile, explores the peculiar ‘exultation of the medium’ of poetry (p. 53) in ‘The Passion for Poetry in Lydia Sigourney and Elizabeth Oakes Smith’, the first of several essays on Sigourney, clearly a crucial figure. Aside from Michael C. Cohen’s fascinating reappraisal of coterie and manuscript verse in ‘Album Verse and the Poetics of Scribal Circulation’, all the other essays in this portion of the book deal with Sigourney in some way. Desirée Henderson’s marvellous survey, ‘The Friendship Elegy’, examines the friendship elegies of Sigourney and others, ‘a subgenre of the elegy that demonstrates how generic conventions could be leveraged to promote the status of women’s relationships and women’s writing’ (p. 106); Elizabeth A. Petrino, in ‘Presents of Mind: Lydia Sigourney, Gift Book Culture, and the Commodification of Poetry’, finds Sigourney ‘capitalized on the gift book’s popularity by contributing to a wide variety and compiling at least seven volumes herself’ (p. 88); and, finally, in ‘Gendered Atlantic: Lydia Sigourney and Felicia Hemans’, Gary Kelly explores the link between these two central women poets of the period, separated by the Atlantic. This is a crucial, expertly organized volume. Marshall Brown takes the issue of self-identity in another direction in his contribution to Inventing Agency, edited by Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada. In ‘I Think, Therefore I Feel’ (pp. 17–27), he wonders what the relationship is between thinking and being, consulting William Wordsworth, John Clare, and John Keats as three of his many informants. Descartes had claimed that we exist because we think: but does this mean that we only think, or is our power of thought just a part of a larger self? (p. 17) Wordsworth leaned towards the second answer, describing mental states that are arguably thoughts but lack Descartes’s sense of ‘cogitation’ (p. 20). Clare had a different take, suggesting in his darker moments that mere thinking was no kind of existence at all (p. 21). Keats meanwhile longed for a life without thoughts, but found it impossible to ‘feel his existence without taking the trouble to think’ (p. 22). Brown compares these poets to a range of mostly Romantic writers and thinkers, with all the graceful erudition to which his readers have become accustomed. At least as influential and pervasive in its appropriately eerie cultural afterlives as Romanticism, the Gothic continues to reach into the present. The Gothic and Death, consummately edited by Carol Margaret Davison, is a volume that presents the many terrible aspects of the Gothic, from its instantiation to the present, arranged around ‘one of the foremost terrors at the heart of [the] field of study’ (p. 1): death. In this enjoyably wide-ranging study are two essays of specific interest for any scholar of Romantic poetry. Opening the collection, Serena Trowbridge dwells on ‘Past, Present, and Future in the Gothic Graveyard’, exhuming the ways in which ‘death is refigured in the wake of Graveyard Poetry’ (p. 21), specifically the poetry of Thomas Gray, Edward Young, and Robert Blair, all of whom produced master-texts that haunt Romantic poetry. Adam White’s essay, ‘Deadly Interrogations: Cycles of Death and Transcendence in Byron’s Gothic’, reads Byron’s verse dramas, particularly The Prisoner of Chillon and The Two Foscari, as caught up with Gothic questions of repetition and suffering and what White defines as ‘Romantic’ attempts at ‘transcending death and death-like conditions’ (p. 88), before moving on to detect something ‘distinctively Byronic in the play’s treatment of death’ (p. 89). These two fascinating essays aside, there is much to enjoy in this ironically lively volume about death. Bo Earle’s ambitious and wide-ranging study, Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life, takes on Hegel’s formulation (via Marx) of history as tragedy doomed to be repeated as farce, and attempts to apply this formula to our numbed, bathetic present by way of the Romantic lyric. Earle’s contention is that what he terms the ‘ascendance of abstraction’, the means by which we de-individuate history and experience even in the process of individuating them, has left us ‘phenomenally exiled from the real events of our own history’, and, since this ascendance, ‘like climate change itself, is retraceable to the historical advent of industrialization’, Romantic poetry—specifically lyric poetry—‘could be of particular use’, as a means of sensitizing us to these numbnesses as locations of potentially liberating disruption and/or difference (p. 5). After a brief preface that takes in Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, and climate change, the book settles into a fairly orthodox chapter structure covering the Big Six minus Coleridge: Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, P.B. Shelley, Keats. Chapter 1, ‘Wordsworth, Apocalypse, and Prosthesis’, examines Wordsworth’s lyrics, including ‘Simon Lee’ and ‘We Are Seven’, as works in which ‘Wordsworth makes poetic failure negatively bespeak the weight’ of what Earle terms moral ‘worlds’ (p. 8) or planets—with consequences for our responses to climate change and suffering, a conclusion heavily influenced by Timothy Morton. Chapter 2, ‘Blake’s Infant Smile: Facing Materialism’, charts Blake’s important modifications and surprising affinities with Lockean subjectivity via Freud, the two representing the ‘aptly incongruous bookends of the long nineteenth-century hegemony of the bourgeois subject’ (p. 35). Chapter 3, ‘Byron’s Sad Eye: The Tragic Loss of Tragedy’, examines the appropriately Byronic ‘paradox that the loss of the tragic art form’ in the self-consciousness and commodity culture best represented by the Byronic brand ‘could not be presented as tragedy without implicitly refuting itself’ (p. 65). Finally, chapters 4 and 5, ‘Shelley’s Viral Prophecy: The Erotics of Chance’ and ‘Keats’s Lame Flock: The Erotics of Waste’, present the former as desperately committed to an ‘inherently excessive’ sympathy, bodied forth in a poetic imagination that ‘necessarily’ but productively and constitutively ‘fails’ (p. 117), and the latter as resting more comfortably in such excess, a cool critic of consumerism and masturbatory or wasteful poetics even in the process of recognizing their inescapability (p. 169). This is a novel, urgent, but ultimately flawed book, let down by a lack of cohesion and a conflicted thesis. Michael Gamer’s Romanticism, Self-Canonization and the Business of Poetry is a somewhat misleadingly titled but extremely well-researched study of how Romantic poets arranged for their works to be reprinted. Though this may seem a niche topic at first, Gamer makes some powerful arguments for its relevance. By choosing which poems to reprint and when, Romantic poets and publishers shaped the public image of the writer: re-collections ‘are necessarily representations of an authorial self’ (p. 4). Re-collections are driven simultaneously by economic and aesthetic forces. By studying them, Gamer argues, we can bring together book history and the study of literary subjectivity. Chapter 1 considers Wordsworth’s Poems [1815]. Wordsworth was such a self-conscious self-canonizer that Gamer has the opportunity in this chapter to survey the history of the collected edition. Citing the examples of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Torquato Tasso, and Alexander Pope, Gamer reveals the social nature of literary re-collection, and the different forces at play when living rather than dead poets are collected. He goes on to consider the various eighteenth-century attempts to publish a poetic canon, most of which Wordsworth claimed to hold in utter contempt. This historical discussion provides a rich context for Gamer’s discussion of the vexed and multilayered Poems of 1815. Following chapters are more focused. In chapter 2, Charlotte Smith offers a contrast to William Wordsworth. She sold the copyright in her poems as she printed them, making it essentially impossible to produce a collected edition at the end of her life. Earlier, however, she did have control over the shape of her growing collection of Elegiac Sonnets [1787], and Gamer shows how she used ordering, paratexts, and additional poems to reshape her authorial persona. Chapter 3 considers the Della Cruscans. It was by moving from magazine publication to book collection, argues Gamer, that these internationalist poets challenged the literary powers that be and brought on the ire of William Gifford. Chapter 4 returns to Wordsworth, and the expanded Lyrical Ballads of 1800. Chapter 5 is a welcome study of Robert Southey, who used his ascent to the Poet Laureateship to consolidate his reputation after a decade of busy miscellaneous writing had fragmented it. Unfortunately, accepting the post exposed him to ‘pressures to conform to government policy’ (p. 167), and, as he himself freely admitted, it was the salary as much as the honour that led him to accept the job Sir Walter Scott had turned down. The final chapter considers the cultic collectors of Shelley poems and paraphernalia after the young poet’s tragic death at sea. It rounds off a subtle and original study of book history, the canon, and the figure of the poet. James Whitehead describes his volume, Madness and the Romantic Poet, as ‘a cultural history of a set of ideas attached to poetry and poets, and an exercise of sorts in the sociology of literary identity’ (p. 11). Setting out to discover why the image of the ‘mad poet’ became so popular over the nineteenth century, Whitehead moves more or less chronologically. The first two chapters consider how Romantic writers engaged with ancient Greek, early modern, and eighteenth-century ideas of madness. The next two chapters consider the Romantic period itself: how did Romantic-era doctors and literary reviewers understand the relationship between madness and creativity? The final three chapters serve as the meat of the argument, directly analysing the popularity of the ‘mad poet’ myth in the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 examines several mid-century biographies. Nineteenth-century biographers had a ‘drive towards the admirable or heroic life’ (p. 132), while also condemning Romantic poets for their supposedly mad behaviour. Poised between admiration and contempt, Romantic biographers of the period wrote remarkably polyvalent books (p. 141), and foreshadowed the later development of psychobiography. Chapter 6 surveys a range of medical and pseudo-medical writers of the later century, who drew on Romantic examples to develop their theories of insanity. Nineteenth-century theorists like Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso drew on the commonly accepted tropes of mad Romantics to provide evidence for their theories. In doing so, they set the terms for twentieth-century psychological debates on the topics of insanity and creativity, and demonstrated significant continuities with the writers of Whitehead’s earlier chapters. The book culminates with a chapter on the Big Six plus John Clare. These poets all, in different ways, confronted the possible connection between madness and inspiration. Madness was a frightening prospect for men who claimed to be great poets because they were psychologically superior. Percy Shelley is the poet who inspires Whitehead’s best criticism. This is hardly surprising: in ‘Alastor’ [1815] and ‘Julian and Maddalo’ [1818–19] Shelley takes a thoroughly Whiteheadian approach to the central questions of the book. It is a pity that Whitehead did not spread the net wider. Mary Robinson’s ‘The Maniac’ [1793] or Felicia Hemans’s frightening drama on collective delusion, The Vespers of Palermo [1823] could have provided rich examples for his argument. Madness and the Romantic Poet is in any case a fine and wide-ranging study. We received notice of two volumes in WVT Trier Verlag’s Studien zur Englischen Romantik series, but the publisher declined to provide review copies. Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern, edited by Sebastian Domsch, Christoph Reinfandt, and Katharina Rennhak, responds to Christoph Bode’s Ästhetik der Ambiguität [Max Niemeyer, 1988] to explore the relationship between the ‘ambiguity’ and the ‘modernity’ of Romantic literature. Bode himself is the editor of Romanticism and the Forms of Discontent, whose contributors place Romantic concepts of ‘discontent’ in the broader history of emotions. Both of these volumes are testament to the influence of Bode, surely Germany’s leading scholar of British Romanticism, and it is a pity we are not able to provide a more detailed review of their contents. This year also saw the publication of a fine new textbook aimed at undergraduate students of Romanticism. Michael O’Neill and Madelaine Callaghan’s The Romantic Poetry Handbook is a comprehensive and compact introduction to British Romantic poetry. It is a commendably varied volume that pays tribute to the great widening of Romantic scholarship since the 1970s. It is a pleasure simply to reflect on the eighteen poets selected for consideration, six of whom are women. Though one might quibble with some choices—why include Thomas Lovell Beddoes and not Joanna Baillie?—the volume does present a very reasonable version of the canon taught in universities today. For this very reason, however, the book throws into sharp relief continuing limitations in the scholarship and pedagogy of Romantic poetry in English. It is telling that Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are here represented by only four writers: Thomas Moore, Felicia Hemans, Robert Burns, and Lord Byron. Hemans and Byron, of course, always described themselves as English, despite their places of birth or abode. The complete absence of writers from elsewhere in the British empire is also telling. No Canadian or Australian poet is present, nor are any of the literary figures—most notably Sir William Jones—who worked in other colonies. Absent too are any Romantic poets who wrote in British languages other than English, as for instance the Welsh hymnodist Ann Griffiths. All this makes the book’s claim to be a comprehensive introduction to ‘British’ Romanticism rather suspect. One might also wonder whether the restriction to ‘British’ writers continues to make sense at all, when the British empire was so vast and disparate in the Romantic period, and the literary ties between Britain and the United States so strong. It is not usually the place of Year’s Work in English Studies to engage in such extended analysis, but The Romantic Poetry Handbook is a good illustration of both the breadth and the confines of ‘Romantic Poetry’ in the anglophone world today. It is a beautifully written and well-organized textbook, which will be of great value to undergraduates in English departments around the world. The introduction offers a series of short reflections on a range of themes in the study of Romantic poetry, from the ‘Definitions’ of Romanticism to ‘Romantic Poetry and the Reader’. There follows a detailed timeline, which provides a rich European context for the writers covered in the book. The following section comprises a series of two-page biographies of the poets. These could perhaps have been a little longer and more vivid. The strong heart of the book, however, is the ‘Readings’ section. Each ‘Reading’ focuses on one or a few texts. O’Neill and Callaghan are to be commended for the deft way they combine close reading and scholarship in these delightful essays. Students will surely find them invaluable models for their own work. The book concludes with a further reading section, and this brings us now to our consideration of the individual poets who attracted particular scholarly attention in 2017. We begin with Anna Laetitia Barbauld. E.J. Clery’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis is a landmark in Barbauld studies: the first full-length monograph on her longest and arguably most serious poem. It begins with a reflection on the myth that William Croker’s savage review of the poem ended Barbauld’s career as a poet. Clery deftly unpicks the myth, arriving at the core question of her study: what about the poem provoked the inventor of the word ‘conservative’ to such ire (p. 6)? In the following seven chapters, Clery moves methodically through the poem, carefully unpeeling the layers of its rhetoric and allusion. In the opening lines of the poem (covered in chapter 1), Barbauld cleverly shifts from a conventional pacifist position to an analysis of Britain’s political economy — an extremely original topic for a poet of the period to cover (p. 19). Britain’s military might, based on its island fastness, is a myth in a globalized economic world (p. 27). In the next section of the poem (chapter 2), Barbauld introduces a satirical element by addressing Britain and detailing its moral wrongs (p. 43). Analysing Barbauld’s satire, Clery comes to the delightfully counter-intuitive conclusion that the savage reviewer Croker was actually Barbauld’s ‘ideal reader’; so offensive would he find Barbauld’s satire that ‘he could feel its strategies on his pulse’, and ‘decode’ them all perfectly (p. 37). Barbauld then turns about to praise rather than satirize Britain (chapter 3), but through diligent scholarship Clery is able to show how ‘polemical’ Barbauld’s praises are (p. 59), how her examples of great Britons paint a very particular picture of her home. This builds into the following chapter’s discussion of Barbauld’s peculiar brand of ‘stoic patriotism’ (pp. 67–85). Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was a long time coming. Barbauld had developed stoic ideas throughout her earlier writings, but never before had she intervened like this, in the midst of things, ‘with a clear oppositional message’ (p. 80) and an intention to propound it whatever the cost. At this point the quality of Barbauld’s poem changes, and so do Clery’s interests. Hitherto Clery has carefully traced historical, topical, and ideological allusions in the poem, carefully situating Barbauld in the political context of her period. In the final three chapters of her explication, she turns to focus on Barbauld’s lyrical and visionary tendencies. There is a ‘reflexive quality or knowingness’ to Barbauld’ prophetic verse (p. 92), which as Clery shows, brought the older poet close to the younger Coleridge. Unlike Coleridge, however, Barbauld emerges as a ‘dispassionate’ kind of prophet (p. 101). In the following chapter, Clery exposes the ‘parodically multi-voiced weave’ (p. 119) of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, the way it uses contradictions and disjunctions to portray an open-ended reality. The ruin of empires coincides with the ‘jostling of ideological struggle’ in the everyday world (p. 136). In the final chapter of explication, Clery binds together her whole argument about Barbauld’s economic, political, religious, and poetic concerns with a bold and original argument: that the mysterious ‘Spirit’ that Barbauld claims is the motor force of history is no spiritual being, but rather an allegory for ‘Public Credit’ (p. 140). We will leave it to readers to judge the power of this provocative economic interpretation. In the final section of the monograph, Clery considers the aftermath of Barbauld’s poem. Chapter 8 is a remarkable blow-by-blow chronology of the events of January to June 1812, taking in the events of Barbauld’s life and the progress of the government’s war policy, both of which build towards a strange coincidence. Henry Brougham succeeded in enacting a Barbauldian policy, and had the government’s Orders in Council repealed on 16 June in an effort to avert war with America. Croker, Barbauld’s public nemesis, was absent from the chamber when the votes were cast. The final chapter considers the poem’s aftermath in the press, and the final years of Barbauld’s life. In her conclusion, Clery meditates on Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’s role in ending use of the trade blockade as an instrument of government policy, and on Barbauld’s place as a woman in the British public sphere. Turning now to William Blake: Joseph Fletcher’s ‘Leibniz, the Infinite, and Blake’s Early Metaphysics’ (SiR 56[2017] 129–55) draws out some remarkable parallels between Blake’s critique of empiricism and Leibniz’s. Blake’s early philosophical poems espouse a pan-psychist view of nature that has much in common with Leibniz’s, but Blake goes beyond his German predecessor in positing a ‘radical monistic view of pantheism’, in which God is synonymous with the material universe (p. 130). It is surprising that Fletcher does not mention Spinoza in this connection, but the essay is nonetheless rich in content. Fletcher compares Blake’s early poems No Natural Religion [1788], All Religions Are One [1788], and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [1790] with Locke’s Essay [1689], Berkeley’s Dialogues [1713], and finally with a selection of Leibniz’s metaphysical works to demonstrate the artisan poet’s strikingly original contribution to pantheist and pan-psychist thought. Lucy Kellett takes a more formalist approach in ‘ “Crooked roads without improvement”: Rhyming and Unrhyming in Blake’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 133–44). She observes that for Blake, rhyme was a symbol of mental imprisonment. This did not simply mean he abandoned it, however. In his early poems, and even in his later epic Jerusalem [1804], he used rhyme to represent the divisions and structures of human consciousness. In Jerusalem in particular, he switches between rhymed and unrhymed verse to symbolize his theory of ‘Contraries’ (p. 143). Byron continues to be the most international of British Romantic poets, as Alan Rawes and Diego Saglia’s new volume Byron and Italy demonstrates. This edited collection features contributions from Czech and Italian scholars, as well as from distinguished Romanticists from Britain and the United States. In their introduction (pp. 1–22), Saglia and Rawes indicate why Byron’s work continues to resonate across Europe. Behind all the myths—the debauchery in Venice, the heroism in Ravenna—the ‘the real, historical “Anglo-Italian” Byron’ was a keen observer of Italy and successfully incorporated Italian traditions into his writing (p. 3). The collection examines Italy as a ‘construct’ in Byron’s writing, as a stage where he performed his poetry and personality, and as a social world where he lived as a human being (pp. 11–12). What harmonizes the collection is a common focus on Byron’s deconstructive and generative power. His experience of Italy was destabilizing, enabling him to cut through British prejudices and recombine disparate cultural materials into marvellous verse. The first essay in the collection, by Nicholas Halmi (pp. 23–43), considers Byron’s ‘transhistorical identification’ with some great figures of Italian poetry (p. 25). He focuses on the poems of 1817–20, showing how Byron ‘insinuates a Byronic Italianness’ in The Lament of Tasso [1817], The Prophecy of Dante [1819], his part-translation of Morgante Maggiore [1819–20], and two stanzas from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV [1818]. The next five essays consider Byron’s experiences of Italian life. In ‘Byron’s Ethnographic Eye: The Poet among the Italians’ (pp. 44–60), Gioia Angeletti demonstrates that Byron was a skilled ethnographer, who pierced through the romanticized prejudices of his British contemporaries and described a ‘contingent’ Italy in his letters (p. 45). He was attuned to ‘individual’ and ‘local’ aspects of Italian life (p. 51), though as Angeletti shows, Byron’s zest for ‘directly experienced, present-day Italy’ eventually palled into ‘disenchantment’ (p. 54). Jonathan Gross brings out another aspect of Byron’s travelling style, in his essay on ‘Byron’s Scottish Identity in Italy’ (pp. 61–76). Byron filtered his experiences of Italy through his decidedly unstable sense of Scottish, English, and British identity. Where Gross and Angeletti consider Byron’s experiences of Italian culture, Mauro Pala analyses Byron’s apprehension of the Italian landscape (pp. 77–93). Byron was a typical Romantic, for whom landscape description was normally a kind of self-portrait, as Pala demonstrates through a close reading of Childe Harold IV. Jane Stabler similarly emphasizes how ‘creative[ly]’ Byron apprehended physical reality (p. 96), in her essay on ‘Byron and Italian Art in Ravenna’ (pp. 94–111). In the opening pages of the essay, Stabler cleverly reconstructs Shelley’s and Byron’s experience of art in Ravenna, where British tourists trained in Michelangelo and his contemporaries struggled to perceive the beauty of the city’s Byzantine mosaics (p. 98). She links this to her interpretation of Cain [1821], which she reads quite convincingly as a study in perception and misperception. Rounding off this series of essays on Byron’s Italian experiences, Bernard Beatty considers Byron’s responses to ‘Italian Catholicism’ (pp. 112–29). Revisiting the Italian poems analysed by Halmi, Beatty reveals how Byron deconstructed his own Protestant identity in Italy, shifting and complexifying his opinions of the Catholic Church. The final five essays of the volume place Byron’s ‘Italianism’ in the context of European literature. Arnold Anthony Schmidt compares Byron to Alessandro Manzoni in his essay ‘The Politics of the Unities’ (pp. 130–48). Both Manzoni’s Il Conte de Carmangnola [1820] and Byron’s The Two Foscari [1821] feature the figure of the condottiero, which they use to symbolize a liberal political ideology, but the two playwrights take opposite approaches to dramatic form, Manzoni adopting a loose Shakespearean structure where Byron rejects the English tradition and adheres to the three unities. Mirka Horová also offers a study of Byron’s Italian plays in her essay ‘Playing with History’ (pp. 188–207). In Marino Faliero [1821], Foscari, and The Deformed Transformed [1824], Byron mined Italian history to critique the Western notion that European society is inherently civilized and progressive. In the following essay, Peter W. Graham reads Mazeppa [1819] and Parisina [1816] in the context of Romantic orientalism (pp. 149–65), showing how they reveal Byron’s evolving sense of Anglo-Italian identity. Alan Rawes shifts the focus to western Europe in ‘This “still exhaustless mine”: De Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman Lyricism’ (pp. 166–87). The three titans of European Romantic literature all viewed Rome as a place of pilgrimage. In Corinne: ou l’Italie [1807], Italienische Reise [1816–28], and Childe Harold IV respectively, de Staël, Goethe, and Byron meditate on the educative value of a Roman holiday, drawing subtly different conclusions about art, politics, and the transience of things. Byron and Italy quite rightly concludes with an analysis of Byron’s finest Italian poems, Beppo [1818] and Don Juan [1819–24], from the pen of editor Diego Saglia (pp. 208–26). In a remarkably compact discussion, Saglia sketches the key Italian contexts for the poems, and draws on Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of irony as ‘permanent parabasis’ to explain their contradictory and ambivalent structure (p. 209). Thus ends this exemplary collection. It is finely organized, takes in a wide sweep of Byron’s life and work, and is a model of international scholarly co-operation. Scholars in the English-speaking world must continue to marvel at the productivity of what might now be called the ‘Parma school’ of Romantic studies, which continues to draw the study of British Romanticism out of what can be rather narrow confines. The final main work on Byron for 2017 is Robert Morrison’s elegant essay, ‘Blackwood’s Byron: The Lakers, the Cockneys, and the “Throne of Poetical Supremacy” ’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 272–81), which falls into three clear sections. His aim is to survey Byron’s relationship with the conservative magazine north of the Tweed. The first section consider the series of Byron reviews John Wilson wrote for Blackwood’s, the second considers John Lockhart’s essays on the lordly poet, and the final section offers a close reading of Byron’s unpublished essay, ‘Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’ [1820]. Morrison nicely brings out the strange symbiosis of Byron and conservative cultural critics. On the one hand, as he, Wilson, and Lockhart all realized, they all had much in common when it came to poetry and culture. On the other, they could not see eye to eye politically, and once Byron had published the magnificently risqué Beppo [1818], they could no longer see eye to eye in artistic taste either. We now move to Coleridge. Coleridge and Contemplation, edited by Peter Cheyne, has already been mentioned in Section 1 above. But several of its essays concern Coleridge’s poetry directly, and are considered here. J.C.C. Mays begins the collection with a general reflection on ‘Contemplation in Coleridge’s Poetry’ (pp. 19–34). He opens with a ‘slow motion’ (p. 24) reading of ‘First Advent of Love’, a six-line poem whose every syllable Mays picks over to show how it communicates a certain ‘state of mind’ (p. 23). He then expands his focus, citing a range of examples to show how Coleridge strove in prose for ‘clarity of mind’, while engaging in a different kind of contemplation in his poetry, in which he ‘work[ed] through [the] arguments on his pulse’ (p. 28). Kathleen Wheeler and Cristina Flores both consider how Coleridge’s poetry interacts with the thought of specific philosophers. Wheeler’s essay, ‘Coleridge, John Dewey, and the Art of Contemplation’ (pp. 60–76), is really a broad study of the affinities between Romantic poets and American philosophers. She reads Dewey’s Art as Experience [1958] as a Romantic affirmation of art’s ability to expand human perception and enrich our moral lives. Citing examples from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, Wheeler shows how the earlier poets anticipated many of Dewey’s concerns with the ‘de-generation’ and ‘re-generation’ of imaginative vision (p. 74). Flores considers an older philosopher in her piece, ‘ “Contemplant Spirits”: Ralph Cudworth and Contemplation’ (pp. 211–20). Having described Coleridge’s intense reading of Cudworth in some detail (pp. 213–15), she turns to ‘Religious Musings’ and the Conversation Poems, showing how these works express a vision of ‘plastic nature’ (p. 218) that is fundamentally in tune with Cudworth’s monistic metaphysics. In an interesting turn, Michael McGhee offers a ‘Buddhist Response’ to ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ (pp. 263–77). He analyses Coleridge’s theory of reason, faith, and the trancelike states of the soul in the context of Christian doctrine, before reintroducing the familiar Buddhist concept of ‘mindfulness’, which is best understood as a ‘balanced and progressive integration, bringing about an enlarged and sustained awareness’ (p. 271). In the concluding pages of the essay, McGhee argues persuasively that Coleridge aspires to a similar kind of enlarged, sustained attention to the wideness of the world in his contemplative verse. The other essays in the volume will be of great interest to students of Coleridge and of philosophy. At a time when ‘interdisciplinary’ threatens to become an empty buzzword, it is a true pleasure to encounter a book like Coleridge and Contemplation, in which scholars of many disciplines collaborate to produce a rich range of responses to a rich and wide-ranging writer. Humberto Garcia takes things in a different direction in ‘Coleridge, India, and the Spectral Banyan Tree’ (SEL 57[2017] 701–24). Trees are potent symbols of nation, class, and creed. For Coleridge, the spreading banyan with its massive gloomy branches was an ‘arboreal icon of Indian paganism’ (p. 716), particularly in his notebook poem on the Fakir. To contextualize Coleridge’s horrified response to the banyan, Garcia uses Thomas Maurice’s Indian Antiquities [1793–1800] as a point of reference. In Maurice’s ‘fanciful historiography’ (p. 703), the banyan is part of a vast global history, in which prehistoric Brahmins migrated to Britain and planted the roots of Druidism on European soil. Both Maurice and Coleridge contrast pagan tree-worship with the supposed civility and rationality of Christian worship. The East had its many-stemmed banyans, the West its stolid and unified oaks. This interdisciplinary interest in Coleridge the philosopher-poet continued in the two essays on his poetry in 2017’s Romantic Circles PRAXIS Series, both in Tilottama Rajan’s themed issue on ‘Romanticism and the Rights of the Negative’. In ‘Positive Negation: On Coleridge’s “Human Life” ’ (RCPS [June 2017]), David Collings considers Coleridge’s hypothetical denial of immortal life in his late poems. In the strange movements of Coleridge’s mature mind, oblivion after death morphs into death-in-life and finally into a sense of ‘surplus’ (para. 12). Coleridge was sensitive to the paradoxes of negativity, the way it can twist into an uncanny kind of positivity. Marc Mazur considers another kind of negativity in ‘The Immaterial “Christabel”: Reading Revision Before and After Publication’ (RCPS [June 2017]): not oblivion, but ‘retreat’. What was Coleridge fleeing from when he withheld ‘Christabel’ from the public (para. 5)? Mazur argues that he was in retreat from a public sphere that did not accord with his definition of a healthy polity. If his decision to withhold the poem can be seen as a ‘voluntary retreat’, his decision to publish entailed an ‘involuntary retreat’ because of the poem’s fragmentary condition (para. 14). Christabel retreats ‘as subject’ (para. 14), evading the reader and the poet, simultaneously frustrating and preserving the ‘desire for completion’. This issue of RCPS underscores how Romantic poetry continues to perplex, continuing Coleridge’s project for a more sinuous and interconnected form of consciousness. Elizabeth Fay also uncovers the sinuous and interconnected aspects of Coleridge’s phenomenology in her essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [1798]. In ‘Coleridge Finds Spinoza’s Dharma Nature’ (WC 48[2017] 128–37), Fay carefully unpacks the Rime to reveal its engagement with the philosophy of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Böhme. Although Coleridge had yet to read Schelling when he composed his famous ballad, Fay is able to show that he anticipated much of his later engagement with the idealist philosopher. What runs through all Coleridge’s idealism, she concludes, is a theme that links him to Spinoza and to Indian philosophers—a critique of the ‘crime of self-passion’ (p. 135). Sean Barry continues the discussion of Coleridge’s philosophizing in ‘Old Words, New Words, Wrong Words: Coleridge’s Poetics of Interruption in “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” ’ (ERR 28[2017] 379–85). Barry finds that the Rime has much to say to contemporary debates about the narrative self. Coleridge weaves a sophisticated narrative in the Rime, but constantly interrupts it with neologisms, anachronisms, and abrupt beginnings or turnings away. This narrativity with disruption charts a middle course, claims Barry, between the strong narrative theories of self promulgated my communitarians like Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum, and the anti-narrative philosophy of contemporary Cartesian Galen Strawson. Julie Carmada covers similar ground in ‘Pig Looks, Snake Looks: Coleridge’s Poetics of the Unsaid’ (ERR 28[2017] 333–42). Not only does Coleridge disrupt narrative, he disrupts utterance. Coleridge, like other Romantic poets, is often interpreted as a writer of overflowing ego, but in this piece Carmada tries to give a sense of ‘Coleridge the Listener’ (p. 336), a man who strove to achieve ‘mutual, sympathetic comprehension’ (p. 337). Having demonstrated Coleridge’s conversational powers in life, Carmada shows how the conversation poems are marked by a ‘capacity for multisensory response’ (p. 338). Brittany Pladek contributes the fourth major essay on Coleridge’s Rime for 2017. Like Carmada and Berry, she takes an ethical approach to the poem in ‘ “A Radical Causation”: Coleridge’s Lyrics and Collective Guilt’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 62–74). Comparing the Rime and ‘Fears in Solitude’, Pladek elucidates Coleridge’s subtle thoughts on collective and personal guilt. He had an ‘individualist model’ of collective guilt (p. 63), argues Pladek. Applying this model to the morally complex Rime, she claims to resolve the long-running debate about the poem’s moral coherence. Though Coleridge remains of primary interest to scholars as a thinker, scholars still maintain interest in his practice as a poet. Olivia Reilly offers a formalist analysis of his verse in ‘ “[A]nother and yet the same”: Rhyme’s Music in Kubla Khan’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 145–54). Reilly begins by analysing some of Coleridge’s comments on music. His theories on the subject were characteristically sophisticated. She then notes how Coleridge extended his theory of music to the study of rhyme, and proceeds to read Kubla Khan [1798] as a sustained reflection on the musical (read: dialectical, anticipatory, intervolved) structure of its own poetic form. Her vindication of Coleridge’s skilled poesis rounds off 2017’s discussion of his verse. The 2017 issue of the John Clare Society Journal reveals that ecopoetics and formalist analysis remain at the heart of Clare studies today. Fiona Stafford leads the issue with her essay on ‘Clare and the Splendid Sycamore’ (JCSJ 36[2017] 7–16), an extended reading of Clare’s ‘In massy foliage & a sunny green’. Stafford reveals Clare’s concern for ‘ordinary’ things like sycamores (p. 8). She considers his use of the sonnet form, his apprehension of time and survival, his accurate portrayal of the tree’s many details, his sense of the tree’s cultural and historical associations, and his sense of openness, uncertainty, and wonder. This is a model close reading of a poet who well repays the effort. Peter Cox’s essay, ‘ “From the World Away”: Clare and the Hermit’s Life’ (JCSJ 36[2017] 17–30), takes a more biographical approach, as does Robert Heyes’s ‘A Keats-Clare Connection Refuted’ (JCSJ 36[2017] 49–56). Cox examines the books Clare is known to have read, to determine which writers and traditions influenced Clare’s idea of the hermit. He then surveys a wide range of Clare’s poems, showing how the poet refracted his experience of people in his community through these traditions of hermitude. Heyes also trawls through Clare’s letters with the comb of the scholar, but with a more practical purpose: to determine the truth about a manuscript in the New York Public Library. In 1917, the collector Samuel Loveman believed he had happened upon a remarkable artefact. It was a letter of John Clare’s with a couplet from ‘Lamia’ written in the margin—in the handwriting of John Keats. Sadly, as Heyes reveals, the letter is in fact not one of Clare’s, though the scrap of ‘Lamia’ in the margin was certainly put there by Keats. Heyes tells an engaging narrative of obsession and mystery. Fans of Umberto Eco or The Aspern Papers, or sufferers from Derridean archive fever, will likely enjoy Heyes’s tale of a dedicated Clarean of old. The remaining two essays in the issue, Michael Falk’s ‘The Nightjar’s Shriek’ (JCSJ 36[2017] 31–48) and Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s ‘Exemplary Figures in Clare’s Descriptive Poems’ (JCSJ 36[2017] 57–68), are studies of the aesthetic and epistemological underpinnings of Clare’s poetry. Weiner, the author of one of the finest Clare monographs, contributes an insightful essay on the semantic structure of Clare’s nature imagery. Clare is often praised for his detail and particularity, but Weiner demonstrates that really his imagery is usually not particular but ‘exemplary’. When he describes animals and people, ‘[t]hey are usually singular—the milkmaid, the hare, the nightingale—and yet they are not individuals’ (p. 57). Clare ‘seldom particularizes within groups’ (p. 57), and this disinclination to particularize is one of his most characteristic features. His poems are epistemologically optimistic. The world is ‘universally intelligible’ for Clare; everything is ‘unfailingly meaningful’ (p. 60), because he can always see the category or kind to which each thing belongs. There are no unidentifiable birds, no uncategorizable stones, no unnameable places for Clare. Weiner stresses that Clare’s categorizations are far from ‘rigid’ (p. 61). His poems are experiments in dynamic perception. Through the simple act of observation Clare orders and synthesizes all the components of his reality. Falk’s essay also considers Clare’s implicit philosophy of perception, drawing on a database of sonnets to systematically compare Clare’s rhyme-schemes and syntactic structures with those of Charlotte Smith. Statistical analysis reveals crucial similarities between the sonnets of Clare and Smith, especially when compared to those of Wordsworth, introduced to the study as a control. Clare and Smith had a preference for parataxis, for Shakespearean or experimental rhyme schemes, and held to a common ‘aesthetic of variety’ (p. 34). Nonetheless important differences emerge. Clare’s use of rich rhyme and couplet sonnets introduces distinctive dynamics into his form of description, while Smith’s interest in extreme or diseased mental states distinguishes her poems in important ways from both Clare’s and Wordsworth’s. Falk concludes that common Wordsworth-centric narratives of the Romantic sonnet do not do justice to its variety, and obscure the particular achievements of sonneteers like Clare and Smith. This issue of the JCSJ is beautifully illustrated with botanical and zoological prints, and ends with an extremely useful bibliography of recent Clare scholarship compiled by Andrew Hodgson and Erin Lafford. Adam White’s John Clare’s Romanticism is a comparative study of Clare and four other Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Robert Burns. White sets out to prove that Clare is a Romantic. To do so, he trawls Clare’s works for images and phrases reminiscent of these other Romantic poets. Like Byron, Clare wrote movingly of the destructive effects of time. Like Burns, he wrote lilting love lyrics. Like Wordsworth, he described the mind in the process of comprehension. Where most other Clare scholars stress the immediacy of Clare’s poetry, its focus on the here and now of ecological consciousness, White argues that Clare was actually interested in the power of the imagination to shape and mediate experience. He wrote his poems in ‘a Romantic visionary mode’ that expressed faith in the power of the mind to master the world (p. 117). Simon Kövesi takes a starkly opposing view in John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History. Indeed, far from trying to prove that Clare was a proponent of powerful ‘Romantic’ subjectivity, Kövesi argues that Clare tried to move beyond the ego and achieve a ‘free plurality of “existences”, a multiplicity of free writing selves’ (p. 88). The book begins with an extended meditation on ‘John Clare and Place’. For 200 years, Kövesi argues, Clare scholars have insisted that Clare is a ‘down-to-earth’ poet (p. 3), a lower-class figure who lacks ‘agency’ or ‘artistry’ (p. 8). Against this, Kövesi sets out to prove that Clare was a ‘deliberate’ and ‘intellectual’ poet who developed new ideas and practices as time went on (p. 10). Clare was not always or only a poetic photographer, taking images of what lay directly before him. Kövesi uses the examples of The Parish [c.1823] and ‘To My Cottage’ [1821] to show how Clare could perceptively describe different layers of social, religious, and political meaning in the space around him. He goes on, in dazzling fashion, to show how Clare was also a poet of no-place, a man who identified with rootless and aristocratic poets like Lord Byron, a student of alienation as well as belonging. He contrasts this with modern-day ‘domesticising’ practices of remembering Clare in museums, memorials, and events (p. 43). Having shuffled off this critical legacy of Clare the local, immediate, and lower-class poet, Kövesi turns to three crucial themes in Clare’s verse. Chapter 2 concerns ‘ecocentrism’, chapter 3, Clare’s writing practices and textual history, and chapter 4, his treatment of women. In each case Kövesi builds on the revisionist case set out in chapter 1. Clare’s ‘ecocentrism’ and lack of ego have often been understood in social terms—Clare was a nobody in class terms, and was a nobody in his verse. Kövesi demonstrates, however, that Clare actually developed his anti-egoistic poetics by philosophically analysing the presentation of self in earlier Romantic poems. Similarly, Clare’s spelling, diction, and punctuation have often been linked to the fact he was a ‘Northamptonshire peasant’. Accordingly, his modern editors have split into two camps: those who argue that Clare’s rough manuscripts represent his authentic voice, prior to officious middle-class correction, and those who argue that if we leave Clare’s poems uncorrected, we cannot perceive the poet behind the peasant. Kövesi criticizes both camps for their absolutism: what we need is an open-ended textual scholarship, that will ‘enable engagement with the textual complexity’ of Clare’s body of work (p. 138). In his chapter on women, Kövesi shows a different side of his case. Clare was an inveterate writer of love lyrics and satires, in which he expressed a range of (not always attractive) views about women and their role in society. If we continue to read Clare primarily as a poet of place, then these aspects of his work will continue to be obscure or simply ignored. This is a landmark publication in Clare scholarship that justifies Clare’s increasingly central place in studies of Romantic poetry. Kövesi concludes the book with a thoughtful essay on Clare’s contemporary relevance in an age of historicist scholarship, literary tourism, and period drama. He ends wistfully, with the aspiration for a more creative and open-ended criticism. In her essay, ‘Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry’ (SiR 56[2017] 157–76), Katey Castellano contrasts human labour with ‘nature’s work’ (p. 158) in Clare’s poetry. Clare is often seen as a writer of georgics, a singer of labour, but Castellano argues that Clare departs from the georgic tradition by emphasizing ‘non-human’ labour (p. 158). Her key example is the mole. Clare describes the mole as a ‘Rude architect’, a hidden creature normally only visible by it molehills, the ‘marks of its labor’ (p. 161). Through a series of close readings, she shows how Clare uses the mole’s unceasing underground labour to critique the reigning ideology of improvement. Theresa Adam’s article, ‘John Clare and the Problem of Audience’ (ERR 28[2017] 625–42), is a thoughtful reflection on how Clare navigated the confusing waters of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace. The book trade was marketizing during the period, but was still characterized by ‘the persistence of patronage’, particularly for labouring-class poets (p. 626). At the beginning of his career Clare accepted patronage, but as time went on he increasingly forswore his patrons and attempted to reach a public of his peers. In his later poems, as Adams arrestingly puts it, Clare displays a ‘desire to be commodified’ (p. 635). But the market he dreamed of did not exist, leading him to ‘idealize’ and ‘abstract’ his readers in his difficult and provocative last poems. Clare was not merely a writer, of course, but also an avid reader. Andrew Hodgson unpacks the various emotions—‘enthusiasm, self-assurance and self-deprecation’ (p. 103)—with which Clare read his great predecessor Wordsworth, in ‘Clare on Wordsworth’ (WC 48[2017] 102–9). The essay begins with Thomas De Quincey, and his recollection of Clare’s deep and terrible admiration for the Lake poet. Hodgson sets out to refute De Quincey’s account, moving through a series of Clare’s letters and poems to show how he grappled with Wordsworth’s example, drawing on the older writer to think through issues of poetic practice, nature, imagination, and artifice. Joseph Cottle is not frequently the subject of research in Romantic poetry. All the more delightful, therefore, is Paul Cheshire’s ‘Cottle’s Bristol Album, “Evening” and the “Insane Man at Dr Fox’s” ’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 15–26). In the period in the mid-1790s when Bristol was the unknown capital of Romantic poetry, Cottle kept an album of his friend’s poems. Robert Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge all contributed poems to the album, but Cheshire is more interested in ‘an Insane man at Dr Fox’s’, the unfortunate anonymous author of a poem entitled ‘Evening’ in the volume. Cheshire offers a reading of the poem, observing its musical qualities, and suggests that, quite probably, it influenced Coleridge when he sat to write ‘Eolian Harp’ [1795]. Sharon Ruston considers another less-studied poet in her essay, ‘Humphry Davy in 1816: The Letters and the Lamp’ (WC 48[2017] 3–6). The essay is a pre-publication introduction to The Collected Letters of Humphry Davy [forthcoming 2019]. Ruston considers a number of the letters that shed new light on the priority of Davy’s most famous invention, the safety lamp. Scholars of Romantic poetry, however, will be particularly interested in the final pages of the essay, when Ruston introduces Davy’s unpublished poem, ‘Thoughts after the ingratitude of the Northumbrians with respect to the Safety Lamp’. The poem is largely of interest as a biographical document, a window into Davy’s ‘bitter but also resilient’ frame of mind at the end of the Safety Lamp affair (p. 14). Interest in the Australian Romantic poet Charles Harpur is growing as the 150th anniversary of his death approaches. In ‘Charles Harpur: The Editorial Nightmare’ (JASAL 16:ii[2017] 1–14), Paul Eggert introduces readers to the knotty textual legacy of this complex writer. Harpur was an inveterate reviser, whose manuscripts contain dozens of expanding and contracting versions of his poems. Eggert distinguishes the ‘editorial’ from the ‘archival’ function, and shows how advances in compositing software and Web technology have enabled a new kind of edition more suitable to Harpur’s manuscript oeuvre. Returning to a more canonical poet, John Keats in Context is a wide-ranging and well-organized collection of thirty-four short essays, divided into six parts: I, ‘Life, Letters, Texts’; II, ‘Cultural Contexts’; III, ‘Ideas and Poetics’; IV, ‘Poetic Contexts’; V, ‘Influence’; and VI, ‘Critical Reception’. In a remarkably compact introduction (pp. 1–5), Michael O’Neill evokes the ‘vibrant’ aspects of Keats’s poetry, and gives a useful summary of twentieth-century Keats scholarship before introducing the main sections of the volume. Part I, on Keats’s ‘Life, Letters and Texts’, has a pleasing arc. Sarah Wootton commences the section with a pungent meditation on the ways we remember Keats’s life (pp. 9–18), comparing Jane Campion’s film Bright Star [2009] with the recent biographies by Andrew Motion [1997] and Nicholas Roe [2012]. There is a tension in these texts, claims Wootton, between ‘elusive states of being’ and ‘artistic agency’ (p. 16). This claim frames the next five essays in Part I, each of which vividly evokes elusive moments of Keats’s life, while trying to relate his experiences to his growth as a poet. Nicholas Roe contributes two essays (pp. 19–27, 28–37), the first co-written with Hrileena Ghosh, on Keats’s early years in London. The first essay makes a compelling argument that ‘medicine and poetry served the same purpose’ for Keats. The second is remarkable for its vivid and detailed descriptions of Keats’s seventeen months at Guy’s Hospital. The next three essays in the section pick up on later aspects of Keats’s life: Heidi Thompson (pp. 38–47) describes his familial, friendly, and romantic relationships with women, and gives pleasing emphasis to the women other than Fanny Brawne; Shahidha Bari (pp. 48–55) retells the heartbreaking narrative of Keats’s death in Rome; Jeffrey C. Robinson (pp. 56–65) considers Keats’s travel, giving extended treatment to the Scottish tour of June–August 1818. The final two essays in the section shift from the facts of Keats’s life to its documents. Madeleine Callaghan (pp. 66–74) analyses the form and structure of Keats’s letters. John Barnard gives an impressively comprehensive survey of Keats’s textual history, from 1817, the date of his oldest surviving manuscripts, up to 2009, the date of Stephen Hebron’s selected facsimile edition. Part II describes the ‘Cultural Contexts’ of Keats’s verse. Gregory Leadbetter provides a smooth segue from the biographical concerns of Part I to the intellectual themes of Part II. He begins his essay on ‘The Hunt Circle and the Cockney School’ (pp. 89–98) with a sketch of Leigh Hunt and his contemporary reception, before describing Keats’s intense involvement with Hunt’s project, and his eventual transcendence of it. Part II then opens out into a discussion of wider contexts. Timothy Webb (pp. 99–107) describes the range of Keats’s Londonian interests—walking (p. 100), window-shopping (p. 101), ‘routs’ (p. 101), the theatre (p. 103). He makes a convincing case that this ‘Cockney’ poet was a London writer. Richard Cronin’s essay is ostensibly about ‘Politics’ (pp. 108–16), but quickly morphs into a discussion of the artifice of Keats’s verse. Grant F. Scott continues Webb and Cronin’s analysis of the importance of Leigh Hunt to Keats’s poetics in his essay on ‘Sociability’ (pp. 117–25), but his argument broadens to consider how Keats’s private writings ‘aspire[d] to the phonetic immediacy of conversation’ (p. 120). The last two essays of Part II take off in fresh directions. Nancy Moore Goslee (pp. 126–35) describes London’s art scene and shows how it influenced Keats’s ekphrastic poetry. Anthony John Harding puts Keats in mythological context (pp. 136–45). At this ultimate cultural horizon, Keats emerges as a poet plying the crosswinds of transience and eternity (p. 142). Part III moves away from life and London, and places Keats in the more purely intellectual contexts of ‘Ideas and Poetics’. This section also has a coherent structure: the first two essays discuss writers who influenced Keats, the next three essays consider some key concepts of Keats’s thought, and the section ends with an essay on Keats’s theory of poetry. Porscha Fermanis provides an overview of Keats’s reading of Enlightenment thinkers like Robertson and Voltaire, before revealing the remarkable ways in which Keats echoed the thought of thinkers like Adam Ferguson, Hugh Blair, and Immanuel Kant, whom he appears never to have read (pp. 149–58). Duncan Wu gets specific in his convincing discussion of Hazlitt’s influence on Keats (pp. 159–67). Charles W. Mahoney traces the history of Keats’s theory of the imagination (pp. 168–77), revealing how the poet moved from ‘confidence to scepticism’ in his thoughts on the topic (p. 177). Wu and Mahoney both show how important Hazlitt’s influence was on Keats, and Seamus Perry continues the discussion in his essay on ‘The Poetical Character’ (pp. 178–87). Perry agrees with Wu and Mahoney that Hazlitt’s writings helped Keats to form his idea that the poet’s self is really ‘not itself’ (p. 180), and quite effectively proves that Keats’s concept of the ‘negative life of the imagination’ (p. 184) was not simply an idea, but a motivating force in his poetry. Stacey McDowell takes the discussion away from ideas and into the Keatsian realm of experience in her essay on ‘The Senses and Sensation’ (pp. 188–97). Through a series of close readings, she shows that there are two ‘modes’ of sensation in Keats: a ‘mimetic’ mode and a freer ‘associative’ mode (p. 195). This segues nicely into editor Michael O’Neill’s essay on the intervolved, resonant structure of the odes (pp. 198–206). Part IV transitions from the intellectual to the literary context. The first four essays describe the poets who most influenced Keats, and the final three essays consider the major poetic genres in which Keats wrote. According to Chris Murray (pp. 209–19), Keats distinguished himself from his English contemporaries by appreciating the philosophy of Dante’s poetry (p. 214), and combined Dante with King Lear [1606] to produce the Hyperion poems (pp. 216–17). Beth Lau considers a wider range of influences (pp. 220–8), revealing a progression in Keats’s ideas about the poetic canon. At the start of his career, he agreed with his contemporaries in rejecting the Augustan poets and lionizing the Renaissance (p. 220). But as he matured, he showed greater receptivity to Augustan modes, emulating Dryden in Lamia and Pope in The Jealousies. The next two essays focus on poets of Keats’s time. O’Neill considers a range of poets (pp. 229–37), but reserves most of his energy for a subtle discussion of Keats’s ‘conflicted response’ to Wordsworth’s poetry (p. 234). Jane Stabler (pp. 238–47) deals quickly with Keats’s dismissal of Coleridge, before considering at some length how the erotic impulses of Shelley and Byron inflected his notions of beauty. Andrew Bennett’s essay on ‘Ballad, Romance and Narrative’ (pp. 248–57) is a fine beginning to the subsection on genre, with its reflections on Keats’s ‘deformations and deviation from convention’ (p. 248). Susan J. Wolfson’s essay on ‘Epic and Tragedy’ (pp. 258–68) follows on smoothly, beginning with Keats’s ‘Adieu to Romance’ (p. 258). Rather than focusing on genre, however, Wolfson offers an extended close reading of the Hyperion poems. Christopher Miller concludes Part IV by telling the familiar story of Keats’s ‘development’ from a sonneteer to the writer of the great odes (pp. 269–77). Parts V and VI both consider the aftermath of Keats’s poetry. The three essays in Part V show how he influenced later writers, the four in Part VI analyse the reactions of scholars and critics to his verse over the last 200 years. Herbert F. Tucker (pp. 281–90) considers how Victorian poets strove to ‘contain’ Keats’s dangerously seductive verse (p. 287). Michael O’Neill argues that twentieth-century poets have found Keats more straightforwardly inspirational (pp. 291–9). Mark Sandy briskly summarizes Keats’s North American reception, from the Transcendentalists to Roth and Stevens (pp. 300–9). It is a pity the same consideration was not given to the rest of the English-speaking world. Kelvin Everest kicks off the final series of essays on Keats’s critical reception by showing how ‘disconcertingly different’ Keats’s poetry was for his contemporaries (pp. 314, 313–22). Francis O’Gorman goes on to show how voyeuristic concern over Keats’s love life warped his critical reception through the nineteenth century (pp. 323–30). Matthew Scott shows how this Victorian inheritance was deconstructed in the twentieth century (pp. 331–9), building up to the turning point in the 1960s, when for the first time the whole range of Keats’s poems and the full extent of the surviving documents were finally taken into account (p. 336). Richard Marggraf Turley concludes the volume on a wry note (pp. 340–9), by surveying the ‘critical biases’ of recent scholarship (p. 340). His summary takes in a wide range of critical approaches to Keats, confirming the vitality and importance of Keats studies today. These essays on Keats’s reception conclude this excellent collection. The book’s organization is impeccable. The essays are concise and digestible enough to suit the undergraduate reader, and packed with enough details and witty observations to please the most experienced scholar. Serena Trowbridge continues the consideration of Keats’s reception in ‘Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of “The Eve of St. Agnes” ’ (in Sophia Andres and Brian Connelly, ed., Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings, pp. 17–28). As she demonstrates, the sensuous jewellery of Keats’s verse attracted the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais’s The Eve of St Agnes [1863], Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro [1848], and Arthur Hughes’s The Eve of St Agnes [1856] all celebrate the dramatic and lyrical aspects of Keats’s great work of narrative. In the final section of her essay, Trowbridge throws these Keatsian qualities of sensuality and drama into relief, by contrasting these examples with Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal’s painting The Eve of St. Agnes [1850], based not on Keats’s poem, but on Tennyson’s stiller and more contemplative work of the same name. Eric Eisner considers a less well-known chapter in Keats’s reception in ‘Drag Keats: Mark Doty’s Cockneys Poetics’ (ERR 28[2017] 387–93). The contemporary American poet Mark Doty is often accused of Keatsianism, and Eisner carefully considers the evidence of this charge. In the end, he concludes, Doty is able to draw productively on the earlier poet because of ‘the way Keats disconnects style from unique selfhood’ (p. 392). The shifting music of his verse is not constrained by a particular personality. Stacey McDowell picks upon this theme of disconnection in her essay on ‘Shiftiness in Keats’s “Ode on Indolence” ’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 27–37). She draws fascinating connections between the unstable textual history of ‘Indolence’, its themes of ‘generative passiveness’ (p. 28), and Keats’s famed theory of Negative Capability. She argues that all these strands can be drawn together under the rubric of ‘shiftiness’, offering close readings of the poem as evidence. Tristram Wolff likewise picks up on the fleeting aspects of Keats’s poetry in ‘Surface Feeling, or What Ephemerality Does to Reading in Hazlitt, Hogarth, and Keats’ (ERR 28[2017] 349–60). Interdisciplinary scholars have in recent years done much to illuminate ‘deep time’ in Romantic poetry, argues Wolff, and have neglected ‘shallow time’, the time of instants or moments. He begins with a long comparative discussion of Hogarth’s and Hazlitt’s intertwined theories of wit and beauty. For these two writers, ‘images fairly vibrate with possibilities’ (p. 355). Having built up this framework Wolff then turns to Keats, bringing out the contradictory aspects of fleeting and freezing time in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ [1819]. Thomas Moore attracted three articles this year. While Blackwood’s Magazine was reliably hostile about most things emancipatory, Daniel S. Roberts argues, in ‘ “The Only Irish Magazine”: Early Blackwood’s and the Production of Irish “National Character” ’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 262–71), that it took a surprisingly complex line on Ireland. Examining Maga’s engagements with Moore’s smash hit, Lalla Rookh [1817], allows Roberts to explore the nuances of the magazine’s position on Ireland. Frederik Van Dam, meanwhile, in ‘Waterloo Remembered: Thomas Moore and the Diplomatic Legacy of the Battle of Waterloo in the Nineteenth Century’ (SiR 56[2017] 379–98), accounts for Moore’s relative silence on this period-defining battle by highlighting the Irish poet’s interest in the battle’s ‘diplomatic aftermath’ (p. 381), as shown in his two popular satires, The Fudge Family in Paris [1818] and Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress [1819]. Julia M. Wright squares up to another side of Moore in her wonderfully researched and entertaining essay, ‘Cosmopugilism: Thomas Moore’s Boxing Satires and the Post-Napoleonic Congresses’ (SiR 56[2017] 499–523), opening with a fascinating account of the popularity of boxing and boxing slang in Regency satire. Moore was, Wright argues persuasively, quick to pick up on this, incorporating boxing and boxing slang into his popular satirical poetry of 1818 and beyond. Grégory Pierrot’s essay, ‘Droit du Seigneur, Slavery, and Nation in the Poetry of Edward Rushton’ (SiR 56[2017] 15–35), looks at the chronically under-considered poetry of Edward Rushton, specifically the poetry he wrote against slavery after his transition from sailor in the trade to radical abolitionist. Among many aspects considered in this insightful, wide-ranging essay, Pierrot focuses particularly on the idea of revenge in anti-slavery poems, and the way in which British poets managed their own uneasiness at the prospect of outright slave rebellion and self-determination. In addition to the article by Michael Falk above, Charlotte Smith’s work was the focus of a number of further works. Bethan Roberts’s essay, ‘ “Breaking the Silent Sabbath of the Grave”: Charlotte Smith’s Sonnet XLIV and Her Place in Literary History’ (ERR 28[2017] 549–70), delves deeper into the peopled ground of Smith’s most famous sonnet, excavating an extraordinarily complex pattern of appropriation, imitation, and, most appropriately, ‘disintegration’ (p. 554) of eighteenth-century poetic tradition. Roberts usefully and sensitively complicates the established view of Smith’s sonnet as a radical break with tradition, replacing this easy narrative with something far more nuanced. Tobias Meneley’s ambitious essay, ‘Late Holocene Poetics: Genre and Geogistory in Beachy Head’ (ERR 28[2017] 307–14), asks a vast question: ‘What do we learn … if we reperiodize literary history in relation to, and as expressive of, epochal change at the scale of the Earth System?’ (p. 307). What follows is a rich and complex reading of Smith’s Beachy Head, with particular attention to the ways in which Smith conceptualizes and figures ‘the flow of energy on Earth’ (p. 313). Meanwhile, in ‘The Negative Turn: Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and the Right Not To Communicate’ (RCPS [June 2017] 25 paras.), Samuel Rowe makes a radical departure from critical orthodoxy in exploring the ‘counter-sentimental in Smith’s writing’, specifically her sonnets, which maintain a ‘stony silence on the cause of their despondency’ (p. 3). Characterizing Smith’s sonnets as practising ‘affective dissociation and phenomenal withdrawal from the world’, Rowe claims Smith ‘for a Romantic tradition of lyric negativity’ (p. 1). Eight articles or essays on Shelley were published in 2017. Matthew C. Borushko examines the Shelleyan sublime in ‘Perils of the Sublime: Ideology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor’ (ERR 28[2017] 643–58), using the Alastor poet’s encounter with the veiled maid as a departure point for a thoroughgoing account of Shelley’s anxieties about the sublime and ‘the habits of mind it compels’ (p. 644). Carmen Cassaligi’s ‘From Coppet to Milan: Romantic Circles at La Scala’ (WC 48[2017] 59–66) considers the importance of cosmopolitan centres like Milan for the work of the second generation of Romantics, particularly Shelley. This is a highly pertinent and pointed essay that insists on the significance of Europe in any formulation of British Romanticism. Bysshe Inigo Coffey throws himself into the breach between materialism and idealism in Shelley’s poetry. Coffey’s essay, ‘Shelley’s Alastor and “On a Future State” ’ (WC 48[2017] 39–46), attempts to do away with ‘the various linear narratives’ of Shelley’s movement from materialism to idealism, arguing instead that ‘Shelley did not seek to resolve the relation between the material and immaterial world … but to actuate and enact the dynamic between sensuous reality and the gaps and pauses that punctuate it’ (p. 39). Benjamin Colbert, in ‘Romantic Palingenesis, or History from the Ashes’ (ERR 28[2017] 369–78), uses the ‘metaphorically rich discourse’ of palingenesis, or birth from the ashes, to consider ‘the ways in which Shelley problematizes the suture between organic selfhood, individual consciousness, and social-political history’ (p. 370). While Shelley’s work abounds in images of resurrection and rebirth, Colbert skilfully reveals an entropic undersong of disintegration, disruption, and decay. J.D. Lamperez’s essay, ‘ “Strong hold and fountain-head of their idolatry”: The Juggernaut in the Work of Claudius Buchanan and Shelley’s The Triumph of Life’ (SiR 56[2017] 423–52), identifies the mysterious ‘Car of Life’ at the centre of Shelley’s late, unfinished poem as ‘the Indian god-cum-metaphor known as the Juggernaut’ (p. 423). Lamperez explains Shelley’s unique use of this popular metaphor by reference to Claudius Buchanan, ‘an East India Company provost and chaplain whose own reimagining of this divine personality transformed it from Indian deity to British idea’ (p. 424). Monika Lee offers a series of beguiling reflections on place and influence in ‘Shelley and Rousseau: The Mirror and the Lake’ (WC 48[2017] 52–9). Pursuing Shelley and Byron on their famous sailing trip around Lake Geneva in 1816, Lee argues that, for Shelley, the most important conversation of Shelley’s Swiss sojourn was ‘the ongoing intertextual dialogue between Shelley and Rousseau’ (p. 53). Daniel Westwood’s ‘Movement in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” ’ (WC 48[2017] 32–9) offers an accomplished formal reading of Shelley’s preoccupation with ‘the role of movement in quest narrative’ (p. 32), finding in Shelley a poet who valorizes ‘the act of seeking as that which lays a pathway through the uncertainties of human experience’ (p. 39). Michael O’Neill examines the influence of Dante on Shelley in ‘Turning to Dante: Shelley’s Adonais Reconsidered’ (WC 48[2017] 119–28), contending that, particularly in Adonais, Dante ‘increasingly had come to the fore as the type of “great poet” ’ (p. 120) for whom Shelley reserved a prophetic function. In 2017 Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt completed the next volume in their marvellous open-access project of collecting and annotating Robert Southey’s letters, part of his wider rehabilitation as an important and valuable object of study in the period. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part Six (RC [2017]; <https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Six/index.html>) is fully accessible online, and, like the past instalments, has a wonderfully helpful index and a series of neat biographical sketches for each of the correspondents, and remains a joy to use. Southey’s epistolary style is fresh, easy, and chatty, and the volume offers further insight into the life of the hardest-working Laker. Stuart Andrews, in ‘Southey on Coleridge: Bristol Letters, 1799–1803’ (WC 48[2017] 168–72), offers an account of Southey’s opinions on Coleridge, and his life as a ‘Bristol Poet’ (p. 168), as reconstructed from Southey’s Bristol letters. Harriet Kramer Linkin casts welcome light on Mary Tighe in ‘Locating Irish Romanticism in Mary Tighe’s Poetry and Prose’ (ERR 28[2017] 431–45), illuminating her cloudy, sporadic presence as the quintessential Irish woman poet of the period. In a wide-ranging survey of Tighe’s work, Linkin shows ‘how completely [Tighe] could enact the connection between the personal and the political’ (p. 432), and provides a number of fascinating readings of Tighe’s work next to more canonical Romantic poets. Dan Froid’s electronic edition of Catherine Upton’s The Siege of Gibraltar & Miscellaneous Pieces (RC [2017]) reminds us again of how much textual recovery work remains to be done in the period. Readers will find Froid’s introduction useful in placing Upton and her patriotic celebration of the Great Siege of Gibraltar. Wordsworth studies continued to flourish in 2017, with new sites of scholarly enquiry opening, and apparently well-trod paths revisited for further insight. In ‘Wordsworth’s Unwelcome Visitors’ (WC 48[2017] 77–84), Quentin Bailey revisits the question of Wordsworth’s vagrants, both as victims of specific social conditions and as prompts to more general questions about hospitality and duty of care, by way of the current refugee crisis. Toby R. Benis, meanwhile, in ‘Vagrants and Neighbors in The Prelude’ (WC 48[2017] 84–7), looks to ‘neighbors’ and ‘neighborhood’ as a way of exploring ‘social belonging’ (p. 85) without succumbing to partisanship or nationalism, contrasting neighbourly bonds with vagrancy in Book IV of The Prelude. Kelvin C. Black’s ‘Bound by “the Principles of 1776”: Dilemmas in Anglo-American Romanticism and Douglass’s The Heroic Slave’ (SiR 56:i[2017] 93–112) presents an interesting parallel movement in the politics of William Wordsworth and Frederick Douglas. Black re-reads the Burke vs. Paine debate in light of Douglass’s novel, The Heroic Slave [1852], a book Smith believes marks Douglass’s reconciliation with sympathetic nationalism, and detects a similar accommodation in The Prelude. Julia S. Carlson’s essay, ‘ “With gentle hand / Touch-”: “The Horrid Blank of Nature” and the New Feel of Reading’ (ERR 28[2017] 279–88) offers a fascinating survey of Romantic attitudes to the ‘new haptic technologies’ (p. 280) emerging in France, precursors to braille. Carlson argues persuasively that these new sensory worlds filtered through into conceptions of subjectivity and models of private reading, concluding with an ingenious and insightful reading of Wordsworth’s ‘The Blind Highland Boy’ [1815]. Wordsworth’s fascination with blindness has often been remarked on, but Carlson here brilliantly finds a source for this fascination in the material culture of the late eighteenth century. Clay Daniel introduces yet another complicating factor in the fraught relationship between Wordsworth’s poetry and politics in ‘Milton, Politics and The Prelude’ (WC 48[2017] 172–7), pointing out a range of fascinating clashes and contradictions in Wordsworth’s identification (or not) with his great republican forebear. Another fascinating addition to Wordsworth studies, Hugh Davis’s essay, ‘ “As if admonished from another world”: Wordsworth’s Prelude, Schopenhauer, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ (in Lofaro, ed., Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75, pp. 95–113), considers problems of perception, representation, and knowledge in Book VII of the Prelude and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [1941]. While careful to acknowledge that ‘the situation to which James Agee hoped to do justice in 1930s rural Alabama was far removed from the urban spectacle of teeming London’ (p. 97), in Book VII Davis reveals a number of far-reaching parallels between the two authors—with consequences for our reading of both. Eric Lindstrom meditates on a different sort of praise between famous men in his essay, ‘Mourning Life: William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 38–52), a fascinating, responsive account of Shelley’s many Wordsworthian turns—both for and against. Charting this switchback course, Lindstrom discerns in Shelley’s imagination a ‘dialectical energy of thought that works much like the alternations of an electrical current’ (p. 49). Carmen Faye Mathes’s haunting essay on the effects and affects of sound, ‘Listening Not Listening: William Wordsworth and the Radical Materiality of Sound’ (ERR 28[2017] 315–24), begins with Canadian poet Jordan Scott’s recordings of ambient sound in the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, before considering the often involuntary scenes of hearing in Wordsworth’s poetry, with particular attention to ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ [1802]. Steven Matthews’s Ceaseless Music: Sounding Wordsworth’s The Prelude, attacks its canvas with pleasingly broad brushstrokes: ‘This book considers how the revolutionary autobiographical epic, The Prelude, altered and changed in its author William Wordsworth’s mind’, ‘how the poem changed the minds of his readers’, and ‘authors across the centuries since’ (p. viii). What follows is a series of lightly researched reflections on Wordsworth’s self-originating epic and ‘how it is that poetry sounds out the world, how it sounds out of the world, how it demands attention as a way of understanding who we are, where we are’ (p. ix), interleaved with brief biographical anecdotes of the Wordsworth circle and Matthews himself, riffs on brain science and aesthetics, and the odd original poem inspired by or related to a famous Wordsworthian work or landmark. Matthews’s openly avowed inexperience and status as a kind of poetic lay-preacher—‘I take it you do not know who I am’ (p. 1), the first chapter begins—sets the tone and sometimes yields dividends. Insights like the following, for example, are all the better for being put simply: ‘Perhaps it is Wordsworth’s supreme confidence that there is a story of his life to be woven which is the most inspiring aspect of The Prelude’ (p. 130). These insights, however, are rarely pursued in any detail or complexity, and Matthews sometimes falls into truism or factual inaccuracy in the process of scoring a rhetorical point. ‘Why … should I be the one reflecting on The Prelude? By what right?’, Matthews asks, since ‘I am not known as a scholar’ (p. 1), before answering himself: ‘Hubris would say, well, Wordsworth himself was unknown when he began work on The Prelude … He had published only “his” section of Lyrical Ballads’ (p. 2). In fact, Wordsworth had published two long poems and a number of shorter poems before ‘his’ section of the Lyrical Ballads. While Matthews’s purpose, as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘Beyond Criticism’ series, may be an admirably levelling one, this endeavour is undermined by the price: an eye-watering £85. This is a book that struggles to identify its audience—a suitably Wordsworthian dilemma. Stacey McDowell’s essay, ‘Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 179–90), offers sensitive and witty readings of two great Cumbrian poets separated by time (but not very much space). Reading Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Unvisited’ with and against Nicholson’s ‘Askam Unvisited’, McDowell draws out the deft poetical footwork underlying both poems which facilitates their authors’ mutual fascination with ‘unvisiting’, and the various themes of temporality, memory, and imagination this curious concept suggests. This is a marvellously intricate but unfussy account of how skilfully these two poets matched or deliberately mismatched content with form. Joseph McQueen, meanwhile, revisits The Prelude with Walter Benjamin as a guide in ‘Remembering the Revolution: Wordsworth, Benjamin, and Mnemonic Critique’ (ERR 28[2017] 241–58). Highlighting the way in which ‘emphasis on Wordsworth’s inward turn and subsequent political apostasy risks obscuring the moments in his work, particularly those in The Prelude, that are not simply reactionary’ (p. 242), McQueen argues that, via Benjamin, memory can be a vehicle for political recovery—a claim that has major consequences for readings of The Prelude. Joel Pace’s luminous essay, ‘Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, and Self-Mapping’ (SiR 56[2017] 113–23), revisits the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, recasting Wheatley as a Romantic by showing how ‘Wheatley’s critiques of Enlightenment ideology anticipate Romanticism’ and the ‘[a]utobiographical pentameter’ (p. 116), usually deemed specifically Wordsworthian. In doing so, Pace shows how Romanticism might look if the Atlantic, specifically the Black Atlantic, is placed at its centre. Taylor Schey courses on the borderline between similarity and difference in ‘Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers’ (SiR 56[2017] 177–201), producing a brilliantly insightful and nuanced account of this most difficult of Wordsworthian texts. After a vigorous account of the conflict between symbol and analogy in the work of David Hume and major theorists of Romanticism, Schey goes on to read the repetition, illegitimacy, and mistaken identity at play in The Borderers [1842] as an attempt to grapple with the use and misuse of analogy, and the difficulty of ultimately discerning where difference and similarity begin and end. John Williams presents a novel reading of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell [1819] in ‘Wordsworth, Shelley, and the Riddle of Peter Bell’ (Romanticism 23[2017] 75–87), showing, first, how this befuddling poem depends on a tradition of folk ‘riddling’ rarely acknowledged in Wordsworth’s work (p. 76), and, secondly (for the first time), how Shelley’s furiously satirical response, Peter Bell the Third, drew on Thomas Moore’s wildly popular Phil Fudge satires (p. 82). Williams concludes his wide-ranging reappraisal, by way of an ingenious series of biographical readings of the original poem with an answer to the riddle at its heart—‘Peter Bell is William Wordsworth’—before closing, appropriately, with an even more potent mystery: ‘we are still left with the question, “Who is William Wordsworth?” This is the riddle that was to haunt Wordsworth’s poetry to the end of his life, and beyond’ (p. 86). The search continues. Kim Wheatley, meanwhile, mines a rich seam of Wordsworth’s poetry in ‘John Cowper Powys and the Inhuman Wordsworth’ (ERR 28[2017] 773–88), using Powys’s writings to excavate the ‘stony version of Wordsworth’ (p. 777), who champions a kind of heroic insensibility. In 2017 historicism remained the dominant mode of study for Romantic poets and poetry. But this apparently settled orthodoxy is undermined, productively, by a number of inner contradictions and new (or old-made-new) directions. In the first instance, while historical recovery work continues apace, expanding the period and its stable of authors, and, particularly in the case of the exceptional new work being done on women’s writing, blurring its temporal and conceptual boundaries, the so-called canonical Romantic poets continue to monopolize critical attention. The study of Romanticism, particularly the poetry of Romanticism, remains haunted by its traditional theoretical formulations—a confrontation between new history and old theory seems inevitable. In the second, 2017 shows a noticeable turn towards formal analysis, part of an ongoing formal turn which has been apparent for some time—but this is, perhaps, a statistical anomaly produced by the extraordinary contributions and influence of the late Professor Michael O’Neill, who sadly passed away in 2018. The authors would like to offer their sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and students. He will be greatly missed. 4.Drama Last year’s review began with the observation that 2016 had been a particularly thin year for research into Romantic drama; unfortunately the same holds true in 2017. Romantic-era drama tends to be mentioned only as part of longer surveys rather than forming the central object of study. Of the works discussed below, many are unified by an interest in theatre's ability to both reflect and construct identities or ideas. In Antitheatricality and the Body Public, Lisa A. Freeman contends that antitheatricality does not—as Jonah A. Barish famously had it—underlie every response to the theatre. Far from antitheatrical prejudice being an ahistoric universal, writes Freeman, any negative reaction is a product of a specific set of historic circumstances or, what Jonas Barish dismisses as ‘local considerations’ (The Antitheatrical Prejudice, UCalP [1981], p. 4). To make her case, she takes five famous examples of anti-theatricality, spanning collectively more than three and half centuries, and places each in its unique context in order to ‘trace the actual politics that govern these ostensibly aesthetic and moral debates’ (p. 2). Antitheatrical discourse, she argues, was deployed to political ends and was intimately related to the theatre’s capacity to act as a space, actual and metaphorical, for the contestation of what and who constituted ‘the public’ (p. 5). The case study with relevance to the Romantic-period chapter of YWES concerns the competing representations of the Richmond Theatre fire, which took place in Virginia in 1811. Freeman claims that antitheatrical rhetoric was used as a rallying call to Americans for the purpose of cultivating a Christian body public. Mourning for the seventy victims of the fire was soon subsumed beneath a wave of condemnation directed at the sins of a play-going people. In their sermons, preachers presented the fire as a visitation of providence upon corruption and as presaging later, greater judgement if proper reform and acts of contrition did not follow. Significantly the site of the destroyed theatre was replaced with a church. The antitheatrical sermons were, however, in themselves highly theatrical, and made moral theatre out of the young women who died in the fire. Sermons thus were shaped into a ‘dramaturgical event’. (p. 231). Whether these were any more histrionic than the usual run of sermons, Freeman does not explore. Perhaps she might also have noted if a debate similar to that which was taking place in Britain over the propriety of theatrical sermons (see, for instance, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park [1814]) was also taking place in America at the time. In Theatre and Governance in Britain 1500–1900, Tony Fisher is, like Freeman, sceptical about the existence of any ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’. He proposes instead that animus against the stage was not so much fuelled by a distrust of representation as by a ‘profound contempt for common life’ (p. 22). This he labels an ‘anti-theatocratic prejudice’ (p. 22). Fisher views the Romantic period as marking a fundamental, though, subtle, shift in the way that the theatre was regarded. While for most of the eighteenth century it had been believed that the joint powers of theatrical licensing and the vox populi were able to prevent anything either political or immoral from making an appearance on stage, by the end of the century this discourse began to be questioned. John Thelwall, in a series of lectures entitled ‘On the Political Prostitution of the Theatres’ [1795], argued that the stage was ineluctably political by virtue of being under government control, and that as government was corrupt so, therefore, must be theatre. The solution proposed by Thelwall was to end the system of monopoly. This, claims Fisher, marked the point when the focus of theatrical governance began to shift away from the content of plays to the reform of governance itself. Fisher considers this shift in relation to the Old Price (OP) riots which, he argues on the basis of a report in The Times, made the relation of the patent system to government blindingly apparent to the populace, and it was ‘precisely this visibility’ which ‘enabled OPers [a name given to those protesting in the riots] to convert, so persuasively and so incisively, Kemble’s price rises into the sign of economic corruption’ (p. 208). Almost inevitably the monolithic Sarah Siddons looms large. She has a starring role in both James Armstrong’s ‘Succeeding the Siddons: Eliza O’Neill and the Triumph of the Romantic Style’ (TN 71[2017] 171–89) and Glen McGillivray’s ‘Rant, Cant and Tone: The Voice of the Eighteenth-Century Actor and Sarah Siddons’ (TN 71[2017] 2–20), and plays a substantial bit part in Jean I. Marsden’s ‘Affect and the Problem of Theatre’ (ECent 58[2017] 297–307). None of the articles are about Siddons per se, but in each she is used as an exemplar (or indeed as an exemplary figure). Armstrong’s article begins where Siddons stops—at her retirement and the subsequent search for a worthy successor. Yet with Siddons as the standard against which each aspirant tragic actress was judged, many were found wanting—until, that is, the advent of Eliza O’Neill. Armstrong argues that the younger actress’s success lay in espousing a romantic and unaffected style of tragic acting that differed fundamentally from the statuesque grandeur of the elder. This meant that she could not be simply written off as a second-rate Siddons. The ‘natural’ actress O’Neill, Armstrong suggests, chimed with the cultural moment. She became a focal point for the diverse strands of Romanticism and played a role in shifting tragic acting away from the classical and stylized towards the natural. Yet, unlike Siddons, O’Neill retired from the stage on marriage, and her short stint as the tragic muse is now largely forgotten. Armstrong’s article raises a worthwhile question over the extent to which ‘anxiety of influence’ is a relevant concept for theatrical as well as literary studies. Siddons’s extraordinary acting power is also alluded to in Jean I. Marsden’s article on affect in the theatre. Marsden attempts to account for the puzzling (as so many see it) popularity of the Georgian stage. How did dramas which seem to modern commentators overwrought and even ridiculous manage to produce such dramatic emotional effects on their auditors? Marsden quotes writings from David Hume and James Boswell to show that affect in drama was perceived as dependent in part on the fact of play-watching being a communal experience—in other words, the emotions generated by a play are made more intense by the presence of others. Arthur Murphy’s 1772 tragedy The Grecian Daughter is used to illustrate the way in which a play written off by Sarah Siddons’s biographer Thomas Campbell as a ‘tolerable tragedy in all but the words’ could be transmuted into something of intense emotional power when performed by a supreme actress such as Sarah Siddons and experienced when part of an audience (quoted p. 302). Thus Elizabeth Inchbald, in her remarks on the play in The British Theatre [1808], notes the disjunction between the rapturous applause The Grecian Daughter met with on stage and the severe criticism it received when read ‘in the closet’. Marsden’s article ends on a call for tracing the way in which response intrudes into literary texts—if plays stood or fell by the responses they elicited from the audience, then the response of an audience dictated the ways in which plays were edited. Plays, she urges, should be considered as ‘lived experience rather than fixed forms’ (p. 304). McGillivray is similarly concerned with the way in which modern biases may lead to inadequate understanding of past experience. In the above-cited work, McGillivray makes the obvious but often overlooked point that while the acting of past generations may seem unbearably mannered and stiff to those who come later, it may not have done so to contemporaries. To put it another way, the artifices of a later era were the naturalized rhetorical conventions of an earlier one. In his article, McGillivray seeks to set the historical record straight on two points: firstly that ‘ranting, canting, and toning’ were not phenomena of Restoration tragedy alone but rather persisted throughout the eighteenth century, and secondly that what constitutes a ‘natural’ performance is in the eye of the beholder and that naturalness comprises more than truth to life—an actor’s style must be appropriate for the rhetorical conventions of both a particular play and a particular time. While the first part of the essay tries to establish what is meant by ranting, canting, toning, or ‘naturalness’ in relation to James Quinn, David Garrick, and Charles Macklin, the second part deals with Sarah Siddons’s ‘grand style’. The statuesque poses, stately movements, and grandiose gestures of Siddons and her brother, John Phillip Kemble, were viewed by commentators as inaugurating a ‘new’ style of acting. Yet, as McGillivray observes, the ‘new’ style’s rhetorical conventions had much in common with the old, particularly with those of pre-Garrick actors such as Barton Booth and James Quinn. As a result of this Kemble would often strike his audiences as stiff and over the top. It is testimony to Siddons’s supreme skill, however, that she managed to make her grand classical acting seem ‘natural’. McGillivray proceeds to build a picture of Siddons’s voice—an exercise reminiscent of Judith Pascoe’s Sarah Siddons Audio Files (UMichP [2011])—which, it seems, could rant, tone, and rasp to great emotional effect. McGillivray concludes by arguing that the sign of a successful performer (he names David Garrick and Sarah Siddons) is the success with which they shift the expectations of rhetorical conventions. In, ‘A Mozart Duet in a Sarti Opera: “Là Ci Darem La Mano” in Udine, 1793’ (ECM 14[2017] 117–22), John Platoff bears witness to the power of the performer as he asks how and why a duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni [1787] was inserted into a production of Giuseppe Sarti’s popular opera buffa Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode [1782] which took place in the small Italian town of Udine in 1793. The question, he writes, is interesting for two reasons: first because substitutions in the Sarti score were rare and secondly because Mozart’s music was not widely known in Italy at the time—the full Don Giovanni was not performed there until 1811. The convincing explanation provided was that the role of Titta in the Sarti opera was performed by the bass Felice Ponziani, who had played Leporello in the original Prague production of Don Giovanni in 1787. The incident is further proof, Prest concludes, that eighteenth-century operas were by no means the fixed texts that they had become a century later and, moreover, that an opera’s content could be shaped by its singers as well as its composer and librettist. Two pieces consider the role played by the stage in mediating particular British identities—that of the soldier and that of the Jew. In ‘The Soldier in the Theater: Military Masculinity and the Emergence of a Scottish Macbeth’ (ECent 58[2017] 429–47), Kristina Straub argues that portrayals of Shakespeare’s Macbeth changed in accordance with the dominant image of the military, and in consequence Macbeth became the locus for a negotiation of British masculinity. As memories of the Jacobite rebellion gradually became more distant and were replaced in the public imagination by stories of Scottish valour during the Napoleonic Wars, the red coat of David Garrick’s Macbeth was replaced by Scottish dress. By the beginning of the nineteenth century Macbeth had become a romantic Gothic warrior and, Straub argues, able to symbolize a ‘quasi-mythical British past that dignified rather than reflected the increasing respectability—and inclusive Britishness—of the soldier’ (p. 433). Daniel O’Quinn’s chapter, ‘Proxy Israelites: Staging Ethnic Violence in the Ring and the Pit’ (in Gilmarton, ed., Sociable Places, pp. 97–121) considers the way in which the stage (or equivalently theatrical entertainments) could shape public attitudes—in this case towards the legendary Jewish fighter Daniel Mendoza. O’Quinn charts how Mendoza’s representation in the press changed over the course of his career from that of low, cunning Jew to, thanks to his boxing success and acts of ‘staged mercy’ in the ring, a symbol of Jewish ‘humanity’ and ‘British liberality’, and then back to an anti-Semitic hate-figure (pp. 110, 109). Mendoza’s relation to the theatre is presented by O’Quinn as threefold. The first in the similar ways in which prize fights and theatrical productions were mediated by the press—both were reported in the society columns, for instance. The second connection is far more direct. Kemble called on Mendoza and a group of fellow boxers to control the Drury Lane crowds during the OP riots of 1809. This fuelled an ‘anti-semitic firestorm’ and while the boxers were drawn from many ethnicities and religions, in the public imagination all were Jewish (p. 112). The most fascinating aspect of O’Quinn’s essay is his speculative account of the way in which John Phillip Kemble attempted to rehabilitate his post-OP reputation at the expense of Mendoza. During the riots Kemble, Mendoza, and Shylock had been critically conflated. Kemble, in an attempt to dissociate himself from Jewishness and Mendoza, turned to the repertoire, staging The Merchant of Venice [1596–9] and The Duenna [1775], and in both plays he chose to play the part of the unambiguous Christian. Kemble’s manoeuvrings failed as a result of an uproarious audience drowning out the action on stage. Jeffrey Cox and John Robbins are likewise concerned with the mediating power of the stage, although in their articles it is an event or subject, and not a section of the British population, which is being theatrically represented. In ‘From Pantomime to Poetry: Wordsworth, Byron, and Harlequin Read Waterloo’ (SiR 56[2017] 321–40) Cox claims that examining how theatres reacted to the news of Wellington’s triumph at Waterloo can lead to a better understanding of the ways in which Southey, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron wrote about the battle. As Cox observes, makers of pantomimes, like the poets, had to deal with the question of how to turn a recent battle which had seen a horrific loss of life into art. This framing is unnecessary, as what Cox has to say about pantomimes is interesting enough not to need the justification of being presented as in the service of the Romantic poets. Covent Garden and Drury Lane took divergent approaches in their treatment of the death toll. The former cleared its battlefield of dead bodies, depicting Waterloo as the prelude to peace rather than the site of war. Covent Garden, on the other hand, in a harlequinade by Thomas John Dibdin, made the costs of war its especial focus. Chelsea and Greenwich pensioners were drafted in to represent war casualties and a ‘Waterloo Orphan’ danced a hornpipe. Cox argues that the use of the ‘real’ in the context of the theatre was Dibdin’s method of reminding the viewer of his pantomime’s fictionality. Dibdin, writes Cox, ‘wants us to remember the tragic reality outside of theatre, including the reality of wounded soldiers, widows and orphans’ (p. 329). Cox then turns to the poetry and, without attempting to claim any direct influence or link other than that both aestheticize war, argues that that the poets’ work equivocates similarly between war as necessary for peace and war as the bringer of destruction. According to Cox, Byron’s method of self-consciously drawing attention to himself as a poet in Childe Harolde [1812] serves a similar metatextual function to Dibdin’s use of the real in his pantomime. In John Robbins’s article science is the subject for theatrical mediation. ‘ “It Lives!”: Frankenstein, Presumption, and the Staging of Romantic Science’ (ERR 28[2017] 185–201) is one of several articles to mark the centenary of Frankenstein’s publication and the only one to make Frankenstein’s stage adaptation the central focus. Robbins argues that, unlike its novel original in which scientific developments are presented as escaping the control of their progenitor, Richard Brinsley Peake’s stage adaptation Presumption [1823] limits the potential threat of science by omitting the creature’s dangerous threat to reproduce and by staging the monster’s execution. Even with these attenuating measures, Presumption still shared much of its parent text’s anxieties about scientific experimentation—in particular its potential to overwhelm the experimenters—a narrative, Robbins believes, which must have been reinforced by the way Presumption’s own runaway success outstripped its parent text. The article concludes with some reflections on theatre’s importance in disseminating and framing scientific developments. Matthew Wilson Smith’s monograph, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of the Modern Theater, also considers the connection between the stage and science. The stage of the nineteenth century, Wilson Smith claims, underwent two fundamental shifts: firstly, nerves replaced gestures as the window into a person’s hidden life; secondly, the primacy of sympathy in the creation of the liberal subject gave way to neural sensations. Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions are used by Wilson Smith to illustrate the sensation/sympathy paradigm. For Baillie, Wilson Smith states, gestures, especially those of the unobserved subject, reveal psychological or emotional truth. In Shelley’s The Cenci, however, this connection is broken as characters feign (or simply refuse to perform) gestures and thereby disguise their true state of mind. In the light of the overwhelming popularity of Macbeth at the period in which exactly such gestural dissimulation is a central theme, I wonder how far Wilson Smith is justified in saying of Shelley’s drama that ‘no play of the period captures the crisis of representation exposed by Romantic-era neurology more drastically’ (p. 77). Julia Prest takes us out of Europe as she considers three forgotten performances of Cristoph Gluck’s operas in Haiti in the 1780s in ‘Iphigénie en Haïti: Performing Gluck’s Paris Operas in the French Colonial Caribbean’ (ECM 14[2017] 13–29). These performances, she argues, not only testify to Gluck’s truly international popularity but also provide information about the nature of performance in the French colonial Caribbean. At least one Gluck opera was performed per year in Saint-Domingue between 1782 and 1791, and local newspapers suggest that these productions boasted high production values and expensive sets. Casts, such as that of Orphée et Eurydice, performed in 1782, included non-white performers, one of whom, a soprano called Minette, achieved such levels of respect and success as to be given the title of ‘Dlle’ (Demoiselle—something usually reserved for white women). As with Mendoza, celebrity and talent had the power to upend racial and ethnic prejudice. Art and scholarship are alike in too often either forgetting or caricaturing older women. This is not the case in two essays by Amy Garnai and Amy Culley. Culley’s chapter, ‘Ageing, Authorship, and Female Networks in the Life Writing of Mary Berry (1763–1852) and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851)’ (in Winckles and Rehbein, eds., Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: ‘A Tribe of Authoresses’, pp. 73–98), charts the enduring friendship of the two writers, Mary Berry and Joanna Baillie. One of the ways in which this friendship was manifested was in the busy circulation and mutual editing of their literary works, including their plays. In ‘Conjuring Comedies of 1792’ (WC 48[2017] 88–95) Garnai considers the treatment of the older woman in two plays of 1792. The first of these is Robert Merry’s The Magician No Conjuror [1792] and the second Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers No Conjurors [1792]. It is Garnai’s contention that this coincidence of titles represents a particular cultural moment in Britain—each play is an attempt to evade the tight regime of stage censorship in order to make a political point. In Inchbald’s case, writes Garnai, a double point, for her play was both a response to the political situation of the time and simultaneous with Merry’s play. Where Merry’s play used the vocabulary of the French Revolution to create a masculine magical romance in which two young men rescue a young woman imprisoned by her oppressive conjuror father and her ridiculous overweight aunt, Inchbald chose to focus on those whom Merry’s play ‘left behind’ (as Garnai poignantly expresses it), in this case the older unmarried woman (p. 88). Merry’s older unmarried woman is presented as a stock comic figure—there to provoke laughter in the audience—and she is not incorporated into his revolutionary commentary on the knaveries of the Pittite government (Pitt was repeatedly represented in satire as a conjuror). In Inchbald’s hands, however, the older unmarried woman is a ‘worthy and serious figure in the human landscape’. Her ‘vulnerabilities’ are connected to a ‘critique of hegemonic power and its deceptions’; thus Inchbald includes the older woman in the ‘revolutionary equation’ (p. 93). Closet drama makes three appearances in this year’s output. One of these is in the aforementioned monograph on neuroscience by Matthew Wilson Smith—although there the plays are treated as potential performance pieces. This is not the approach of John Robbins who, in ‘Documenting Terror in Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre’ (SEL 57[2017] 605–19), suggests that the private reading experience can enhance feelings of terror. While the narrative drive of onstage productions is to make sense and reach resolutions, ‘exceptional occurrences’, such as the Terror of the French Revolution, ‘cannot be analysed or described directly, but can only be apprehended through analogy, displacement, and substitution’ (p. 606). This method, he writes, is in itself a strategy of terror. Thus in Inchbald’s closet drama The Massacre [1792], events like the deaths of the central character’s family are only documented in retrospect and this prevents the reader reaching catharsis. Inchbald’s insistence on finding ways other than straightforward representation to document the undocumentable can, conversely, help its reader process the effects of terrorism. This article tends to conflate, or make interchangeable, the Terror and terror. As Robbins treats small-t terror in a way that verges on the transhistorical (he turns to contemporary analysis of the creation of terror in the sanitized news coverage of the Iraq war by way of parallel), a more explicit handling of their relationship would have been helpful. Madeleine Callaghan’s is the third work to focus on closet drama in Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, although the two plays she considers—Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound [1820] and The Cenci [1819]—have received far more attention than Inchbald’s. Both dramas, she suggests, can be better understood in the light of letters by Shelley around the time of writing—particularly a letter to Thomas Love Peacock in 1818 in which Shelley meditates on the imprisonment of Tasso and thereby on the theme of tyranny. Callaghan makes the case that the two plays were viewed by Shelley as ‘expressive binaries’ (p. 144). This is evident in Shelley’s denomination of their intended audiences—Prometheus Unbound was for ‘the elect’, while The Cenci was ‘calculated to produce a very popular effect’ (p. 144). In Callaghan’s reading of The Cenci, Beatrice is the representative of imagination and sensibility and therefore occupies the role of poet. Her destruction at the hands of her father is ‘the corruption of poets by tyrannical society’ as presented in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry [1821], ‘writ large’ (p. 147). Prometheus Unbound, like The Cenci, explores the relationship between tyranny and poetry. Here Shelley uses linguistic form—changing from blank verse to something more experimental, rejecting overly theatrical rants—as an analogue for political freedom. Thus ‘ethics and aesthetics seem inextricably bound’ (p. 160). The final work to be considered in this year’s Romantic drama section is Jocelyn Harris’s new monograph on Jane Austen’s engagement with celebrity—Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen. This is dealt with in Section 2 above, but is revisited here as it contains a chapter devoted to the private theatricals of Mansfield Park [1814]. This episode, Harris argues, was inspired by a fictionalized private theatrical in Maria Edgeworth’s recently published novel Patronage [1814]. But as Patronage was published in January 1814 and Mansfield Park in May 1814, the timeline poses difficulties. These Harris inventively solves by suggesting that Austen radically rewrote sections of her finished manuscript and proof straight after reading Edgeworth’s novel. In other words, according to Harris, Lover’s Vows [1798], Mr Yates, Henry Crawford, and Maria Bertram’s theatrical flirtation, are all last-minute additions to Mansfield Park. The reason that Harris is prepared to make such a bold claim rests on several similarities between the two works—both private theatricals provoke rivalry between sisters, each contains characters concerned with the grandeur of their costume, both heroines refuse to act, Henry’s ‘mixed character’—which, she believes, could only derive from direct influence (p. 136). In a similar theatrical vein, Harris suggests Henry’s height and skill at acting are an allusion to the short David Garrick. A later chapter also deals with theatre—although this time the ‘celebrity’ influence is not a fictionalized performance but real-life actresses. In this chapter Harris contends that Dorothy Jordan, one of the most revered actresses of the age, was the inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet. While Elizabeth Bennet certainly exhibits the combination of hoyden energy, expressiveness, naturalness, and arch sensitivity that characterized Jordan’s acting style, other connections are less convincing. There is no evidence that Jordan’s long-term partner, the Duke of Clarence, was attracted to Jordan when she ‘refuse[d] to pay court to him’ as Elizabeth refuses to do to Darcy (although it is the case that Jordan did not accept Clarence’s advances until she had made certain that her current romantic partner would not marry her) (p. 218). Another surprising connection is drawn by Harris between the gossiping and virtuous Mrs Smith in Persuasion [1817] and the quondam actress, lover of the Prince of Wales, and later successful poet, Mary Robinson. While some of Harris’s conclusions may seem too speculative, she continues the important work of integrating Austen into the broader culture of her time. Other than the aforementioned tendency for Romantic drama to feature only as a subsection of a larger area of research, the other noticeable commonality of this year’s output—with few exceptions—is that it concentrates on big names, be they theatrical or literary, and on London theatres. Such a focus is not a problem per se. Yet it needs to be balanced by other studies which reach to the regions, the uncelebrated professionals, the amateurs of the working and middle classes, the temporary and the itinerate. In the absence of these, we have only a partial and truncated version of the vibrant and multifarious Romantic-era drama. Books Reviewed Ayres Brenda , ed. Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century . Palgrave . [ 2017 ] pp. xiv + 291. €99.99 ISBN 9 7833 1956 7495. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Barnett Suzanne L. 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Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Corporaal , Marguérite Christina Maria , Morin Christina , eds. Travelling Irishness in the Long Ninetenth Century . Palgrave . [ 2017 ] pp. XV + 258 . £89.99 ISBN 978 3319 5252 66. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cross Ashley. Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism: Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821 . Routledge . [ 2017 ] pp. 288 . £115 ISBN 9 7818 4893 3682. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Davison Carol Margaret , ed. The Gothic and Death . ManUP . [ 2017 ] pp. xvi + 240. £75 ISBN 9 7817 8499 2699. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Domsch Sebastian , Reinfandt Christoph , Rennhak Katharina , eds. Romantic Ambiguities: Abodes of the Modern . WVT . [ 2017 ] pp. 308 . €35 ISBN 9 7838 6821 7278. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Duffy Cian , ed. Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges 1770–1842 PalMac . [ 2017 ] pp. xii + 281. £89.99 ISBN 9 7833 1951 2464. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Earle Bo. Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life . OSUP . [ 2017 ] pp. xiv + 212. $84.95 ISBN 9 7808 1421 3520, e-book $19.95 ISBN 9 7808 1427 5863. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Farina Jonathan. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain . CUP . [ 2017 ] pp. 314 . £75 ISBN 978 1107 1816 32. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Fisher Tony. Theatre and Governance in Britain 1500–1900 . CUP . [ 2017 ] pp. x + 282. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0718 2158. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Freeman Lisa A. Antitheatricality and the Body Public . UPennP . [ 2017 ] pp. 376 . £44 ISBN 9 7808 1224 8739. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Froid Dan , ed. The Siege of Gibraltar & Miscellaneous Pieces . RC . [ 2017 ] <https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/upton/index.html>. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Galperin William H. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday . Stanford UP . [ 2017 ] pp. 200 . $55 ISBN 978 1503 6001 95. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Gamer Michael. Romanticism, Self-Canonization and the Business of Poetry . CUP . [ 2017 ] pp. xvi + 330. £75 ISBN 9 7811 0715 8856. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Gilmarton Kevin , ed. Sociable Places: Locating Culture in Romantic-Period Britain . CUP . [ 2017 ] pp. 280 . £75 ISBN 9 7811 0706 4782. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Goulbourne Russell , Higgins David , eds. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism: Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation . Bloomsbury . [ 2017 ] pp. 264 . £65 ISBN 9 7814 7425 0665. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Hall Lynda A. Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity . PalMac . [ 2017 ] pp. x + 225. £79.99 ISBN 9 7833 1950 7354. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Harris Jocelyn. Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen . BuckUP . [ 2017 ] pp. xxii + 349. $110 ISBN 9 7816 1148 8395. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Higgins David. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene . Palgrave . [ 2017 ] pp. IX + 142 . £49.99 ISBN 978 3319 6789 31. 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Women's Literary Networks and Romanticsim . Liverpool UP . [ 2017 ] pp. xii + 314 . £90 ISBN 9 7817 8694 0605. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - XII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maz010
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/xii-literature-1780-1830-the-romantic-period-V4scUrR2jw
SP - 620
VL - 98
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -