TY - JOUR
AU1 - Coffey, Bysshe, Inigo
AU2 - Davies,, Colette
AU3 - Hawley-sibbett,, Ruby
AU4 - Falk,, Michael
AU5 - Greig,, Elias
AU6 - Kiek,, Miranda
AB - Abstract This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Bysshe Inigo Coffey; section 2 is by Colette Davies and Ruby Hawley-Sibbett; section 3 is by Michael Falk and Elias Greig; section 4 is by Miranda Kiek. 1. General and Prose While last year was dominated by the article and the bric-a-brac of material culture with its endless exchanges and peregrinations, 2018 was the year of the book and broad research interests. Thankfully, there is not a single theme or topic that wins out. On offer are studies of Anglo-German relations, the connections between science and the imagination, and indigenous translations of Romantic texts, among many other things. The year escaped the shaping influence of a strident passion, or fashion. Romantic scholarship is in rude health. This has been a good year for essay collections in particular. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon, edited by Karen O’Brien and Brian Young, is helpful to those working on the eighteenth century, the Romantic Period, and historiography more generally. Gibbon is the author almost everyone owns, and almost nobody seems to have read. In ‘An Overview of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, J.G.A. Pocock provides an elegant survey of Gibbon’s magnum opus. Pocock situates and critically examines Gibbon’s methodology: ‘[i]t is a constant in The Decline and Fall, where among its many sophisticated legacies we find the continuing assumption that “the historian” is primarily the contemporary or near-contemporary author of a received account of the career of a people or state, and only in a second sense the “modern” who reiterates and critically reviews the former’s authoritative narrative’ (pp. 20–1). Gibbon emerges as a historian whose work issues as ‘a mosaic of narratives’ and modalities (p. 30). Robert Mayhew’s ‘Gibbon’s Geographies’ explores the relationship between geography and history, and Gibbon’s persistent geographical endeavours (p. 59). Catherine Edward’s ‘Gibbon and the City of Rome’ finds, among other things, a parallel between Rome and the historian’s work: ‘In this final chapter of The Decline and Fall, I would like to suggest, Gibbon invites us to think of the destruction of the city of Rome, which had endured so long, but also of the comparable—or greater—capacity for endurance, which his own literary monument may possess’ (p. 76). Mark Whittow examines the relevance of Gibbon to Byzantine historians. While a resounding ‘No’ answers the essay’s title, ‘Do Byzantine Historians Still Read Gibbon?’, Whittow concludes: ‘[t]wenty-five years ago, in the heyday of microhistory, Gibbon’s large scale of vision would have seemed simply an aspect of his being a philosophic historian in the eighteenth-century mode; halfway through the first third of the twenty-first century, with historians taken by the global turn, a vision of Rome’s fall that spans more than a millennium and reaches from China to the Atlantic, Scandinavia to Africa, seems to speak more closely to current concerns than ever. This does not mean that more than a very few historians of the fall of the Roman empire will actually ever read The Decline and Fall, but it does mean that Gibbon’s ideas expressed in other people’s words will be more current than ever’ (p. 90). In the realm of literature this conclusion is also apposite. As Whittow reminds us, today, world literature is unafraid of its own grand narratives and sweeping connections; while the old stories no longer have the power to scare or enthral us, they remain as a mode at once comforting and lazy. Gibbon often lies, unconsciously, behind them. George Woudhuysen’s ‘Gibbon among the Barbarians’ examines the complex position the barbarians occupy in the historian’s thought: ‘Throughout [The Decline and Fall] they have been seen in a multitude of roles, allowing Gibbon to devise new ways of writing social history, to probe the future of his own society and to pose difficult questions for contemporaries inclined to parse the world by social theories’ (p. 107). The collection also contains Tim Stuart-Buttle’s analysis of ‘Gibbon and Enlightenment History in Eighteenth-Century Britain’; Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore’s study of ‘Gibbon and Republicanism’; Brian Young’s essay on ‘Gibbon and Catholicism’; and Fred Parker’s contribution on ‘Gibbon’s Style in The Decline and Fall’. Robert Mankin examines ‘Gibbon’s Mind and Libraries’; Charlotte Roberts focuses on ‘The Memoirs and Character of the Historian’; and the collection concludes with David Womersley’s ‘Afterword: A New Gibbon Manuscript’. The collection is replete with significance and builds to an impressive work of major consequence to scholars of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. Gibbon appears altered and ripe. I follow a well-lit and newly witnessed Gibbon with an example of conceptual reclamation. Richard C. Sha’s Imagination and Science in Romanticism retrieves and redeems a rather tired word. Imagination—often discussed unimaginatively—will be found among the scurf that litters the undergraduate essay. Here, however, Sha offers a simple observation: the imagination is just as important to the arts as it is to Romantic science. As Sha explains, ‘[m]y aim here is to restore connections between Romantic literature and science through one of the period’s key terms: “imagination”’ (p. 1). He continues: ‘[i]n brief, the main claim of this book is that both Romantic artists and scientists seized upon the imagination to connect more fully with the experience of objects, not to leave them behind, and thus “transcendence” could not automatically separate art from science’ (p. 1). Sha notes that ‘work on Romantic science has become a virtual cottage industry’ (p. 1). Sha’s book is intelligent, important, and a corrective to more facile interpretations of Romantic science. Chapter 1, ‘Imagining Dynamic Matter: Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, and the Chemistry and Physics of Matter, considers Shelley’s engagement with dynamic formulations of materiality. Shelley is placed among figures such as ‘Boscovich, Kant, Davy, Priestley, Marcet’, and Faraday’ who ‘turn to dynamic matter to reconceptualize the subject as continually dissolving and being remade, which, in turn, remakes the objects that bring the subject into being’ (p. 95). The chapter offers insightful and exciting readings of Prometheus Unbound while placing it within scientific contexts of consequence. The second chapter, ‘William Blake and the Neurological Imagination: Romantic Science, Nerves, and the Emergent Self’, is elegant and written with the concision Blake deserves: ‘William Blake understands the imagination to be embodied in the nerves’ (p. 96). A highlight of the chapter is how this insight led to Blake’s ‘awareness of the costs of reductionism’ (p. 141). Indeed, he ‘define[s] self-annihilation against the developing scientific form of it called objectivity’ (p. 141). In a manner similar to Percy Bysshe Shelley in ‘A Future State’—a link overlooked by Sha—Blake ‘challenges the idea that delusion equals madness by recognizing how attractive the condition of forgetfulness is and by having his characters choose states of “oblivion”’ (p. 141). Blake emerges as a figure who implores us to reconsider the imagination as ‘not merely subject to understanding, as Kant understood it, insofar as Blake shows the ways in which even delusions can enhance understanding, because they are often, at bottom, about the misguided need to aggrandize the self at someone else’s expense’ (p. 143). Chapters 3 and 4 extend the same concern for scientific contexts to Coleridge and Mary Shelley. Coleridge’s imagination is physiological, and physiology ‘does nothing less than model for Coleridge what cooperation between imagination and reason looks like. Imagination will usurp reason’s place if it invents entities with no possibility of actuality and mistakes what happens as a result of our abilities to apprehend things as properties of things’ (p. 184). Sha follows deftly the lacing influence of the concrete on the abstract. Chapter 4 turns to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Sha, contrary to most contemporary writing on the novel, provides striking and important insight into the contexts informing the work. As Sha notes, ‘[w]hile Frankenstein has long been seen as a birth myth, we have yet to unpack how the place of imagination within obstetrics and embryology shaped Mary Shelley’s thinking about imagination, creation, and science’ (p. 185). Indeed, ‘Erasmus Darwin helped to realize the value of thinking about science as an organic process that enabled the spontaneous encounter with objects of study. Because it produced work that could be evaluated, the operationalization of the goal of the stricter analogies, not the goal itself, made the goal useful’ (p. 230). Sha’s book is an important contribution to the study of Romantic literature and science. Literature is not reduced to science’s helpmeet. This work is a touchstone; it demonstrates just how one can write about literature and science without traducing the former and inflating the ego of the latter. Alexander Regier’s Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations reminds us that there is no progress without contraries. Regier’s study is a beautiful and important challenge, suggesting that there is a better Enlightenment and Romanticism for all ahead—bigger and brighter ‘constellations’. Regier contends that Anglo-German relations change the way in which one understands both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, ‘[t]his book offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It puts into view a constellation of Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to rethink our own literary history of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. It is a polyglot study, and buoyantly so’ (p. 1). According to Leslie Stephen, ‘no Englishman read German literature in the eighteenth century’, and as Regier explains, ‘[h]is pithy 1898 assessment reflects a widely held view that has been held in some circles up to the present day. It is an erroneous caricature that made it easy to treat these national literatures as completely distinct until the advent of Romanticism. By implication, it also allowed a neat and radical break between those two conceptual categories and periods when it came to Anglo-German relations’ (pp. 1–2). The book is beautifully conceived and written; Regier promotes something sorely missing in the anglophone scholarly community, a polyglot approach. Such approaches ‘to literary and cultural history allow us to discover important new critical patterns, including highly unfamiliar ones’. Secondly, it is important that we take these unusual, excessive, and sometimes even exorbitant figures seriously, precisely because they cannot be successfully absorbed into our conventional literary history. We need to understand the power of exorbitant thinkers such as a Blake or Hamann and how their scepticism tells us something about the orthodoxies we have inherited. It is only if we resist the temptation to absorb and to domesticate exorbitant thinking that we can get a sense of how the critical power of their alternative accounts of a language, full of ontological power and creativity, might be relevant for our own thinking about linguistics, history, or even the world. To do that takes trouble, just as it takes trouble to work comparatively or to rethink the relation between Enlightenment and Romanticism. The suggestion of this book is that all of those are worth it, and that we should take on these troubles without immediately opposing them or straightaway wanting to end them. (pp. 29–30) The suggestion should not be ignored. Indeed, one might call it the polyglottal imperative: Scholars, you have nothing to lose but your insularity. The book is composed of eight chapters: ‘Unexpected Connections: Anglo-German Contexts’; ‘Blake and Hamann: Exorbitants’; ‘Crossing Channels: Fuseli, Hamann, and Lavater’; ‘Blake and Hamann: Poetry as Mother-Tongue and the Fight against Instrumental Reason’; ‘The Polyglot Moravians in Eighteenth-Century London’; ‘A Critique of Habit: Blake and Hamann on Religion, Matrimony, and Pedagogy’; ‘Hybrid Hymns: Anglo-German Voices in Blake’s Songs’; and ‘Every Letter Has a Body: Blake and Haman on the Sexuality of Language’. The book is essential to scholars of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Philip Aherne’s The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America, 1834–1934 is, along with the monographs of Sha and Regier, in the view of this reviewer, one of the best books of 2018. Aherne’s study will hopefully inspire similar work on the intellectual legacy of figures. Studies of reception tend to end up as essay collections, or as parts of anthologies. Narrative is missing. What is often required is a book-length study which explores the long evolution, the slow bubbling, and a reputation’s sudden vagaries. We need to see a reputation’s peregrine condition. As Aherne notes: The engraving of George Scharf’s (1788–1896) forgotten watercolour of Coleridge’s chamber at Highgate [the book’s cover image] reveals many of the qualities of Coleridge’s legacy: all the details point to his presence, and yet he is absent. Numerous specific aspects of the picture invite the observer to imagine how Coleridge used the room: the faint lettering that runs across the spines of the studiously read book collection; the wooden floorboards that crease the slightly ragged carpet where he would have paced; the papers that are strewn across the desk, suggestive of the numerous works-in-progress that he left unfinished; the view from the window that many would have seen when they visited him. (p. 2) Absent from the scene, yes, but then this picture reveals the character of Coleridge’s thought and legacy: ‘[t]he nature of Coleridge’s influence’ was ‘as discreet as it was powerful’ (p. 3). The book takes us behind this ‘forgotten’ watercolour into the tumult of the sage’s thought. The book follows Coleridge’s intellectual legacy chronologically. The reader begins with chapter 1, ‘The Elusive Legacy’, which explains the unique challenges of Aherne’s project, which, once established, lead into the second chapter: ‘The Sad Ghost: Coleridge as the Sage of Highgate’. The chapter places special emphasis on the role of aphorism in Coleridge’s thinking. Indeed, aphorisms contained the qualities of Coleridge’s conversation: ‘the writer of aphorisms practises a precise manner of writing whereby sentences are not bound logically to each other but are self-contained’ (p. 42). Writing on Coleridge is never an easy task, and Aherne has researched, sifted, and synthesized. Chapter 3 concerns ‘The Ruined Man: Coleridge’s Posthumous Reputation’; chapter 4 focuses on ‘The Power of Criticism: Poetry, Aestheticism, and Literary Criticism’; chapter 5 turns to ‘The Construction of Doubt: Reflection, Faith, and the Knowledge of God’; chapter 6 examines ‘The Endurance of Idealism: Ethics, Epistemology, and the Self’; chapter 7 analyses ‘The Religion of Politics: The State, the Church, and Political Economy’; the eighth chapter considers ‘The Harmony of Society: The Clerisy, Liberal Education and the Idea of Culture’; and the book concludes with ‘The Coleridgean Vocation’. This capacious study is an extremely important addition to the history of Romanticism, Coleridge studies, and intellectual history. Returning to essay collections, Diego Saglia and Ian Haywood have edited one for Palgrave’s Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters series. The collection, Spain in British Romanticism 1800–1840, is formed of two parts. In the first, the essays are grouped under the title ‘Spain and the Romantic Canon’, whereas the second section turns to ‘Discovering Texts and Contexts’. The book offers a fresh encounter with the representation of Spain during the Romantic period. In ‘The Matter of Spain in Romantic Britain’, Gary Kelly notes that, ‘[d]uring the Romantic period, British representations of what could be called the “matter of Spain” responded to intensifying public interest in the fate of the Iberian Peninsula and its empires in relation to Britain’s ongoing struggle for global dominance’ (p. 19). Kelly points to ‘today’s academic practice’ which estranges us from the collaborative character of different genres: ‘such diverse genres [novels, travelogues, and journalism, among others] are commonly treated separately and separately from Spanish and other representations of the matter of Spain, but for British observers at that time all could be used in formulating a matter of Spain in their own interests, and certain topics prominent in journalistic and travelogue-survey accounts recurred in literary representations’ (p. 23). The essay contextualizes ‘the matter of Spain’ skilfully. The second essay, by Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt, examines ‘Robert Southey and the Peninsular Campaign’. While ‘Southey’s involvement with Iberia was accidental’, it had a shaping influence on the rest of his life, which this essay charts (p. 37). Juan L. Sánchez also writes on Southey, contributing an essay on ‘Southey, Spain, and Romantic Apostasy’. Alice Laspra-Rodriguez de Coletes turns to ‘Wordsworth’s Spain, 1808–1811’. Maria Eugenia Perojo Arronte offers an essay focused on ‘Coleridge and Spanish Literature’. Agustin Coletes Blanco writes on ‘Spain and Byron’s The Age of Bronze (1823)’. Diego Saglia’s essay, ‘Felicia Hemans, Spain and Cosmopolitan Liberalism’, explores The Siege of Valencia; a Dramatic Poem. The Last Constantine: with Other Poems [1832]. He argues that Always strategically alert to her audience’s topical interests, Hemans knew that 1823 was the right time for this kind of collection, and the book made a respectable profit of £132 for Murray and her to share. In preparing the volume, she capitalized on the opportunity to satisfy her readers’ expectations, yet also produced a book that, through its orchestration of interrelated geographies, motifs and concerns, is a genuinely moving testimony of national narratives of oppression and servitude, as well as opposition to them. (p. 155) Joselyn M. Almeida’s essay, ‘The Shelleys and Spain’, concludes the first part of the collection. As Almeida explains, ‘[t]his essay positions Percy and Mary Shelley’s creative and personal engagements with what Saglia calls “the Spanish text”, a shorthand term that describes the British construction of the Hispanic world from the composite of literary and other kinds of texts, within the larger field of the Anglo-Hispanic imaginary’ (p. 158). The essay builds to an interesting argument of importance to Shelleyans and Romanticists in general. The second part of the volume features a diverse range of essays. The Gothic scholar Angela Wright contributes an essay on ‘Spain in Gothic Fiction’; Susan Valladares writes on ‘British Women Writers of Peninsular Fiction’; Ian Haywood turns to ‘The Spanish “Revolution” in Print and Image’; Fernando Durán López adds an essay on ‘Alexander Dallas’s Reimagining of Spain’; and Daniel Muñoz Sempere concludes the volume with an essay on ‘Valentin de Llanos and Spanish Writing in Exile’. Sadly, Walter Savage Landor is only referred to twice, and very briefly at that, in the collection. Landor’s settled neglect is unfortunate, and I am with Swinburne—Count Julian [1812] deserves attention. Nonetheless, the collection is important and valuable. Alexander Grammatikos’s study, British Romantic Literature and the Emerging Modern Greek Nation, also published as part of Palgrave’s Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print series, is an important contribution to the study of British Romantic Hellenism. Rather than focusing on an idealized ancient Greece, Grammatikos examines the responses of Romantic writers to modern Greece. One might think here of Scythrop Glowry’s distaste for modern Greece, and Italy, in Nightmare Abbey. Peacock is left out of Grammatikos’s account. But he provides fascinating insight into the range of responses to contemporary Greece. As he explains, ‘[t]he Romantic-era literature about modern Greece that I examine in this book was immensely influenced by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century neoclassicism and travel writing’ (p. 14). Indeed, ‘by focusing on the intercultural relationship between Britain and Greece in the early nineteenth century, [Grammatikos’s] book contributes to an understanding of Romantic-era British literature as preoccupied with matters of global, national, and cultural significance’ (p. 15). The book invites readers to reconsider the ‘scope and complexity’ of British Romantic Hellenism (p. 15). The book’s shift in historical focus is to be extremely welcomed and will reinvigorate discussions of Romantic Hellenism. This year also saw the publication of David McAllister’s Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. As the blurb puts it succinctly, ‘this book offers the first account of the dead as an imagined community in the early nineteenth century. It examines why Romantic and Victorian writers (including Wordsworth, Dickens, De Quincey, Godwin, and D’Israeli) believed that influencing the imaginative conception of the dead was a way to either advance, or resist, social and political reform’. Chapter 1 examines the role of the dead as agents of revolutionary change or resistance. ‘Revolutionising the Dead: Burke, Paine, De Quincey’ articulates the diverse ways in which the dead can be put to use or be exorcized politically. While there is ‘Thomas Paine’s ejection of the dead from the social body’, we find the opposing force of Burke’s appeal to ancestry (p. 20). Today, this remains a potent and effective political tool. The dead await mobilization. The book is beautifully written and offers an important study of death culture. I turn now to the articles which appeared in 2018. In American Notes and Queries, Matthew C. Jones’s ‘Joseph Hucks (1772–1800): Poet, Travel Writer, Coleridge’s Companion in Wales’ (ANQ 31[2018] 22–6) explores the influence of the rather neglected Joseph Hucks in the genesis of Coleridge and Southey’s ideas of pantisocracy. Hucks was a modest fellow: ‘Clearly, even though he tended throughout to defer to Coleridge, Hucks remembered himself as a co-designer of the “air-built” schemes cultivated in the “Cambrian wilds”’ (p. 23). The Byron Journal had four articles of relevance to this section in 2018. In ‘Byron’s “Hellenic” Voices: Wherever I Travel Greece Wounds Me’ (BJ 46:i[2018] 5–20), Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou connects with the concerns of Grammatikos’s book, referred to above, in pointing to the pain Byron often encountered in relation to his idealization of Greece and its past. Frank Lawton’s ‘Addressed to Impress: Byron’s Dandy Style’ (BJ 46:i[2018] 21–36) offers a study of dandyism and how it might leave its trace on Don Juan as a poetic texture. Abhishek Sarkar’s ‘Reading Byron in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’ (BJ 46:i[2018] 49–62), echoing the concerns of Aherne above, charts the Bengali reception of Byron and his work. Jeffrey Vail contributes ‘Byron, Caroline Lamb, and Samuel Rogers: Unpublished Passages from Moore’s Letters’ (BJ 46:i[2018] 63–8). Vail refers to ‘two letters from Moore in the Longman Collection [which] feature interesting deleted passages concerning Byron that have never been published. Both letters appear in expurgated form in Russell and Dowden, with no indication to the reader that any material has been omitted’ (p. 63). The second volume of The Byron Journal contains Emily A. Bernhard-Jackson’s ‘“Sometimes I feel like the whole human race”: Lord Byron and David Bowie Consider the Question of Identity’ (BJ 46:ii[2018] 5–20). The essay compares Byron’s exploration of identity in poetry to David Bowie’s work during 1973–82. I am not entirely convinced, but those who seek to understand what Byron and Bowie had in common will find it fun. Marie Kawthar Daouda’s ‘Byronic Authority in Petticoats: Marie Corelli’s Improvisations on Byron’s Themes’ (BJ 46:ii[2018] 141–8) charts Marie Corelli’s adoption of the Byron hero and the redemptive uses to which he is put. Geoffrey Bond’s essay, ‘Byromania: A Reflection on Collecting Byron Books’ (BJ 46:ii[2018] 149–58), is beautiful testament to the allure of book-collecting. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria has been the subject of two essays this year. Both appear in the European Romantic Review (ERR 29:vi[2018]). Whitney Arnold’s ‘Coleridge and the Strategy of Genius’ (ERR 29:vi[2018] 733–49) examines the complex role and conceptualization of genius in Coleridge’s notorious work, and Megan O’Connor’s ‘To Read a Bull: Nominalism, Commodification, and Negative Dialectics in the Biographia Literaria’ (ERR 29:vi[2018] 751–68) explores Coleridge’s engagement with nominalism and John Locke. A special edition of the European Romantic Review on the topic of ‘Romantic Life’ assembled a collection of essays on the conception of life in the Romantic period (ERR 29:iii[2018] 271–430). Lauren Gillingham and Julie Murray offer a broad and conceptually astute introduction to the topic (ERR 29:iii[2018] 271–4), which is followed by Robert Mitchell’s essay ‘Regulating Life: Romanticism, Science, and the Liberal Imagination’ (ERR 29:iii[2018] 275–93). Dahlia Porter contributes ‘Epistemic Images and Vital Nature: Darwin’s Botanic Garden as Image Text Book’ (ERR 29:iii[2018] 295–308). My favourite essay of the year is ‘On First Looking into Mary Shelley’s Homer’ by Will Bowers (RES 69[2018] 510–31). The piece is a rare achievement. As Bowers explains in the abstract: This article describes, reconstructs, and analyses the contents of an unexamined manuscript notebook in the hand of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The notebook is kept in the Brewer–Leigh Hunt Collection at the University of Iowa. A number of material and textual factors allow the use of the notebook to be dated from May 1820 and to June 1822, the time of the Shelleys’ residence at Pisa. The notebook contains transcriptions from Marco Lastri’s L’osservatore fiorentino (1821) and a translation of more than 250 lines of Homer’s Odyssey. It therefore reflects Mary Shelley’s two central literary occupations of her last years in Italy: her historical novel Valperga (1823) and her two-year study of Ancient Greek. Shelley’s Greek studies have received little critical attention, but this translation allows for a proper consideration of her method of language learning and can be usefully situated alongside a number of other Greek manuscripts in Shelley’s hand in the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. (p. 510) The author combines assiduous textual scholarship, sound judgement, and an elegant style to form an essay of major importance to Shelleyans in particular, and Romanticists in general. To offer the reader all three qualities is most generous of the author. Romanticism published two special collections in 2018. The first was ‘Edgy Romanticism’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 113–228). Nick Groom reconsiders Romanticism in the light of racial migration, commerce, and Whig cultural identity in ‘Catachthonic Romanticism: Buried History, Deep Ruins’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 118–33). As Groom concludes, catachthonic readings can help to uncover the historical ruins on which histories are built, on which political myths and ideologies are predicated—exposing the insularity and limitations within genealogical lineages and at the same time unleashing their teeming foundations. Like the ossuaries on which the Convent of St Clare is built, the primordial graves that litter the land, or the racial ancestry of blood—in which Gothic kinship is mixed with undead dread—catachthonism retrieves histories-beneath-history: innumerable assemblages, multitudinous and Legion. In such a context, triumphalist Whig history looked ominously untenable. But the catachthonic is more than merely a challenge to the progressive Whig history that continued to inflect and permeate Romanticism: it is relentlessly sceptical of any historicizing presumption. Catachthonism is the expression of a persistent anxiety in realizing the teleological fabrications of the past, a dogged resistance to historical reductivism that revels in untimely proliferation. (p. 130) Elizabeth Edward’s ‘“A Kind of Geological Novel”: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 134–47) ‘explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith’s 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday’s early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts’ (p. 134). Merrilees Roberts takes on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s complex prefaces in ‘Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 158–68). As she explains in the abstract accompanying the essay: the prefaces to Shelley’s poems are generally seen as an important addendum to understanding the complex narratorial personae in the poems they accompany; to pull these textual edges into the centre of enquiry allows for consideration of the unique perspectives on ethics and aesthetics that they offer. I argue that Shelley’s prefaces conflate Sympathy conceived of as a personal and morally accountable emotional reflex, such as found in the thought of Adam Smith, and sympathy conceived as the abstract, disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. This conflation casts the sensitivity of the poet as both a faculty of judgment which forges an only indirect relationship to moral concerns, and, paradoxically, as something requiring explicitly moral behaviour. This tension engenders a psychological trauma which makes the idea of ‘the self’ a contested, liminal space that marks the edges of Shelley’s understanding of the mental operations that occur in aesthetic experience. (p. 158) This is an interesting project, but more evidence is required to justify the claim that Shelley understood sympathy in this way. Susan Civale’s ‘Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 191–202) contends that the perceived shortcomings of Robinson’s Memoirs are in fact complex strategies of self-presentation. The third issue focuses on the topic of ‘Romanticism and War’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 229–305). Neil Ramsey and Joshua Gooch offer an introduction entitled ‘Meditating War’. As they explain, ‘the Romantic era not only witnessed dramatic changes in warfare with the birth of total war, but equally saw fundamental transformations in the media forms by which war was represented and waged. From the shifting relationship between war and the medium of theatre, to the constitution of modern wartime through the mass mediation of distant conflicts, this period saw its new media and war inextricably entangled’ (p. 229). Anders Engberg-Pedersen, in ‘Wallenstein’s Contingency Media’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 231–44), examines ‘through the prism of Schiller’s Wallenstein from 1799 … the development of military contingency media from the 17th to the early 19th century. Delving into the disagreements between Johannes Kepler and the historical Wallenstein about the reach and power of astrological star charts and horoscopes, the essay analyzes Schiller’s late Enlightenment critique of astrological contingency media as well as his transformation of them into productive poetic devices’ (p. 231). Jan Mieszkowski writes on ‘Heinrich von Kleist and the Right to War’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 245–54), Philip Shaw contributes an article on the subject of ‘Cannon-Fever: Beethoven, Waterloo and the Noise of War’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 255–65), Graham Tulloch investigates ‘Walter Scott and Waterloo’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 266–77), and Thomas H. Ford concludes the collection with wide-ranging piece on ‘Echohistoricism: Aristotle, Dryden, Montgomery, Conrad’ (Romanticism 24:iii[2018] 278–93). The first issue of the Wordsworth Circle in 2018 was organized around the theme of ‘Word and Image in British Romanticism’. This is an exceptional edition focused on visual culture and offers, as is customary with the Wordsworth Circle, unusually astute and elegant essays. Joseph Viscomi’s impishly titled ‘On Not Reading William Blake’s Large Color Prints’ (WC 49:i[2018] 3–9) explains that ‘William Blake executed twelve large colour prints in 1795. He printed thirty-three impressions over three printings, twenty-nine of which are extant. His method for printing colours to produce paintings was radical and new. Contemporary printmaking and painting treatises do not mention it’ (p. 3). But ‘the idea that Blake planned the twelve designs as a series to illustrate his myth in new ways is not supported by the material or critical evidence. The designs grew in number as Blake found suitable images among his own earlier works to recreate and conceived of new ones to invent in his exciting new medium’ (p. 9). Peter J. Manning contributes an essay on ‘Wordsworth’s “Illustrated Books and Newspapers” and Media of the City’ (WC 49:i[2018] 10–19), and Tom Mole offers a fascinating article on ‘Victorian Illustrations of Romantic Poetry’ (WC 49:i[2018] 19–28). Deirdre Coleman writes on ‘Antislavery Satire before Abolition’ (WC 49:i[2018] 28–32), Elizabeth Fay explores ‘Blake’s Wollstonecraft’s Girls’ (WC 49:i[2018] 32–40), Sarah B. Stein examines ‘The Jewish Marriage Contract in Blake’s Job’ (WC 49:i[2018] 41–6), Rossetta Young writes on ‘Table Games 1790–1832’ (WC 49:i[2018] 46–53), and Mariam Wassif concludes the issue with an intriguing study of ‘Polidori’s The Vampyre and Byron’s Portraits’ (WC 49:i[2018] 53–61). The second issue also contains delights. Pamela Woof’s elegant essay, ‘Dora Wordsworth, Artist 1804–1847’ (WC 49:ii[2018] 72–84), admits us into the world of a charming and accomplished, if often overlooked, individual. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, Joseph Fletcher, and Michael Fox announce, on behalf of the William Blake Archive, ‘the publication of a digital edition of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion Copy R from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; colored impressions of Visions Plates 1, 2, and 3 (Copy mpi) from the Morgan Library and Museum; a proof of Visions Plate 6 from the Fitzwilliam Museum that belongs to our previously published Visions Copy a; and five monochrome wash drawings for the wood engravings in Thornton’s Virgil added to the seven previously published designs’ (WC 49:ii[2018] 94–5). The issue also includes essays on the subject of walking—‘Walking: A Selection of Papers from the MLA, 2018’. These include Ashton Nichols’s ‘Walking with Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth’ (WC 49:ii[2018] 96–8), Debbie Lee’s ‘The Infinite Helix: Walking Spiral Jetty with Coleridge’ (WC 49:ii[2018] 99–102), Mark Lussier’s ‘Walking to Enlightenment’ (WC 49:ii[2018]103–7), and Alan Richardson’s ‘Lucy on the Trail with Violets’ (WC 49:ii[2018] 108–10), discussed in Section 3 below. The final issue of the Wordsworth Circle, not including its annual review copy, includes a number of interesting essays. Charles W. Mahoney provides an illuminating essay on ‘Coleridge’s Final Lectures on Shakespeare’ (WC 49:iii[2018] 138–47), Peter J. Kitson contributes an essay on ‘The Last War of the Romantics: De Quincey, Macaulay, the First Chinese Opium War’ (WC 49:iii[2018] 148–58), Peter Larkin charts ‘Coleridge and the New Theological Romanticism’ (WC 49:iii[2018] 158–61), and Stuart Andrews tackles ‘Coleridge, Southey and Freedom of the Press 1816–1821’ (WC 49:iii[2018]162–76). 2. The Novel The majority of publications pertaining to the Romantic novel in 2018 once again focused on Jane Austen. The second most popular subject was Mary Shelley, presumably because 2018 marked the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In this section Ruby Hawley-Sibbett reviews work relating to Jane Austen, two monographs which feature discussion of Austen alongside other female writers, and individual essays on Charlotte Smith, Sydney Owenson, and Alice LeFanu; Colette Davies reviews work focusing on Mary Shelley, the Gothic novel, male novelists, and the other extensive scholarship published on the Romantic novel in 2018 not covered by the aforementioned categories. It is worth noting that female novelists attracted more critical attention than their male contemporaries in 2018. This section is broadly divided into four sub-topics. We shall first concentrate on critical works published on Jane Austen. The next section will cover Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, the Gothic, and Ann Radcliffe. We then turn to the two monographs which compare women novelists, before discussing individual articles on Charlotte Smith, Alice LeFanu, Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney and Sarah Harriet Burney, Eliza Fenwick, Jane West, Susanna Rowson, and Mary Robinson. The fourth section covers male writers, beginning with the criticism on Walter Scott, before moving on to the military novel and then William Godwin. The contributors close this section by reviewing material relating to the Romantic novel in the collected edition, The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism. The volume and breadth of Austen criticism continue to be immense. We will open with a discussion of monographs, followed by book chapters, the three editions of JASNA’s Persuasions On-Line, a special issue of Women’s Writing, and, finally, individual essays. Austen’s afterlives loom large in these discussions, but close reading and textual and stylistic approaches also remain popular. Writers generally refer to the female characters in Austen’s novels by their first names, but use surnames for male characters; the reviews below follow this practice but the reviewers recognize that it is arguably misogynistic. Ruta Baublyté Kaufmann’s The Architecture of Space-Time in the Novels of Jane Austen constitutes a ‘formal’ and ‘psychological’ analysis of the ‘spatiotemporal architecture’ of the novels (pp. 2, 14). The introductory chapter explains Kaufmann’s particular focus on ‘the ways that the linear and cyclical are intertwined in patterns that are variously connected to the psychological trajectories of the principal characters’ (p. 14). Chapter 2, ‘Changing Seasons: The Cyclical and the Linear’, discusses the ‘internal rhythm’ of Austen’s plots (p. 19), in relation to the cycles of social life and the changing seasons in particular. Kaufmann covers the trends in Austen’s use of each season in turn: she notes that generally autumn is a time of social gatherings and psychological interiority, Christmas is often pivotal and followed by the town season, and spring is divided into an early period of outdoor movement and a return home, with the plots often resolved in summer. Kaufmann also includes tables representing geographical settings mapped onto the seasons across the novels. She then discusses the seasonal and spatial changes in each of the novels and fragments in turn. In chapter 3, ‘Changing Homes: Transformations in Space and Time’, Kaufmann draws on Bachelard and examines four types of home which she identifies in Austen’s novels. She discusses ‘childhood/original homes, temporary homes, dream homes, and independent adult homes’ (p. 82), noting that dream homes are often described in more detail. The chapter closes with a discussion of doors and windows as connecting spaces. Chapter 4, ‘Spatiotemporal Movement and Psychological Change: Walking and Dancing’, once again refers to cyclical and linear movement, drawing on Lefebvre. Kaufmann argues that walking often creates potential for privacy, intimacy, or decision, whereas dancing creates a ‘specifically transformed interior space’ (p. 158) and often leads to strong emotions. She discusses the walking of Elizabeth Bennet, Marianne Dashwood, and Emma Woodhouse in particular, arguing that the other heroines are ‘less determined walkers’ (p. 149). She then examines the emotional intensity of dance and the dancing space in all of the novels. Overall, this book gives a wide-ranging analysis of ‘space-time’ in Austen and demonstrates its complexity, with an emphasis on the cyclical. Marie Nedregotten Sørbø’s Jane Austen Speaks Norwegian: The Challenges of Literary Translation provides fresh insight into the global reception of Austen. The introduction, ‘Jane Austen’s Travels’, explains the history of Austen translations. Sørbø argues that ‘although a total figure for translations is at present impossible, we can venture to state that Austen’s work has been transmitted in more than 680 foreign versions, and predominantly since the 1920s’ (p. 10). She considers the particular challenges presented by translating Austen, such as her irony, but she also argues that Austen is not as ‘difficult’ as she is sometimes perceived to be (p. 11). The main part of the book focuses on Norwegian translations. The first chapter, ‘Jane Austen Goes to Norway’, provides a comprehensive chronological overview of Norwegian translations of Austen. The first translation of Austen into Norwegian was the 1871 anonymous translation of Persuasion in a daily newspaper, which Sørbø identified and first presented in research in 2013. She suggests that the interest created by Austen-Leigh’s Memoir may have inspired this translation. Sørbø judges that this translator was ‘well qualified for the task’ but tended towards ‘elaboration’ (p. 22). A description of the Norwegian market for translated literature and Jane Austen’s reputation in Norway is also provided. Sørbø then describes the eight book translations and two magazine versions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She gives insights into the translators’ biographies and their stylistic choices, concluding that they use very different strategies. The subsequent chapters discuss different issues which emerge from Sørbø’s analysis of six of these translations. Chapter 2 covers ‘Cuts and Simplifications’: Sørbø discusses the translators who abbreviate the novels with ‘extensive simplifications’ (p. 52). She notes that only the 1871 Persuasion and the 2003 Pride and Prejudice ‘aimed to keep the text of the novel virtually intact’ (p. 52). In contrast, chapter 3 discusses ‘Additions and Elaborations’, which Sørbø characterizes as demonstrating the prevalence of the idea that Austen ‘must be improved’ and clarified (p. 53). Chapter 4, ‘Blunder’, discusses errors: Sørbø lists a selection of common mistakes, including in grammar, the confusion of characters, vocabulary, reversals of meaning and loss of humour. Translators’ difficulties with Austen’s ‘Shades and Nuances’ are covered by chapter 5, while chapter 6, ‘A Sense of Style’, covers issues of connotation and tone, including the rendering of Austen’s free indirect style. Chapter 7, ‘Wanted and Unwanted Repetitions’, notes that ‘sometimes translators discard Austen’s repetitions’ but also sometimes ‘introduce their own’ (p. 108). Translators’ ‘Choice and Repertoire of Words’ are covered in chapter 8. The question of whether the translators make the text ‘appear as if it belongs in the receiving culture’ (p. 140) is addressed in chapter 9, ‘Foreign or Domestic?’. Chapter 10, ‘Irony’, discusses how translators represent Austen’s use of various narrative techniques, and demonstrates that irony is often lost. Instances of the ‘Censorship’ of Austen’s ideas are covered in chapter 11 while the final chapter, ‘Amending the Love Story’, considers how translators deal with Austen’s more ironic comments on romance. Cris Yelland’s Jane Austen: A Style in History takes a historical approach to the analysis of Austen’s style. Yelland prioritizes three historical questions: Austen’s inheritance from the eighteenth century, the development of her own style between 1811 and 1817, and her reception by the Victorians. The central argument is that orality and reading aloud were crucial to the development of Austen’s style. Yelland supports his argument with analyses of quotations from Austen’s prose, but also considers the historical context of her stylistic choices. In chapter 1, ‘Prescriptivism, Perspicuity and the Female Reader and Writer’, Yelland argues that linguistic prescriptivism significantly influenced Austen, noting that this is more visible in her lexis than in her syntax. Chapter 2, ‘Abstraction, Synonymy and Metaphor in Jane Austen’s Lexis’, considers specific examples of the influence of prescriptivism. Yelland notes a quality of ‘hardness or exactness’ in Austen (p. 30): for example, he notes Austen’s perspicuity even in emotional scenes. He challenges the view that Austen’s work does not contain many metaphors because she lacked imagination, arguing that her avoidance of metaphor is a stylistic choice. Chapter 3 moves on to the alternative influence on Austen, ‘Reading Aloud’. Yelland argues that orality was a crucial part of Austen’s process and stylistic development. He considers the context of reading aloud in this period, in the Austen family, and in her novels. Yelland also argues engagingly that audiobook versions of the novels can be useful for academic study. He finds that readings of Austen’s novels are inherently ‘expressive’ but not ‘mimetic’ (p. 75). In chapter 4, ‘Jane Austen and Johnsonian Syntax’, Yelland argues that Austen engaged in the ‘feminisation of Johnsonian syntax’ (p. 120). With a focus on relative clauses in Austen’s narration and characters’ speech, Yelland argues that there is a clear distinction visible between the Steventon and Chawton novels. Chapter 5 considers Austen’s ‘Experiments with Speech and Thought’. Yelland argues that Austen increasingly uses a hybrid of direct and indirect speech. He goes on to consider the features which characterize free indirect discourse, as well as considering free indirect thought and free indirect speech. Yelland’s argument is that Austen’s increasing use of free indirect discourse is attributable to the influence of orality. This is demonstrated in chapter 6, ‘Jane Austen and Free Indirect Discourse: A Developmental Account’, which traces changes in her use of the technique over time. Yelland focuses on Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion to demonstrate that Austen’s development of free indirect discourse was not linear. The final chapter, ‘The Victorian (Re)Construction of Jane Austen—and a Coda’, argues that the Victorians rejected Austen’s eighteenth-century influences, while enjoying her novels’ suitability for reading aloud. Highlighting this oral quality, Yelland concludes that Austen’s work developed significantly throughout her career, which explains why she is seen to be a ‘transitional’ writer (p. 206). Moving on to book chapters which discuss Austen, Fred Parker’s On Declaring Love: Eighteenth Century Literature and Jane Austen covers literature from the mid-eighteenth century through to Austen’s novels. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 discuss the Romantic-period novel. The book discusses the performative element of love. Chapter 1, ‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’ (pp. 1–24), links the William Blake lyric named in the chapter title with a discussion of Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Parker considers Hays’s presentation of love and argues that the novel is ‘a critique of passionate excess’ (p. 14) rather than an endorsement of it. Parker also discusses the novel as a fictionalized debate between Hays and William Godwin. Chapter 4, ‘The Performance of Love in Jane Austen’ (pp. 116–62), analyses a series of examples of proposals, including a comparison of Mr Collins’s and Mr Darcy’s respective failed proposals. Parker considers Austen’s use of the terms ‘regard’ and ‘gratitude’ (pp. 121–2). Parker argues that, in Austen’s novels, ‘for love to happen, it must have already happened, or seem to have happened’ (p. 131) as attention is returned based on expectation. The cancelled chapter of Persuasion is compared to Anne and Wentworth’s declaration in the published text. In chapter 5, ‘The Lethal Reserve of Fanny Price’ (pp. 163–94), Parker focuses on Mansfield Park, but he also mentions other reserved characters, including Jane Fairfax and Elinor Dashwood. Of these reserved characters, Parker asks, ‘can one really own (possess) feelings which one does not own (admit to)?’ (p. 172). He also notes that free indirect discourse allows Austen to ‘bypass the question of how conscious the character is of their own sentiments’ (p. 176). For Parker, Fanny is an internally conflicted character, and her reserve leads to the impossibility of her love for Edmund being directly communicated by the narrator, even at the end of the novel. Michael Greeney’s Sleep and the Novel: Fictions of Somnolence from Jane Austen to the Present includes a detailed discussion of Austen in chapter 2, ‘“The Yawns of Lady Bertram”: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen’ (pp. 36–74). Noting the lack of previous criticism on sleep in Austen, Greaney gives a wide-ranging account of sleep in the novels but focuses on Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park. Greaney borrows the term ‘sociable sleeping’ from Sasha Hindley to describe the secondary characters, such as Lady Bertram, who demonstrate their ‘privilege’ through this ‘renunciation of personal dignity’ (p. 42). Observing that only primary characters experience insomnia, Greaney focuses on Catherine’s ‘recreational insomnia’ and Fanny’s ‘permanent tiredness’ (p. 43). Anne D. Wallace’s Sisters and the English Household: Domesticity and Women’s Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature has a broad focus but does include some discussion of Romantic novels. Chapter 1, ‘Alternative Domesticities, Revaluing the Sibling in the House’ (pp. 19–54), includes a reading of Austen’s Emma. Wallace considers the scene in which Emma and Mr Knightley discuss whether they will dance together, arguing that ‘some degree of being brother and sister potentially authorizes, rather than forbids’ their dancing together (p. 23). This is because, for Wallace, Austen ‘represents sibling relations as an essential stabilizing force that enables appropriate marriage’ (p. 24), considering how characters meet partners through siblings or marry their metaphorical siblings. The opening of chapter 3, ‘The Problem of the Sister in the House’ (pp. 85–126), discusses the ending of Mansfield Park. Wallace considers how Fanny changes for Edmund from ‘unmarried adult sister into wife’ (p. 86) and notes that, with Susan becoming the sister figure, there is a ‘general recovery of the values and practice of corporate domesticity’ (p. 86). Maya Highashi Wakana’s Performing Intimacies with Hawthorne, Austen, Wharton, and George Eliot: A Microsocial Approach covers ‘Host–Guest Relationships in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice’ in chapter 3 (pp. 33–72). Wakana applies a microsocial reading influenced by Erving Goffman. She analyses a wide range of examples, including Lady Catherine and Elizabeth’s ‘ultra-backstage talk’ at Longbourn (p. 42) and Mr Collins’s inappropriate behaviour: ‘he is either too backstage (too familiar) or too frontstage (too stiff)’ (p. 51). Wakana argues that Pride and Prejudice has a ‘focus on issues related to what microsociology calls “face”’ and that the novel demonstrates an ‘understanding that all human relationships are in essence host–guest relationships’ (p. 67). Three issues of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) journal Persuasions On-Line were published in 2018. The first of which, Persuasions On-Line 38:ii[2018], was a special issue, edited by Susan Allen Ford and Anne Toner, featuring a collection of essays from the conference ‘Sanditon: 200 Years’ at Trinity College, Cambridge, 29–31 March 2017. Although the essays all centre on Sanditon, their subjects are wide-ranging, covering textual issues, historical contexts, close readings, and Sanditon’s afterlives. Ford’s ‘Editor’s Note: Mutability’ discusses how the context of Sanditon’s composition during Austen’s illness in 1817 leads the reader to consider time and mutability. In the first section of the issue, titled ‘“A Small, Retired Place”: Jane Austen in Cambridge’, James Clements and Patricia McGuire’s ‘Jane Austen at King’s College, Cambridge’ describes the exhibitions held at King’s College to mark the bicentenary of Austen’s death: an exhibition in the Archives Reading Room as part of the Sanditon conference and a public exhibition of Austen’s novels at King’s College Library. Clement and McGuire explain the breadth of the library’s and archive’s holdings on Austen and illustrate their paper with images of the items, such as the Sanditon manuscript and college-related documents. This section’s second article, Anne Toner’s ‘Jane Austen: Letters and Readers. An Exhibition at the Cambridge University Library’, gives an account of the bicentenary exhibition at Cambridge University Library, organized by Toner and John Wells. Toner explains how the exhibition and her essay juxtapose the three letters held at Cambridge and reproduces the letters and other items from the exhibition. The next section is ‘“Some Private Hand”: The Manuscript of Sanditon’. In its first article, ‘Jane Austen: Fragmented Artist’, Kathryn Sutherland argues that the young Austen ‘honed her art among ruins’, referring to the influence of her literary favourites as well as physical ruins (para. 10, l. 7). Sutherland discusses the fragmentary nature of Austen’s art, including three of her finished novels being ‘recast’ (para. 10, l. 3), Persuasion’s two endings, and the two abandoned draft novels. Sutherland considers Austen’s composition style from her manuscripts and concludes with a discussion of Sanditon. She highlights ‘the appropriateness of the fragment’s unfinished status to its subject matter of rash speculation, misinformation, and wrong turns, of risk exposed’ (para. 42, ll. 4–6). In ‘Sanditon as Fragmentary Draft Manuscript’, Michelle Levy argues for reading it ‘explicitly as a fragmentary draft manuscript’, not ‘an embryonic novel’ (para. 4, ll. 14–15). Levy notes how different Sanditon appears from Austen’s print novels, suggesting that it instead ‘seems continuous with her longstanding habits of confidential manuscript writing’ (para. 23, ll. 4–5). For Levy, the singularity of Sanditon could be explained by it being ‘written with her domestic readers in mind’ (para. 38, l. 2). The next group of essays, ‘“On This Very Terrace”: Sanditon and Its Time’, opens with E.J. Clery’s ‘Conversations on Political Economy in Sanditon’. Clery states that Sanditon shows Austen participating in the cultural ‘Zeitgeist by presenting two illustrative conversations on political economy’ (para. 4, l. 8), between Mr Heywood and Mr Parker, and Mr Parker and Lady Denham. Describing the economic and domestic tourism issues of 1817, Clery argues that that Mr Parker’s speculation is ‘doomed to failure’ (para. 51, l. 2). However, Clery also reasons that Austen’s ‘own speculative connections’ make it ‘unlikely that nostalgic notions of the old order would have been wholly vindicated in Sanditon at the expense of the new’ (para. 71, ll. 10–12). The next essay, Julia Banister’s ‘Masculinity and Militarism in Jane Austen’s The Brothers’, reads Austen’s planned title The Brothers as a sign ‘that she conceived of this work … as a study of men and masculinity’ (para. 3, ll. 5–6). Banister reads Mr Parker’s home, Trafalgar House, as comparable to a ship. She also suggests that Austen exposes Sir Edward’s brand of masculinity as one which ‘legitimizes sexual violence’ (para. 30, ll. 1–2) to serve his financial desires. Banister concludes that Sanditon ‘challenges the militaristic masculine roles that are celebrated by poems like Southey’s The Poet’s Pilgrimage or Scott’s Marmion’ (para. 35, ll. 8–9). Jane Darcy’s ‘Jane Austen’s Sanditon, Doctors, and the Rise of Seabathing’ examines the history of sea-bathing for medical purposes dating from Dr Richard Russell’s 1753 dissertation. Considering several passages in Sanditon which shed light on ‘the democratization of medical knowledge’ (para. 2, ll. 4–5), Darcy concludes that ‘beneath the broad comedy of Sanditon, Austen has explored the limitations of contemporary medicine’ (para. 43, ll. 8–9) through sea-bathing. Amanda E. Himes, in ‘Reading the Tea Leaves: Sanditon’s Reflection of English Identity’, argues that ‘tea plays a vital role in the formation of Englishness’ (para. 1, ll. 1–2). She discusses attitudes to tea in the eighteenth century and takes examples from Austen’s works, particularly Sanditon. For Himes, Miss Lambe, ‘with her mixed English and slave ancestry … stands as a symbol of tea-drinking’s acculturation, tea itself, though originating in China, symbolizing Englishness’ (para. 24, ll. 2–3). In ‘Sanditon and the Uncertain Prospects of a Resort Business’, Akiko Takei traces the popularity of seaside resorts. Takei argues that Austen’s inspiration ‘owed much to the commercialization of leisure and the spread of medical information that began in the second half of the eighteenth century’ (para. 4, ll. 1–2). Noting that while older characters are ‘skeptical’ (para. 15, ll. 13–14), ‘the younger generation imagines only a rosy future’, Takei predicts that ‘even if the Sanditon business were to fail, the village would start up some other development activity’ (para. 33, l. 304). The next section, ‘“Observance and Attention”: Readings of Austen’s Last Novel’, opens with Margaret Case’s ‘Catching Austen in Acts of Greatness: Re-reading Sanditon with Caution’. Case undertakes a close reading of Sanditon, noting ‘disjunctive moments’ (para. 24, l. 7) and the ‘unsettled’ nature of its ‘character assessments’ (para. 12, l. 3), for example the reader’s awareness of Sir Edward’s seduction plot and Charlotte’s changing assumptions about Clara. Case argues convincingly from this evidence that Austen’s intention could be ‘misleading normally good readers’ (para. 27, l. 2). She posits that ‘Sanditon’s greatness might lie in its almost Post-Modern interest in the power of genre to shape perception’ (para. 49, ll. 4–5). Kathryn’s Davis’s ‘“Rotatory Motion”: The “Circle” and Human Flourishing in Sanditon’ argues that Austen deliberately ‘draws our attention to her use of the circle as a dead metaphor’ (para. 29, ll. 3–4). Contrasting the ‘circles’ of Willingden and Sanditon, Davis concludes that Sanditon’s ‘promotes flexibility and mobility but absolutely at the expense of solidity and rootedness’ (para., 11, ll. 2–3). In her view, the message of Sanditon is that ‘truth-telling—first, to oneself, then, to others—keeps a community alive’ (para. 23, ll. 3–4). In ‘Sublime Laughter in Jane Austen’s Sanditon’, Kathy Justice Gentile argues that Austen creates comedy in the fragment ‘by endowing characters’ speech and actions with spurious sublime gestures that reveal the absurdity of their narcissistic claims’ (para. 7, ll. 7–8). The comic characters, particularly Sir Edward and Dorothy Parker, ‘inadvertently’ create ‘the false or comic sublime’ when they try to ‘elevate themselves’ (para. 7, ll. 9–11). Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud suggests, in ‘“She Saw Indeed”: Perception and Speculation in Sanditon’, that the fragment appears to show Austen using ‘a different approach to free indirect discourse that reflects the speculative nature of seeing’ (para. 32, ll. 3–4). DeVaull-Robichaud examines moments where Charlotte appears to not be seeing clearly, for example her reassessment of Sir Edward and her assumptions about Clara. She suggests that Charlotte’s difference from Austen’s other heroines is attributable to the style of narration. The next section, ‘“Extraordinary Stile”: Style and Genre”’, begins with Clara Tuite’s ‘Jane Austen’s House of Friction’. Tuite engages with the ways in which Sanditon is ‘ambiguous’, at once ‘stylistically, thematically, materially, and biographically’ (para. 1, ll. 1–2). She analyses the fragment across these categories. She suggests that Sanditon combines Austen’s earlier and later writing techniques and draws a connection with ‘The Mystery’ as similarly celebrating ‘the value of the incomplete’ (para. 13, ll. 11–12), and The Watsons in its treatment of ‘social violence’ (para. 37, l. 2). Olivia Ferguson argues, in ‘Historicizing Austen’s “Caricatures”’, for the importance of applying ‘a historicized view of what caricature meant’ (para. 2, l. 7) at the time of Austen’s writing. Ferguson discusses the history of caricature in this period, Austen’s use of the word ‘caricature’, and Austen’s early readers’ thoughts on her ‘writing that stylistically approximates caricature’ (para. 32, l. 13). She points out that the question of caricature is particularly relevant to Sanditon because of its difference in characterization from Austen’s published novels. Joe Bray argues for the importance of ‘metaphor and metonymy’ (para. 1, l. 5) in ‘The Figurative Language of Sanditon’. He traces this interest through Austen’s earlier work and examines how a sense of ‘restriction’ in Sanditon is conveyed by ‘the recurring, extended metaphor of social life as a circle’ (para. 8, ll. 1–2). He then considers the function of metonymy in the fragment, particularly in Mr Parker’s use of names. Anne Toner’s ‘Jane Austen Jotting: The Manuscript of Sanditon and the Question of Style’ argues that the fragment’s style is inextricable from its incompleteness. Toner compares its fragmentary dialogue with other examples in Austen’s other work, particularly Emma and The Watsons. Based on a reading of Mr Parker’s speech, Toner argues that, in this draft, ‘a narrative shift into free indirect discourse can be indistinguishable from authorial summarizing’ for future composition (para. 33, ll. 1–2). The penultimate section, ‘“The Very Thing Perhaps To Be Wished For”: Continuations of Sanditon’, begins with Peter Sabor’s ‘“The Same Difference as between Real Lace, & Imitation”: Anna Lefroy’s Continuation of Sanditon Revisited’. Sabor outlines Lefroy’s biography and considers her continuation of Sanditon in relation to her earlier attempts at finishing Austen’s work, and her own published children’s fiction. He suggests that Austen’s writing advice to Lefroy influenced her approach to the Sanditon continuation, particularly her apparent intention ‘to avoid echoing any of aunt’s novels’ or too closely imitating her style (para. 20, ll. 12–13). Sabor also compares Lefroy’s with later continuations. Maria Clara Pivato Biajoli’s ‘When Sanditon Met Pride and Prejudice: Crossovers and Influences in Jane Austen Fan Fiction’ states that the Austen ‘fanon’ is ‘highly determined by’ Pride and Prejudice fan fiction (para. 12, ll. 2–3). Biajoli traces this influence in continuations of Sanditon, identifying fan fiction’s focus on romantic love over and above other themes. She also notes the particular influence of Marie Dobb’s continuation, as well as film and TV adaptations of Austen, on several post-2000 continuations of Sanditon. ‘“An Early Visit to the Library”: Teaching Sanditon’ is the final section, comprising one article, Katie Halsey’s ‘“The Certain Corrective”: Sanditon, Students and Strategies of Defamiliarization’. Addressing a shortage of scholarship on teaching Austen’s juvenilia and unfinished works, Halsey argues for the importance of teaching Sanditon. Halsey draws convincingly on her experience of teaching an advanced Austen module and highlights the ‘exciting opportunities’ provided by teaching the manuscript works (para. 11, l. 10). Sanditon ‘makes explicit so many of the issues that are muted or implicit in Austen’s other novels’ (para. 15, ll. 2–3), facilitating discussions of themes such as slavery and social mobility. ‘“A Very Civil Salutation”, the ‘Afterword’ by Janet Todd, summarizes the discussions brought up in this issue, and observes that ‘as befits a fragment … we end with questions and partial answers’ (para. 3, ll. 3–4). The next issue of Persuasions On-Line (8:iii[2018]), ‘Undisciplined Austen’, is a special issue offering a collection of essays from the ‘Immortal Austen’ conference (July 2017) and the ‘Undisciplined Austen’ research seminar series at Flinders University, South Australia. The issue opens with Susan Ellen Ford, Gillian Dooley, and Eric Parisot’s ‘Editor’s Note: Undisciplined Austen’. The themes ‘Undisciplined Austen’ and ‘Immortal Austen’ have prompted a series of engaging essays, many of which discuss themes relating to faith, belief, and morality. The first essay is Charles Dufour and Gillian Dooley’s ‘“A More Gentle, Less Dignified, Forgiveness”: Willoughby’s Apology in the Context of Austen’s Religious Beliefs’. They analyse the scene and argue that forgiveness in the novel is ‘largely a secular affair’ (para. 30, l. 7). They also discuss Austen’s treatment of the Church in her letters, novels, and possible manuscript prayers. The next essay, ‘“Religious Piety and Pigs’ Brains”: The Faith of Zombies in Burr Steers’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, by Steve Taylor, discusses the religious practices of Austen’s England and their relationship to colonialism through an analysis of this film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith. Taylor argues that the zombies in the film are neither ‘parodic nor simply a money-making device’ but a significant ‘ethical trope’ (para. 37, ll. 5–6). Geoffrey Baker’s ‘Empiricism, Evidence Law, and Emma’ examines the novel’s engagement with British evidence law, as influenced by empiricism. Baker traces legal language in the novel, for example when Harriet justifies her belief in Mr Knightley’s attachment to her. He also examines the concept of consistency of character in Austen. ‘Free Indirect Style and Moral Thought in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ by Sean Haylock and Craig Taylor challenges the view that any moral thought conveyed by a literary text can be considered separately from its literary features. They argue that philosophical readings have not appreciated that Austen’s use of free indirect style in Persuasion includes the communication of thoughts that ‘cannot be conveyed independently of the distinctive emotional qualities and moral sensibility’ of the character who expresses them (para. 2, ll. 7–8). They particularly focus on Gilbert Ryle’s argument that Austen represents an Aristotelian ethic, and argue that Persuasion focuses on Anne’s moral maturity. The next essay, ‘Music and Class in Jane Austen’ by Gillian Dooley, Kirstine Moffat, and John Wiltshire, opens with the observation that Fanny’s disinclination to learn music may be attributed not only to her reserved character but also a sense ‘that she will never belong to the class in which “accomplishments” like musical performance and drawing will be useful social accessories’ (para. 4, ll. 5–6). They go on to discuss Austen’s use of music to explore social position, class, and morality, including a discussion of the ‘erotically charged’ musical scenes (para. 16, l. 1) but also the association of unmarried women’s precarious situation with musical performance. In ‘“Dido, in Despair!”: Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes and the Shape of Mourning in Persuasion’, Melinda Graefe explores the embodiment of grief. Drawing on the passage which discusses Mrs Musgrove’s size and sadness, Graefe suggests that Austen ‘criticizes the idea that there might be an appropriate shape that mourning ought to take’ (para. 1, ll. 11–12). Graefe reads Austen’s discussions of grief and the body in the context of Lady Emma Hamilton’s ‘tableaux vivants of classical beauties’ (para. 4, l. 9) and Gillray’s responses to these image of grief in a larger body. Judy Stove’s ‘Alice Meynell and the “Consequence” of Jane Austen’ discusses the essayist and poet’s attack on Austen. Stove explains that Meynell’s view of Austen as ‘insufficiently moral’ (para. 3, l. 3) or serious was not unusual in the late nineteenth century. Stove argues that Meynell’s argument relies on a misreading of the word ‘consequence’ in Austen’s novels, because it is often used ironically. Turning now to the final edition of Persuasions On-Line for this year (39:i[2018]), Susan Allen Ford’s ‘Editor’s Note: Constancy’ explains that JASNA’s 2018 annual general meeting in Kansas City had the theme ‘200 Years of Constancy and Hope’. The first section of this issue features papers from this conference, on the subject of Persuasion. They have a particular focus on the novel’s naval themes as well as its social context. The first essay is ‘How the “Long War” Affected Jane Austen’s Family and Her Novels’ by Collins Hemingway. The essay discusses the context of the war, the Austen family’s role in it, Frank’s and Charles’s careers and, in the final section, Austen’s use of the war in her novels. Hemingway discusses military characters and influences across Austen’s novels but especially in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. He concludes that Austen’s ‘naval touches are personal, not political’ (para. 64, l. 1). Hazel L. Jones discusses the events of Persuasion through the context of navy lists and the Naval Chronicle in her essay ‘“She Had Only Navy-Lists and Newspapers for Her Authority”’. Jones considers how Anne would have kept informed of Wentworth’s movements after breaking off their first engagement. She posits links between real navy lists and events in the novel and notes that, unlike Anne, Austen herself would have had news from personal correspondence with those she cared about in the navy. Susan Allen Ford’s ‘Sailors in Fiction before Persuasion’s “Gentlemen of the Navy”’ compares Austen’s naval characters with those in fiction by Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and several less well-remembered authors including Anna Maria Porter and Eliza Parsons. Ford considers what Austen’s readers would have expected from portrayals of the navy, noting that sailors are often ‘romantic heroes’ but that their ‘merit is often only fulfilment of the secret of high birth’ (para. 3, ll. 5–6). She also considers their physical appearance, moral virtues, and, conversely, their reputation for misogyny. Moving on from fictional inspiration, the influence of real men on Austen’s naval characterization is the subject of the next essay, Jocelyn Harris’s ‘Captain Wentworth and the Duke of Monmouth’. Harris argues that the duke of Monmouth was among the real men who inspired Austen’s creation of Wentworth, alongside Byron, Napoleon, Cook, d’Arblay, and her own brothers. Harris explains how ‘the names Wentworth, Strafford, and Croft as well as the places Lyme and Taunton, suggest that Austen also had the brilliant, dangerous, and headstrong Duke of Monmouth in mind’ (para. 3, ll. 3–5). The next essay, Mary Ellen Bertolini’s ‘The Grace to Deserve: Weighing Merit in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’, discusses characters’ assessments of each other’s worth and of the different ranks represented in the novel. Bertolini argues that the novel ‘implies that deserving comes from character and actions’ (para. 1, ll. 9–10) and ‘favors the Royal Navy’ over the upper classes (para. 2, l. 1) The essay focuses on Anne and Wentworth’s relationship, with Bertolini, arguing that its success relies on Wentworth’s encouragement of Anne’s ‘rise in confidence’ (para. 16, l. 10). Theresa Kenney’s ‘A Tale of Two Captains: Whose Heart is Worth Having?’ considers Anne and Wentworth’s differing opinions of the future of Louisa and Benwick as an example of Austen showing how her characters predict each other’s marital happiness. Kenney analyses their conversation and notes the parallels between Benwick and Wentworth, as ‘each values Anne; each flirts with Louisa’, but also considers their differences (para. 14, l. 15). Kenney makes the interesting observation that Charles Musgrove also originally preferred Anne, so his marriage to Mary may be ‘prophetic of the Benwicks’ future’ (para. 27, l. 1). Captain Benwick is also the subject of the next essay, ‘Ivory and Canvas: Naval Miniature Portraiture in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ by Moriah Webster. Webster discusses the historical context of the miniature and its changing class associations. Focusing on Benwick’s miniature, Webster argues that ‘the ordering of a miniature portrait by an essentially self-made man is a transgressive act’ (para. 24, l. 1) which embodies ‘the anxieties felt by the aristocracy’ (para. 15, l. 4). This sense of social and economic change in Persuasion is also highlighted by Kristen Miller Zohn in ‘“A State of Alteration”: Stylistic Contrasts in the Musgroves’ Parlor’. Zohn argues that Austen represents social change through furnishing and clothing but endorses improvements only where they are ‘undertaken in the spirit of friendliness and egalitarianism’ (para. 34, l. 7). For Zohn, Henrietta’s and Louisa’s choices ‘reflect the ideals of a more democratic society’ (para. 34, l. 3). The final piece in this section is Juliet McMaster’s ‘Revisiting Lake Louise 1993’, an essay in which McMaster reflects on her time at the 1993 JASNA AGM. The essays in the ‘Miscellany’ section have a broader focus, covering contextual issues, close analysis, and psychological readings, and, finally, adaptation. The section opens with Maggie Burns’s ‘Three Pamphlets on the Leigh-Perrot Trial: Why Austen Sent Susan to Crosby’. Burns links Austen’s choice to send her novel Susan to Benjamin Crosby to his having ‘advertised and then jettisoned’ (para. 6, l. 2) a pamphlet on the trial of her aunt, Jane Leigh-Perrot. For Burns, ‘Austen’s relief and gratitude for Crosby’s forbearance might help to explain her remarkable forbearance with Crosby later’ (para. 34, ll. 6–7) when he indefinitely delayed Susan’s publication. David Worrall’s ‘Where Jane Austen Sat: The “Austin” Box at Edmund Kean’s Shylock, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, March 5, 1814’ is covered in the Section 4 below. The next essay is Donna R. White’s ‘Nonsense Elements in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia’. White argues that Austen’s use of features of the English nonsense genre in the juvenilia has been overlooked, including elements such as alliteration, exaggeration, and reversal. Defining nonsense as ‘a kind of linguistic play that does not concern itself with aesthetic or moral values’ (para. 3, l. 1), White identifies much of the juvenilia as nonsense, with the exceptions of ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘Catherine’. Brenda S. Cox focuses on Sense and Sensibility in her essay ‘Marianne Dashwood’s Repentance, Willoughby’s “Repentance,” and the Book of Common Prayer’. Cox notes Austen’s presentation of characters who recognize their sins and resolve to change. She argues that Marianne’s repentance resembles ‘the general confession’ in the Book of Common Prayer, while Willoughby’s ‘also includes elements of that prayer but is not as complete as Marianne’s’ (para. 11, l. 5). In ‘The Probable Location of Donwell Abbey in Jane Austen’s Emma’, Kenneth Smith challenges R.W. Chapman’s claim that it is impossible to locate such a setting. For Smith, Donwell Abbey is Claremont Park, Highbury is Esher, and Hartfield is Esher Place. The evidence for Smith’s claim includes the triangulation of distances (he argues that the distance of sixteen miles from London refers specifically to Brunswick Square), as well as descriptions of Donwell Abbey which are comparable to Claremont Park. Austen’s presentation of the future is discussed in Maria Frawley, Kaitlyn Nigro, and Gwendolyn Umbach’s ‘To Be “Esteemed Quite Worthy”: Fortunes, Futures, and Economic Language in Persuasion’. In contrast to the widespread reading of Persuasion as a nostalgic novel, they note its particular focus on futurity. Frawley, Nigro, and Umbach consider economics and stability in the novel, as well as the futurity implied in its ending, with its consideration of Anne’s future as a sailor’s wife. ‘“Even Miss Bates Has a Mind”: A Cognitive Historicist Reading of Emma’s Miss Bates’ by Kathleen R. Steele counters readings which ‘marginalize her character’ (para. 2, l. 9) with a detailed analysis of her speech. Steele applies a cognitive historicist approach, one which considers ‘texts alongside contemporaneous scientific, philosophical, and political discourses’ (para. 4, ll. 3–4). Steele considers how ‘Miss Bates’s speech breaks cognitive constraints’ (para. 13, ll. 1–2), including Austen’s representation of her ‘anxiety’ (para. 13, l. 10). The next essay also focuses on Austen’s presentation of secondary characters. Jenny Rebecca Rytting’s ‘Jane, Bingley, and the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator; or, The Other Couple in Pride and Prejudice’ argues that they have an important role as ‘foils’ to Elizabeth and Darcy’ (para. 1, l. 4). Rytting applies the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator theory, based on the work of Carl Jung, to Jane and Bingley, in contrast to Elizabeth and Darcy. Rytting argues that Bingley and Jane are significant because they show ‘what happens when one does not have enough pride or prejudice’ (para. 26, ll. 1–2). The psychological assessment of characters is further explored in Tawny Burgess’s ‘Jane Austen in the Nursing Classroom: A Tool to Expand Psychiatric Assessment Skills’. Burgess’s innovative essay describes how she developed an assignment for psychiatric mental health nursing students which used Austen’s characters as case studies. Burgess notes the prevalence of apparent personality disorders among Austen’s secondary characters, including ‘a disproportionate amount of dramatic or histrionic personalities with impulsive behavior’ (para. 2, ll. 9–10), which she argues Austen describes ‘accurately’ (para. 2, l. 5). When analysing Wickham’s behaviour in Pride and Prejudice, Burgess argues that he shows signs of antisocial personality disorder. The next essay, Reiner Wels’s ‘Pride and Prejudice in Black and White: First and Last Impressions (1938–1967)’, provides an overview of adaptations of the novel from this period. Wels notes that many adaptations have been lost and several have been overlooked by other scholarship. In this essay, Wels surveys televised adaptations in English within the aforementioned period, beginning with the 1938 BBC version. Wels notes additions and deletions to Austen’s story, arguing that, since 1938, adaptations have generally become longer and also more closely resemble Austen’s text. Wels is also the author of the next essay, ‘Pride and Prejudice in Black and White: De vier dochters Bennet (1961–1962)’. In this piece, Wels describes the only Dutch TV adaptation of Austen, the title of which translates as ‘The Four Bennet Daughters’ (Kitty having been cut from this version). Wels analyses the Dutch series but also considers what it could suggest about the now lost BBC 1950s adaptation, because it was based on a translation of the same screenplay. Wels notes various mistakes that were made in live sections between pre-recorded inserts and describes the programme’s reception as ‘lukewarm’ (para. 17, l. 1). Continuing the discussion of TV adaptations, Wim Tigges’s ‘Lost in Austen: A Postmodern Reanimation of Pride and Prejudice’ presents the 2008 series as ‘a deconstructive reading’ of the text (para. 1, l. 5). Tigges argues that this reading is the result of ‘the juxtaposition of recognizable themes and patterns from Jane Austen’s novel with a modern young woman’s uncomfortable immersion in a postmodern reanimation of that world’ (para. 6, ll. 15–16). Tigges analyses the plot and its postmodern qualities, as it ‘deconstructs not only Austen … but also the “reality” of our own time’ (para. 19, l. 1). The final piece is Deborah Barnum’s ‘Jane Austen Bibliography, 2017’, listing Austen-related works and texts from the previous year. Connecting to the discussions often foregrounded in Persuasions On-Line, Austen’s reputation, reception, afterlives, and adaptations are the subject of a special issue of Women’s Writing (WW 25[2018]), ‘Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives’, edited by Annika Bautz and Sarah Wootton. In the introduction (WW 25[2018] 413–15), Bautz and Wootton note that the issue ‘reengages with debates over Austen, her continuing appeal and significance as an author and a lucrative brand, her unique cultural standing and ubiquity’ (p. 415). The first essay, Susan Civale’s ‘Austentatious: Comedy Improv and Austen Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century’ (WW 25[2018] 416–28), is covered in Section 4 below. In ‘Morbid Curiosity and Monstrous (Re)Visions: Zombies, Sea Monsters, and Readers (Re)Writing Jane Austen’ (WW 25[2018] 429–42), Rebecca Soares considers Austen ‘mash-ups’. Based on a reading of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [2009] and Ben H. Winter’s Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters [2009], Soares proposes a ‘theory of the penetrative and masculinized reader’ (p. 430), noting the insertion of new, often explicit, material and challenges to Austen’s authorial status. Soares argues that both the methodology and the material are ‘problematic’ (p. 432). She concludes that ‘while penetrative reading is both sexist and anti-intellectual … it extrapolates from academic reading practices and ultimately reinforces the cultural biases that literary criticism attempts to expose’ (p. 440). The third essay, Lana L. Dalley’s ‘Mediations on Value in Mansfield Park, or Jane Austen Tries to Balance the Books’ (WW 25[2018] 443–53), engages with economic readings of Austen. Dalley argues that value is a central theme of Mansfield Park, and that it ‘shows Austen ways in which economic modes of thinking might come to bear on affective modes of experience’ (p. 454). Analysing multiple examples of judgements of value in the novel, Dalley argues that it emerges as an ‘unstable’ quality (p. 445). She reads gift-giving in the novel as ‘an effective register for larger-scale fluctuations in value’ (p. 445). In ‘Philadelphia and the Making of Jane Austen in the United States, 1816–1838’ (WW 25[2018] 454–67), Emily Schultheis argues that, despite Austen’s association with Englishness, she was ‘first marketed as a canonical author in America’ (p. 454). Schultheis focuses on Austen’s reception in America in the early nineteenth century, which she argues has been hitherto overlooked. Considering the period between the first publication of Emma in Philadelphia in 1816 and the Carey, Lee & Blanchard 1836 edition of the six novels, Schultheis describes what she calls the ‘then-unique steps’ (p. 455) taken by the publishers, including marketing Austen ‘as an independent author organized under her name’ (p. 463), in contrast to Bentley’s ‘Standard Novels’ editions. Annika Bautz’s ‘Austen’s Late-Nineteenth-Century Afterlives: 1890s Introductions to Her Novels’ (WW 25[2018] 468–85) describes the introductions to editions that were published in this decade. Bautz argues that introductions have been under-discussed, but contends that they were ‘culturally significant’ (p. 469). She notes the cultural power of the six male introduction writers of the 1890s and considers their introductions ‘as paratexts that would have shaped many thousands of readers’ encounters with Austen’s texts’ (p. 470). The paratexts’ prominent themes include ‘humour, gender, biography, genius, characters, realism, scope’ (p. 477). In ‘“Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt And Misery”: Jane Austen and Escapism, from Trench Warfare to YouTube Fanvids’ (WW 25[2018] 486–98), Rebecca White argues that Northanger Abbey anticipates the nostalgic appreciation of Austen of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. White argues that Austen’s writing engages with the contemporary and has a ‘pragmatic presentness’ which is not often acknowledged by adaptations (p. 487). She considers the nostalgic turn to Austen during twentieth-century wars as context for her analysis of Austen’s twenty-first-century afterlives. White focuses particularly on Hess’s Austenland [2013] and YouTube fan videos, including montages as well as ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ series. Christopher C. Nagle’s ‘The Problem of the Jane Austen Musical’ (WW 25[2018] 499–511) is discussed in Section 4 below. Stephanie Russo’s ‘Austen Approved: Pemberley Digital and the Transmedia Commodification of Jane Austen’ (WW 25[2018] 512–24) focuses on the Emma Approved series [2013–14]. Russo considers the series to be a distinctly twenty-first-century manifestation of Jane Austen’s afterlife’ (p. 513) because it seeks to monetize Austen’s cultural capital. The series shows Emma as a lifestyle coach, advising not only characters but also the viewer, which creates an ‘interesting tension’ with the source text (p. 518). Russo highlights that the series encourages the viewer, positioned as female, to purchase clothing and other advertised items, and often fails to engage with Austen’s ‘social critique’, although ‘conspicuous consumption’ is ‘perhaps inadvertently’ discussed (p. 520). Marie Nedregotten Sørbø asks what remains of Austen’s irony in media adaptations and translations, in ‘Interpretations of Jane Austen’s Irony on Screen and in Translations: A Comparison of Some Samples’ (WW 25[2018] 525–35). Sørbø argues that translations and screen adaptations are connected, as they translate Austen’s words. She focuses on how examples of irony from Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are realized in seven screen adaptations of these novels, as well as five Norwegian translations of the former. Sørbø considers how the opening line of Pride and Prejudice is translated or adapted, with the meaning changing when it spoken by different characters. The final essay in the issue, Sarah Wootton’s ‘Revisiting Jane Austen as a Romantic Author in Literary Biopics’ (WW 25[2018] 536–48), considers whether Austen biopics are ‘neoconservative’ or whether they show an ‘alternative … model of female authorship’ (p. 537). With a focus on Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane [2007] and Jeremy Lovering’s Miss Austen Regrets [2008], Wootton asks what can be gained from considering literary biopics as ‘enriching chapters in the author’s cultural afterlife’ (p. 537). She concludes that ‘the Austens of these biopics are neither flat heritage reproductions nor “authentic” Austens’ (p. 546). The final part of this section on Austen covers the numerous individual essays that were published, grouped according to theme and the texts which they discuss. In ‘Jane Austen and the Myth of the Enduring Jacobite’ (RES 69:ii[2018] 298–315), Peter Knox-Shaw challenges the evidence that Austen held Jacobite views. Knox-Shaw discusses Austen’s marginalia to Goldsmith’s History of England as well as Austen’s ‘The History of England’, which he argues is written in the voice of an ironic persona. He also proposes that a comment about Queen Elizabeth in a letter to her brother Francis in 1813 is impossible ‘to square … with any kind of seriously entertained Jacobitism’ (p. 306). Comments on history from Northanger Abbey, as well as Austen’s own reading, are also used to argue that she did not hold Jacobite views in her adult life. In ‘Jane Austen’s Universals’ (EIC 68:ii[2018] 211–33), Freya Johnston considers questions of universality in Austen’s novels. Johnston discusses Austen’s use of the word ‘universally’ in the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, arguing that the joke ‘hinges’ on it (p. 211). She also considers a range of other instances of the universal (or otherwise), including Austen’s use of ‘every Body’ or ‘everybody’. Kathryn Sutherland’s ‘Jane Austen: Fragmented Artist’ was also published separately (EIC 68:ii[2018] 190–210), as well as being included in Persuasions On-Line (see Persuasions On-Line 38:ii, above). In ‘Pride and Prejudice: Chapman’s Internal Dating Corrected’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 351–57), Deirdre Le Faye corrects Chapman’s assumption that the action of the novel was updated to fit the 1811–12 calendar. Le Faye demonstrates that the dates better fit the calendar of 1793–4, and shows that the arrival of the militia, the existence of the camp at Brighton, and the style of female fashions all support this earlier setting. A corrected chronology of events is included. Le Faye shows that the novel is largely ‘unaltered’ (p. 357) from Austen’s first composition, except in the concluding comments, which look forward to the characters’ futures. Le Faye also discusses possible revisions in ‘Pride and Prejudice: What Loppings and Croppings’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 356–9). She notes five instances where she suspects sections may have been removed: the origin of Bingley and Darcy’s friendship; the five additional meetings between the Bennets and the Netherfield residents after their meeting at the Meryton assembly; Bingley’s request that Darcy come to Netherfield with him; the coincidence of Mr Collins meeting Darcy without previous awareness of his relationship to Lady Catherine; and a stronger ‘reason for Darcy’s churlish behaviour at the Meryton ball’ (p. 359). Le Faye also notes that Mr Collins’s final letter may have been an addition. Trisha Urmi Banerjee applies game theory to Emma in her essay entitled ‘Austen Equilibrium’ (Rep 143:i[2018] 63–90). Banerjee uses economic methodology, including comparisons with laissez-faire economics, and a reading of the theme of ‘aversion to waste’ in the novel (p. 64). The relationship between the capitalist economy and Austen’s ‘formal economy’ (p. 75) is also considered. Banerjee argues that ‘Austen’s aesthetic values are suffused with an affinity for capitalist values’ (p. 84). Christopher Stampone’s ‘“Obliged To Yield”: The Language of Patriarchy and the System of Mental Slavery in Mansfield Park’ (SNNTS 50:ii[2018] 197–212) argues that ‘words—especially “duty,” “gratitude,” “obligation,” and “ought”—work to enslave every character’ in the novel (p. 210). Stampone draws on Johnson’s Dictionary and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication to argue that the novel is ‘the “daylight equivalent” of traditional Radcliffean Gothic romance, unmasking patriarchy as an inescapable system of mental slavery’ (p. 198). Stampone considers Fanny as particularly enslaved by her gratitude to Edmund, so her choice to reject Henry is not ‘free’ (p. 204). Azar Hussain’s ‘“Jane Austen: An Early Comment”—Revisited’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 359–61) returns to Brian Southam’s article of November 1959 which quotes a letter of 11 August 1814 from John William Ward (1781–1833). Southam quotes a section in which Ward admires Mansfield Park and compares it with Maria Edgeworth’s work with a comment about her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Hussain points out that Ward goes on to say that he hopes Richard will soon ‘pop off’ (die). Hussain argues that Ward ‘was perhaps either consciously or subconsciously echoing’ Tom Bertram’s use of the phrase in Mansfield Park, which the letter shows he was reading (pp. 360–1). In ‘“An Office in which She Had Always Depended”: Surrogate Managers in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Persuasion’ (JECS 41:iii[2018] 373–89), Rita J. Dashwood states that Austen was ‘patently influenced’ by conduct books (p. 374) in her discussion of domestic management. She discusses Mrs Norris and Mrs Clay as trying ‘to appropriate the position of household manager’ (pp. 377–8), although they will never own the property themselves, being neither sufficiently closely related to the male owner nor sufficiently restrained to be legitimate managers. Although Mrs Clay never becomes manager of the Elliot household, Dashwood argues that Anne regards this as a threat. In ‘Left Hanging: Silence, Suspension, and Desire in Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ (ECent 59:i[2018] 85–103), Christien Garcia provides an alternative reading of Anne’s silence. Garcia contends that Anne’s silence is not simply a deficiency, to be resolved by her union with Wentworth, as many others have argued, but a ‘suspension’ (p. 87). For Garcia, ‘suspension … describes the manner in which silence functions … to keep things “up in the air”’ and ‘to define the intimate relationship of Anne and Frederick’s bodies in space’ (p. 87). Beth Lau applies evolutionary psychology to Austen in ‘Sexual Selection and Female Choice in Austen’s Northanger Abbey’ (SNNTS 50:iii[2018] 465–82). Lau argues that ‘the idea that she [Catherine] is socially inept and mentally obtuse is challenged by the fact that she ends up marrying the most eligible man in the novel’ (p. 465), Lau considers mate-selection strategies in the novel, arguing that Catherine correctly identifies Henry as a better prospect than John Thorpe. Lau also argues that Catherine’s ‘guilelessness’ is actually beneficial, as it demonstrates that she is ‘harmless’ and likely to be faithful (p. 378). The juvenilia, Sanditon, and Lady Susan were each the subject of one individual essay. Shawn Normandin’s ‘Jane Austen’s “Evelyn” and the “Impossibility of the Gift”’ (Criticism 60:i[2018] 27–46) argues that Austen anticipates Jacques Derrida’s Given Time. Normandin argues that ‘Evelyn’ has been comparatively neglected but deserves attention because it ‘may be Western literature’s keenest examination of the gift—because, not in spite of, its absurd frivolity’ (p. 28). As well as discussing the Webbs’ gifts to Mr Gower, Normandin also reads later episodes in the tale as symbolic gifts. Richard T. McClelland’s ‘Shamelessness in Jane Austen: The Case of Lady Susan’ (JM&B 39:iii[2018] 229–49) considers the concept of shame from a biological and psychological perspective, using the character of Lady Susan as a ‘paradigmatic example of shamelessness’ (p. 235). McClelland argues that ‘Austen has anticipated the Machiavellian personality’ (p. 237), as well as many of the findings of contemporary science, in her portrayal of Lady Susan. As well as the special issue of Persuasions On-Line discussed above, Sanditon was also discussed in an essay by Victoria Baugh. In ‘Mixed-Race Heiresses in Early-Nineteenth-Century Literature: Sanditon’s Miss Lambe in Context’ (ERR 29:iv[2018] 449–58), Baugh compares Miss Lambe with mixed-race heiresses in the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour [1808] and Mary Ann Sullivan’s Owen Castle [1816]. Baugh notes multiple in ways in which Miss Lambe stands out from other mixed-race heroines, including ‘Austen’s bypassing the need to explain’ her ‘birth’ (p. 450) and the fact she does not have a black maid to ‘serve as a foil’ (p. 454). Bough argues that, although Miss Lambe does not speak, she emerges as a ‘central’ character (p. 450). Austen’s letters were also the subject of several essays. In ‘Another Unexplained Reference in Jane Austen’s Letters: “No one in fact nearer to us than Sir John himself”’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 342–47) Maggie Burns discusses Austen’s reference in a letter of 30 January 1809 to the death of Sir John Moore following the battle of Corunna, which implies a relationship to the Austens. Burns notes Austen’s several mentions of Corunna and, referring to Le Faye, explains that Austen’s brother Frances commanded HMS St Albans, which handled the disembarkation of Moore’s forces. Burns also states that Austen’s Susan (later Northanger Abbey) was advertised by Crosby in The Beauties of Doctor John Moore. Dr John Moore was the father of Sir John Moore. Deirdre Le Faye notes, in ‘Jane Austen: Appearance of Three Missing Letters’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 347–9), that a complete letter and two fragments were sold at Sotheby’s on 11 July 2017. These fragments have been previously published based on copies. She describes the letters (numbers 76, 83, and 84) and notes some minor differences in no. 76 from the text in her edition previously made from a copy. Le Faye also explains, in ‘Jane Austen: A Hitherto Unknown Fragment of Letter No. 87 Sold at Auction’ (N&Q 65:iii[2018] 349–50), that the last part of letter no. 87, dated 15–16 September 1813, was found in an autograph album owned by Lady Charlotte Portal. Le Faye transcribes this fragment, to be numbered 87 (S.2), and explains that the reference to ‘George & his party’ is a reference to Edward’s second son, George (p. 350). We now move to works published on Mary Shelley. This year saw two monographs, one biography (of popular interest), three collected editions of essays, and ten articles on Mary Shelley. The majority of works concentrated on Frankenstein, its legacy and transmedia adaptations. New readings of Frankenstein were provided, approaching the text through the lenses of disability studies and medical studies. Relatively few scholars broadened their focus and considered Mary Shelley’s other works. This section first covers an article which argues for Mary Shelley’s authorship of Frankenstein, before addressing the monographs and works considering Shelley’s wider oeuvre, followed by articles on disability and illness in Frankenstein, medicine and science within the novel, and finally inheritances, legacies, and adaptations of Frankenstein. Before discussing the criticism on Mary Shelley, it is worth summarizing the position recent criticism has taken regarding her authorship of Frankenstein, a topic which has previously divided critics. Will Bowers’s ‘On First Looking into Mary Shelley’s Homer’ (RES 69[2017] 510–31), discussed in Section 1 above, and Suzanne L. Barnett’s essay, ‘Romantic Prometheis and the Molding of Frankenstein’ (in Weiner, Stevens, and Rogers, eds., Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction, pp. 76–90; reviewed below), argue for greater recognition of Mary Shelley’s authorship of Frankenstein and of her intellectual prowess. In ‘On First Looking into Mary Shelley’s Homer’, Bowers investigates an unexamined manuscript notebook belonging to Mary Shelley, held within the Brewer–Leigh Hunt Collection containing Mary Shelley’s translation of over 250 lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Bowers analyses this alongside her diaries as proof of her intellectual studies in Pisa and to suggest her active participation in collaborative literary practices. Their competence leads Bowers to theorize that Percy Shelley may have only read his wife’s translations of osservatore fiorentino when writing ‘Ginevra’ rather than reading Lastri himself, reducing the intellectual weight of Percy in favour of Mary Shelley. Such support of Mary Shelley’s literary and intellectual abilities permeates the critical works published on her in 2018. Scholars celebrate her literary innovation, unconventional lifestyle, complex representation of ethical and scientific debates, her literary influence, and her novels’ longevity. Angela Wright’s monograph Mary Shelley ‘seeks significantly to revise our understanding of Mary Shelley’s engagement with the Gothic’ (p. 1) by looking at her oeuvre beyond the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein. Wright succeeds in broadening our understanding of Shelley’s engagement with the Gothic by discussing Frankenstein [1818; 1831], Matilda [1819], Valperga [1823], The Last Man [1826], and short stories such as ‘Transformation’ [1831] and ‘The Mortal Immortal’ [1833], both published in The Keepsake literary annual. Identifying Shelley as an ‘author driven by intellectual curiosity’, Wright demonstrates that ‘Mary Shelley experimented throughout her literary career with different generic forms as suitable carriers for her anatomisations of human feeling’ (p. 4). In her first chapter, in which she focuses on the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, Wright identifies the ‘silent female’, Margaret Walton Saville, as the ‘structural and thematic core of the tale’ (p. 49). In so doing, Wright sets up a feminist lens for her readings of Matilda and Valperga in the ensuing two chapters. Chapter 2 comprises an autobiographical reading of Matilda. Primarily focusing on the incest narrative enables Wright to connect Shelley’s novel to Gothic forebears such as Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis, but also demonstrates the female protagonist’s testimony of her horror at her father. Wright argues that Shelley knew ‘when not to reveal the full extent of horror’ (p. 64), revealing a restraint imposed on her imagination. Themes of horror but also self-control continue into chapter 3, which concentrates primarily on the character of Euthanasia in Valperga. Wright suggests that the female characters’ silences in this novel ‘diminish the terrors evoked by absolutist figures’; the women’s measured testimonies are seen to grant them control and authority (p. 88). Chapters 4 and 5 sustain the focus on female narrative and editorship but focus increasingly on Mary Shelley’s grief, evident in her writings. The process of Mary Shelley’s grief connects her essay, ‘On Ghosts’ [1824] to The Last Man. Wright identifies that Shelley’s characters rein in the horrors that terrified them, leaving them present in the current moment, a reflection of her own grieving at this time. Finally, chapter 5 returns to Frankenstein but looks at the 1831 edition. As in Frankenstein [1818], Valperga, and The Last Man, female editorship prevails in the 1831 edition. Looking minutely at the preface and also the changes made to the character of Elizabeth Lavenza, Wright traces how this edition of Frankenstein becomes a critique of the ‘Gothic disposability of the female’ (p. 114). Thus Wright convincingly traces Mary Shelley’s enduring fascination with the Gothic in texts not usually identified as Gothic, revealing the prevalence of Gothic tropes throughout her works. Female editorship and transformation are inscribed as operative forces within Mary Shelley’s oeuvre, and Wright’s illuminating and enjoyable monograph pushes us to recognize and appreciate the continuation and transformation of Shelley and her writings. As many of the critical works published in 2018 argue, Mary Shelley is more than just Frankenstein. Two other articles also concentrate on a wider selection of Shelley’s novels. Olivia Zolciak’s ‘Sublimating an Apocalypse: An Exploration of Anxiety, Authorship and Feminist Theory in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’ (AJES 77[2018] 1243–76) re-evaluates The Last Man and positions it as a hitherto unrecognized feminist work. With specific references to the character of Sibyl, Zolciak argues that Shelley sublimates moments of anxiety caused by illness and authorship in the novel into discourses of female authorial authority. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Jeffrey N. Cox’s ‘Living through Insecurity in the Works of Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’ (ER 25:ii[2018] 229–47) concentrates on Frankenstein, The Last Man, Prometheus, and The Cenci. Reading both of the Shelleys’ insecure lives and moments of insecurity in these texts (such as both Victor’s and Jupiter’s failed attempts to control their creations) leads Stevenson and Cox to argue that living through insecurity in life and in fiction offers opportunities of progression and emancipation. It is in enduring instability that both the Shelleys and their characters live ‘beyond security’s power games [in] a world transfigured’ (p. 247), where harmony is created from insecurity. This section now moves on to works which focus more specifically on Frankenstein, commencing with the second monograph published on Mary Shelley: Daisy Hay’s The Making of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A book of academic and popular interest, Hay’s text brings together numerous well-known and less well-known objects, portraits, paintings, and manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library, as well as at other institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, to tell anew the story of how Mary Shelley conceived of, wrote, and published Frankenstein. Hays divides her monograph into five chapters: ‘Time’, ‘People’, ‘Place’, ‘Paper’, and ‘Relics’. Each section makes use of individual items and people which contributed towards Mary Shelley’s writing and which reveal how she produced the novel. ‘Time’ guides readers through the popularity in the early nineteenth century of Gothic and ghost stories, paintings and caricatures of fear, scientific experimentation and developments, and travel and discovery to locate Frankenstein as a product stemming from these societal concerns. ‘People’ provides a brief biography of Mary Shelley’s childhood and then discusses the roles Byron, Claire and Charles Clairmont, and Matthew Lewis played in devising Frankenstein. Hays notes that ‘Frankenstein, though, is not shaped by those in Mary’s circle who spoke loudest. It also demonstrates a deep preoccupation with those who cannot speak, or those who speak and are not heard’ (p. 51). Through this, the influence of Fanny Imlay and of Harriet Shelley is considered, making readers aware of the novel’s thematic concerns with the loss of a child and parental responsibility. Chapter 3, ‘Place’, is concerned with Mary Shelley’s time in Italy and Switzerland. It traces how the lightning storms Shelley saw in Italy feature in the novel in order to discuss galvanism and to denote moments of characters’ revelation and clarity. British places which Mary Shelley visited or heard about, such as Scotland, Oxford, and Bath, are also shown to feature in or influence Frankenstein, leading Hay to conclude that memories of places affected the narrative just as much as Shelley’s physical location when writing. ‘Paper’ draws on empirical evidence from Mary Shelley’s Draft Notebooks A and B and the Fair-Copy Notebooks C1 and C2. Hay discusses Shelley’s writing and editing processes. ‘Paper’ ends with a feminist claim that a letter from Mary Shelley to Walter Scott in 1818 ‘reads as a statement of an author finally taking back the pages of the manuscript, and claiming them as her own’ (p. 94). The final chapter, ‘Relics’, discusses the two main theories of the origin of the name ‘Frankenstein’ and focuses on the applications and adaptations of ‘Frankenstein’ as a term since 1818; it is a ‘catch-all political metaphor’ (p. 98) as well as a term of cultural power. Hay concludes by prophesying that ‘Frankenstein will continue to endure as long as humans have the capacity to imagine impossible futures, and then to be frightened by the consequences of their imaginations’ (p. 115). This book is of interest to both general and scholarly readers and will certainly contribute to sustaining the legacy of Frankenstein and of Mary Shelley. In Frankenstein, the realization of impossible futures is achieved through the inclusion of science and experiment. Reading science in literature is an increasingly popular avenue of critical studies, and two articles take this focus. Mary Fairclough’s article, ‘Frankenstein and Chemistry’ (L&M 36:ii[2018] 269–86), concentrates on the vague descriptions of scientific experiments and Frankenstein’s attic-laboratory in Shelley’s novel. Rather than using this imprecision to argue for Shelley’s lack of scientific knowledge, Fairclough neatly argues that it reflects the emerging and competing scientific practices regarding electrochemistry and galvanism at the start of the nineteenth century. Jed Mayer’s article focuses on the outside world rather than laboratory scenes. ‘The Weird Ecologies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (SFS 45:ii[2018] 229–43) discusses the novel’s concern with environment, pollution, ecology, and the Anthropocene. Mayer argues that Frankenstein’s creature both disgusts and enthrals readers, meaning that, for Mayer, Frankenstein ‘inaugurates the birth of the weird’ (p. 239), a genre characterized by features which both fascinate and terrify us. A thematic focus on illness is sustained by the following two articles, which approach Frankenstein through the lens of disability studies. Martha Stoddard Holmes’s ‘Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability’ (L&M 36:ii[2018] 372–87) provides a new approach to Frankenstein, in particular to the body and actions of the Creature. Holmes connects the descriptions of the Creature’s body to other characters’ adverse and shocked reactions to him, which, she argues, ‘resonates with disability experiences’ (p. 374). Such a focus, Holmes compellingly argues, brings the novel closer to people’s lived experiences with, and in response to, disability, and ultimately reveals both nineteenth-century and modern prejudices about bodies and beings which evoke the uncanny. Kathleen Béres Rogers, meanwhile, looks at mental rather than physical manifestations of illness in Frankenstein, although the two are arguably inextricable. In ‘The Monstrous Idea in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (L&M 36:ii[2018] 356–71), Rogers connects Victor’s repeated ideas, seen as obsessions and enthusiasms, to the Romantic concept of ruling passions. In turn, Rogers argues that these obsessions with life, and with science more generally, over-stretch his mind, and it is this which evokes the uncanny, and ultimately the monstrous, in Frankenstein. We now move to studies of the intertextuality of Frankenstein, in terms both of classic influences and of the text’s futurity. ‘Reading Milton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (MiltonS 60[2018] 157–82), by Lauren Shohet, demonstrates that there are more parallels between Frankenstein and Paradise Lost than previously recognized. The Creature is the ‘best reader of Paradise Lost’ (p. 157), Robert Walton is the ‘worst Miltonist’ (p. 157), and Victor occupies the middle ground of awareness tempered by avoidance. Walton’s ignorance is shown to be dangerous as he lauds Victor’s ‘Satanically persuasive rhetoric’ (p. 162). Shohet ultimately concludes that Shelley recombines elements and rhetoric from Paradise Lost, embodying a form of religious dissent she perceives as Miltonic. The rich intertextuality of Frankenstein enabled Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M. Rogers to edit the impressive collection, Frankenstein and Its Classics. This edited collection sheds light on the numerous Roman and Greek texts on which Mary Shelley drew, inadvertently or consciously, while writing Frankenstein. Similarly to other edited collections, Frankenstein and Its Classics justifies its ‘confluence of old and new’ (p. 2), or its eclectic mix of essays, by invoking the analogy of Frankenstein’s Creature’s stitched-together body. The analogy may be well worn, but the material in Frankenstein and Its Classics is impressively original. No other work has yet traced the classical filiations between Frankenstein and Graeco-Roman myths. Unfortunately the prose is somewhat obscured by the frequent and sometimes inconsistent use of abbreviations (e.g. MWS, PBS, SF, F). Frankenstein and Its Classics is split into two parts, ‘Promethean Heat’ and ‘Hideous Progeny’; the first part looks how Frankenstein ‘transmit[s] and transmut[es] material from Greek and Romantic antiquity’ (p. 2) while the latter looks forward to classical receptions mediated through Frankenstein in modern adaptations. Weiner, Stevens, and Rogers posit a fundamental link between Frankenstein and modern science fiction; both are apt media through which to posit and discuss urgent ethical questions in response to science and humanity and technology. Opening the first group of essays, Genevieve Lively, in ‘Patchwork Paratexts and Monstrous Metapoetics: “After tea M reads Ovid”’ (pp. 25–41), makes judicious use of Shelley’s journals and notebooks to show how fundamental Ovid’s Metamorphoses and George Sandys’s Metamorphoses [1632] were in the creation of Frankenstein. Identifying similarities in the gigantic size and ghastly appearance of the creatures in both texts leads Lively to conclude that ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is—in part—made out of Sandys’s Ovid’ (p. 40). The following articles also identify classical influences but move away from the more well-known identification of Ovid’s text within Frankenstein. Martin Priestman’s ‘Prometheus and Dr. Darwin’s Vermicelli: Another Stir to the Frankenstein Broth’ (pp. 42–58) connects Hesiod and Aeschylus, as well as Ovid, to the novel. Priestman uses evidence from texts by the earl of Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, and Immanuel Kant to show that ‘the phrase “modern Prometheus” was in the air’ in multiple embodiments when Shelley wrote Frankenstein (p. 45). Similarly, Andrew McClellan’s ‘The Politics of Revivification in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (pp. 59–75) investigates the concepts of revivification and war allegories in the ancient Roman poet Lucan and in Shelley’s novel. Both writers are shown to have responded to coeval political situations, the Roman imperial regime and the ancien régime respectively, in their characterization of their monsters. Suzanne L. Barnett, in ‘Romantic Prometheis and the Molding of Frankenstein’ (pp. 76–90), looks at other embodiments of Prometheus in less well-known classical texts, from ‘Hesiod and Horace to Francis Bacon, John Frank Newton, and Erasmus Darwin; and from Andrew Tooke to William Godwin’ (p. 76). Barnett notes that ‘Prometheus’ ought to be plural, as Shelley would have been influenced by a number of characterizations of the Prometheus character. Barnett argues that Shelley’s manifestation of Prometheus in Frankenstein influenced Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound [1820]. David A. Gapp’s ‘Why the “Year without a Summer”?’ (pp. 91–101) provides an original literary-geographical approach to the context of the novel. It focuses on climate change and both contemporary and modern accounts of the weather in 1815, and thus provides ‘a rich description of the extra-literary context for Frankenstein’s conception’ (p. 16) in its use of graphs and illustrations. Matthew Gumpert sustains this focus on environment in ‘The Sublime Monster: Frankenstein, or the Modern Pandora’ (pp. 102–20). Gumpert argues that the Creature owes its rejection to its ‘excess of “the sublime”’ (p. 16) and ‘if Victor is “the modern Prometheus,” then ‘his Creature is a modern Pandora’ (p. 102), referring to Hesiod’s myth. The ‘territory of desire’ (p. 102) is shown to be incisive in Frankenstein. Part II of Frankenstein and Its Classics ‘examines Frankenstein’s role in mediating the reception of Graeco-Roman myth, literature, and thought in later works of art and literature’ (p. 16). In ‘Cupid and Psyche in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Apuleian Science Fiction?’ (pp. 123–44), Benjamin Eldon Stevens considers the ‘bedroom tableau’ (p. 16) and compares it to Apuleius’s similar scenes in Metamorphoses and Golden Ass. Carl A. Rubino’s essay, ‘The Pale Student of Unhallowed Art: Frankenstein, Aristotle, and the Wisdom of Lucretius’ (pp. 145–52), is wide-ranging in its discussion of Frankenstein and the classics as it discusses ‘Aristotelian ethics and Epicurean atomism’ as well as ‘modern thermodynamics, chaos theory, and the invention of the mad scientist’s assistant in later adaptations of the novel’ (p. 17). Rubino argues that these ancient philosophies are included to make Frankenstein a cautionary tale about the ‘incertitude’ (p. 151), but possibilities, of our human condition. The final four essays look at adaptations of Frankenstein. Neşe Devenot’s ‘Timothy Leary and the Psychodynamics of Stealing Fire’ (pp. 153–69) looks at overt Promethean themes in Timothy Leary’s High Priest [1968]. Devenot argues that Leary alters the pessimistic narrative usually found in Shelley. ‘Frankenfilm: Classical Monstrosity in Bill Morrison’s Spark of Being’ (pp. 170–89), by Jesse Weiner, focuses on Morrison’s film, Spark of Being [2010]. Building on the premise that ‘a monster is a creature of mixed parts’ (p. 171), Morrison’s film positions both itself and viewers as monsters through its self-conscious and culturally stigmatized aesthetic mode of patchworked hybridity. Readers are also prompted to consider what the term ‘monster’ means. In ‘Alex Garland’s Ex Machina or the Modern Epimethus’ (pp. 190–205), Emma Hammond concentrates on artificial life in the film and how this activates concerns about artificial intelligence. Hammond focuses on the mind and body of Ava in Ex Machina [2015] to illuminate that debates concerning the real, the artificial, and the ‘human and the cyborg’ (p. 203) are entwined in story-telling within science fiction and classical myth, and that this dialogue is only just beginning to be realized. Finally, Brett M. Rogers’s ‘The Postmodern Prometheus and Posthuman Reproductions in Science Fiction’ (pp. 206–27) looks at Ridley’s Scott’s film Prometheus [2012] and the comic series Ody-C [2014 onwards]. Both texts show worlds where ‘biological reproduction is complicated by technoscience’ (p. 18). Rogers posits that visions of the ancient Prometheus are mediated by Frankenstein, giving audiences hitherto unimagined outcomes due to science fiction’s capacity to look forward—a forward-looking ending to this volume complemented by ‘Other Modern Prometheis: Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing’ (pp. 228–37) by Samuel Cooper, presented at the end of the collection. Global Frankenstein, a collection of essays edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, also takes Shelley’s Frankenstein as its source and concentrates on the numerous adaptations and afterlives of this novel across the world. It is split into five parts. Part I comprises three essays concerned with ‘Science, Technology and the Nature of Life’ (p. 9). Jerrold Hogle’s article, ‘The Gothic Image and the Quandaries of Science in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (pp. 21–36), considers why Shelley adopted the form of the Gothic novel for her text, noting that the tensions of the Gothic form correspond to the tensions surrounding science in contemporary society. Sustaining a focus on science, Victor Sage discusses the role of Paracelsus in Frankenstein. Sage’s ‘Paracelsus and “P[r]etty Experimentalism”: The Glass Prison of Science and Secrecy in Frankenstein’ (pp. 37–52) argues that it is Victor Frankenstein’s choice to view Paracelsus as his master which consigns him to a fate of self-imprisonment. ‘Monstrous Dissections and Surgery as Performance: Gender, Race and the Bride of Frankenstein’ (pp. 53–71), by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, connects anatomical dissection and the horror generated at seeing dissected corpses to Victor Frankenstein’s mutilation of the ‘Bride of Frankenstein’. Mulvey-Roberts’s analysis of ORLAN stitching back together this female body reveals that ORLAN celebrates the ‘otherness’ which alarmed Frankenstein. Part II, ‘Frankenstein and Disabled, Indecorous, Mortal Bodies’, focuses on the emerging approach of reading literature through disability studies. This field’s relevance to Frankenstein is hardly difficult to see. Bruce Wyse’s article, ‘“The Human Senses Are Insurmountable Barriers”: Deformity, Sympathy, and Monster Love in Three Variations on Frankenstein’ (pp. 75–90), looks at Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘A Manuscript Found in a Madhouse’ [1829], Mel Brooks’s parody film Young Frankenstein [1974], and an episode of Doctor Who, ‘The Crimson Horror’ [2013]. Wyse argues that each adaptation ‘explore[s] ways of setting things right for the stigmatised creature’ (p. 89), overcoming the negativity of monster-making by coupling their monster with a companion. The following two essays consider ‘issues of embodiment and hybridity within different cultures, disciplines, and artistic forms’ (p. 10). ‘“We Sometimes Paused to Laugh Outright”: Frankenstein and the Struggle for Decorum’ (pp. 91–108), by Carolyn D. Williams, considers the idea of amalgamating genres. Williams posits that a narrative of commingled genres about a monster could never retain generic purity, rendering it monstrous; this focus on genre speaks to Hogle’s earlier chapter. Carol Margaret Davison explicitly focuses on the body in her article, ‘Monstrous, Mortal Embodiment and Last Dances: Frankenstein and the Ballet’ (pp. 109–29). For Davison, concerns of corporeality and monstrousness are accentuated but also, importantly, mediated, in modern adaptations of this novel for the ballet. Part III, ‘Spectacular Frankensteins on Screen and Stage’, considers theatrical and cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein. Courtney Hoffman’s ‘Now I am a Man!’: Performing Sexual Violence in the National Theatre Production of Frankenstein’ (pp. 133–48), focuses on the rape of Elizabeth (as well as the audience and Victor viewing this rape) in this 2011 theatrical adaptation. Hoffman argues that this confirms the original text is anti-feminist and a reactionary enforcement of antediluvian gender roles. The next two essays increasingly move the focus away from Shelley’s novel. Scott Mackenzie’s ‘The Cadaver’s Pulse: Cinema and the Modern Prometheus’ (pp. 149–66) is concerned with video cutting, editing, and montage in contemporary, transnational films. The final chapter of Part III is by Xavier Aldana Reyes. ‘Promethean Myths of the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Frankenstein Film Adaptations and the Rise of the Viral Zombie’ (pp. 167–82) argues that it is now the figure of the zombie, rather than Frankenstein’s stitched-together creature, which sustains Shelley’s myth. The chapters in Part IV pertain to ‘Frankensteinian Illustrations and Literary Adaptations’. Within this, Scott Bukatman’s article, ‘Frankenstein and the Peculiar Power of Comics’ (pp. 185–208), positions comics as vital to revivifying reimaginings of Frakenstein, Frankenstein’s monster, and Frankenstein. Emily Alder sustains this focus on visualization and visuals. Her chapter, ‘Our Progeny’s Monster: Frankenstein Retold for Children in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels’ (pp. 209–26), suggests that Frankenstein is open to rewriting and illustration, arguing that these adaptations both instil and modernize the Romantic social mores in Shelley’s work. ‘Beyond the Filthy Form: Illustrating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (pp. 227–44), by Beatrice González Moreno and Fernando González Moreno, continues this focus on illustration and takes the reader through various illustrated Frankensteins which resist simplifying and reducing the narrative. Finally, Part V looks to ‘Futuristic Frankensteins/Frankensteinian Futures’ and is increasingly distant from discussions of the source text. Shannon Rollins’s article, ‘The Frankenstein Meme: The Memetic Prominence of Mary Shelley’s Creature in Anglo-American Visual and Material Cultures’ (pp. 247–64), examines extremely modern manifestations of literary tropes, one example being memes, issuing from Frankenstein to prove the novel’s cultural currency and significance. Kirstin Mills looks at the digitization of Frankenstein in ‘Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (pp. 265–82). Tanya Krzywinska’s ‘Playing the Intercorporeal: Frankenstein’s Legacy for Games’ (pp. 283–300) identifies computer games that draw on Frankenstein, but argues that computer games ‘centralise mastery and winning’ (p. 299), and thus provide an alternative narrative. ‘What Was Man…? Reimagining Monstrosity from Humanism to Transhumanism’ (pp. 301–18), by Fred Botting, approaches Frankenstein through a capitalist lens, arguing that ‘humanity barely plays a role in recent recastings of Shelley’s novel’ (p. 15). Global Frankenstein closes with David Punter’s poem, ‘Meditation on Frankenstein’ (pp. 319–28), an apt ending as the ‘monster becomes a mouthpiece for the “wounds of nations”’ (p. 15). Indeed, Frankenstein and the monster pervade society as cultural icons and, as humans never cease to wound or be wounded, the novel will continue to be reworked and adapted. The focus on Frankenstein and its adaptive potential continues in another collection of essays. Similarly to Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts’s Global Frankenstein discussed above, Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. Perry’s Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture includes a wide variety of engagements with adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Brought together by Shelley’s novel, Adapting Frankenstein has a wider focus than Global Frankenstein and thus its component essays are less closely related to Shelley’s original text. Cutchins and Perry’s introduction discusses the various wide-ranging readings of the character of Victor Frankenstein that are visible in adaptations of the novel, from well-meaning to ambitious, to failed parent, to fundamentally cold and fierce. For Cutchins and Perry, this ‘continuous and ongoing popularity demands scholarly attention’ (p. 8). Adapting Frankenstein is split into five sections. Part I, ‘Dramatic Adaptations of Frankenstein on Stage and Radio’, combines a teleological approach within these media adaptations with audience demands. Lissette Lopez Szwydky, ‘Frankenstein’s Specular Nineteenth-Century Stage History and Legacy’ (pp. 23–44), argues that each adaptation functions as ‘both destroyer and descendant’ of the source text (p. 40). For Szwydky, it is vital not to see any adaptation as a product influenced singularly by Shelley’s Frankenstein and not other, subsequent, adaptations. Glenn Jellenik’s ‘A Frankensteinian Model for Adaptive Studies, or ‘It Lives!’: Adaptive Symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein’ (pp. 45–61) concentrates on the ‘intertextual multiplicity’ within theatrical adaptations of Shelley’s novel (p. 59). ‘The Gothic Imagination in American Sound Recordings of Frankenstein’ (pp. 62–76), by Laurence Raw, provides analysis of radio adaptations of the novel, identifying the influence audiences had on adaptations. Part II, ‘Cinematic and Television Adaptations of Frankenstein’, groups five essays which compare Frankenstein to the likes of Forbidden Planet, X-Men, and I, Robot, along with the Hammer Film Studio’s adaptation of the novel. Dennis R. Perry, in ‘A Paranoid Parable of Adaptation: Forbidden Planet, Frankenstein, and the Atomic Age’ (pp. 79–91), draws connections between Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, focusing on the influence of atomic science post-1945. ‘The Curse of Frankenstein: Hammer Film Studios’ Reinvention of Horror Cinema’ (pp. 92–110), by Morgan C. O’Brien, discusses how this film ‘changed the face of horror cinema’ by ‘effect[ing] a paradigm shift in horror’ (p. 92). Kyle William Bishop’s ‘The Frankenstein Complex on the Small Screen: Mary Shelley’s Motivic Novel as Adjacent Adaptation’ (pp. 111–27) provides analysis of television adaptations, arguing that these sustain Frankenstein’s legacy as they increasingly permeate popular culture and self-replicate. The next article, ‘The New Ethics of Frankenstein: Responsibility and Obedience in I, Robot and X-Men: First Class’ (pp. 128–42), by Matt Lorenz, notes how these films portray a wider definition of creation than the novel or other adaptations, a definition which includes ‘modification and influence’ (p. 128). ‘Hammer Films and the Perfection of the Frankenstein Project’ (pp. 143–58), by Maria K. Bachman and Paul C. Peterson, does not discuss the novel, focusing instead on Hammer’s decisions regarding the creator of the monster, Victor Frankenstein, as film director. ‘Literary Adaptations of Frankenstein’, Part III, identifies ‘textual resurrection[s]’ (p. 15) and reincarnations of the monster across genres from adult dystopian literature to neo-Victorian novels. Jamie Horrocks’s ‘“Plainly Stitched Together”: Frankenstein, Neo-Victorian Fiction, and the Palimpsestuous Literary Past’ (pp. 161–77) focuses on ‘metafictional deployments’ (p. 163) of Frankenstein motifs in neo-Victorian novels. Carol Margaret Davison’s ‘Frankensteinian Re-articulations in Scotland: Monstrous Marriage, Maternity, and the Politics of Embodiment’ (pp. 178–90), looks at ‘transgressive female power’ (p. 15) in Scotland’s politics and history through the literary trope of the bride. Focusing on the body of the monster in children’s literature, Jessica Straley, in ‘Young Frankensteins: Graphic Children’s Texts and the Twenty-First-Century Monster’ (pp. 191–209), argues that these visual forms enable young readers to discuss issues pertaining to physical and mental health. Chapter 12 (not chapter 11 as this edited collection’s introduction states) is by Farran L. Norris Sands. Sands’s article, ‘In His Image: The Mad Scientist Remade in the Young Adult Novel’ (pp. 210–20), locates the anxieties expressed by the monster in Frankenstein as similar to those expressed in ‘steampunk, dystopian, and apocalyptic literature for young adults’ (p. 210). Closing this section, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s ‘The Soul of the Matter: Frankenstein Meets H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator”’ (pp. 221–35) proffers that monstrosity is connected to the body; to understand monstrosity, we must first understand notions of human and humanity. Part IV, ‘Frankenstein in Art, Illustrations, and Comics’, includes Kate Newell’s ‘Illustration, Adaptation, and the Development of Frankenstein’s Visual Lexicon’ (pp. 239–58), Joe Darowski’s ‘The X-Men Meet Frankenstein! “Nuff Said”: Adapting Mary Shelley’s Monster in Superhero Comic Books’ (pp. 259–69), and Véronique Bragard and Catherine Thewisson’s ‘Expressionism, Deformity, and Abject Texture in bande dessinée’ (pp. 270–91). These articles take a visual culture and material approach to art and comics adaptations of Frankenstein as they redesign and repurpose the monster but do not engage with Shelley’s novel. Finally, Part V focuses on ‘New Media Adaptations of Frankenstein’, such as live broadcast television productions. Tully Barnett and Ben Kooyman’s ‘Assembling the Body/Text: Frankenstein in New Media’ (pp. 295–315) examines ‘newer technologies of reading’ (p. 295) which remain concerned with the original medium of Frankenstein. They illustrate how adaptations and the novel have a mutually reflexive relationship: each is invigorated by the other. Kelly Jones, in ‘Adaptations of “Liveness” in Theatrical Representation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (pp. 316–34), addresses the concept of ‘liveness’ in theatrical adaptations. Adapting Frankenstein closes with Richard J. Hand’s ‘Frankenstein’s Pulse: An Afterword’ (pp. 335–9). Like the inexorable pulse beating in Frankenstein, Cutchins and Perry’s edited collection of essays attests to the vast array of progeny stemming forth from Shelley’s novel. Martine Mussies’s article, ‘Frankenstein and The Lure: Border Crossing Creatures: Through a Feminist Lens’ (Foundation 47:cxxx[2018] 47–58), focuses on the ‘comeback’ (p. 47) of Frankenstein through the 2015 film The Lure. Mussies argues that both texts portray an inherent distinction between men and women which ‘correlates to the distinction between public and private spheres’ (p. 47). With a focus on mermaids as the ‘monsters’ in The Lure and Frankenstein’s monster from Shelley’s novel, Mussies investigates portrayals of characters in both fan art and transmedia adaptations. Ultimately, audience members are invited to consider and reconsider the monster and societal perspectives. Amanda Pavani’s article, ‘The Man-Machine and the Machine-Man: Frankenstein, Synners, and He, She and It’ (Foundation 47:cxxx[2018] 59–70), uses Shelley’s novel to as a way into analysing ‘the negotiation of characteristic cyberpunk themes’ (p. 59) in Cadigan’s Synners [1991] and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It [1991]. As in Frankenstein, Pavani argues, these novels warn against the ‘repercussions of simulation’ (p. 70). Also published in 2018 was Fiona Sampson’s biography, In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein, which is aimed at a general audience. A creative rendition of Mary Shelley’s life, this biography takes a freeze-frame approach to moments Sampson believes to be of the greatest importance to the writing of Frankenstein and intersperses the narrative with extracts from sources such as Godwin’s journal and Mary and Percy Shelley’s letters and notebooks. Sampson notes that biography bears similarities to the creation of Frankenstein’s monster, in the sense that it is a patchwork of another’s life stitched together. A similarly popular and enduring focus of studies on the Romantic novel is the Gothic novel. Two monographs and a number of articles focused on Gothic novels and Gothic writers in 2018. Christina Morin’s The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c.1760–1829, expands the focus of Irish and Gothic literary history by analysing many under-studied texts by authors born in Ireland, authors who spent a significant time in Ireland, or novels which were published in Ireland. Neiman posits that ‘Irish writers participated in a widespread and inclusive literary phenomenon unrestricted by national boundaries and shaped by historically and culturally specific constructions of and reflections on the Gothic past’ (pp. 8–9) and this collapses the artificial boundaries imposed by the terms ‘Irish Gothic’ and ‘Gothic novels’. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate terminology. ‘Gothic Temporalities: “Gothicism”, “Historicism”, and the Overlap of Fictional Modes from Thomas Leland to Walter Scott’ interrogates ‘historical Gothic’ fiction. Morin argues that Walpole’s overt and well-received ‘Gothicism’ in The Castle of Otranto eclipsed the earlier Gothic text Longsword by Thomas Leland because Longsword does not fit the Gothic expectations set out by Otranto. In contrast, Morin argues that Longsword is a Gothic novel for its treatment of history. This chapter broadens discussions of historical Gothic texts with readings of novels by Regina Maria Roche, Charles Robert Maturin, and John and Michael Banim, with Morin concluding that formal and generic identifiers are intertwined and overlapping. Generic boundaries between the Gothic and historical fiction are ‘mutable’ (p. 30). Chapter 2, ‘Gothic Genres: Romances, Novels, and the Classifications of Irish Romantic Fiction’, sustains this terminological focus but looks at ‘romance’ and ‘Gothic’. Morin provides a statistical breakdown of generic identifiers on Irish Gothic texts, revealing that they overlap and shift. Close attention is paid to the self-conscious textuality of novels such as Anne Fuller’s The Convent; or, The History of Sophia Nelson [1786], Mrs F.C. Patrick’s The Irish Heiress [1797], and More Ghosts! [1798], and novels by Eaton Stannard Barrett and Alicia Le Fanu. Morin applies the ‘retrospective construction’ (p. 77) of the ‘Gothic’ to the national tale, a genre which looms large in Irish literary history, by comparing Owenson’s and Roche’s novels to those by Walter Scott. Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus onto geography; ‘Gothic Geographies: The Cartographic Consciousness of Irish Gothic Fiction’ discusses Irish Gothic texts which problematize ‘the privileging of Catholic Continental and “Celtic Fringe” settings’ (p. 16). While the majority of novels are set in the British Isles, Morin analyses a number of novels to explore ‘the more far-reaching cultural exchanges of several nationally minded gothic romances’ (p. 119), testifying to the mobility both of the form and of the writers themselves. Chapter 4, ‘Gothic Materialities: Regina Maria Roche, the Minerva Press, and the Bibliographic Spread of Irish Gothic Fiction’, takes the form of a case study of Roche’s fiction. A prolific and popular Irish émigré writer who published all of her works with the Minerva Press, Roche’s fictions detail journeys across the world and had a global readership. Informed by Ireland’s role as a participant in a ‘post-Union Atlantic economy’ (p. 158), Morin argues, Roche’s novels demonstrate an ‘Irish cultural nationalism informed by transnationalism’ (pp. 158–9). Overall, Morin argues against the view that Irish Gothic texts are ‘delayed and derivative, a secondary development of an English tradition’ (p. 198) and invites further consideration of individual cases as well as collective bodies of literature. Inventing the Gothic Corpse: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, by Yael Shapira, provides another new approach to studying the evolution of the novel and the Gothic genre. Defining the ‘Gothic corpse’ as the ‘image of a dead body rendered with deliberate graphic bluntness in order to excite and entertain’ (p. 1), Shapira demonstrates how the corpse in Gothic literature moved from a device for instructive purposes in the early to mid eighteenth century, to one used to thrill and satisfy readerly desire in the 1790s and beyond. Shapira grounds the use of this trope in three contexts: the development of the novel as a form; its emergence as a consumer product; and the emerging leisure readership. This monograph discusses Behn and Defoe as the starting points of Shapira’s quasi-canon of novels linked by their treatment of the corpse: ‘their implicit acknowledgement of readerly curiosity (Defoe) and authorial ambition (Behn) as motivations for crafting such spectacles contain, in embryonic form, the combination of style and attitude that will allow the Gothic corpse to assume its shape’ (p. 78). Shapira then moves on to Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to close Part I, before moving on, via Horace Walpole, to Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charlotte Dacre in Part II. Close readings of Clarissa and Tom Jones in chapter 3 demonstrate that Richardson focuses on beautifying Clarissa’s corpse while Fielding uses dead bodies for comedic purposes, each ultimately avoiding sensationalism which could compromise the reputation of the novel. Chapter 4, ‘Death, Delicacy and the Novel: The Corpse in Women’s Gothic Fiction’, is probably where most readers would expect this monograph to commence. The dead body for Radcliffe and Lewis is a ‘temptation and also a danger’ (p. 141) as it demonstrates the authors’ desire to satisfy their readers. Radcliffe’s gender is essential to Shapira’s reading of her; her femininity and desire to maintain female decorum influence her treatment of the corpse and terror as ‘experiences that can be demystified and neutralized’ (p. 156). Her centrality in the Gothic genre restricted her freedom; freedom which Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs Carver enjoyed in their blunter depictions of the corpse. Matthew Lewis and Charlotte Dacre ‘divest the fictional corpse completely of its old didactic uses, turning it into both symbol and fixture of a popular literature that fully embraces its own ability to entertain’ (p. 167). The corpse of Antonia demonstrates that Lewis infracts the symbolism of Christian virtue of Clarissa’s corpse into a ‘sexual plaything’ (p. 178) while Victoria in Zofloya finds ‘a visceral, irresistible delight’ (p. 179) in the visions of her enemies’ violent deaths. Both novelists disavow the restrictions imposed by viewing the corpse as an educative tool, championing instead the novel’s role to entertain and satisfy readers. Shapira closes by looking to the future, to Frankenstein’s corpse and novellas in Blackwood’s Magazine which gesture back to the corpses’ historical instructional purposes. Jumping to Stephen King’s The Shining [1977], a reading of the bathtub scene is used to complete the transition Shapira identifies as the corpse transforms from a ‘tool of moral instruction into the pop-culture mechanism’ (p. 229). Several articles focused on female agency within the Gothic. Hope Rogers, in ‘Secret Agents: Agency without Responsibility in The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (SiR 57:iv[2018] 539–641), revises previous critical accounts deeming Emily St. Aubert a passive character. Rogers identifies three iterations of tenuous agency: ‘agency without interest, agency without choice, and agency with minimal action’ (p. 541) to argue that Emily St Aubert embodies fragmented agency. Her minimal actions, such as simply lifting a veil, do not constitute transgressive gender behaviours in themselves, yet these actions incur great consequences which constitute instances of female resistance to social expectations. Jennifer Airey’s ‘“He bears no rival near the throne”: Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre’ (ECF 30:ii[2018] 223–41) argues that Dacre’s novels take ‘a pessimistic approach to women’s options’ (p. 223). Using The Libertine [1807], Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer [1805], Zofloya [1806], and The Passions [1811], Airey identifies Dacre’s anger against the patriarchal culture that enforces female suffering. Apollonia in Passions is read as a woman who views ‘education as a form of rebellion against male dominance’ (p. 236). Providing examples where female education could empower women, this article reveals that no female character enjoys a happy ending; male narcissism undermines female education to maintain female subjugation. Two articles focused on slavery and empire within the Gothic. Joel Terranova, in ‘Anxiety of Empire in John Palmer, Jun.’s The Haunted Cavern’ (GS 20:i–ii[2018] 346–57), uses close readings of two subplots to cast the novel as a reflection of social anxieties about colonialism. His readings of the hermit Ambrose, a ‘victim of imperialism’ (p. 354) due to his former enslavement and loss of family, and of Donald, the ‘cruel colonizer’ (p. 354) who undertook ravaging attacks on neighbouring nobility, critique the excesses of British imperialism. Terranova insightfully argues that Palmer’s use of character also subverts the racial ideas justifying the British imperialist slave trade by placing a European, Ambrose, as the novel’s enslaved figure. Olivia Ferguson’s ‘Venus in Chains: Slavery, Connoisseurship, and Masculinity in The Monk’ (GS 20:i–ii[2018] 29–43) focuses on the role of the statue of Venus de’ Medici in Lewis’s The Monk [1796] and Journal of a West India Proprietor [1816]. The statue’s still form as a ‘white female body’ (p. 30) reveals male virtue, while also highlighting slavery, proprietorship, and male desire: ‘statuesque poses and living statues became scandalously linked with libidinous connoisseurship’ (p. 35). Ferguson argues that Lewis is neither condemnatory of nor complicit in this approach to statues. Rather, Lewis’s texts reflect his ‘properly masculine appreciation and repudiation of Venus’ (p. 41) due to his situation as a patristic colonial inheritor. This focus on materiality is sustained in Mariam Wassif’s ‘Polidori’s The Vampyre and Byron’s Portraits’ (WC 49:i[2018] 53–61). Wassif notes that Byron was subject to constant refashioning in portraits and that Polidori often frames Ruthven as a ‘figure in a portrait’ (p. 56). Drawing on Polidori’s interest in portraiture and visuality, Wassif argues that Ruthven is a portrait of Byron’s portraits, but not of the historical figure. This enables readers increasingly to project their own scopophilic desires onto Ruthven and/or Byron while stimulating the era’s terror of vampires. M.-C. Newbould’s ‘Gothic Piles and Cynical Follies Revisited: A Quizzical Tour through Country House Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century’ (NJES 17:i[2018] 85–103) uses Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Mary Leapor’s ‘Crumble Hall’, William Beckford’s Vathek, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, and Byron’s Don Juan to show that the Romantic era’s tourism industry facilitated complimentary and satirical responses to grand country houses. These houses constitute architectural metaphors, enabling writers to create suspense, portray the precarity of the aristocracy despite the durability of their houses, and identify the ‘cynical folly’ (p. 89) of the ‘past and present, fragmentation and wholeness’ (p. 91). Country houses, with their ties to the past, are interpreted as restricting and liberating of society and authority. Moving on to the articles on Ann Radcliffe, the first continues the focus on spatiality that has been noted above. Patrick O’Malley’s ‘“It May Be Remembered”: Spatialized Memory and Gothic History in The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (ECent 59:iv[2018] 493–512) argues that Radcliffe treats memory as spatially determined, which, in turn, provides ‘an alternative gothic historiography’ (p. 494). Drawing on the commonly accepted understanding of the Gothic ‘as a mode necessarily reliant upon cultural and psychic memory’ (p. 494), O’Malley highlights examples where characters express the loss of their memory of a place when they relocate. The memory of a place requires ‘persistent present stimulus’ (p. 495) and, thus, O’Malley argues that Radcliffe’s use of memory is spatialized and somewhat atemporal, leading to his conclusion that Radcliffe wrote ‘ahistorical Gothic’ novels (p. 508). Rebecca Addicks-Salerno’s ‘Reframing Radcliffe: Botany and Empiricism in The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (GS 20:i–ii[2018] 155–68) concentrates on moments when Emily St Aubert engages with scientific practices in domestic settings. For example, St Aubert’s botanical walks enable her empirical observations of the world, a fundamental but flawed part of her education as she draws the wrong conclusions. Thus, Addicks-Salerno argues that Radcliffe critiques Rousseau’s theorization of education through empiricism, as society denied women the ‘cultural agency to use their observations to make decisions outside of the home’ (p. 160). Addicks-Salerno also identifies the lack of scholarship on science in Radcliffe’s novels, suggesting a prejudice in today’s society about what constitutes science and who may practise it. Jakub Lipski’s ‘The Perils of Aesthetic Pleasure in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (NJES 17:i[2018] 120–34) uses close readings of aesthetic appreciation to undermine the polarization of villains and heroines. He argues that the villains Montoni and Montalt use music and decor to deceive and seduce the heroines, and that their aestheticism distances Montoni and Montalt from their villainy. Yet Lipski’s inclusion of Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 [1795] allows him to read aesthetic appreciation as empowering women. A specific reading of Adeline shows her willingness to engage in Montalt’s masquerade and deceptive practices, a deception she enters into willingly to secure her later freedom. Reema Barlaskar’s article, ‘The “Contagion” of “Ridiculous Superstition”: Representations of Lower-Class Voices in Ann Radcliffe’s Novels’ (GS 20:i–ii[2018] 184–98), draws on Joseph Addison’s essays on the Gothic [1711 and 1712] to assert that servants’ voices were considered contagious. Barlaskar takes a different approach. Using examples from The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Barlaskar argues that fear in Gothic texts is spread from a ‘top-down hierarchy of power relations rather than a bottom-up order’ (p. 186). From this, Barlaskar argues that lower-class characters have ‘interpretative and expressive authority’ (p. 186) which they teach to their heroines. In turn, this leads to heroines enacting resistive reading practices, destabilizing the patriarchal hegemony. This section now turns to novels by women writers, some of which overlapped with the Gothic. Two monographs published in 2018 compared women novelists, with an aesthetic and domestic focus. Jessica A. Volz’s Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney was published in 2017, but not received in time for inclusion in last year’s section. Volz analyses how these writers use visuality, ‘which functions as a continuum linking visual and verbal modes of communication and understanding’ (p. xi). She argues that female authors’ use of visual themes ‘points to the fragility of the female reputation in a society of patriarchal authority’ (p. 9). The introductory chapter discusses the context of ‘visuality’ as well as its particular appeal to women writers, negotiating ‘how their sex saw and was to be seen’ (p. 3). The chapters are non-chronological in order to avoid ‘a false sense of definitive evolution’ (p. 14). Chapter 1, ‘Jane Austen’s Aesthetic Vocabulary of Character’, focuses on ‘portraiture and architecture’ in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Volz argues that ‘the companionate marriages that Austen’s novels produce owe much of their success to the novelist’s use of physiognomic correlatives of character to elevate shared views’ (p. 85). In the first section, Volz discusses Edward’s miniature, Emma’s portrait of Harriet, and Elizabeth’s admiration of Darcy’s portrait. The second part focuses on ‘architectural identification’ (p. 66): the importance of Pemberley’s impression on Elizabeth, Fanny’s ‘progress from neglect to notice’ as figured through interior furnishings (p. 75), and Austen’s representation of Emma and Knightley’s relationship through place. The second chapter, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Reconstructions of Female Identity and Experience’, discusses Radcliffe’s use of visuality ‘to explore sexual, religious and social forms of female subjection’ (p. 87). Volz focuses on A Sicilian Romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian. Portraiture is considered first, then architecture, which ‘consistently serves as a visual metaphor for the plight of womanhood’ (p. 111). The third section discusses ‘the veil as a prison that moves between man-made and natural frames of female oppression’ (p. 111). Volz then considers natural panoramas, and, finally, ‘the obscure’, including ‘women’s fears of immaterial matter’ (p. 124). Chapter 3, ‘The Gendered Gaze and “Made-up” Women in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Ennui and Belinda’, argues that Edgeworth shows external decorations as ‘extensions of, if not replacements for, women’s innermost selves’ (p. 137). Volz explores ‘the relationship between representation and perception’ in these texts (p. 138). Edgeworth’s male narrators and her portrayal of ‘the way in which men viewed women’s relationships with their material selves’ are considered first (p. 150). The second section discusses fashionable appearances in Belinda. The final chapter discusses ‘Optical Allusions in Frances Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer’. Volz considers Burney’s use of ‘coded forms of visuality for rhetorical liberation’ (p. 173). She argues that Burney ‘underscores the need for women to deflect the gaze in order to preserve their appearances’ from ‘misinterpretation’ (p. 173). Volz argues that, as an epistolary novel, Evelina ‘highlights the implications of the woman’s simultaneous status as a viewer and a subject-on-view’ (p. 187). Volz contrasts this with The Wanderer, in which she argues for the importance of ‘the language of colors’ (p. 199). Joseph Morrisey’s Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations considers ‘women’s work and leisure activities as functions of human experience’ (p. 4). In the introductory chapter, Morrisey contends that previous scholarship focusing on female domestic action as subjugation or resistance has overlooked its relationship with ‘the human capacities’ (p. 4). The book’s subtitle, ‘Dangerous Occupations’, refers to the psychological implications of these activities for the self and others. Morrisey discusses activities which have a relation to the domestic but do not necessarily take place within a home. He provides close readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Ethelinde, and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer. He considers each writer’s approach to the theme and how it is influenced by their narrative style. Chapter 2, ‘Needlework in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park’, considers the relationship between needlework and femininity in these texts. Morrisey notes that while needlework in this period was ‘commonplace’ (p. 17) and therefore not always seen as warranting description, in these two novels it ‘functions as an important driver of characterisation and social commentary’ (p. 18). He discusses the ostensible contradictions in Smith’s portrayal of Monimia, arguing that her apparently stereotypical relationship with needlework ‘is in fact a key part of Smith’s critique’ of such class and gender stereotypes’ (p. 23). Morrisey then compares Austen’s presentation of Fanny, Lady Bertram, and Mrs Norris’s relationships to work. For Morrisey, Austen’s representation of women’s work shows that she is ‘ultimately supportive’ of the status quo of class and gender roles (p. 19). Chapter 3, ‘Musical Accomplishment in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer’, opens with a contextualization of the gendering of music and music teaching. Morrisey then undertakes a close reading of Miss Arbe in contrast to the heroine Juliet and considers the relationship between music and friendship. Morrisey argues that, in The Wanderer, ‘accomplishment, when free from the taint of class prejudice, becomes entwined with sentimental discourse’ (p. 118). In chapter 4, ‘Reading Novels in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey’, Morrisey applies theories of psychological development to the characters’ reading practices. He considers Catherine’s development as an ‘adolescent’ reader (p. 132) but argues that this does not have a ‘negative psychological impact’ (p. 136). Pointing out the ‘weaknesses’ (p. 138) in Henry’s reading style, Morrisey argues that Austen advocates a style which combines Henry’s style with Catherine’s. For Morrisey, Austen’s narrative style promotes an ‘integrated reading strategy’ that is both ‘imaginative and rational’ (p. 168). In chapter 5, ‘Sensibility in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde’, Morrisey applies theories of social economy to the novel. Morrisey argues that Smith’s discussion of sensibility is ‘self-conscious of its ambiguity’ (p. 193). He argues that Smith allows dual interpretations of the novel, one which ‘aligns with the overt position of the narrator’ and one which opposes it (p. 200). For Morrisey, the domestic activities in these novels are ‘vital functions in women’s forging of identity, agency and interpersonal intimacy’ (p. 14). Several articles discussed women novelists’ use of peripheral or Celtic settings. As well as in Morrisey’s monograph (discussed above), Charlotte Smith was also the subject of Emily Morrallis’s ‘Charlotte Smith’s Aesthetic System and the Borders of Romanticism’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 169–78), which focuses on the female relationship to space in Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake and Montalbert. Morrallis argues that ‘Smith engages with Burkean terminology’ (p. 173), particularly ‘at points of intersection between land and water’ (p. 170). For Morrallis, this is the basis of a new aesthetic system. Smith’s marginality in relation to the canon is linked to her interest in geographical peripheries and female characters on the margins of society. Themes of marginality are also foregrounded in ‘Fashionable Connections: Alicia LeFanu and Writing from the Edge’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 179–90) by Anna M. Fitzer, which considers the rarely discussed writer Alicia LeFanu’s use of chapter epigraphs in her novel Strathallan [1816]. Fitzer links the marginal status of the epigraph on the page to LeFanu’s own status as ‘a writer arguably on the edge of things’ (p. 179) both geographically and academically. Among a detailed discussion of the range of LeFanu’s sources and her presentation of female education, Fitzer focuses on her references to Anna Seward. Fitzer makes the case for LeFanu’s importance in discussions of women writers at the margins of Romanticism. In ‘Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl’ (ECent 59:iv[2018] 513–33), Melissa Bailes discusses Owenson’s use of ‘botanical themes and imagery’ which she argues ‘subtly highlights the unsavoury aims and effects of England’s imperial absorption of Ireland’ (p. 513). Bailes provides an extensive analysis of Owenson’s botanical imagery, including her comparisons of characters with plants, and argues the novel ‘reverses’ the stereotypical association of Ireland with cannibalism, suggesting that ‘the English Protestant faith threatens to devour or absorb Catholicism’ (p. 527). Maria Edgeworth was the subject of one article, in addition to Volz’s discussion of her work in Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney (discussed above). In ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda: A Dialogue with Alexander Pope’ (ECF 30:iv[2018] 539–69), Victoria Warren argues that Pope is a more significant presence in the novel than has previously been acknowledged. Warren explains Edgeworth’s references and responses to The Rape of the Lock [1712, 1714, 1717], An Epistle to a Lady [1735], and An Essay on Man [1733–4], positing that ‘Edgeworth does not simply reflect Pope’s ideas, but actively responds to them’ (p. 540). For example, she argues that the novel ‘responds to Pope’s charges of female inconsistency’ (p. 548). Frances Burney was the focus of two articles as well as the chapter in Volz’s monograph (discussed above). Sarah Eron, in ‘More Than a Conscious Feeling: Reading Evelina’s Mind in Time’ (SNNTS 57:ii[2018] 171–96), traces Evelina’s mental development. Using examples where the titular heroine displays her self-consciousness, Eron argues that this impairs Evelina’s mental development and subjectivity in volumes 1 and 2. Volume 3 is interpreted to show that Evelina develops mentally, arriving at a ‘phenomenological understanding of self and world’ (p. 193). In turn, Eron connects this to the form of the novel, perceived as ideally constructed for exploring memory and self-consciousness. In ‘“Fairest Observers” and “Restless Watchers”: Contested Sites of Epistemology in Frances Burney’s Camilla’ (SNNTS 50:iii[2018] 315–35), Kristen Pond judges that ‘Camilla is no less bold in its social commentary than Burney’s other writings’ (p. 315). Pond argues that the novel’s focus on misinterpretation functions as ‘implicit social critique’ and shows ‘skepticism about interpretative acts’ (p. 316). This article considers Edgar’s failure to correctly interpret Camilla’s actions and argues that Burney’s narrative style ‘anticipates the ruptures in realism’ explored in nineteenth-century literature (p. 332). Critical attention is broadening out from Frances Burney, with one article in 2018 concentrating on Sarah Harriet Burney. Carmen María Fernández Rodríguez, in ‘Blackness and Identity in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Geraldine Fauconberg (1808) and Traits of Nature (1812)’ (SJES 39[2018] 97–115), provides close readings of the black characters, Caesar and Amy, in Geraldine Fauconberg [1808] and Traits of Nature [1812], respectively. Rodríguez discusses traits of violence and considerations of the characters’ beauty in each novel to highlight the marginalization of people of colour in nineteenth-century society. Caesar’s and Amy’s characters simultaneously emphasize the novels’ heroines’ merits and expose their own oppression. Sustaining a focus of recovery and re-evaluation, three essays individually treated the less well-known writers Eliza Fenwick, Charlotte West, and Susanna Rowson. In ‘“[H]is Mind Was … My Disease”: Viral Affect in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock’ (RCPS [2018] 18 paras), Jonas Cope argues against the widely held belief that Eliza Fenwick’s characters in the under-studied Secresy are inalienable, isolated beings. Cope provides close readings of moments where Caroline and Clement share affective emotions and bodily experiences and when Sibella and Valmont react similarly to the environment around them. The prevalence of metaphors of contagion and a rhetoric of infection and viruses demonstrates that these characters are not polarized or isolated. ‘“My Mite for Its Protection”: The Conservative Woman as Action Hero in the Writings of Charlotte West’ (JECS 41:i[2018] 43–60), by Stephanie Russo, discusses the heroine in Charlotte West’s A Ten Years’ Residence in France [1821]. Highlighting both the feminism and conservative politics espoused by the novel, Russo reveals differences in the female characters’ agency between West’s novel and those by Helen Craik, Maria Edgeworth, and Grace Dalrymple Elliot. This article compellingly demonstrates that West’s heroine takes an active role to ensure monarchic and political stability and order, suggesting radical feminism can sometimes serve conservative politics. ‘“Low as Your Charlotte Is Fallen” × 2 in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons’ (ANQ 31:ii[2018] 76–81), by David McCracken, compares Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple [1791] with Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons [2004] as both discuss the cultural paradox that female innocence is both socially expected yet held responsible for female oppression. McCracken shows that the cultural contexts of the two texts are not dissimilar, despite two centuries having passed between their publication. Both heroines forfeit their sexual innocence to achieve a desired cultural status, yet Charlotte Simmons rebounds while Charlotte Temple becomes a ‘martyr for casualties of libertine seduction’ (p. 79). The final woman writer we turn to is Mary Robinson, who was the focus of two articles. Susan Civale’s article, ‘Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson’ (Romanticism 24:ii[2018] 191–201), takes a fresh approach to Robinson’s Memoirs [1801]. Civale questions whether the Memoirs were intended to salvage or repair Robinson’s reputation, instead persuasively suggesting Memoirs is there to ‘shape’ the reputation. Close readings of narratorial gaps and silences, scenes described as ‘indescribable’ (p. 192), and omissive punctuation marks such as asterisks are seen as ‘strateg[ies] of self-presentation’ (p. 192). Civale convincingly argues that these features engage readers in the imaginative process and, secondly, achieve ‘a delicate balancing act’ (p. 194) of celebrity allure, coyness, and virtue which contributed to sustaining Robinson’s legacy and afterlife. Stephanie Russo’s ‘History Repeating: Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in Mary Robinson’s Vacenza and The False Friend’ (TSWL 37:i[2018] 67–90) compares Robinson’s first and penultimate novels to show Robinson’s disillusionment with romantic love and marriage. Russo highlights that Robinson’s female characters absorb and repeat their mothers’ sexual transgressions, entertain incestual desires unrecognized by them, and ultimately are damaged or even killed by marriage. As such, Robinson echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s view that women are made subservient by ‘love or lust’ (p. 76) and instead advocates a life of singlehood through the unscathed character of Miss Stanley. This section now turns to writing by male novelists in the Romantic era, commencing with Walter Scott. Criticism from 2018 read Scott in relation to history, modernity, and landscape. Two monographs were published. The first should have been covered in last year’s section but was not received in time. Walter Scott: New Interpretations, edited by Susan Oliver, comprises fifteen essays on Scott, split into five parts. Several, but not all, of the essays included in this collection are also relevant to the novel in the Romantic period more broadly. Susan Oliver’s introduction describes Scott as a writer ‘concerned about community’ (p. 1). Continuing by providing a brief literary history and literary review of Scott, this collected edition is designed to show the relevance of Scott in the twenty-first century and in Scotland’s literary history. Two articles in Part I, ‘Walter Scott: Transmission and Afterlives’, discuss Scott’s novels. Annika Bautz’s ‘The “Universal Favourite”: Daniel Terry’s Guy Mannering; or, The Gipsey’s Prophecy (1816)’ (pp. 36–57) concentrates on the theatre adaptation of Guy Mannering by Daniel Terry in 1816. Terry’s adaptation, Guy Mannering; or, The Gipsey’s Prophecy; A Musical Play in Three Acts is shown to be markedly different from Scott’s novels by virtue of its attention to social class, gender, and political issues. Bautz demonstrates that the novel and the play were beneficial to each other’s reception and to Scott’s and Terry’s reputations. Céline Sabiron’s ‘Handing Over Walter Scott? The Writer’s Hand on the English and French Marketplace’ (pp. 58–74) focuses on Walter Scott’s hands. Building on the knowledge that Scott suffered from chilblains and his reliance on amanuenses, Sabiron identifies the hand motif in Scott’s novels as disembodied and disempowered but having metafictional properties. In turn, Sabiron identifies the ‘intrusive hand’ of one of Scott’s chief French translators, Defauconpret, whose translations ultimately ‘played a significant role in the evolution of the French realist novel’ (p. 73). Linked by a focus on genre and the magical, Part II comprises Evan Gottlieb’s ‘Vanishing Mediators and Modes of Existence in Walter Scott’s The Monastery’ (pp. 77–92), Matthew Wickman’s ‘“In contrast to those whom we have called materialists, Mr. [Scott] is spiritual”: On Scott and Woolfe, Romance and “Fullness of Life”’ (pp. 93–109), and Fiona Price’s ‘The Politics of Fear: Gothic Histories, the English Civil War and Walter Scott’s Woodstock’ (pp. 110–24). Gottlieb focuses particularly on the White Lady in The Monastery, using her physicality as a spirit to discuss the broader topic of modes of existence. Wickman’s article concentrates on the legacy of Scott’s The Antiquary in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse via Woolf’s focus on ‘spiritual connectedness’ (p. 96). Both writers, Wickman argues, reveal that spirituality is not solely concerned with history, but that within literature spirituality enables a greater ‘exploration of meaning’ (p. 108). Following Wickman’s article, Price reflects on ‘the political uses of gothic and historical fiction’ (p. 8); Scott’s Woodstock [1826] is ‘a bitter exposé’ of the civil war through Scott’s employment of spiritual Gothic tropes (p. 110). Like a ghost, the political past is shown to pervade the political present. Nigel Leask’s ‘Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and the Ossian Controversy’ (pp. 189–202), opens Part IV and sustains the focus on The Antiquary, but focuses mainly on volume 3 for its commentary on the Highlanders. Hector, ‘a more acceptable embodiment of the modern Gael’ (p. 200), speaks authentic Ossianic verses. Thus, Leask suggests, Scott integrates Scottish historical verses within his characters’ speech to champion an ideal of national unity. Also providing ‘new approaches to Scott and history’ (p. 11), which is the focus of Part IV, are Tara Ghoshal Wallace’s ‘“The Right of Mercy”: The Royal Pardon in The Heart of Midlothian’ (pp. 203–23), and Carla Sassi’s ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Caribbean: Unravelling the Silences’ (pp. 224–40). Wallace concentrates on the narrative voice in The Heart of Midlothian, using this to reveal the social and class issues surrounding the presentation of Effie Dean. Carla Sassi’s article discusses The Antiquary, Rob Roy, and The Heart of Midlothian through the lenses of postcolonial and slavery studies. Sassi demonstrates ‘Scott’s reserve’ on these topics: he is neither anti- nor pro-abolition, which Sassi attributes to his public position. Taking this ambivalence positively, Sassi argues that these silences alert readers to the complex and distressing issues vocalized through slavery and colonial narratives. The last part, Part V—‘Literary Geographies and Ecocriticism’—features one essay relevant to this section. Penny Fielding’s ‘“All that is curious on continent and isle”: Time, Place, and Modernity in Scott’s “Vacation 1814” and The Pirate’ (pp. 243–62) considers what happens to the concept of national geography when ‘extreme peripheral geographies’ such as the Scottish northern isles come into play. Fielding identifies Orkney and Shetland in The Pirate as embodying ‘free-floating spatiality’ (p. 255), liberated from socio-political ties and which experience a shifting, imperfect relationship to the past. Susan Oliver’s essay, which closes the volume, is worth mentioning in brief as it directs readers to areas ripe with possibilities for future study, namely ‘environmental humanities, ecological historiography, and ecocriticism’ (p. 15). Dani Napton’s book, Scott’s Novels and the Counter-Revolutionary Politics of Place, analyses six of Walter Scott’s novels to trace Scott’s representation of past politics and thus his commitment to future politics of progression. Sustaining a focus on historical landscapes and the monarchy, read through the lens of spatial theory, Napton innovatively brings together The Fortunes of Nigel, Woodstock, Peveril of the Peak, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Waverley, and Redgauntlet. These are considered in an order informed by the historical setting of each novel rather than according to publication date. The monograph remains tightly focused on the various British monarchs and their governments as their power waxed and waned in a mutually dependent relationship. Napton argues that a counter-revolutionary argument builds throughout these novels, ‘moving from the necessity for the personal involvement of the sovereign’s natural body to the monarch’s instituting a degree of social stability that negates the need for the royal presence to effect justice’ (p. 20). Chapter 1 compares The Fortunes of Nigel and Woodstock in light of notions of ‘otherness’ (defined according to Edward Said) and legitimate or compromised authority, enabling Napton to conclude that legitimate authority, even when undermined, is a superior authority. Chapter 2 reads Woodstock against Peveril of the Peak, illustrating that locale affects experiences of governance and sovereignty. The focus is on the restoration of Charles II. This continues into chapter 3, in which Peveril of the Peak and The Heart of Mid-Lothian are read against Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference [1990]. Napton argues that ‘Scott’s counter-revolutionary argument purposefully amalgamates the monarchical remediation of injustice and the creation of social order with the traditional narrative devices of marriage and individual happiness’ (p. 99). The fourth chapter is concerned with landscaping politics and justice, shifting the focus increasingly onto the body politic of the sovereign. The Heart of Mid-Lothian presents a unified geopolitical vision of post-Union Britain while, by contrast, Waverley and Redgauntlet depict the ‘failed and degenerative nature of rebellion’ (p. 101). Chapter 5 sustains the focus on the monarch and analyses the presentations of James VI and I, Charles II, Queen Caroline, George II, and George III across the six novels this book considers. Contrary to her kingly counterparts, Queen Caroline’s portrayal reveals that ‘Scott considers a woman’s sovereignty to be significantly less august’ (p. 165). Considering the ‘place’ referenced in the monograph’s title more in terms of ‘locale’ in this chapter enables Napton to conclude that the royal figure is the most significant ‘place’ in each novel. Locales such as the body politic of the monarch are demonstrated to have provided Scott with an ingenious literary apparatus through which he articulates his counter-revolutionary position. Ultimately, Napton writes that these six novels attest to Scott’s support of the rehabilitation of monarchic dynasties but, importantly, the body of the sovereign is not needed for effecting justice as the monarch’s correspondent government is both stable and effective. Rather, for Scott, the monarch becomes a figure heralding and instigating social, rather than political, stability. Also focusing on law and legality, Theodore Ziolkowski’s article, ‘The Infanticide Theme: A Legal-Literary Link between Goethe and Scott?’ (MP 115:iii[2018] 412–23), draws parallels between Goethe’s Faust and Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian to show both writers were interested in the legal proceeding of infanticide and debating the outmoded punishment of the death penalty. Ziolkowski argues that Scott was influenced by earlier, German drafts of Faust, which he believes Scott read in German, using evidence from the Memoirs of John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law, to theorize this. In ‘“Hospitality to the Exile and Broken Bones to the Tyrant”: Early Modernity in Walter Scott’s Waverley’ (PJES 7:i[2018] 27–44), Sinan Gül moves away from reading Scott as the first writer of historical fiction. Close readings identify elements of modernity in the novel: the hero, Edward, is portrayed as a politically and culturally neutral character, and English culture (figured as ‘modern’) is seen to dominate over Scottish (archaic or feudal) culture. Gül calls for readers to acknowledge Scott’s Waverley as a novel on the cusp of and endorsing modernity as it heralds imminent social changes. Continuing a focus on modernity and militarism in novels are the two articles published on the military novel. Neil Ramsey’s ‘“To Die as a Soldier”: The Vital Romance of the Military Novel’ (JECS 41:ii[2018] 579–96) provides a reassessment of the military novel, not as a minor form of the historical novel, but as a genre which provides a new form of aesthetic romance. Primarily using Thomas Hamilton’s Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton [1827], but making comparisons to marriages in Scott’s Waverley [1814] and Austen’s Persuasion [1817], Ramsey contends that Hamilton’s novel’s focus on the bodily figure of the wounded soldier, Cyril Thornton, casts military honour as a romantic aesthetic which is life-giving, like marriage, in the modern, commercial era of peace. Daniel Diez Couch’s ‘Printing Emma Corbett: Revolutionary Violence and the Prosthetics of Typography’ (ECent 59:iv[2018] 449–69) argues that Pratt develops Swift’s, Richardson’s, and Sterne’s ‘experimental typography’ (p. 451) and uses these interruptions to the narrative to ‘represent disabled bodies’ (p. 451). For example, elisions represent the Carbine brothers’ amputated limbs. Their ruined identities enable Pratt to critique the American Revolution alongside the formation of a new national American identity. One article focused on William Godwin. In ‘Free Indirect Discourse and the Problem of the Will in Two Novels by William Godwin’ (SiR 57:ii[2018] 301–43), Thomas Salem Manganaro identifies that free indirect discourse allows readers hermeneutic opportunities. Sentences can be read as ‘matter-of-fact notation’ and as ‘performance[s]’ of that character’s consciousness (p. 302). Using examples from St. Leon [1799] and Fleetwood [1805], Manganaro argues that Godwin’s use of, or lack of, punctuation allows narratorial sections to be read as free indirect discourse. This highlights the complexities of volition as well as the hypocrisy of a character’s subsequent actions, particularly in the case of Fleetwood. Free indirect discourse enables readers to read characters in polarized ways, leading to diametrically opposed interpretations in the representation of will and volition. To close this section, we turn to David Duff’s edited collection, The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism; an encyclopaedic collection of forty-six individual articles and split into ten themed sections: ‘Historical Phases’, ‘Region and Nation’, ‘Hierarchies’, ‘Legislation’, ‘Cognition’, ‘Composition’, ‘Publication’, ‘Language’, ‘Aesthetics’, and ‘Imports and Exports’. The Handbook provides the reader with a comprehensive yet detailed account of Romantic-period literature, history, and culture. It builds on the premises that Romanticism may be a divided and contestable phenomenon but it ‘is an observable phenomenon whose historical development can be traced and at least partially explained’ (p. 1), and that Romanticism underwent distinct phases but that it ‘can only be fully understood by attending to the different national and regional transitions of the British Isles and to the connections and tensions between them’ (p. 2). These chapters bestow attention on well-known poets and prose writers such as Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen, but also recognize the influence and importance of writers as varied as Leigh Hunt, Robert Burns, and Maria Edgeworth. The ‘novel’ as a focus permeates nearly every chapter in the Handbook and the following writers are discussed with different foci: Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Charlotte Dacre, Amelia Beauclerc, Thomas de Quincy, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and James Hogg. This list is far from exhaustive, but these writers are considered in light of their publication histories, plot content, authorial personas, and forms, as well as from other angles. Chapter 12, ‘The Spectrum of Fiction’ (pp. 188–203), by Gary Kelly, offers a ‘readerly historicist’ (p. 188) overview of the expanding and formally diverse fiction market in the Romantic period. Kelly views fiction as a vehicle for modernization and a means of representing contending versions of modernization. He discusses the rapid expansion of the fiction market, the price and market appeal of different fictions, including circulating-library novels, and the print run and size of fictions issued. Kelly then considers the material aspects of fictions: the sociocultural implications of illustrations, paper quality, and typography, along with how copyright influenced publication and printing decisions. Turning finally to the works of fiction themselves, he writes about the common trends in and significances of subtitles, further descriptors and what they indicated about the work, reviewers’ converging comments against novels, common plot-lines, and the increasing number of works by foreign authors. The novel is demonstrated to be a popular and prevailing genre of fiction. While it does not provide analysis of specific novels, Kelly’s chapter nonetheless provides essential foundational knowledge about the social, economic, and literary marketplace and culture in which Romantic novelists operated. 3. Poetry Suzanne L. Barnett’s lively and entertaining study, Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle, is an appropriate place to begin this section as it, like many other books published in 2018, works to connect Romanticism with other periods and temporalities. Addressing the question of the so-called second-generation Romantics’ interest in classical paganism, Barnett breaks new ground in taking this interest seriously. More than simply a fashion for Greek tags and titillating statuary, paganism was, in Barnett’s words, ‘a theme of key importance to the young Romantic writers: a reclamation of the mythology and imagery of the classical world characterized not only by philosophy and reason … but also by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences—all of which registered as decidedly un-Christian (even anti-Christian) and potentially subversive’ (p. 2). Following a motley and fairly open-ended crew of Romantic pagans, unified under the convenient banner of the Shelley circle—including, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas Love Peacock, but, curiously, not Keats and Byron—the former being too well covered by scholarship, and the latter too Christian—Barnett attempts to show that, as much as it could be, Romantic paganism was a serious business of wine, jollity, and song, with important political ends. Paganism, she writes, ‘was a loaded idea at the turn of the nineteenth century, an idea that entangled religion, politics, and aesthetics in the popular imagination and, quite deliberately, in the poetic projects of the Shelley circle’ (p. 11). While Barnett’s case is slightly overstated—particularly in the way she formulates a quarrel between first- and second-generation Romantics over the uses and abuses of paganism—there is much of value in this study. Barnett’s readings of Percy Shelley are especially suggestive, and her chapter on Prometheus Unbound [1820] is a highlight. Reading this extraordinary work as ‘the culmination of his development of his pagan-inspired ideology of ecstatic dissolution, an ideology that increasingly relies on the idea of music’, Barnett looks to the opera and ballet being staged in Italy during the Shelleys’ residence there as the prompt for Percy’s taking up of ‘lyric poetry’s ancient bedfellow … as a more direct and effective means of communication than postlapsarian language’ (p. 6). While it is mildly inconvenient to Barnett’s argument that the turn to music as a truer language was commonplace among first-generation Romantics, the historical recovery work around Shelley’s greatest poem still pays dividends, and more than justifies the writing of this enjoyable and informative book. ‘When early nineteenth-century critics wished to indicate the potential influence and longevity of their favourite contemporary authors’, writes Nikki Hessell in the opening pages of her ground-breaking study, Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations, ‘they turned to the map of the colonised world’ (p. 1). Acknowledging the extraordinary mobility, reach, and portability of Romantic texts from the nineteenth century on, Hessell co-locates the Romantic period with an age of colonial expansion and consolidation, during which works by canonical Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott ‘travelled in the literal and figurative baggage of the diasporic British population’, and even held official posts as ‘prescribed’ works of ‘the European canon and the English language … building blocks of the imperial education system in British India’, for example, as well as in ‘the curricula of the mission schools for indigenous children in the Pacific throughout the nineteenth century’. All of which, Hessell suggests, should remind us that ‘English literature formed a central part of the colonial project … English literary texts were synonymous with the experiences of colonisation’, and the Romantics were ‘crucial to this project’ (pp. 2–3). While the colonial context of Romanticism has been an object of study for some time, and Hessell is quick to acknowledge new work from scholars like Manu Samriti Chander and others on Romanticism’s ‘influence on and overlaps with the work of colonised writers’, what distinguishes Hessell’s study is its unique focus on ‘indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts’. These translations, Hessell argues, ‘offer a different avenue for examining the ways in which Romantic literature could be adapted to the literary traditions of colonized populations and speak to their concerns’, with the ‘potential to resituate the critical discussion in ways that take account of new autonomous indigenous remakings of British literature, rather than simply the representation of indigenous peoples in that literature’ (p. 4). As well as a provocative reversal of gaze, such translations replace the single or binary perspectives of established narratives of colonial encounter for multiple, mobile, and dynamic interactions between colonized and colonizer through Romantic texts—texts which, as Hessell shrewdly notes, continue to offer ‘shared situations, interests, and anxieties … around traditions, language, authority, and land’. Romantic texts, in Hessell’s words, ‘were always already concerned with colonisation, and thus it is perhaps unsurprising that those same discourses caught the eye of indigenous-language translators’ (p. 5). Readings from the ‘edge’, in this instance, can be confidently traced back, through Hessell’s work, to the very ‘centre’ of the Romantic period—culturally and geographically—an approach that produces and recovers a number of novel and far-reaching readings and conclusions that have the potential to change our approach to the period as a whole. Beginning with Felicia Hemans, ‘not only one of the most popular poets of the nineteenth century’ but ‘also the preeminent poet of colonisation’, each chapter examines a key translation—of an author, a text, or group of texts—in Hemans’s case, the translation of her poems into Māori ‘by members of the settler population’ in Aotearoa New Zealand ‘with the aim of reaching indigenous readers’ (p. 29). Progressing from Hemans to Burns (whose work, Hessell notes, ‘was so familiar that it became incorporated into their own languages’, transliterated by famous Māori elder and translator Reweti Kōhere as ‘Ropata Purana’; p. 57); to Scott’s Ivanhoe, serialized ‘in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Au Okoa’ (p. 93) in the 1870s; to the complex interactions of home, property, naming, and ownership in Wordsworth’s poetry when read through indigenous architecture; to the imperial medical practices seeded in Keats’s ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’, revealed in the Malayam translation of the poem by Moorkoth Kumaran in 1927, Hessell reveals multiple points of similarity and difference between the texts and their translators, showing, with consummate skill, the ways in which Romantic texts, even as they were used as tools of cultural domination, often turned in the hands of those who wielded them, offering, in translation, sympathy, mutual engagement, and even a shared language of resistance. As Hessell concludes, indigenous-language translations ‘are not just novelties, nor simply evidence of the global power and reach of Romantic literature’—rather, they ‘have the potential to reshape entirely our approach to texts and to authors that we think we know well’ (p. 229). This year witnessed the publication of a major collection by one of the most influential voices in the field: Marjorie Levinson’s Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric. This notice will focus in detail only on the introduction, the only hitherto unpublished essay in the volume, but the book as a whole is a welcome reminder of what has made Levinson such a prominent voice in Romantic studies, and serves as a summary or capstone of her scholarly career. In her introduction, Levinson looks back over thirty years of scholarship and tries to elicit the key threads. Her work is a defence of the ‘intellectual dimension of poetry’ (p. 4), its ability to generate new concepts, to test and refine our understanding of things. It is also a defence of a certain kind of critique, which Levinson defends against new conceptions of ‘shallow’, ‘erotic’, or less ‘critical’ forms of reading. It is true, she argues, that in her work she often observes a poem’s ‘blind spots’, but this is not simply a matter of attacking or debunking a poem: ‘By analogy to a visual field, textual fields do not merely contain blind spots, they come into being in relation to some particular blindness … Paradoxically, the existence of this blind spot … is the condition of seeing at all’ (p. 9). After surveying the contents of the volume, Levinson concludes with an extended discussion of ‘through-thinking’, as in thinking through a problem, both as something poems do, and as something critics do. Addressing a range of writers, but in particular Martin Heidegger, John Keats, and Donna Haraway, Levinson arrives at a muscular picture of thought. The through-thinker works progressively through a problem, ‘if not solving [it], then coherently and in step-by-step fashion addressing it’ (p. 29). This is Levinson’s vision of a critical poetry, and of a poetic criticism. It is borne out in the essays that follow. The two parts are divided loosely by chronology and methodology. Part I (chapters 2–6), mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, comprises historicist readings of the Romantic lyric. The essays are digressive and expansive, branching off into long discursive footnotes and trailing off into appendices. Levinson’s commitment to ‘through-thinking’ is evident, as is her passionate devotion to Wordsworth, the only Romantic poet who gets sustained attention in these pages. The section ends somewhat incongruously with Levinson’s famous essay ‘What Is the New Formalism?’ (chapter 6), though the chapter does round out the section with a contrast to her earlier works. Part II expands the frame theoretically, as Levinson experiments with what she calls ‘postclassical’ modes of critical awareness. Chapter 7 considers the morphogenesis of clouds in Wordsworth, chapter 8 applies Gottlob Frege to the ‘Lucy’ poems, chapter 9 combines grammar, Gilles Deleuze, and actual photographs of frost to unfold the intricate structure of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ [1798]. Chapter 10 builds from a close analysis of Wallace Stevens to a thrilling analysis of the ‘implicate’ and ‘explicate’ orders of poetry, with a nod to physicist David Bohm (pp. 250–2). In this passage we encounter one of the most prominent New Historicists claiming that a poem is a ‘single, continually self-specifying plane’ (p. 252), an order all of its own. In the conclusion, Levinson encapsulates her later, post-historicist theory of lyric. A lyric is ‘thought happening’, a depiction of the existence or occurrence of consciousness (p. 261), and it is to be understood as a kind of ‘self-organization (or self-assembly)’ (p. 255), in which the ‘entity’ (the poem) and its ‘environment’ (the context) ‘co-create’ one another (pp. 267–72). With her idea of ‘entity/environment cocreation’ Levinson comes full circle, demonstrating that the expansive, scientifically inspired work of her later years can be synthesized with the more focused historicist work that made her famous. It will be for readers to judge whether this synthesis is truly possible and worthwhile. Three books in 2018 systematically considered the breakdown of self and world in Romantic literature. In her study, Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry, Anne C. McCarthy argues that ‘suspension’ was a figure for ‘the ontological crisis of contingency and discontinuity as it was experienced in … the nineteenth century’ (p. 6). Suspension makes the world present by its absence, and indicates the existence of things by their inexistence. Poets of the period used it to suggest that ‘the world might not coincide with itself’. For her Romantic exemplars, McCarthy selects Coleridge and Percy Shelley. Readers interested in McCarthy’s discussion of Tennyson and Christina Rossetti may turn to the poetry section in Chapter XIII of the present volume. In her first chapter on Coleridge, McCarthy considers how the poet describes the suspension of his own consciousness in ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘The Nightingale’. In these poems, she argues, Coleridge is able ‘to occupy multiple subject positions at once’ by entering a trancelike state (p. 32), and though he purports to synthesize his experiences, he is ultimately unable to do so. This self-fragmentation is essential to Coleridge’s theory and experience of the sublime. Moving through his letter on the Scafell incident, and into a discussion of Biographia Literaria, McCarthy argues that, in later years Coleridge achieved a more coherent sense of consciousness. By 1802 Coleridge had developed ‘a set of aesthetic practices that enable him to hold himself together while opening to the unknown and the contingent’ (p. 44). She continues her discussion of Coleridge in the following chapter, revealing how the fragmented and incomplete forms of ‘Christabel’ and Aids to Reflection [1825] reflect Coleridge’s complex feeling of ‘poetic faith’ (p. 52). In her third chapter, McCarthy shifts attention to Percy Shelley. Where Coleridge’s sense of the suspended self was difficult, shifting, and uncertain, Shelley’s is more triumphant: for him, self-suspension is a kind of ‘ecstasy’ (p. 86). In such an ecstatic state, the ‘sublime’ ceases to be a figure of dominance, as it is in Kant. In a poem like ‘Mont Blanc’, Shelley suspends ‘the very structures of reference and conceptual thought that make it possible to distinguish the dominant from the dominated’ (p. 91). In her beautiful reading of this poem and ‘Alastor’, McCarthy shows how Shelley’s exploration of suspended consciousness undoes the distinction between one thing and another, between mind and world, between life and death. The second book on Romantic breakdown is Jonas Cope’s remarkable study, The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism, 1820–1839. In it, Cope suggests that later Romantic writers systematically debunked the notion that an individual person has a stable or essential character. Here we consider his chapters on Hartley Coleridge and Laetitia Landon, two poets who remain on the fringes of Romantic studies. Hartley Coleridge strove to achieve a ‘a “pleasurably” insensate, amoral, structureless, characterless state’ in his poetry (p. 122). According to Cope, this drive for dissolution led Hartley towards atheism, contradicting ostensibly orthodox Christian faith. Life and death are curiously intermixed in Hartley’s verse: ‘organic development serves the broader aim of organic dissolution or regression’ (p. 127). In his readings of Hartley’s poems, Cope skilfully draws out contradictions in the imagery. Hartley uses dissipating smoke as a metaphor for the eternal soul (p. 131). He links the image of a ‘peaceful vale’ and a ‘grassy sod’ to the blaring trumpet of the Last Judgement (p. 134). The chapter demonstrates that Hartley Coleridge was truly a mystical poet of note, who turned the failures of his personal life into great literary achievements. In his chapter on Landon, Cope tackles those core Romantic themes, sincerity and authenticity. Landon has a nomadic ‘I’, which is at times rooted in nature, at other times pleasantly flowing through society. She expresses starkly opposed opinions in her poetry. In ‘Linmouth’ [1833], she rejects Wordsworth’s poetry of nature and solitude (p. 161). In ‘Rydal Water and Grasmere Lake, the Residence of Wordsworth’, she prostrates herself before Wordsworth, describing his house as an ‘altar-stone’ (p. 164). Her nomadic persona makes judgements of authenticity impossible; the emotion of her poetry ‘is neither “real” nor unreal, principled nor unprincipled’. If we use such words, we assume that her poems ‘[reproduce] the contents of personal or dramatic “characters”—concepts she has destabilised before the act of composition’ (p. 165). In the end, she is an author without an ‘authorial voice’ (p. 166). Larry Peer’s edited collection Transgressive Romanticism completes this trio of 2018 books on the breakdown or destruction of self and/or world. Here we note the six chapters (out of a total eleven) that focus on Romantic poetry. Two essays set the scene, describing how we might approach transgressive poetics in the Romantic period generally. Richard Eldridge tackles transgressive lyricism in his ‘Texts of Recovery: Post-Hegelian Reflections on the Work of Romantic Lyric’ (pp. 10–26), while Kevin M. Saylor considers transgressive epic in ‘Future Founding: The Romantic Transformation of Epic’ (pp. 115–32). Eldridge suggests that Romantic lyricism allows us to transgress the boundaries of humdrum selfhood (‘staleness, hyperconventionality, and failures of attentiveness’) and achieve a more ‘animated life’ (p. 10). Drawing on Hegel, he sets out to show how this style of transgressive consciousness really is transgressive. He confronts critics who would claim that Romantic ‘transgression’ is really just the reinstatement of a certain kind of white male European self-satisfaction, turning to Hegel for assistance. What makes Romantic transgression truly transgressive, he concludes, is its inner contradiction: Romantic poets write of both the impossibility and the necessity of being ‘human’ (p. 24), and in this way can speak to the oppressed as well as the privileged. Saylor proposes a similarly axiological definition of transgression in his essay on Romantic epic. What distinguishes Romantic epic, he argues, is its subjectivity and future focus: Romantic epic is rooted in ‘the poet’s own imaginings’ rather than ‘history’, and towards a ‘new founding’ rather than back on a golden age (p. 116). Saylor’s examples are Blake’s The Four Zoas [c.1796–1807], Milton [c.1804–11], and Jerusalem [1804–c.1820], Shelley’s Revolt of Islam [1817], Wordsworth’s Prelude [1805], and Keats’s Hyperion poems. In his view, what makes these poems ‘transgressive’ is the repudiation of classical epic norms. As can be seen from Eldridge and Saylor’s essays, Transgressive Romanticism as a whole really focuses on the familiar theme of Romantic self-assertion rather than on the neglected forms of Romantic self-vitiation explored by McCarthy and Cope. Nonetheless, the essays on specific poets and poems contain much of interest. There are two essays on Keats. In ‘“Utterance Sacrilegious”: Poetic Transgression in Keats’s Hyperion Fragments’ (pp. 27–41), James H. Donelan makes a similar argument to Saylor. He sees the Hyperion poems as a new kind of epic, which is ‘transgressive’ due to its transcendent psychological character. Lloyd Davies offers a more original reflection in his essay, ‘Between Poetry and Music: Keats’s “To Autumn” and Beethoven’s Cavatina’ (pp. 42–60). He focuses on a single line of Keats’s famous ode [1820]—‘Where are the songs of spring?’—comparing it with a movement from Beethoven’s Thirteenth String Quartet (Op. 130). Through this comparison, he seeks to reveal how ‘Where are the songs of spring?’ should be intoned, and in this way unravels the apparently serene mood of the poem. Davies uncovers a haunting dissonance in the poem, in which ‘plenitude’ is simultaneously a figure of ‘loss’ (p. 53). In this way the poem transgresses the demands of a unified subjectivity. The final two essays on poetry in the volume focus on political and religious transgression. Thomas H. Schmid examines Benjamin Bailey’s conservative, imperialist attack on the ostensibly liberal administration of Ceylon (pp. 61–75); meanwhile Richard Johnston considers the fratricidal moral economy of Byron’s Cain [1821] (pp. 151–69). Schmid’s essay is a useful and thought-provoking analysis of a largely forgotten work of poetry, Benjamin Bailey’s Poetical Sketches of the Interior of Ceylon [1841]. Bailey’s Sketches combine wistful Romantic descriptions of Sri Lanka’s natural beauty and architectural heritage with ugly attacks on the culture and practices of native Sri Lankans (p. 63). In a perverse way, Schmid observes, Bailey’s writings are transgressively anti-imperialist: he debunks liberal-Christian imperialist myths, though not because he believes in the emancipation of the colonized, but because he finds the imperial yoke too light! In his essay on Cain, by contrast, Johnston considers a progressive transgression of official Christian values. In a brisk, well-researched essay, he shows how Cain overturned traditional Christian cosmology in the poem, opening Byron up to the well-known attacks that the poem brought down upon him. Jonathan Sachs continues the discussion of Romantic non-existence in a different key, in his monograph on The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism. His first two chapters establish an interesting theoretical framework for ‘decline’, showing how time was quantified in the evolving sciences of historiography and political economy. In insightful readings of Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, and William Playfair, Sachs shows how writers in the emerging social sciences manipulated their timescales to recontextualize ideas of ‘decline’ and ‘progress’. Both Gibbon and Smith narrate the decline of forms of life—Gibbon of the Romans, and Smith of former ‘aristocratic’ forms of civilization. But by placing these narratives in a larger temporal context, Smith and Gibbon convert them into narratives of progress. The decline of one group becomes the precondition for the emergence of another (pp. 37–8, 42–3). Playfair wanted to convert decline into progress in another way: by portraying time graphically in his charts, he sought to make the causes of decline clear, allowing his readers to identify and arrest them (p. 53). Recontextualizing decline could prevent it from actually happening. Like Smith, he felt that decline could be measured, and therefore manipulated. The next chapter forms a bridge between Sachs’s chapter on social science and the literary analysis of later chapters. Reading works by Oliver Goldsmith, Vicesimus Knox, and John Stuart Mill, Sachs fleshes out the period’s understanding of the ‘decline of literature’. These writers were primarily anxious about literature’s decline, argues Sachs, because of the great increase in ‘literary production’ in the later eighteenth century; the ‘saturation’ of the book market ‘contributed to the [period’s] sense of temporal acceleration and [its] fractured, heterochronic sense of time’ (p. 71). While social scientists were considering the possibility that society could collapse, literary figures were worrying that literature was already on the way down, and with it, one of our primary means of understanding modern life. In their various ways, Goldsmith, Knox, and Mill all suggest a similar solution: an enlightened criticism must create a comprehensible canon of literary texts, and resist the market’s tendency to push writers towards the lowest common denominator of literary taste. Having established this rich historical context, Sachs offers three concise chapters on Barbauld, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. In Eighteen Hundred and Eleven [1812], Barbauld contrasts ‘the transience of worldly power and the possibility of culture’ (p. 105). The decline of the state serves as a backdrop for a ringing acclamation of culture’s immortality. England may fall into ruins, but its ruins will be ‘classical ruins modeled on Greece and Rome’, thus preserving what is most important about England itself, its achievements (p. 112). In Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ [c.1795–1797], different temporalities overlap and intersect, creating a distinctive ‘time parallax’ (p. 140). The poem complicates ideas of progress and decline, suggesting that ‘natural and cultural time’ are incommensurable (p. 133). Finally Coleridge establishes a strong contrast between the ‘accelerated present’ and the slow time of the past (p. 145). This leads him to a distinctive understanding of history. In the modern world, ‘historical change’ both intensifies and becomes ‘non-synchronous’ (p. 156). Sachs suggests that, in this realization, Coleridge looks forward to the twentieth-century Marxist historiography of Walter Benjamin and Giovanni Arrighi, a thought that would surely have perturbed this devotee of Edmund Burke (pp. 154–5). Throughout these readings of Barbauld, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Sachs is sensitive to the many different kinds or flavours of time that weave themselves through the poems. He makes many fine critical observations about the nature of different temporalities, such as ‘the complete time horizon of antiquity’ (p. 112), ‘daytime and seasonal time’ (p. 128), and the ‘restless iteration of the new’, a phrase he takes from Peter Fritzsche (p. 147). His sensitivity to different styles of temporality, reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin, is one of the more attractive aspects of his study. He concludes with a chapter that links the Romantic poets to Charles Darwin, revealing how poetic explorations of time intersect with Darwin’s recasting of biological time in his famous works. David Stewart, meanwhile, engages with a different kind of timeliness in his lucid and deftly argued study, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt. Picking up in the late teen years of the nineteenth century and carrying on into its thirties, Stewart investigates this fascinating and, he argues, distinct intertidal zone between the Romantic and Victorian periods, ‘figured, typically, as a lull in literary history: the time between Romanticism and Victorianism in which little happened’ (p. 1). While Stewart shows that this sense of ‘lull’ is often the creation of later critics in service to various canonical agendas, he nevertheless insists that the period’s status as an embarrassment did not come from nowhere. Poets and readers during this period worried constantly about the status of the art in a way that transmits itself to the forms their poems took. They worried in particular about their relation with the market: with the novel an increasingly respectable genre and the periodical press expanding confidently, poets could no longer assume the central place in culture they had long taken for granted (pp. 1–2). In this new or heightened moment of cultural anxiety, those writing, reading, and writing about poetry responded in a variety of ways, and Stewart sets out to survey these responses under three broad groupings: those poets and critics increasingly preoccupied with form and formal questions; those wrapped up in implications of the wildly popular annuals of poetry; and, most enjoyably, those ‘[d]ashing, sparkling comic writers like Thomas Hood and Winthrop Mackworth Praed’ who ‘produced poetry that seems both slight (and therefore akin to the ornamental culture of the annuals) yet brilliantly formal too’ (p. 13). Key to a great deal of the anxiety around popular poetry between 1820 and 1830 was its apparent femininity, an anxiety compounded by the prevalence of women writers and readers, and their grouping around the wildly popular and profitable annuals. As women poets like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon reached new heights of fame and commercial success, challenging traditional hierarchies of poetic import, the ‘relationship between poetry and gender became a problem that poets, readers, and critics worried at, rather than a stable set of positions among which one might locate a particular poet’ (p. 12). As Stewart shrewdly notes, this newly popular, commercial position put pressure on these poets in unique ways, producing anxieties about their own roles and self-conceptions as women writers. Stewart asks us to ‘consider the troubling fact that the female poets of this period produced poems that were sold in a market that desired exactly such commodified femininity’, and, further, that the commercial viability of their work ‘was, for women more than men, a dominant aspect of their creativity’ (p. 11)—a concern very much alive in our own historical moment as so-called Instagram poetry, a fundamentally feminized genre, continues to dominate the market. Stewart’s subsequent discussion of Hemans’s death poetry—a genre of overwhelming and predictable popularity in the annuals—is a book highlight. Faced with a critical orthodoxy that finds Hemans’s death poems formally dead, arguing that Hemans fits her work to generic conventions ‘so well that she becomes fixed in it, unable to speak to readers beyond that limit’, and more recent critics who ‘have been keen, sometimes strenuously so, to bring [Hemans’s] work to life by showing how it engaged with its present moment’, Stewart concludes, with characteristic grace and economy: ‘I want to suggest that the problem is not one we should seek to resolve too quickly’ (pp. 128–9). In a study that concerns itself with the recovery and rehabilitation of ‘a period of doubt’, when ‘poets and readers doubted the nature of their art’, Stewart reminds us again and again of the remarkable fecundity of this peculiar emotion: it was ‘doubt, this book shows, that prompted a remarkable series of formal and cultural experiments that can help us rethink the forms of poetry’ (p. 2). The deep, often invented Romantic past is raked over again in Jeff Strabone’s lucid and entertaining account of the eighteenth-century bardic resurgence, Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities. This book will be of particular and slightly pained interest to those working in what is still, for the moment, the United Kingdom, as it places questions of indigeneity, antiquity, and national identity at the heart of Romantic literature, outlining the ways in which Romantic writers discovered, invented, rehabilitated, and forged a lineage of ancestral poets and ‘archaic native poetry’ (p. 2) to shore up continuities and assert newly sharpened national differences and identities. As Strabone writes, ‘The literary histories which today distinguish England, Scotland, and Wales as culturally distinct nations all draw on the work of the eighteenth-century figures who edited, adapted, understood, and misunderstood their own nations’ rediscovered medieval poetry. The stakes of my argument are thus a revised understanding of the literary canons of the British nations specifically and the role of poetry in the rise of modern European nationalism generally’ (p. 3). One of the more remarkable aspects of this revival was its sudden onset. For Alexander Pope, who looked to classical antiquity, the ‘ancients were foreigners’; for Robert Southey, ‘the ancients were indigenous medieval bards whose culture of song and ceremony marked the native origins of a national literature’ (p. 2). A major cultural shift has here taken place, the laying of a ‘foundation for an essential element of modern nationalism: the construction of the nation as a community defined chiefly not by dynasty, religion, laws, political boundaries, or sovereignty but, rather, by a shared native culture of age-old historical duration’ (p. 2), and Strabone is careful to stress its novelty. While harking back to an imaginary Anglo-Saxon past as strategy of national integrity has its origins in Elizabethan Protestant propaganda, Strabone argues convincingly that what differentiates the Romantic enterprise of antiquarian nationalism is its focus on literature—and poetry in particular. The ‘neo-retro formal features introduced in eighteenth-century poetry’, Strabone contends, ‘assert—at the level of form—a continuity with a long-lost, and largely imaginary, version of the nation’s past’ (p. 3). In the chapters that follow, Strabone traces his argument through what he identifies as the two major strands of the Romantic bardic revival: the recovery, rehabilitation, and printing of ‘ancient’ works; and the incorporation of and innovation on antiquated forms in new work, forging a continuity between present and past. This ground has been covered before, but Strabone’s theoretical foregrounding of the connection between poetry and nationalism—two crucial and intersecting imaginary communities—offers fresh insights, as does his focus on less canonical figures like Allan Ramsay—in whose hands ‘the courtly, aureate, cosmopolitan Middle Scots poets became rugged, native, freedom-loving bards who had defended the nation from foreign encroachment’ (p. 78)—and Welsh bard and creative anachronist, Iolo Morganwg (aka Edward Williams), for whom ‘the real and the fake seem to have been porous categories’ (p. 231). So much so that, when Strabone turns his attention to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the reader is perfectly placed to see the complex mediation of ‘neo-retro’ antiquity written into Coleridge’s poetic practice with new eyes—and appreciate again the usefulness of this compelling study. Dahlia Porter’s novel study, Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism, starts with a fascinating meditation on the parallels between ‘our moment’ of digital revolution, in which ‘digital devices and platforms format and mediate our experience; the virtual structures social and object worlds’, and the scientific and print revolutions at the ‘end of the eighteenth century’. As the ‘artifacts and specimens from across the globe … pouring into European storehouses and museums’ began to seem like ‘another iteration of the proliferation of print’, Porter writes, nature, like the internet, began to ‘look like a heap of minutiae, the totality of which was ungraspable’ (p. 2). Porter’s book, however, ‘is not simply about information saturation in Britain around 1800, a moment that is eerily, pointedly analogous to our own’—it’s also ‘concerned with the method authors used to turn a heap of particular instances into the expression of something larger, and the consequences of that method for books produced in the Romantic period’ (p. 3). In search of a suitably unifying term for this method, Porter lights on induction, specifically the ‘inductive method of seventeenth-century experimental philosophy’. Induction, in Porter’s reckoning, became ‘over the course of the eighteenth century, a template for producing minds and texts across many fields of knowledge production’, including ‘eighteenth-century writing about optics, astronomy, botany, chemistry, cognition, emotions, economy, grammar, history, aesthetics, the production of visual art, and literary criticism’, and ‘authors from Robert Boyle to Samuel Johnson to William Wordsworth’ followed the ‘steps of induction to compile and organize raw materials, with the eventual goal of forging them into a less or more coherent expression of a truth’ (pp. 3, 5). This already vast expanse of fields, texts, and authors is stretched yet further with the extension of induction to form, genre, and even the printed page, offering thrilling new insights and vantages on the connection between paratexts and book and printing histories with authorial and scientific method. Reading key works from a range of Romantic writers, including William Wordsworth and Erasmus Darwin, Porter finds such texts ‘were composites’, the sources of which might include notebooks of first-hand observations or experimental results, stories overheard and noted in passing, records of conversations, commonplace books of textual accounts, or books read and annotated. Whatever combination of sources the authors used, texts made by following inductive method are all products of splicing, grafting, and mixing bits of other written materials onto and into each other (p. 5). Footnotes, collections, and anthologies are likewise conscripted, with facsimile pages from texts like Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, Part II [1789] and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794], among others, included to show how the often unstable but productive ‘outcome of inductive method is made legible’ (p. 13) on the printed page. The capaciousness of Porter’s formulation of induction, however, is the source of a singularly ironic dilemma. Stretched this far, induction becomes so general as to easily encompass any example; it begins to hang loose from the specific historical case Porter wants to make for induction as a method taken up to deal with empirical and material influx. There is no reason, for instance, why induction could not be argued to characterize Shakespeare’s plays, and, taken to extremes, why Porter’s claims about ‘splicing’ and ‘grafting’ might not be microscopically detected in the splicing of sentences in paragraphs, or words in lines. Nevertheless, the chapters that make up this highly original book are filled with brilliant and thought-provoking readings of central and less well-known texts and writers, and the methods of inductive reading prototyped here are sure to provide influential approaches for future workers in the field. Nicholas Roe’s ground-breaking study of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the radical beginnings of a dominant strand of British Romanticism in the turbulent 1790s, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. First published in 1988, Roe’s book remains the best and most suggestive guide to the entanglement of Wordsworth and Coleridge (and, therefore, Romantic poetry as a whole) with the French Revolution and radical politics, providing brilliantly researched contexts and insightful readings, both poetic and biographical, of these two poets and their early work. Handsomely reissued by Oxford University Press, this uniquely valuable book has been scrupulously updated and expanded, with new material, a new appendix, and, most engagingly, a new preface and splendid new introduction. In it, Roe sketches out the changes in scholarly practice over the last two decades—reminding us that, in 1988, when he was finishing his book, ‘there were no electronic research resources, no laptop computers, and no e-mail’ (p. 1)—and updates, complicates, and deepens his reflections on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the revolutionary decade by way of his own history. Adapting his doctoral thesis while working as a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, from 1982 to 1985—in the ‘aftermath of the hunger strike by Irish republican prisoners: ‘shoot to kill’, the ‘Droppin Well’ bombing, and the murder of law faculty lecturer Edgar Graham outside the University Library—Roe was struck by the ‘poets from Northern Ireland’ who ‘proved disarmingly resourceful’, ‘[c]apable of being in many minds’, and ‘told a way through those bitterly riven times much as poets of the mid-1790s had done in theirs’ (pp. 1–2). This fluid movement between historical epochs, with a sensitive attention to the intervention of history in poetry and poetry in history, continues to distinguish Roe’s work. Roe ends his new introduction, characteristically, with a beginning, readdressing his famous conclusion ‘that the failure of the French Revolution had ‘made Wordsworth a poet’ by reminding his readers that he ‘did not say what kind of poet I thought he had become’. After a Keatsian riff on negative capability, moon phases, and the movement of the tides a certain number of miles above Tintern Abbey, Roe throws the question of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s radical years open again by retracing their steps as they journeyed up the Wye valley in company with Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, a short time after the composition of ‘Tintern Abbey’, to visit notorious exiled radical John Thelwall. What was the purpose of this visit, Roe wonders, so soon after Coleridge had advised Thelwall there was no hope of his settling near them in Nether Stowey—famously writing ‘Come! but not yet!’—and what might Thelwall have thought? Roe writes: ‘“Come! but not yet!” might have been Thelwall’s response as he watched all three of them ambling up to his new home’, these ‘figures from his former life with whom he now realized he had to break—even if the poets themselves seemed to be having second thoughts about that. To find out why this might have been so, please read on.’ And so I did. Paul Cheshire has done Romantic studies a signal service with his new edition of William Gilbert’s esoteric poem The Hurricaine [1796]. This is more than an edition, however, as the title demonstrates: William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism: A Contextual Study and Annotated Edition of The Hurricaine. The Hurricaine is esoteric in two senses: it is barely studied, and it is actually a ‘theosophical poem’ of deliberately esoteric import. Cheshire’s study begins with a series of chapters providing key historical and intellectual contexts. These chapters are a mix of biography, literary criticism, and intellectual history. Cheshire sketches Gilbert’s relationships with some of the key figures in Bristol Romanticism: Joseph Cottle, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Southey. He surveys Gilbert’s journalistic and publishing activities. The discussion is brisk and readable, and will be of interest to Romantic scholars generally. Not only does the book serve as a fine introduction to the Bristol scene, but it draws out important ways in which Gilbert influenced the more familiar figures of the canon. Part II of the book comprises The Hurricaine and Cheshire’s commentary. The text itself is beautifully presented. Cheshire has provided copious though unobtrusive footnotes, identifying key textual variants, clarifying esoteric terminology, and revealing some rather obscure references. All the paratexts of the original printed edition have been included (indeed, Gilbert’s notes and other paraphernalia are considerably more bulky than the actual poem), again with Cheshire’s expert annotation. The later chapters of the book provide a wide-ranging literary analysis of the poem. Chapters 6 and 7 make sense of the poem’s complex hermetic and theosophical elements, and will surely be of great use to all first-time readers of the poem. Chapter 8 puts the poem in its historical and imperial context, while chapter 9 rounds off the book with a consideration of Gilbert’s place in British Romanticism. An obscure poet is brought to light, and a new terrain of Romantic thought is opened to the view. James Rovira has surely brought many smiles to many faces with his edited collection on Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth and Metal as Dark Romanticisms. In the introduction (pp. 1–26), Rovira sets out his claim that ‘rock [is] a modern expression of Romanticism’ (p. 2). Rock musicians and Romantic poets respond to a similar context: the Romantic period’s ‘[p]ervasive industrialism, widespread global trade, and the spread of European colonial enterprises’ are broadly similar to the twentieth century’s ‘two world wars followed by the rise of global capitalism and … global communism’ (p. 6). Romanticism is at its core a ‘set of affective responses to capitalism and modernity’, responses which can be seen in certain kinds of rock music as well as in the poetry of two centuries ago (p. 9). He then considers the vexed, ‘overdetermined’ relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic, terms that recur in intermingled fashion throughout the book (p. 11). When it comes to defining rock, Rovira demurs. The word has evolved over the decades, and as an editor he allows his contributors each to provide their own conception of the musical genre (p. 14). Not all the essays in the volume deal directly with Romantic poets, so in what follows we only focus on four of the essays. In her amusingly titled ‘“Bliss was it in that shirt to be alive”: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism through Dress’ (pp. 45–60), Emily A. Bernhard-Jackson considers the parallels between the ‘Big Six’ canonical male Romantics and the self-professed ‘New Romantics’ of the 1970s and 1980s. She justifies her interest in dress by observing a key difference between the two movements: while the original Romantics were primarily involved in a literary movement, the New Romantics ‘used the self as both their weapon and their battlefield’ (p. 47). The New Romantics aped Regency dress as a symbol for Romantic individualism. They wrapped themselves in scarves and flowing robes as an echo of Romantic Orientalism (p. 49). Throughout her analysis, Bernhard-Jackson shows that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Romantic poets had in large part become a set of inherited images circulated by the mass media. Despite this indirect relationship with the original ‘Romantics’, the New Romantics did manage to recover something of their professed forefathers’ rebel spirit. Caroline Langhorst’s essay on Joy Division’s Ian Curtis finds specific Romantic echoes in Curtis’s lyrics (‘A Northern “Ode on Melancholy”? The Music of Joy Division’, pp. 83–100). After surveying Curtis’s Manchester, and considering the Romantic myth that has grown up around Curtis since his death, she turns to Byron and Keats. In ‘When We Two Parted’ [1815], Byron suggests that losing his lover is like losing his self; such loss of control typifies Curtis’s lyrics (p. 95). Likewise, both Keats and Curtis mingle ‘the feeling of numbness or loss of self’ and the ‘direct confrontation with extreme states of mind’ in their verse (p. 96). Matthew Heilman searches hard for linguistic parallels in his essay on feminine figures in the music of Yorkshire metal band, My Dying Bride (pp. 215–34). The band’s lyricist, Aaron Stainthorpe, has a reputation as a particularly literary songwriter. Focusing on Stainthorpe’s ‘lyrical fascination with female archetypes’, Heilman finds specific parallels between the band’s lyrics and the poems of Poe, Keats, Swinburne, and Baudelaire, among others (pp. 218–19). Heilman uncovers a series of troubling images, most of them at least potentially misogynistic, but argues that both Stainthorpe and his Romantic predecessors deconstruct the simplistic binaries that inflect their images of women (p. 229). The final essay in the volume to deal directly with Romantic poetry is Julian Knox’s ‘Ashes against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism’ (pp. 235–57). He begins with a lyrical discussion of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, arguing that they figure a ‘[t]urning away from the light’, a ‘journeying across the cosmos’ and a ‘courting [of] death for death’s sake’ at least as familiar to fans of rock and roll as to readers of Romantic verse (p. 237). Like Heilman, Knox refers to a dizzying variety of Romantic poems, and like Langhorst, his primary interest is in loss of self, darkness, and uncertainty. The essay rounds out the volume nicely, recapitulating the central themes of revolt, the interpenetration of Romanticism and the Gothic, and the artistic vitality of both Romantic poetry and rock music. In the final stages of writing, it came to our attention that Rovira brought out a second similar anthology in 2018 under a slightly different title: Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2. This volume contains a number of essays on how Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and European poets influenced or resonate with twentieth-century rock musicians. We will give a full assessment of the contents in next year’s issue. Claire Knowles continues to make exciting interventions in the study of public poetic culture in the Romantic period. In ‘Della Cruscanism and Newspaper Poetics: Reading the Letters of Simkin and Simon in the World’ (SiR 57[2018] 581–600), Knowles considers how the ‘second wave’ of Della Cruscanism in the 1790s makes a mockery of scholars’ overconfidence. Scholars have hitherto assumed that Della Cruscan verse is simple to define and identify. Not so, says Knowles. Her primary example in this essay is Ralph Broome, aka ‘Simkin’, who wrote a flood of poetic epistles to the World newspaper in the 1780s and 1790s. Focusing just on 1789 allows Knowles to draw out many subtle interconnections in Simkin’s context. She concludes from this case study that scholars have overstated the influence of Robert Merry on the Della Cruscan movement, and overlooked how newspaper editors made use of contributors like Simkin to seize control of Britain’s public culture of poetry (pp. 597–8). The lyric has long been the central genre of Romantic studies, and 2018 saw the publication of several essays reconsidering the nature and purpose of the Romantic lyric. Lindsey Eckert has made an important contribution with ‘Reading Lyric’s Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals’ (ELH 85[2018] 973–97). Focusing on ‘album verse’, Eckert considers the link between genre and mode of publication, arguing that the album poem was a distinctive lyric mode specific to the Romantic period. She draws together structuralist accounts of lyric with the historicizing tendencies of new lyric studies, revealing how the materiality of album verse opened up new avenues for poetic expression in the period. Album verse was highly self-reflexive, ‘focus[ing] on the affective power of seemingly banal, predictable poetry’, lifting what could seem a tawdry commercial venture into a higher aesthetic space (p. 986). Tim Fulford makes a similar argument in ‘Science and Poetry in 1790s Somerset: The Self-Experiment Narrative, the Aeriform Effusion, and the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (ELH 85[2018] 85–117). In the traditional understanding of the ‘Greater Romantic Lyric’, the poet transcends material reality through a process of inner meditation (pp. 85–6). Like Eckert, Fulford argues that Romantic lyrics are actually rooted in materiality. Using Thomas Beddoes as a case study, Fulford sketches the ‘culture of inquiry’ that reigned in Britain at the time Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote The Lyrical Ballads [1798]. He then applies this framework to show how Coleridge and Wordsworth explore the world’s effects on the self and the self’s effects on the world in their famous conversation poems. Onno Oerlemans’s ‘Sing and Be Heard: Birdsong and the Romantic Lyric’ (Mosaic 51[2018] 1–16) notes the ‘special affinity’ poets and poetry seem to have for birds, and asks ‘[w]hy might this be the case?’ (p. 2). This question prompts a re-reading of the many birds—mostly nightingales—in key lyrics from Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, among others, via an examination of the science of birdsong. While Oerlemans’s survey of birdsong and lyric produces a number of beguiling examples and some keen insights into the poetic attraction of birdsong, his conclusion, that ‘birdsong poems can—and indeed ought to be—read as responses to the natural world, and not just as about the poets, poetry, and the human’ (p. 14), is curiously unambitious, given the quality of the work that precedes it. Still on the theme of birdsong, Matthew Rowlinson’s ‘Onomatopoeia, Interiority, and Incorporation’ (SiR 57[2018] 429–45) opens a new and fascinating area of study by considering a ‘largely unnoticed volume published in 1832’ that ‘appears to have been the first work on birds to include nonce-transcriptions of their calls as an aid to identification’ (p. 429). The Minstrelsy of the Woods, or Sketches and Songs Connected with the Natural History of … British and Foreign Birds [1832] is the launching point for a series of readings of transcribed birdsong in Romantic poetry, from Keats to Scott and beyond. While Rowlinson’s argument, that ‘onomatopoeia incorporates animal sounds into human speech, while excluding any possibility that they might belong to language in their own right’ (p. 432), seems unnecessarily fraught, his recovery of this text and the questions it allows will prove of great value to future work on this subject. Natalie Roxburgh and Felix Sprang chart another path through the already wonderfully variegated garden of Romantic botany in ‘Knowing Plants, Knowing Form: Probing the Poetics of Phyto-Centric Life’ (EJES 22[2018] 224–40), showing the ways in which poets from Erasmus Darwin forward have used (or not used) poetry to speak and think vegetable thoughts. Starting with Darwin’s 1791 smash hit, The Botanical Garden, and reaching the present, via John Clare, in Alice Oswald, Roxburgh and Sprang seek to draw our attention back to form—poetical and botanical—as ‘an organic and dynamic phenomenon’—one that ‘will help us to conceptualise the space inhabited by the homme-plante, the space where humans and plants are entangled with each other, to the degree where talking about them as completely separate entities becomes problematic’ (p. 237). Michael Tomko, meanwhile, tackles the complexities of religion in ‘The Reformation Revisited: The Romantic Via Media from Barbauld to Wordsworth’ (ERR 29[2018] 579–600). Engaging closely with Robert Ryan’s The Romantic Reformation [1997], Tomko positions the Anglican Church as the via media or middle way between ‘dissenting Protestantism and Roman Catholicism … by which the Established Church appropriated the moderated, regulated goods of the two unwanted extremes’ (pp. 579, 581–2). The article concludes with ‘two representative readings’ of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Groans of the Tankard’ from her Poems [1773, 1792] and Wordsworth’s ‘Old Abbeys’ from his Ecclesiastical Sketches [1822]. While these are skilfully executed, the selection of poems is strikingly odd, and more than a little convenient. Like many arguments based on finding a ‘middle’, Tomko’s essay, while drawing valuable attention to the varieties of religious politics in the period, comes off as pat. We note an essay by Stephen Behrendt on ‘Using Romantic-Era Laboring-Class Poets to Explore Cultural Archaeology’ (in Binfield and Christmas, eds., Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, pp. 159–67). A review of this book is published below. Having considered general studies of Romantic poetry, we now turn to studies of particular poets. Though no monographs were published on Anna Laetitia Barbauld in 2018, she continued to attract detailed scholarly attention. In her essay on ‘The “Fellowship of Sense”: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Interspecies Community’ (SiR 57[2018] 453–78), Inhye Ha contributes to the growing literature on Barbauld’s animals. Ha observes that scholars have tended to interpret Barbauld’s animals through a political lens: the mouse in ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ [1773] and the caterpillar in ‘The Caterpillar’ [c.1816] are usually seen as disenfranchised underlings deserving of greater respect (p. 454). Ha takes the study of Barbauld’s animals in a new direction by considering their biological and psychological aspects. Barbauld’s animals are also aesthetic objects, Ha reveals, and are vehicles for Barbauld’s sophisticated ideas about the interrelations between aesthetic judgement, ethics, and the community of living things. Lauren Schachter takes a fine-toothed comb to Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem [1812] in the hunt for prepositions in ‘“One Universal Declension”: Barbauld and the Romantic Preposition’ (MLN 133[2018] 1172–87), arguing that Barbauld’s peculiar usage of this ‘class of words often maligned or ignored by eighteenth-century English grammarians and rhetoricians’ means that Eighteen Hundred and Eleven ‘can also be read as an allegory for the possibilities for English in and beyond 1811’ (p. 2). This is a fascinating—if not always entirely convincing—account of the political potential of small, apparently insignificant, words. It was a moderate year in Blake studies, seeing the publication of one edited collection and several articles. The relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic continues to be vexed and fascinating, as is attested by Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger’s edited collection, William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror. Bundock and Effinger make an interesting move in the introduction to the book. Historically, it was the Gothic that was marginalized, as the popular, creaky, melodramatic cousin of the more reputable Romanticism. But today, according to the editors, the problem is quite the reverse. Gothic studies is on the rise, and the canonical Romantic poet Blake has become ‘a spectral, marginal figure’! This is despite the great influence Blake has had on our own ‘contemporary Gothic subculture’, and the obviously Gothic features of Blake’s visual style and anti-Enlightenment philosophy. Part I of the book considers how the Gothic in the literal or narrow sense influenced Blake’s work. How did he engage with Gothic architecture, and the Gothic revival of the later eighteenth century? In ‘“Living Form”: William Blake’s Gothic Relations’, David Baulch considers the evidence of Benjamin Heath Malkin, one of Blake’s early biographers. Malkin is a singularly incompetent critic of the Gothic. Though he purports to explain Blake’s ‘Gothic style’, he ‘fails to include any of the instances of Blake’s work that might actually qualify as Gothic in the literary sense of the term’. But Malkin is still useful, says Baluch, because his failures of understanding throw the poet-painter’s own concept of Gothic form into relief. This concept of ‘Gothic form’ then informs Baulch’s reading of the Joseph of Arimathea engraving and Jerusalem. In his contribution to this section, Kiel Schaub situates the figure of Rahab in a broader Gothic context, buttressing close reading of the poem with consideration of Horace Walpole, William Wordsworth, biblical analogues, and the novels of Ann Radcliffe. To round off this section, Claire Colebrook draws out the philosophical elements of Blake’s Gothicism. She begins with a broad discussion of the ‘Gothic line’, a distinctive aesthetic feature of Gothic architecture. She goes on to argue that Blake’s own Gothic line was anti-absolutist: ‘Blake’s use of point of view is Gothic (and counter-Kantian) and … this style (or form) relates directly to ontology (or content).’ Part II of the book, ‘The Misbegotten’, considers Blake’s portrayal of the human body. Jason Whittaker reveals a tradition of bodily horror that links Blake, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ridley Scott. It is a wide-ranging discussion, revealing the importance of ‘fission and fusion’ to Blake’s writing of horror, and culminating in a discussion of the android David’s Blakean simplicity in Scott’s Prometheus [2012]. The following essays by Lucy Cogan and Stephanie Codsi focus more exclusively on Blake’s own writings. In ‘William Blake’s Monstrous Progeny’, Cogan considers ‘body horror’ in The [First] Book of Urizen. She suggests that Blake’s body horror was part of his response to the French Revolution, when many were anxious that the body politic would disintegrate. Codsi’s essay on ‘Blake’s Gothic Humour’ suggests the Blake’s horror may have been more tongue-in-cheek. His evocation of the ‘shock and revulsion’ of bodily dissection was admixed with ‘a curious sense of Gothic humour’. Blake’s humour reveals the gap between science’s desire for clarity and the mystery of the Gothic; the vivisectionist may desire a clear knowledge of organs, but the Gothic body grins back at them mysteriously. Part III of the book is rather miscellaneous. Peter Otto’s brilliant archaeological reading of a plate from The [First] Book of Urizen draws together many of the themes from Part II: bodily horror as a metaphor for the upheaval of the French Revolution, Blake’s designs as a response to the icky engravings published by the anatomists, Blake’s antinomian criticism of the absolutist mind. Blake depicts a ‘monstrous present and an alien body’, in which past and present weave into one another, and the possibility of regeneration is always latent in the chaos of reality. In the second essay in this section, Ana Elena González-Treviño brings another consideration to the collection, discussing Blake’s representation of female space. Part IV of the book draws out the erotic elements of Blake’s Gothicism. Mark Lussier again stresses Blake’s antinomianism: there is always a gap in Blake’s work between what the ‘eye sees’ and the ‘heart knows’. Drawing on Lacan and Deleuze, among others, Lussier does real justice to the complex, vibrating elements of Blake’s poetry. Tristanne Connolly takes the discussion of eroticism in a more amusing direction, considering the problems of impotence and masturbation in Blake’s more explicit poems. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon echoes the ‘good sex’ ideology peddled by Blake’s contemporary James Graham. The essay is a useful tonic after a series of essays extolling Blake’s complex, liberatory, relativist poetic project—it turns out there was a dash of prudery to his personality as well. In a pleasantly counter-intuitive essay on Blake and Newton, L.J. Cooper argues that Blake was not against Newton himself, but rather ‘institutionalised Newtonianism’ (ERR 29[2019] 247–69). In fact, Blake draws on Newton’s concept of ‘absolute space’ to attack Newton’s own disciples, turning the masters’ weapons against the servants. Cooper’s essay draws attention once again to the sheer complexity of Blake’s responses to the world. Karen Hadley offers a sophisticated ecocritical reading of Visions of the Daughters of Albion [1793] in ‘Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and the Biopolitical Unconscious’. (PMLA 133[2018] 314–28). Hadley draws a connection between Foucauldian biopolitics and twenty-first-century ecocriticism. In the poem, she argues, Blake shows how biopolitics turns spaces into human environments, situating animal and non-animal life in a single political framework. She uses Oothoon’s marigold as her key example, analysing the flower from a range of perspectives. She tracks the marigold’s presence through the illustrations. She considers Erasmus Darwin’s writings on the marigold, scientific illustrations of the flower, and broader sociopolitical themes. In the end this enables Hadley to understand the poem’s ‘cyclical’ structure in a new way (pp. 324–5). There was one volume published in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series in 2018, on ‘Romanticism and Affect’. Unsurprisingly, Keats and Coleridge feature in the volume (see below), but it was a pleasure to encounter Mark Lussier’s essay, ‘Affective Textualities: Reconstructing Subjectivity in Blake’s Marriage’ (RCPS [May 2018]). Keats and Coleridge are obviously poets of sensation and affect. The affective dimension of Blake’s poetry is harder to perceive. In order to reveal this affective dimension, Lussier focuses narrowly on the ‘I’ of the poem, which constantly ‘vacillates between active and passive modes’. He argues that the poem’s collage-like structure inaugurated a new mode of poetic subjectivity, a fitful, oscillating, flighty subjectivity. Drawing on his thirty-five years of teaching the poem, Lussier speculates that it is this complex subjectivity that inspires such a remarkable range of responses in his students. In an essay positively teeming with ideas, Tristram Wolff draws out the multiple selves and worlds available in the Romantic lyric, a form so often read devoted to singular visions as to characterize the entire period. In ‘Being Several: Reading Blake with Ed Roberson’ (NLH 49[2018] 553–78), Wolff couples Blake with contemporary poet Ed Roberson to outline the ways in which both poets encourage the undoing or destabilizing of the self in multiplicity, an idea extended to ecology and history, and a view or approach to history that shows how ‘past and present might work together as a “now” made of many ongoing, interanimating histories’ (p. 554). A supple, fascinating, multiply engaged joining of the Romantic and the contemporary, this essay deserves deep and repeated engagement—it feels, as Blake does, like the future. This year saw the publication of three scholarly books devoted to Lord Byron, attesting to his continued place at the centre of Romantic studies. The decades of his scholarly neglect are well and truly over. The first monograph was Nicholas Gayle’s rather unexpected Byron and the Sea-Green Isle, a book-length study of The Island [1823], probably Byron’s most neglected work of narrative verse. Gayle makes a spirited argument for the importance of The Island. The book has a highly wrought structure. The first two chapters provide historical context. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Byron’s lyricism and language. Chapters 5 to 8 each consider one of the poem’s four key symbols: the ocean, the island, the cave, and the various colours Byron evokes. Chapters 9 to 12 each consider a key episode from the poem’s narrative. In the appendix, Gayle provides a fresh transcription of the poem from Byron’s holograph, which tries in particular to capture the punctuation. The first two chapters are solid and scholarly, sketching Byron’s own situation at the beginning of 1823, and filling in what Byron knew about the Pacific. Unsurprisingly, the mutiny on the Bounty looms large in Gayle’s picture of the poem’s context. More interesting are chapters 3 and 4, where Gayle starts to substantiate his claims about the poem’s self-refracting language and weird rhythms. He sets the bar extremely high, claiming that The Island is, ‘ounce-for-ounce’, more brilliant and witty than Don Juan [1819–24], and that the verbal patterns of the poem achieve a ‘Shakespearean ambiguity’ (p. 41). His analysis in chapter 3 doesn’t quite deliver on this promise: it is essentially a detailed recap of the poem’s syuzhet, interspersed with glowing comments on how ‘fascinating’ (p. 49), ‘puzzling’ (p. 51), or ‘pitch-perfect’ the poem is (p. 56). Gayle’s approach of extreme detail does him better service in chapter 4, where he successfully draws attention to Byron’s surprisingly creative metaphorical language, in which stars have ‘eyelids’ (p. 62), ‘Youth’ transforms the very ‘Air’ into ‘Rainbow’ (p. 67), and words like ‘infant’ and ‘echo’ recur in an odd array of contexts (pp. 74–5). In chapter 3 Gayle’s tendency to great detail diluted his analysis of narrative structure, but here in chapter 4 it allows him to reveal some genuinely paradoxical and intriguing elements of the poem’s verbal tissue. The four symbolic chapters follow much the same pattern. Gayle culls numerous details from the poem in an attempt to demonstrate its aesthetic worth, while also making a few comments on the particular meaning of each symbol. The sea symbolizes the dissolution of self-identity (p. 95). The fictional island on Toonbonai is ‘a product of [European] fantasy and desire’ (p. 120). The cave represents the ineffable—‘an ontological other space whose description cannot be captured by language’ (p. 131). Finally Byron’s use of colours demonstrates the generally ‘polyphonic’ nature of his language as a whole (p. 141). The book concludes with the four chapters on the poem’s narrative. Again, Gayle’s approach is essentially to write a detailed commentary. He plies some traditional Byronic seas, talking about the poem’s themes of love (chapter 9), autobiographical resonances (chapter 10), Byronic heroism (chapter 11), and Shakespearean echoes (chapter 12). While Gayle’s passion for Byron’s poetics and his commitment to close textual exegesis are to be commended, one can’t help but feel that Byron and the Sea-Green Isle is somewhat diffuse. Neither the form of the poem nor its context is brought into sufficient relief, making it hard for Gayle to move beyond broad characterizations of Byron’s poetic mastery or brilliance. The second Byron book of 2018 is the Festschrift Essays on Byron in Honour of Dr Peter Cochran: Breaking the Mould, edited by M.M. Kelsall. It is a generous collection of sixteen essays, featuring many heavyweights of Byron studies. It is a fitting tribute to Peter Cochran (1944–2015), whose career was meteoric in both brevity and impact. The first section, on poetics, features Jerome J. McGann on ‘The Greater Byronic Lyric’ (pp. 2–16), followed by three essays comparing Byron’s poetics to those of other Romantic poets: Misoława Modrewska compares Byron to Julius Słowacki (pp. 17–31), Maria Schoina to the poets from whom he translated (pp. 32–47), and Itsuyo Higashinaka to Wordsworth (pp. 48–63). McGann’s essay is a highlight. He takes issue with the still predominant theory of Romantic lyric propounded by M.H. Abrams. Abrams placed the meditative loco-descriptive poem at the centre of Romantic lyricism. McGann points out that it was not the loco-descriptive meditation but rather ‘the poetic opportunities offered by ballad and narrative’ which was Romanticism’s chief legacy to the nineteenth century (pp. 3–4). In a series of brilliant readings, McGann shows how Byron’s lyric verse erupts fitfully from his longer narrative works (p. 8), and typically features a depersonalized lyric ‘I’ (p. 10). The ‘Greater Byronic Lyric’ tells against the organic wholeness typically assigned to the Romantic lyric. Another highlight of this first section is Modrewska’s essay on Słowacki. Polish Romanticism still cuts far too small a figure in Anglo-American scholarship, despite the great work of Cochran himself to rectify the situation. Modrewska’s essay in this volume is a sprightly and detailed exploration of Byronism throughout Słowacki’s whole oeuvre, and serves as a good introduction to Polish Byronism generally. The next section of Essays on Byron concerns ‘Ideology’. There are seven essays in this section, covering a wide range of political, social, and ecological themes. Bernard Beatty frames the section with his essay ‘Can We Rethink Lord Byron as a Whole?’ (pp. 64–77). We have reached a summit of Byron scholarship, argues Beatty, with the Complete Letters, McGann’s Complete Poems, and Leslie Marchand’s (arguably complete) biography: ‘we have been presented anew with Byron in his entirety at exactly the time when New Critical confidence that Byron could sufficiently be present through discriminating excision … was suddenly lost’ (p. 65). What do we see from this summit? Beatty argues that this complete Byron is a poet of ‘twists and turns’ (p. 76). The fundamental problem in Byron is the stability or instability of the self, and Beatty refuses to come clearly down on one side or the other. To give a sense of the great variety of essays in this ‘Ideology’ section, we briefly mention the contributions of Jane Stabler and John Gardner. In her essay, ‘Byron, Affect and Androgyny’ (pp. 91–104), Stabler addresses the vexed issue of Byron’s ‘feminism’. In ‘Byron, Defender of the Abused Child’, Gardner considers how Byron processed the terrible abuse he suffered for two years as a child (pp. 134–48). Stabler draws on Woolf to uncover the androgynous energies of Byron’s language, the ‘mixing of masculine and feminine economies’ in his verse (p. 102). Gardner focuses on The Deformed Transformed [1822], comparing it in particular with Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824]. In Byron’s chilling vision, child abuse leads to ‘an inability to exist’ (p. 141). Gardner thus provides a tragic context for discussion of Byron’s incomplete or unstable sense of self and poetics of escape. The other contributors to this section take the discussion into a range of equally fascinating contexts, considering refugees (Peter Graham, pp. 78–90), architecture (Shobhana Bhattacharji, pp. 105–18), Byron’s encounter with Lucretius (Mirka Horová, pp. 119–33), and animal studies (Christine Kenyon Jones, pp. 149–65). The penultimate section contains two essays on editing Byron. Andrew Stauffer provides an annotated checklist of newly discovered Byron letters (pp. 166–83). Drummond Bone contributes a wide-ranging discussion of punctuation in Beppo [1817] and The Vision of Judgment [1822] (pp. 184–90). He closely compares Cochran’s editions with those of McGann, reminding us all of an important issue: the instability of the text, and the primacy of textual scholarship in interpretation. The final section of the book is three-essay tribute to Peter Cochran, whose influence on Byron studies is so wonderfully in evidence in this very fine Festschrift. The final Byron book of 2018 is Byron and Marginality, edited by Norbert Lennartz. Much like Bundock and Effinger’s William Blake’s Gothic Imagination, this is a counter-intuitive book, in which an utterly central figure to Romantic studies is seen as ‘marginal’. In his introduction (pp. 1–16), Lennartz argues that Byron’s poetry is ‘in all respects, ex-centric’ (p. 3). Byron’s cynicism, his illicit desires, his scoffing attitude to his contemporaries, his class, his disability—all these, and other aspects of his character, thrust him from the centre to the margins. His masterwork, Don Juan, is both his ‘central’ work, and ‘his most sustained effort to thwart all aspirations to define, fix and categorise [his poetry]’ (p. 9). Unsurprisingly, Lennartz is forced to conclude that Byron is figuratively ‘marginal’, rather than literally so. Indeed, the sheer weight of work being published about him every year demonstrates that he has well and truly been brought back to the centre of Romantic studies after his academic marginalization of mid-twentieth century. The first section of Byron and Marginality presents itself as a reflection on Byron’s canonicity: ‘Byron’s Marginalisation in Romantic World Literature’. Nicholas Halmi offers an essay on ‘Byron and Weltliteratur’ (pp. 19–39). Rather than reflecting on Byron’s place in world literature, however, the essay is really an analysis of Goethe’s reception of Byron. It is a fine scholarly essay, in which Halmi uncovers relevant biographical data about Goethe’s reading of Byron and subjects the ‘Euphorion’ episode of Faust II to sustained critique. He argues that what really drew Goethe to Byron was the two poets’ shared value of ‘cross-cultural engagement’, as evidenced in Don Juan and West-östlicher Divan [1819] (p. 31). The second and third essays in the section do address canonicity more directly. Ralf Haekel draws on media studies to try and sketch a decentred ‘Romanticism’ in which Byron is neither central nor marginal (‘Reshaping the Romantic Canon from the Margins: The Medial Construction of “Byron” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, pp. 40–56). Rolf Lessenich addresses the venerable problem of whether Byron is really ‘Romantic’ or ‘Classic’—a topic touched upon by Halmi also (‘Byron and Romantic Period Neoclassicism’, pp. 57–74). Haekel sets out to prove that Byron’s anti-essentialism separates him from his Romantic contemporaries while also undermining the very concept of a canon. Lessenich takes the opposite approach, trying to prove that ‘Neoclassicism’ was a central trend of Romantic poetry, uniting Byron with many other poets of his age. The reader is left with a pleasantly sceptical aftertaste. The second section of the book takes self and place as its core themes. But again it is somewhat incoherent. Friederike Wolfrum begins the section with another essay reflecting on Byron’s marginality within ‘Romanticism’, which would have had a more natural home alongside the essays by Haekel and Lessenich in the previous section (‘“When a man talks of system, his case is hopeless”: Byron at the Margins of Romantic Counterculture’, pp. 77–97). Her essay is remarkably rigorous, drawing on Wittgenstein and prototype theory to theorize the concept of a literary period or movement, before moving on to a consideration of Romanticism as a ‘counterculture’ (pp. 77–9). Like Haekel, Wolfrum is interested in Byron’s anti-essentialist, critical aspects, and makes the case for a sceptical Romanticism. The following essay, Stephen Minta’s ‘At the Margins of Europe: Byron’s East Revisited and The Giaour’ (pp. 98–115), picks up on the theme of cross-cultural engagement identified by Nicholas Halmi. Jonathan Gross offers a delightful reflection on Byron’s relationship with Isaac D’Israeli, considering how D’Israeli drew on Byron’s marginal annotations to expand his ever-growing collection of literary anecdotes, The Literary Character of Men of Genius [1795–1822] (‘Literary Forefathers: Byron’s Marginalia in Isaac D’Israeli’s Literary Character of Men of Genius’, pp. 116–40). Like the other essays in this section, this one should have been in a different one: this essay about Byron’s foray into marginalia would have made much more sense in the following section about ‘Marginal Genres’. The third section is more coherent than the other two. The first two essays each consider a ‘marginal genre’ in Byron’s oeuvre—Michael O’Neill focuses on the song, and Camilleri on the romance. The third essay, by Josefina Tuominen-Pope, has nothing to do with genre, but meshes nicely with Camilleri’s discussion. In the first essay of the section, O’Neill writes of ‘Byron’s Marginalised Lyricism in Hebrew Melodies’ (pp. 143–65). These songs are typically marginalized in accounts of Byron’s work, argues O’Neill, but are consummate works of lyrical art, which express a deep yearning rooted in a sense of history. In the second essay, Anna Camilleri argues that really it was really the genre of romance, rather than anything in Byron himself, that led to his marginalization in twentieth-century Romantic studies (‘Out of Romanticism: Byron and Romance’, pp. 166–85). Tuominen-Pope makes a similar argument in ‘The Margins of Genius: Byron, Nationalism and the Periodical Reviews’ (pp. 186–204). In the nineteenth century, as the Romantic canon was forming, it was Byron’s association with the popular press, his mass appeal, that told against him. Byron’s verse romances have at times been seen as airport fiction avant la lettre. Camilleri mounts a defence of Byron’s romances as high art. Tuominen-Pope expends her energy showing how the nineteenth-century media constructed the image of Byron as a ‘popular’ rather than canonical author. The fourth section of Byron and Marginality considers how Byron pushed the bounds of good taste, writing of death and sex in what was once often seen as a coarse or dangerous manner. Caroline Franklin writes of suicide (‘“Stand not on that brink!”: Byron, Gender and Romantic Suicide’, pp. 207–32). She focuses on the poetry from Manfred [1817] on, making the strong argument that Byron ‘depict[s] suicide as a feminine act’ irreconcilable with ‘true masculinity’ (p. 214). Tom Mole also considers death in ‘Byron and the Good Death’ (pp. 233–53). Mole contextualizes Byron in the long tradition of the Good Death, stretching back to Latin antiquity, showing how intelligently Byron struggled with the concept throughout his particular death-filled poems. Drummond Bone draws out the link between sex and death in his reading of ‘The Women of Don Juan’s English Cantos’ (pp. 254–68). The three main women of the English Cantos, Aurora, Adeline, and Fitz-Fulke, all express Nature’s sexual forces of creation and destruction in different ways. The final section, ‘Marginal Affairs—Visual and Paratextual Aspects in Byron’, makes no claim to coherence. It contains two essays, one on the visual, and one on paratexts. But the two contributors speak to one another in a pleasant manner. Richard Lansdown raises the question, ‘How marginal were the visual arts to Byron?’ (‘A Marginal Interest? Byron and the Fine Arts’, pp. 271–90). Carefully sifting through the biographical letters and ekphrastic moments in the poetry, Lansdown concludes that art had a greater influence on Byron than he cared to admit. Jonathan Shears asks a similar question of Byron’s letters: was he really as careless and ‘spontaneous’ a letter-writer as he seems? (‘“I ask his pardon for a postscript”: Byron’s Epistolary Afterthoughts’, pp. 291–307). To the contrary, Shears presents considerable evidence that the ostensible carelessness of Byron’s letters was actually a carefully studied pose. These two essays thus provide fresh evidence for the traditional reading of Byron as a performative individualist. Lannartz appears to have prioritized the superficial shapeliness of the collection, wedging the essays into five sections of almost equal length rather than allowing the book to take on a more natural structure according to its contents. This poor organization makes the book hard to grapple with, but cannot detract from the sheer quality of its constituent essays nor from the vitality of its central theme. Byron and Marginality is impressive. It will surely make an impact on Byron scholars in years to come. Julia Coole continues the discussion of marginality in her essay on ‘The Politics of Paratexts’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 148–57). She focuses on elements of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I and II [1812] that are literally in the margins: the footnotes. Byron’s footnotes are for her a prime example of Romantic revision. By paying careful attention to their tone and content, Coole is able to make subtle observations about Byron’s self-presentation. Byron was torn between two desires, ‘to present himself as a learned, trusted authority’ on the one hand, and yet also to be ‘a spontaneous traveller’ reporting the evidence of raw personal experience on the other (p. 152). Ildiko Csengei focuses on a more famous aspect of the poem in her analysis of Canto III [1816] (Romanticism 24[2018] 86–98). In the poem’s description of Waterloo, Csengei can detect a melancholy that goes ‘beyond the boundaries of the individual’ (p. 89). The poem considers the ‘erasure of feeling’ on the battlefield, as the blood soaks into the ground and the violence recedes into a repressed past (p. 92). With his complex poetry of contrasts and misgivings, Byron attempts to recollect these erased emotions. Csengei demonstrates how his account of war’s emotions chimed with contemporary philosophy, and with first-hand accounts of Waterloo. Byron is not usually seen as a nature poet, as J. Andrew Hubbell rightly points out in ‘Figuring Nature: Tropics of Romantic Environmentality’ (SiR 57[2018] 353–81). This makes Hubbell’s ecocritical reading of Byron all the more interesting. Where Wordsworth, John Clare, or Gilbert White devoted their energies to describing particular localities, argues Hubbell, Byron restlessly expanded the horizons of nature. If Wordsworth was a lake poet, Byron was an oceanic one. Hubbell considers Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and includes an excursus on Coleridge, whose ‘closed, homeostatic, hierarchical’ idea of nature he contrasts with Byron’s more open and rhizomatic idea. Continuing her project to reveal the transatlantic dimension of Romantic literature, Deanna Koretsky contributes an essay on how Frederick Douglass made use of Byron’s poetry in My Bondage and My Freedom [1855], in ‘Boundaries between Things Misnamed: Social Death and Radical (Non-)Existence in Frederick Douglass and Lord Byron’ (ERR 29[2018] 473–84). She shows how Douglass wove references to The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems [1816] throughout My Bondage and My Freedom. The poems of Chillon describe vitiated individuality, selfhood that has been robbed or diseased. This poetry of vitiated selfhood resonated with Douglass, who drew on it to describe his own situation of ‘social death’ as a slave (p. 477). In a curiously related vein, Stefanie Markovits draws our attention to counting—both poetic and literal—in ‘Don Juan’s Numerals’ (ERR 29[2018] 639–55), following what she terms the ‘recent numerical turn’ (p. 640) in scholarship, particularly distant reading. ‘Byron’s numbering methods’, Markovits contends, particularly in the apparently inexhaustible numbered stanzas of Don Juan [1819–24], ‘invite us to seek meaning in counting’ (p. 641)—specifically, Byron exploits the generic affordances of his verse as ‘a way to manage the challenge that experiences of proliferation pose to a sympathy-based, Enlightenment ethics’ (p. 643). In an invaluable formulation, Markovits shows the way in which Byron’s counting, rather than a scientistic effort towards mastery, instead works ‘as a gesture of defiance, a fist raised in the face of the incomprehensible’ (p. 646), and so, in yet another sense, the numerical and poetic are shown to be entwined. In 2017 we saw the publication of two monographs dedicated to Clare as well as several articles; 2018 was a relatively muted year in Clare studies. Aside from the 2018 edition of the John Clare Society Journal and a new reading edition of his poetry, we were unable to locate any new work on Clare. Patrick Vincent kicks off the special issue with a discussion of how Clare and William Cobbett responded to the passage of the 1830 Beer Act, which Vincent suggests was ‘arguably more radical than the Great Reform Act of 1832’: ‘“Common Sense and Ale”: Cobbett, Clare, and the 1830 Beer Act’ (JCSJ 37[2018] 5–21). Both Cobbett and Clare published essays on the merits of the Beer Act, though Vincent argues that Clare’s considered defence of free trade was more ‘radically progressive’ than Cobbett’s comments on domestic economy (p. 12). Vincent then considers references to beer in Clare’s poems, showing how he deftly combined domestic and sociopolitical themes in his beer poems (pp. 15–17). Markus Poetzsch draws out interesting features of Clare’s language in his ecocritical analysis of ‘The Flitting’ and ‘Childish Recollections’, in ‘John Clare’s Particular Particularity and the Language of Climate’ (JCSJ 37[2018] 27–40). Poetzsch argues that ecocritics have paid insufficient attention to Clare’s thematization of climate change. Drawing together ecocritical theory and structuralist accounts of language, Poetzsch demonstrates that the ‘particular particularity’ of Clare’s language allows him to overlay multiple temporalities in his descriptions of place (p. 31). In this way he foreshadows the complex temporalities of our own day’s climate science. After Vincent’s historicist article and Poetzsch’s ecocritical one, Nancy Derbyshire offers a formalist analysis of Clare’s acoustics, ‘John Clare and the License of Listening’ (JCSJ 37[2018] 41–61). Derbyshire moves through Clare’s oeuvre, identifying scraps of poetry and prose where Clare describes acts of listening. Clare was a born trespasser, for whom listening to nature was an expression of freedom. He uses ‘listening, imaginative projection and writing’ as three entwined ‘nesting behaviours’ in his poetry (p. 55). He dwells with his ears. The academic portion of the journal is rounded off with two interesting reports from the archive. Sarah Houghton-Walker presents the evidence surrounding the death of Mary Joyce, Clare’s professed muse, in ‘Life Stories: The Coroner’s Report on the Death of Mary Joyce’ (JCSJ 37[2018] 65–77). Including copious photographs and transcriptions from the archive, Houghton-Walker’s article will surely be useful to future Clare biographers. Robert Heyes contributes a short article on ‘John Clare’s Library’ (JCSJ 37[2018] 79–87). Clare’s library is a remarkable survival, one of the few libraries belonging to a major writer that has come down to us intact. Heyes quite rightly laments the fact that the library has been studied so little—there isn’t even a catalogue of its contents (p. 81). Heyes describes the history of the library in broad terms, but refrains from analysing its biographical or critical significance. Like Houghton-Walker’s essay, Heyes’s article is a generous one, inviting fellow scholars into a fresh and unanalysed portion of the ever-growing Clare archive. To round off our discussion of Clare studies in 2018, we note the publication of John Clare: Selected Poems, edited by Stephen Croft. The text of the poems is taken from Robinson and Powell’s edition of the Major Works (OUP [1984]), and therefore hews close to Clare’s manuscripts. Readers can expect only a little punctuation and a great deal of irregular orthography. The book begins with a brisk and well-written biography. The selection of poems emphasizes his nature poetry and the psychological poems of his later years. A number of his love lyrics are included, but the satirical Clare of The Parish and the involuted Clare of the Byron imitations are essentially absent. The notes are printed as an appendix, along with a short general comment on each poem to guide the student. The final two sections of the book, ‘Interpretations’ and ‘Essay Questions’, provide teaching material, written by the editor. All in all, the book seems to be a good teaching resource, the unbalanced selection from Clare’s poetry notwithstanding. Theology, philosophy, and biographical criticism continue to dominate Coleridge studies, as the nine articles published on the poet in 2018 demonstrate. Denae Dyck contributes to a venerable critical tradition with her essay on ‘Gathering and Scattering in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: Poetic Form, Biblical Criticism, and Coleridge’s Tropes of the Imagination’ (ERR 29[2018] 769–86). According to Dyck, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [1798] is biblical not only in its allusions, but also in the texture of its language. Throughout the poem, Coleridge ‘adapt[s] the parallelism highlighted in late-eighteenth-century studies of biblical poetry: chiasmus, synesthesia, and merismus’ (p. 770). Drawing on these rhetorical figures, Coleridge links his theory of the imagination to his own biblical criticism. Kubla Khan continues to fascinate critics as an early form of performance poetry. In his essay on ‘The Sonic Organization of “Kubla Khan”’ (SiR 57[2018] 243–64), Ewan James Jones claims that critics have never really analysed the ‘organization of sound’ in the poem—an extraordinary claim, to be sure, though he does qualify his argument a little (p. 243). Adopting a ‘conventional foot-based’ approach to metre, Jones considers ‘the recurrent moments at which Coleridge’s poem engages critically with historical conventions’ (p. 248). He goes on to consider cognitive and political approaches to Coleridge’s metre. His stress throughout is on the virtuosic variety of Coleridge’s rhythms, a variety that can serve as a metaphor for a more harmonious political order, as well as explain the sheer aesthetic delight of the poem. Aesthetic delight is also a key theme of Gavin Sourgen’s essay, ‘A Volatile Unity: Coleridge, Starling Murmurations, and Romantic Form’ (in GoGwilt and Holm, eds., Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes, pp. 97–119). Sourgen revisits the classic Coleridgean theme of organic form, showing how central bird analogies were to Coleridge’s development of the concept. Drawing on Coleridge’s description of a flock of starlings in the Notebooks, Sourgen offers a series of often quite dazzling reflections on parts and wholes, imaginings and perceptions, art and beauty, linking Coleridge to many other theorists of poetry along the way. Matthew Jones offers a new glimpse into Coleridge’s circle with his short piece on ‘Joseph Hucks (1772–1800): Poet, Travel Writer, Coleridge’s Companion in Wales’ (ANQ 31[2018] 22–6). Jones focuses particularly on Hucks’s Poems [1798], but turns to his Pedestrian Tour through North Wales [1795] to help draw out the social and political meanings of Hucks’s verse. In Jones’s reading, Hucks was an incorrigible Pantisocrat, whose principal reason for living was liberty. In ‘Rethinking the Text of Coleridge’s Dejection Ode’ (WC 49[2018] 130–8), meanwhile, J.C.C. Mays takes a deep dive into the textual and editorial history of Coleridge’s poem, arguing against the ‘prevailing taste’ (p. 130) that opts for earlier manuscript versions over later. ‘The problem with this state of affairs’, Mays contends, is that it opts, sometimes unthinkingly, for a rawer text at the expense of ‘what Coleridge achieves with style, what style enables him to say’ (p. 130). Rebekah Mitsein explores the variety, instability, and Gothic potential of the Romantic family in ‘“And wouldst thou wrong thy only child?”: The Crisis of Affective Kinship in Coleridge’s “Christabel”’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 67–77). Taking to task the critical tradition of ignoring Coleridge’s baffling conclusion to Part Two as merely a placeholder for the rest of the never-to-be-finished poem, Mitsein argues instead that, in it, Coleridge outlines the folly of installing ‘affective bonds of kinship as a stable and orderly foundation for society at large’ (p. 70). Seamus Perry outlines another instance of Coleridge attempting to have it both ways in ‘Coleridgean Politics’ (WC 49[2018] 123–9). Examining a specific passage in Biographia Literaria [1817], Perry draws out the specific usage of ‘balance’ and ‘reconciliation’, showing via German Idealism that Coleridge’s ideal of balance concerned not the unification of opposing qualities, but rather their coequal maintenance, as in the ‘mingled measure’ of Kubla Kahn [1816]—a ‘balance of powers’, but a fundamentally ‘precarious one’ (p. 129). Peter Vassallo reads Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a tradition of early orientalist appetites for the arbitrary, sensational, and transgressive in ‘Voyaging into the “Vast”: ‘The Ancient Mariner’, the Jinni and the Universe of The Arabian Nights’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 78–85), claiming the tales collected in The Arabian Nights as a key influence for Coleridge’s great sea story. While some of the parallels uncovered are suggestive, Vassallo’s reading of both texts is shallow, and his references are notably out of date; his conclusion that, in Coleridge’s poem, ‘it is arbitrariness that supplies a dominating, propelling force’ (p. 83) feels like the start rather than the end of a line of enquiry. Finally, Jude Wright returns to the baffling heterodoxy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in ‘“The Penance of Life”: The Testimonial Paradigm in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (RoN 71[2018]), arguing that the strangeness and irresolubility of the poem are the result of a mismatch between its Catholic-Gothic confessional machinery and a new paradigm of testimony and bearing witness propounded by the Evangelical revival. Interest in Erasmus Darwin continues to grow. He features in several of the general works considered above. Continuing on from the discussion in her Induction monograph, Dahlia Porter contributes an article dedicated to the scientific poet—‘Epistemic Images and Vital Nature: Darwin’s Botanic Garden as Image Text Book’ (ERR 29[2018] 295–308)—which sets to work on ‘both expanding and reorienting how we understand the knowledge work of images in Romantic-era books’, taking up ‘an obvious case, Erasmus Darwin’s two-part annotated philosophical poem The Botanic Garden, comprised of The Economy of Vegetation (Part 1, 1791) and The Loves of the Plants (Part 2, 1789)’ (p. 296). Reading these images and their ‘epistemic function’ (p. 296) as crucial to resolving the jostling conflict between heroic couplets and prose notes in Darwin’s sci-poetry mashup masterwork, Porter argues that ‘images visually articulate the theoretical framework of the composite text, revealing how the text–image combination is integral to Darwin’s intervention in debates over nature’s vitality and organic life more broadly at the end of the eighteenth century’ (pp. 305–6). It was a thin year for studies of Felicia Hemans. In his second article of 2018, (ERR 29[2018] 711–32) Matthew Jones offers a powerful reinterpretation of the Welsh aspects of Hemans’s poetry. Hitherto, scholars who wish to assess the Welshness of Hemans’s verse have focused on a handful of poems specifically about Wales. Jones widens the net, showing how Welsh ideas, customs, and landscapes pervaded Hemans’s entire oeuvre. Hemans was in some ways quite imperialistic, claiming to have a greater insight into the true nature of the Welsh spirit than the native Welsh themselves. She promoted an idea of Welsh nationality rooted in a mythological past, and therefore her poetry was unable to grapple with the growing force of political nationalism in Wales. This was the only scholarly work we could locate on Hemans’s verse for 2018. In a year that saw at least five books dedicated to Wordsworth and three to Byron, it is something of a surprise to find that only one book was published on John Keats. Richard Marggraf Turley’s Keats’s Places pays tribute to the way ecocritcism has revived biographical approaches to literary interpretation, a trend that also inflected many of the Keats articles published in 2018. Turley’s collection must be commended for its coverage. Essays in the Keats’s Places cover Keats’s time at Guy’s Hospital and the Vale of Health, the visit to the Isle of Wight, the places he visited on his tour of 1818, Winchester, Keats’s home at Wentworth Place, Rome—and even America, which Keats of course knew through his correspondence with George. The book begins, appropriately, in London. Hrileena Ghosh offers a broad-ranging account of Keats’s student days at Guy’s Hospital, arguing that his time there was a key part of his early poetic development (‘Keats at Guy’s Hospital: Moments, Meetings, Choices and Poems’, pp. 31–52). This is followed by three essays on Keats’s first encounters in Hampstead Heath, or more precisely at the ‘Vale of Health’, where Leigh Hunt held court. Greg Kucich, in ‘Keats, the Vale of Health, and the Gentle Gendering of Cockney Coteries’ (pp. 53–70), wonders: ‘in what ways did alternative, transitional or transformative types of “masculinity” emerge from the leafiness of the Vale of Health?’ (p. 54). Fiona Stafford shows how the vegetation around the Vale of Health entwined itself in Keats’s verse (‘Keats, Shoots and Leaves’, pp. 71–92). Michael O’Neill focuses on one key acquaintance Keats made on the heath in 1816: Percy Shelly (‘“The End and Aim of Poesy”: Keats and Shelley in Dialogue’, pp. 93–114). Seen together, these three essays reveal the intense impact that a single place could have on Keats’s poetry and reputation. Had Keats not found his way to the Vale of Health in 1816, the myth of the effeminate youth might never have shot up, and the floral delights of ‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’ [1817] and Endymion [1818] might never have bloomed so gloriously. The next four essays take in Keats’s travels around the UK. Turley himself offers an unusual essay on Keats’s transit to the Isle of Wight on 14–15 April 1817 (‘Keats Underway’, pp. 115–34). Keats’s letter detailing the rapid journey ‘constitutes a playful act of countermapping’, whose implications for Endymion Turley teases out over subsequent pages (p. 116). The following three essays all focus on Keats’s 1818 walking tour of Scotland and the north. Heidi Thompson argues that the walking tour was the ‘inspiration and breeding ground’ (p. 136) for the Hyperion poems (‘Keats’s Muses “In the Midst of Meg Merrilies’ Country”: Meg, Mnemosyne, Moneta and Autumn’, pp. 135–56). Of particular interest is Thompson’s treatment of Walter Scott in the essay. She shows how Keats filtered his experience of Scotland through Guy Mannering [1815], which in turn provided many of the tropes and structures for his reworking of the Hyperion myth (see especially pp. 146–7). Thompson’s quite focused treatment of Scottish folklore is complemented by Meiko O’Halloran’s broader essay on Keats’s poetic influences (‘Poetic Genealogies: Keats’s Northern Walking Tour’, pp. 157–80). In particular, she shows how Keats used the tour as an opportunity to wrangle with Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and James Macpherson. Alexandra Paterson rounds out this section with an essay on material things (‘Keats’s “Natural Sculptures”: Geology, Vitality and the Scottish Walking Tour’, pp. 181–204). Keats not only read on his journey, he also looked about him. Paterson shows how objects he saw found their way into his poetry, both when he was on tour and at home at the British Museum. As Keats’s Places draws to a close, it branches out to cover the diverse places of Keats’s final years. Grant F. Scott shows how America figures in the ‘Ode to Psyche’ [1820] (‘Keats’s American Ode’, pp. 205–24). Nicholas Roe evokes Keats’s three visits to Winchester and the sights and sounds he encountered, and tries to recover the peace and feeling of history Keats found there (‘John Keats at Winchester’, pp. 225–44). The essay builds towards a reading of ‘To Autumn’ [1820], in which Roe is able to hear the distant echoes of King Alfred’s England and the English of Chaucer (pp. 238–41). Kenneth Page offers an essay on Wentworth Place—known today as Keats House: ‘Wentworth Place: “A Small Cottage, Pleasantly Situate”’ (pp. 245–72). Page’s interests are primarily biographical and topographical, but he does offer a tantalizing hint that the house might be the place of ‘drowsy noons’ evoked in ‘Ode on Indolence’ [1819] (p. 261). The volume ends on a mournful note, with Giuseppe Albano’s essay on Keats in Rome (‘“Writ in Water”, Etched in Stone: John Keats and the Experience of Rome’, pp. 273–92). He brilliantly evokes the vitality of the Rome that Keats encountered. Glancing back at Keats’s various references to Italy in his early poems, Albano is able to give a compelling account of how the Eternal City appeared to the ailing Keats. And with that Keats’s Places comes to an end. It is a fine collection, and it is especially pleasing to see such fine contributions from Kenneth Page and Giuseppe Albano, respectively the interpretation officer at the Keats House Museum and the curator of the Keats–Shelley House in Rome. In two essays published elsewhere, Jane Darcy and Peter Henning take up and complete the themes raised in Keats’s Places. Darcy fills in a blank with her ‘Primrose Island: Keats and the Isle of Wight’ (KSR 32[2018] 28–46). She argues that, when Keats visited the island in 1817, it changed the way he saw the sea. Keats was not the only writer who visited the Isle of Wight for inspiration. Darcy considers Wordsworth, Thomas Pennant, William Gilpin, and John Sturch, contextualizing their responses to the island as part of what Alain Corbin calls ‘the discovery of the seaside’ (p. 32). She then briefly considers the rise of medicinal sea-bathing, arguing that, by Keats’s time, doctors had lost their grip on the practice (pp. 34–5). She concludes the essay with a long and detailed discussion of Keats’s experiences on the Isle of Wight, complete with several of her own photographs of Keatsian locations. This detective work enables her to flesh out little details of ‘On the Sea’ [1817] and Endymion [1818], and provides a rich sense of how Keats responded to particular aspects of his environment. Peter Henning analyses Keats’s sense of place from a different perspective in ‘Keats, Ecocriticism, and the Poetics of Place’ (SiR 57[2018] 407–27). He adopts a traditional Heideggerian framework, and considers various modes of being, dwelling, and thinking in Keats’s major poems. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ [1819] portrays ‘things as actively engaged in the world’ (p. 413), for instance, while ‘Ode on Indolence’ [1819] considers ‘the immersive pull of artificial objects (p. 423). Henning moves in familiar territory, focusing on self and sensation in Keats’s verse, but manages to pack in a great deal of thoughtful close reading: 2018 was clearly a good year for topographical studies of Keats. Scholars continue to interpret Keats’s work through a biographical lens. In ‘Murder’d Men: “Isabella” and Goethe’s Werther’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 53–66), Tom Baynes argues that Keats’s reading directly influenced his poetry. More specifically, he argues that Keats’s reading of Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers [1774] shaped the writing of ‘Isabella’ [1818]. Baynes presents a range of textual evidence, demonstrating that Keats appeared to have had Werther on his mind during the period in which he wrote ‘Isabella’. He then identifies a series of key textual parallels: like Goethe’s Charlotte, Keats’s Isabella is passionately musical; like Goethe’s Werther, Keats’s Lorenzo has a dazzling sensual life (p. 58). Indeed, it seems that when Keats departs from his main source, The Decameron [c.1353], he seems to be adding Wertherian details. In her essay on ‘The Material Sublime and Theory of Mind in Coleridge and Keats’ (RCPS [May 2018]), Renae Harris considers the problem of ‘automaticity’ in Coleridge and Keats. She situates them in the long tradition of quixotic anxiety: absorptive reading, it was thought, ‘seems to include a loss of the thinking, reasoning self’. She argues that today’s cognitive science both explains and dissipates these eighteenth-century fears. Absorptive reading, we now know, can actually enhance cognitive development. Turning to Coleridge’s and Keats’s poetry of dreams and fascinations, she finds that the two Romantic poets foreshadowed these modern cognitive theories. Philip Lindholm continues a revisionist trend in Keats scholarship in ‘“At the Mere Touch of Cold Philosophy”: Science, Sensation and Synaesthesia in John Keats’s “Lamia”’ (EJES 22[2018] 258–72). Like Harris, Lindholm considers Keats’s understanding of the ‘material sublime’. He takes ‘Lamia’ [1820] as his primary example. The poem appears to be anti-scientific on the surface, but is really very rich in scientific references, which Keats uses to explain the sensory dimension of human life. Lindholm does a fine job of tracking references to contemporary chemistry, psychology, and biology in Keats’s imagery. Lamia’s phosphorescent eyes could not have been so described before the advent of modern chemistry (p. 267), and Lewis is right to argue that Keats was not the anti-scientific poet he was once made out to be. Emily Rohrbach’s exquisitely calibrated examination of Keats’s sonnets and the qualities of the codex book, ‘To “Lean upon a Closed Book”: Keats’s Sonnets, Formal Closure, and the Codex’ (ERR 29[2018] 229–45), begins with a subtle but far-reaching insight: ‘I propose that Keats’s sonnets meditate on what the sonnet form and the material book have in common. That is, the thematic resolution and formal closure traditionally associated with the sonnet form repeat, in the relation between form and theme, the ideas of opening and closing embodied by the materiality of the codex book’ (p. 229). Shedding new light on the peculiarity of the Keatsian sonnet, with its melancholy, purity of image, and strange expansiveness of thought, Rohrbach reveals the way in which ‘Keats’s sonnets heighten a tension between form and theme, whereby formal closure becomes the bedfellow of thematic expansion’, and how ‘Keats makes that heightened tension between opening up and closing, embedded in the very sonnet form, resonate with the conceptual antithesis of opening and closing embodied by the codex book’. That ‘closing and opening can be so intimately linked’, Rohrbach concludes, ‘ushers in, for Keats, issues of existence and subjectivity in a world of contingency, where being closed off from one possibility is to be afforded another’ (p. 230). Carefully evidenced and expressed, this is perhaps the finest article on Keats’s ‘sonnet-thinking’ written—the book on the subject is, as it were, shut. R.S. White’s wide-ranging, chatty essay on Keats and art in ‘Gusto: Keats, Hazlitt, and Pictorial Art’ (KSR 32[2018] 47–54), sketches out the connections between William Hazlitt’s notion of gusto and Keats’s broader approach to sense, affect, and response in his poetry. While no major claims are made, White lays a useful foundation for future work on the subject. Duncan Wu gives an account of a recently acquired early manuscript of Keats’s ‘In Drear Nighted December’ [1817], in ‘“In Drear Nighted December”: The Newly Acquired KSMA Manuscript’ (KSR 32[2018] 22–7). As well as outlining the particulars of the manuscript, Wu offers a brief reading of this extraordinary work as ‘an attempt to write, in compact, lyric form, about loss of vision and its after-effects’ (p. 27). Carol L. Yang, ‘A Passage from Adam’s Dream to the Cessation of Desire: A Buddhist Reading of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”’ (JNT 48[2018] 137–63), closes the year on Keats with an account of how ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ‘embodies such Buddhist principles as the dharma and the Four Noble Truths, articulated through Buddhism’s focus on suffering and its possible antidote’ (p. 138). While not always well structured, this a thoughtful, original reading of a canonical poem, one that re-establishes Keats as a poet of substantial philosophical and moral scope, as well as aesthetic accomplishment. Mary Robinson was the subject of a single essay this year. Sal Nicolazzo draws welcome attention to her lyric innovations in ‘Lyric Without Subjects and Law without Persons: Vagrancy, Police Power, and The Lyrical Tales’ (Criticism 60[2018] 149–70), particularly her engagement with vagrancy of the human and poetic kind in Lyrical Tales [1800]. Engaging with the intersecting legal and lyric ideas of vagrancy and subjecthood, Nicolazzo argues Robinson’s work pushes beyond the conventional bounds of both, stretching ‘lyric to its limits’ (p. 153) by dramatizing a series of dramatic refusals of subjectivity from her vagrant and impoverished interlocutors. Compared to his fiction, Sir Walter Scott’s poetry is generally under-studied. It is a pleasure, therefore to note Graham Tulloch’s fascinating comment on Scott’s war poetry in ‘Walter Scott and Waterloo’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 266–77). Tulloch considers Scott’s attempts ‘to grapple in poetic terms with a new kind of warfare’ (p. 272) in two related texts, The Field of Waterloo [1816] and Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk [1816]. Tulloch argues convincingly that depicting the increasingly modernized reality of battle strained Scott’s poetry, forcing new and sometimes ungainly approaches to depicting history, and alienating his audience. The future, for Scott and Scott’s work as a historical writer, Tulloch shows, lay in prose. Anna Seward was likewise the subject of only a single essay in 2018. Francesca Blanch Serrat’s essay, ‘“Thine Sacred Friendship”: Anna Seward’s “Llangollen Vale” and the Female Romantic Community’, appears in Persistence and Resistance in English Studies: New Research, edited by Sara Martin, David Owen, and Elisabet Pladevall-Ballester (pp. 69–77), a volume otherwise unconcerned with Romantic poetry. Serrat’s essay is a fine work of biographical scholarship. She describes Anna Seward’s relationship with the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, two runaway Irish noblewomen who established a home for themselves in Wales. In ‘Llangollen Vale’ [1796], Seward turned these women’s domestic life into an image of idealized female friendship (p. 71). Serrat views female friendship through a primarily intellectual lens, suspending judgement on the queer aspects of the ladies’ relationship (p. 74). Though Seward succeeds in elevating the ladies onto a ‘quasi-divine plane’ in her poem, she is unable to transform them into an image of intellectual ‘community’, on account of their aristocratic exclusivity (p. 76). It was a rich year for studies on Percy Shelley, seeing the publication of a major philosophy monograph that took the metaphysical reflections in Shelley’s verse extremely seriously. It also saw the publication of a raft of articles on The Revolt of Islam [1818], 200 years after its first publication. Apparently politics and metaphysics, Shelley’s two favourite themes, remained central to scholars of his work this year. For many critics, one of Romantic poetry’s most attractive features is its philosophical sophistication. Yet professional philosophers in the English-speaking world have only rarely devoted scholarly attention to the Romantic poets as philosophers. As a result, those few who have done so, such as Bertrand Russell on Byron, or Roger Scruton on Coleridge, are quite conspicuous. In last year’s edition, we had the pleasure of noting Peter Cheyne’s interdisciplinary collection Coleridge and Contemplation. This year, it is a pleasure to note O. Bradley Bassler’s metaphysical study, Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics, which considers Shelley alongside Immanuel Kant as a ‘guide’ to ‘paraphysics’ (p. 7). Bassler’s study is rooted in philosophy. He only engages a little with literary scholarship, his main purpose being to see how Shelley can help him reformulate his concept of the ‘parafinite’. The parafinite is that aspect of reality which exceeds or brings into question the distinction between finitude and infinity. It does so because it is indeterminate. In a nutshell, Bassler claims that Kant’s transcendental aesthetics deals with the ‘relative parafinite’, while Shelley’s nature poetry invokes the ‘absolute parafinite’ (pp. 24–5). He illustrates the distinction with a discussion of the sublime. For Kant, an object is sublime because we judge it to be larger than things of itself. That is, it is large even without being compared to anything else—it is indeterminately large. This gives us an intimation of some great power, but this intimation is subjective because it is rooted in the transcendental structure of our own minds (pp. 33–6). In ‘Mont Blanc’, by contrast, Shelley claims to observe a ‘Power’ which objectively actually lurks behind all things (p. 25). Bassler’s main aim is to show that an objective theory like Shelley’s is defensible. After the introduction, the book proceeds through five chapters of philosophical and metamathematical discussion, drawing in a wide range of thinkers from the seventeenth century to the present. It culminates in the final chapter on Shelley, where Bassler stages a final conflict between Shelley and Kant, with some assistance from Blake. It was in the figure of Demagorgon that Shelley found the most apt poetic symbol for the parafinite. Demagorgon is unable to speak the ‘deep truth’, which is ‘imageless’ (p. 471). This imageless truth is for Shelley ‘an underlying source for poetic creation in a way that escapes figuration’ (p. 487). Reality itself is radically indefinite, and this is what gives scope for the creative act. Bysshe Inigo Coffey considers a different side of Shelley’s Kantianism in ‘Shelley’s Kant, Wordsworth, and Peter Bell’ (WC 49[2018] 167–76). Coffey closely analyses a reference to Kant in Peter Bell the Third [1819]. In that poem, Shelley accuses Wordsworth of stodgy Kantianism (p. 168), and draws on the popular image of Kant as ‘a placeholder for obscure German metaphysics’ (p. 169). Nonetheless, as Coffey demonstrates, Shelley remained interested in Kant to the end of his life, and there is evidence that he read at least some Kant in Latin translation. The year 2018 marked two centuries since the first publication of one of Shelley’s major political poems, The Revolt of Islam. Shelley’s politics were once an embarrassment to scholars. But these days, as Pietro Deandrea demonstrates in ‘The Revolt of Islam, Postcolonialism and the Arab Springs’ (KSR 32[2018] 158–69), scholars have come to value Shelley’s revolutionary theories. Deandrea argues that in the wake of the ‘Arab Springs’, Shelley’s theories of hope have gained new relevance. Shelley’s belief in political miracles may have seemed absurd to prior scholars, but ‘some recent revolutions witnessed, albeit briefly, this closeness between the miraculous and history’ (p. 169). The angelic poet’s wings apparently did not beat in vain. Joey S. Kim’s ‘Disorienting “Shapes” in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam’ (KSR 32[2018] 134–47) agrees that Shelley was a truly ‘radical visionary’ (p. 135). The Revolt of Islam might seem a gaudy and cliché-ridden work of orientalism on the surface, but in his typical way Shelley ‘reorient[s]’ the ‘East/West binary’ and makes an ‘expressive turn’ towards ‘Orientalist plurality’ (p. 135). Kim contextualizes Shelley’s poem through a reading of William Jones’s Poems, consisting chiefly of translations from the Asiatick languages [1772], before turning to a close analysis of the word ‘shape’ in Revolt. It was Shelley’s poetics of ‘shape’, concludes Kim, that allowed Shelley to transcend the orientalist discourses on which he drew. Alessandra Monorchio’s fascinating reading of the revolutionary potential of sympathy, ‘“My Spirit Sought / To Weave a Bondage of Such Sympathy”: Sympathy, Enthusiasm and Revolution in Laon and Cythna’ (KSR 32[2018] 123–33), picks out ‘Laon and Cythna as one of Shelley’s attempts to combat the Lakers’ post-revolution despondency’, and the ideal text to consider the ambivalent potential of sympathy. In the process of ‘elucidating how the poem reveals [Shelley’s] hopes and anxieties about’ the potential of sympathy, Monorchio offers a usefully brief political, philosophical, and scientific history of the concept (p. 124). Diego Saglia, in ‘Shelley’s Revolt in the Mediterranean: Writing Restoration’ (KSR 32[2018] 148–57), continues a rich year for Shelley’s Revolt of Islam, reading the poem as a complex response to the retreat of the French Revolution, the aftermath of Napoleon, and the restoration of ‘Legitimacy’. Re-reading ‘the familiar shortcomings of Shelley’s poem—its complexities, intricacies and contradictions even’ as ‘textual mechanisms for effecting a re-engagement with revolution, as well as a rethinking of restoration’ in its various connotations is productive (p. 157), but more needed to be said on Shelley’s deployment of and engagement with the discourse of orientalism on the rise at this time. In ‘Kindred Spirits in an Age of Political Censure: The Revolt of Islam and the Example of Mary Wollstonecraft’ (KSR 32[2018] 113–22), Fiore Sireci reads Shelley’s poem in dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft, teasing out a number of surprising similarities and sharp differences between the poet and his deceased mother-in-law. Finally, Paul Whickman closed out 2018’s debate over Shelley’s politics with his trenchantly argued and carefully evidenced essay on Shelley’s changes to Laon and Cythna [1817], the original version of The Revolt of Islam, in ‘Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam: Revisions as Transition’ (KSR 32[2018] 102–12). While these changes have been widely regarded as grudging and forced, Whickman continues to read the poem as an ‘evaluative or a transitional one’, but ‘considers the enforced revisions Shelley made to the poem at the end of 1817 in the same light’ (p. 103). Referring to the original text, Whickman identifies the major change in the poem is the swapping of the word ‘God’ for the word ‘Power’. Done to avoid blasphemy laws, this change, while blunting the specificity of Shelley’s original attack on Christianity, ends up, Whickman shows, extending rather than restricting the ‘notion of the collusion between religious and political authority’ (p. 112). ‘These enforced revisions’, Whickman concludes, ‘are therefore not only simple pragmatic acts of self-censorship but can also be seen to provide Shelley with an opportunity to rethink and to refocus an aesthetic and political philosophy’ (p. 112). This textual scholarship has significant ramifications for Bassler’s equation of ‘Power’ with the ‘parafinite’ in Shelley’s metaphysics. The remaining eight articles on Shelley from 2018 largely continued these discussions of revolutionary politics and revolutionary metaphysics. Ben Hewitt explores the competing claims of hope and despair in Shelley’s verse in ‘Percy Shelley and the Tragedies of Lacanian Psychoanalysis’ (ERR 29[2018] 787–803). He argues that Shelley shared a tragic view of the human subject with Jacques Lacan, citing Julian and Maddalo [1818], ‘The Triumph of Life’ [1822], and Prometheus Unbound [1820] as evidence. Both Shelley and Lacan believed that the human mind was inevitably divided and inexplicable to itself. Like Deandrea, however, Hewitt ultimately concludes that Shelley expresses a fundamentally hopeful view of life—as does Lacan, by extension. Though the truth may be ‘imageless’, according to Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, ‘eternal love’ is a guiding star that can lead the visionary mind beyond the confines of finite knowledge (pp. 799–800). In this conclusion, Hewitt provides a different interpretation of what Bassler calls the Shelleyan ‘parafinite’ (see above). Greg Ellerman combines philosophy and politics in his analysis of Queen Mab [1813], ‘A Poetics of Ether’ (ERR 29[2018] 389–98). Ellerman focuses on ‘figurative transformations’ in Shelley’s early poem: Queen Mab constantly oscillates between images of matter and spirit, ‘upending … metaphorical and metaphysical hierarchies’ (p. 390). Ellerman begins by sketching contemporary science as Shelley understood it, and then goes on to show how Shelley uses the concept of ‘ether’ to critique prevailing scientific ideas. What makes Shelley’s poem ‘ethereal’ is its ‘suspension of oppositions’, which for Ellerman has a political as well as a poetic dimension (p. 397). Philipp Erchinger, in ‘Science, Footnotes and the Margins of Poetry in Percy B. Shelley’s Queen Mab and Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head’ (EJES 22[2018] 241–57), agrees that Shelley suspends oppositions, though he has a different idea of how this suspension comes about. Where Ellerman focuses on Shelley’s imagery, Erchinger discusses Shelley’s use of annotations. Shelley’s annotations blur the boundaries of text and world, and therefore confound poetry and not-poetry, imagination and reason, literature and science. Shelley is not the sole focus of Erchinger’s analysis. He argues that Charlotte Smith makes a fundamentally similar use of annotations in her blank verse masterpiece, Beachy Head [1807]. This specific comparison is welcome in a field where male and female poets are often tacitly separated into two discrete and homogeneous groups. Alexander Freer, ‘Shelley’s Vestimentary Poetics’ (P&L 42[2018] 292–310), drops down from the lofty heights of politics, metaphysics, and science to consider an altogether more quotidian aspect of Shelley’s poetry: clothes. Like Ellerman and Erchinger, he finds that Shelley is preoccupied with the union of opposites and the deconstruction of categories. He takes issue with the long line of Shelley critics who have claimed that his gaudy imagery is a ‘robe’ that ‘distract[s] from his faulty ideas’ (p. 292). In fact, Shelley had a sophisticated understanding of how the poems’ obvious surface and deep ideas interact. His poems are full of clothing imagery, which symbolizes the ‘multiplicity of [poetry’s] surfaces and shapes’ (p. 306). Brian McGrath engages in an even more minute form of word analysis in ‘Shelley, Among Other Things’ (MLN 133[2018] 1188–1205), focusing on the difference between ‘among’ and ‘amongst’, and arguing for the profound importance of Romantic prepositions. If his methods are slightly credulity-straining, McGrath’s conclusions are nonetheless sound and illuminating. Taylor Schey’s maddeningly productive essay on Shelley, Hume, scepticism, and the sufficiency of ignorance, ‘Skeptical Ignorance: Hume, Shelley, and the Mystery of “Mont Blanc”’ (MLQ 79[2018] 53–80) pulls up short of a solid, satisfying conclusion, shrewdly demonstrating, in its mischievous phrasing, ‘the points at which one stops and walks away, empty-handed but satisfied, thereafter ignoring the demands of metaphysical inquiry’ (p. 62). Schey’s Shelley is a poet and thinker fundamentally uninterested in getting to the root of things—indeed, the delving, penetrative aspect of epistemological reasoning seems to be a specific point of resistance. While I could not wholly agree with Schey’s reading of Shelley as a grand practitioner of the ‘poetics of epistemic sufficiency’ (p. 75)—Shelley seems much too restless and various a poet—the argument advanced here sheds light on a number of key mistakes in the orthodox formulation of Romanticism that continues, however covertly, to exert its sway over contemporary scholarship. Sophie Thomas pushes Shelley into three dimensions in her fascinating essay, ‘Vital Matter(s): Shelley, Herder, and Sculpture’ (ERR 29[2018] 377–87). Drawing out Shelley’s time spent studying statuary in Italy, Thomas proposes, via Herder, that such statuary allowed Shelley to think in new ways about the intersection between the ideal and the real, the results of which, Thomas shows, are recorded in the unique awareness of position and figure in Prometheus Unbound [1820]. Two articles were published on Robert Southey’s poetry in 2018, both of them by Stuart Andrews, and both published in Wordsworth Circle. In the first article, Andrews reveals how Southey shaped the reception of Thomas Chatterton (WC 49[2018] 65–71). He reveals the considerable scholarly effort Southey put into the edition, transcribing thousands of lines from Chatterton’s unpublished manuscripts (p. 66), and defending Chatterton’s poetry stoutly in the periodical press and in his edited volumes (p. 67). Andrews goes on to describe how Chatterton was picked up by editors and literary critics in the nineteenth century, revealing the profound influence of Southey’s work on later readers. In the second article, ‘Coleridge, Southey and Freedom of the Press: 1816–1821’ (WC 49[2018] 162–7), Andrews considers Southey and Coleridge’s arguments against freedom of the press in the reactionary years after Waterloo. For a magazine editor, Southey was remarkably hostile to freedom of publication. In his later political writings, Coleridge too seemed to long for greater state control of the media, but his advocacy was ‘muted’ by his respect for English law and his feeling that censorship was practically unworkable (p. 164). Southey had no such qualms. As the lone article concerning John Thelwall and Romantic poetry, Jerome McGann’s ‘Romantic Subjects and Iambic Laws: Episodes in the Early History of Contract Negotiations’ (NLH 49[2018] 597–615) is, fortunately, a good one. Drawing on the heroic efforts of Judith Thompson and others to recover Thelwall’s texts and reputation, McGann gives a detailed account of Thelwall’s ideas of speech and performance—specifically, how Thelwall imagined a poem should be read. The social, affective, community-directed act of reading out loud is then directed towards Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others, arguing again for Thelwall’s profound influence on the canon of writers from which he was removed by political persecution in the 1790s. It is a pleasure to notice Harriet Kramer Linkin’s article on the three-way relationship between Mary Tighe, George Romney, and William Hayley (Romanticism 24[2018] 1–21), the only article dedicated to either Tighe or Hayley in 2018. Her article sheds new light on the challenges faced by women poets in a literary industry dominated by gentlemen. She reveals how Hayley tried to turn Tighe into his proxy, asking her to publish her own Psyche [1805] with the illustrations Romney had made for Hayley’s own version of the Psyche legend. Romney’s illustrations would have been comically inadequate for Tighe’s poem: ‘Only the first cartoon pictures a moment that appears in Tighe’s Psyche; the rest depict episodes Tighe omits and perspectives she seeks to alter’ (p. 2). Tighe herself painted at least one image based on her poem, which, as Linkin shows, is remarkably similar to two of Blake’s plates for The Book of Thel [1789]. The essay is a fine, detailed biographical study, illuminating another subgraph of Romantic poetry’s wider social network. William Wordsworth continues to be a titanic presence in studies of Romantic poetry. Three major monographs and a host of articles testify to scholars’ continued fascination with Wordsworth’s writings on subjectivity, religion, and the natural environment. Mark Bruhn’s energetic, closely argued study for Wordsworth’s beginnings, Wordsworth before Coleridge: The Growth of the Poet’s Mind, 1785–1797, adds yet another set of philosophical influences to the ever-growing list of intellectual mentors who, apparently, helped the young Lakeland poet on his way to his mature, ‘philosophical’ verse. Taking issue with what he terms the ‘habit of tracing the pattern of Wordsworth’s thought according to the successive bents of Coleridge’s’, which has, Bruhn claims, ‘led too many critics to neglect the original impulses behind Wordsworth’s philosophy and thus, inevitably, to disregard their presence and persistence throughout the body of his work’ (p. 3), Bruhn swaps traditional influences like Coleridge and William Godwin for Dugald Stewart, Ralph Cudworth, and Kant via Friedrich August Nicht. Bruhn’s argument for Stewart in particular hinges on passages from a handful of letters Wordsworth wrote to a friend in 1794 about a proposed political periodical to be called The Philanthropist, and on the changes Wordsworth made to An Evening Walk [1793] in 1794. In these changes, Bruhn detects a celebration of the ‘decidedly non-Godwinian values of domestic attachment and natural feeling’ (p. 4), signalling an apparent sea-change in the young Wordsworth’s philosophy. While it must be said that these few letters and some rather minor edits and rewrites to a highly conventional picturesque poem do not always bear up under the strain of carrying Bruhn’s determinedly weighty argument, there is much of value in this book. While his central thesis can feel tendentious, Bruhn’s examination of the poetic and philosophical traditions Wordsworth was working within and without is always lively and engaged. Chapter 2, ‘Growing Out of Pope’, in which Bruhn outlines the ways in which the work of Alexander Pope ‘reinforced in moral and poetic terms the foundational dualism to which’ the very young Wordsworth, at Hawkshead, ‘was already being introduced through his study of mathematics’ (p. 46) is a particular highlight. As Bruhn writes, ‘I trust that readers who … remain skeptical of my specific attributions will nevertheless find the study valuable insofar as it complements the efforts of previous scholars’ (p. 7). Jessica Fay’s patient, thoughtful, painterly study, Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community, takes up the strangely neglected subject of ‘Wordsworth’s subtle, complex, and often conflicted thinking about the routines and legacies of monasticism’ (p. 2). Just how subtle and complex this thinking is quickly becomes apparent as Fay shows Wordsworth entertaining a reverence for monastic ruins as a ‘deeply resonant aspect of the landscape’, while also holding a ‘strong antipathy towards the foundation of Roman Catholic monasteries in England’ (p. 2). This is a conflict Fay is too subtle a scholar to try and resolve, and the interests of the book are broader. As Fay writes, ‘This topic is not merely of interest in terms of what it suggests about religious dimensions of Wordsworth’s writings or his opinions concerning Roman Catholicism; rather, Wordsworth’s thinking about monasticism offers new insights into a range of important issues in his poetry and prose, including the historical resonances of the landscape, local attachment and memorialization, gardening and cultivation, Quakerism and silence, solitude and community, pastoral retreat and national identity’ (p. 2). Key to this range is Fay’s entirely convincing argument that Wordsworth viewed ‘monastic sites as loci that draw together temporally disparate communities’, rather than simply stops on a conventional picturesque itinerary; sites enriched ‘by the passage of time and the work of nature … palimpsests of collective identity’ (p. 2)—places through which (and at which) questions of historical inheritance and social practice could be mediated and meditated upon. This centring of monasticism offers a new vantage on Wordsworth’s still oddly under-examined antiquarianism, particularly in the so-called ‘middle years’ of his career, covering the composition of poems like The White Doe of Rylstone (written 1807) and parts of the Excursion. Perhaps the most valuable chapter is ‘Quakerism, Cultivation, and the Coleorton Period’, in which Fay identifies an appreciation and emulation of Quaker thought and worship running through Wordsworth’s poetic project and, indeed, his move to and reverence for agrarian community, in line with Thomas Clarkson’s account of Quaker worship and beliefs in Portraiture of Quakerism [1806]. With their connection of spiritual and material gardening, and their reverence for silence and natural communion, Clarkson’s Quakers chime with ‘Wordsworth’s own habits and experiences’ to a remarkable degree (p. 68). In less skilled hands this material might appear dense or obscure, but Fay’s lucid prose and careful research make for a remarkably accessible and thoroughly evidenced argument. While some of Fay’s conclusions, particularly with regard to the political ramifications of Wordsworth’s taking up a kind of sublimated monasticism, might have been pushed further, this book makes a valuable and startlingly original contribution to Wordsworth studies. Similarly original but entirely different in its aerial approach, Thomas H. Ford’s Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change takes as its subject that most subtle of Romantic fluids, air—or, more properly, atmosphere. Practising what he terms ‘ecophilology’ (p. 1), Ford takes the reader on an inspirited tour of the Romantic (in)firmament, a transhistorical journey made possible by the unique qualities of atmosphere as both material and metaphor, a fundamentally unstable, shifting figure that never quite settles itself as literal or figurative, but hovers, breathes, and gusts between these two poles. As Ford writes, this ‘book describes the historical emergence of these semantic paradoxes of atmosphere’, tracing particularly the ways in which the ‘conceptual recursivity’ of atmosphere—its function as both that which constitutes and that which is constituted by, mood, event, history—provides the model and the medium for Romanticism’s ‘new and self-defining atmospheric sense of history’, as a distinct historical period and also a historically mobile style or mode (pp. 2–3). Drawing on etymologies and histories of usage to show the manner in which atmosphere continues its work as a subtle medium into the present, via works of philosophy, natural history, and medical science by writers like Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and John Thelwall, all of whom are arranged around the apparently central figure of William Wordsworth, Ford argues that, in Wordsworth’s lyric poetry, ‘atmospherics and language were brought together into a new configuration that was seen as capable of communicating the otherwise indescribably unique feeling of a delimited historical moment to other worlds and other times’ (p. 3). Key to this communication is a certain airy permeability, one Ford detects specifically in Wordsworth’s most anthologized piece of blank verse, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, a title shortened to ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above’ to ‘position this poem as a kind of sky-writing, an inscription set aloft in an aerial zone’ (p. 156). Ford’s close reading of this specific, load-bearing text does not arrive until the book’s final chapter, the previous four operating as both fascinating explorations of atmospheric science and thought and as so many alternative introductions to a thoroughly canonical Romantic text. While these chapters are mesmerizing in their own right, an almost inevitable sense of anticlimax hovers over the final chapter, a chapter to which I arrived slightly out of breath, having traversed the length of the book. While his theoretical and historical frames are endlessly suggestive and remarkably confident, Ford’s reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’, by contrast, is partial, convenient, and not wholly convincing—prone to a certain breathlessness. Arguing that the fact that ‘Wordsworth pushed the respiratory patterns of classical rhetoric to the limit can be shown empirically: try reading out aloud the second verse-paragraph of “Lines” with just two breaths, pausing to inhale only after the full stop in line 36’ (pp. 165–6), for example, Ford, in his haste to provide solid evidence for an airy architecture, floats over commas, semi-colons, colons, and other text marks that might invite a reader to stop for breath. His subsequent formulation, that ‘[y]ou do not see into the life of things until breath is almost suspended, and until the metabolic interchange required by any act of reading is reduced below the threshold of atmospheric comfort’ (p. 168), seems, as a result, somewhat laboured. This is, however, a minor gripe with a dazzling study, one that rides the still-raging Romantic wind from the 1790s to the present with breathtaking ease, even if it does sometimes sink and touch the ground. Sanford Budick offers a sophisticated reading of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (MLQ 79[2018] 145–71). He revisits the classic themes of cognition, happiness, temporality, and the sublime in the poem, situating Wordsworth in a philosophical dialogue with Coleridge, John Milton, and Immanuel Kant. Though he makes scarcely creditable claims about Kant’s direct influence on Wordsworth, it must be said that Budick’s philosophical framework does give great clarity to his argument. He concludes that Armytage is able to achieve a problematic happiness by entering ‘a dimension that escapes linear time’ (p. 157). In a meditative state, Armytage is able to recognize aspects of consciousness that precede all actual experience. Piotr Kałowski views ‘The Ruined Cottage’ through a medical frame in his essay ‘“Vain Dalliance with Misery”: Moral Therapy in William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”’ (Anglica 27:i[2018] 21–33). Kałowski argues that the male characters in the poem treat the female characters like psychiatric patients. He historicizes psychiatry, reconstructing the Romantic-era notion of ‘moral therapy’. Moral therapy was a kind of talking cure, where the counsellor tried to be sympathetic while persuading the patient to conform to society’s norms (p. 22). This mixture of sympathy and moral authoritarianism is what characterizes the behaviour of the male characters in the poem. As a result, the poem ‘treats Margaret’s traumatic experiences as a thought exercise’ and ‘ignor[es] her individuality’ (p. 31). James Chandler’s ‘The Question of Sensibility’ (NLH 49[2018] 467–92) is a wide-ranging account of the problem of ‘sensibility’ in literary history, but it culminates in a reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ that will doubtless be of great interest to scholars of Romantic poetry. He begins by demonstrating how relevant the old concept of ‘sensibility’ remains to contemporary defences of the humanities. There is a growing tradition of university teachers who are convinced ‘that sensibility formation is richest when literary education remains open to the past’ (p. 481). In ‘Tintern Abbey’, argues Chandler, Wordsworth shows us how such ‘sensibility formation can be achieved. The poem charts a series of moments in which Wordsworth moves from the perception of smaller realities to larger ones, and the poem as a whole can be seen as an ‘effort to serialize achieved sensibility’ (p. 487). Wordsworth studies has always been dominated by work on Wordsworth’s philosophy and poetics. It is a pleasure therefore to turn to an innovative work on the poet’s reception: ‘The Power of the Weak Signifier: Wordsworth’s Lucy in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy’, by Nicole Gervasio (MLS 47[2018] 36–57). Gervasio reads Wordsworth’s Lucy as ‘an archetype for the precarity associated with women of her time’ (p. 38). Wordsworth’s portrayal of the mysterious Lucy is so ‘amorphous’ she becomes ‘ontologically impossible’; in this way, Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems are ‘unconscious[ly]’ misogynistic (p. 40). It is this very ‘flatness’ that has allowed Lucy to be appropriated in so many different cultural contexts, argues Gervasio, including in J.M. Coetzee’s South Africa and Jamaica Kincaid’s Antigua (p. 41). In ‘Wordsworth’s Dropsy: Flux and Figure in The Excursion’ (Romanticism 24[2018] 36–52), Arden Hegele draws attention to Wordsworth’s most maligned work of poetry. Her essay is a study of the ‘hydraulics’ of the ‘embodied mind’ in The Excursion (p. 36)—to make sense of the mind’s embodiment, Wordsworth imagines it as a liquid. Her key example come from Book II of The Excursion, where the poet and the Wanderer encounter a waterlogged copy of Candide [1759] on the ground, and realize that it belongs to the Solitary. The book is a symbol of the Solitary’s ‘inflamed, unbalanced, and over-saturated emotional state’ (p. 38). Hegele is a scholar of medical humanities, and ably situates Wordsworth’s hydraulic image of mind in eighteenth-century psychology. Her essay is a useful counterweight to the ‘pneumatic’ approaches to Romantic psychology that have predominated in recent decades. John Hughes pays welcome attention to an early Wordsworth poem in his ‘Towards a Reading of Wordsworth’s “Now Ye Meet in the Cave”’ (RoN 71[2018]). ‘Now Ye Meet in the Cave’ [c.1788] is an ‘abandoned, fractured, and irreducibly puzzling poem’, but Hughes finds himself ‘intrigued by the unbridled intensity of [its] imploring voice’, its ‘mystery’, and its ‘haunted, haunting scenario’. Hughes carefully considers a range of Wordsworth’s very early works to build up a context for this weird Gothic fragment. Many of Wordsworth’s early poems centre on ‘a self who is constrained and impaired by a mysterious, shadowy muse associated with the world of death’. In this context, Hughes reads ‘Now Ye Meet in the Cave’ as a reflection on the instability of subjectivity, uncovering deep philosophical resonances in the incomplete text. Jamison Kantor begins his essay on ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood’ [1804]—‘Immortality, Romanticism and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination’ (PMLA 133[2018] 508–25)—with a somewhat amusing episode in the poem’s reception: its appropriation in the order of service at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. Thatcher’s funeral leads him to a question: ‘Why do liberals love the Immortality Ode?’ (p. 512) His story begins with John Stuart Mill, who ‘project[ed] his own crisis onto Wordsworth’ in order to ‘reaffirm the universality of utilitarian liberalism’ (p. 514). The apparently healthful and hopeful message of the poem made it easy to appropriate as a text promoting sound middle-class values—despite the poem’s own radical critique of bourgeois economic values. Kantor continues his story into the twentieth century, showing how the ode was appropriated by mid-century liberals like Lionel Trilling, and how it has been used to justify neoliberal projects like Margaret Thatcher’s. Kantor’s essay is, all in all, a fine piece of reception analysis. In a note for the Wordsworth Circle, David Lewis, ‘Wordsworth’s Iron Works’ (WC 49[2018] 93), reveals an amusing inconsistency in Wordsworth’s behaviour. It turns out that one of the pre-eminent anti-industrial poets was a shareholder in an ironworks! According to a document from c.1843, the elder Wordsworth was a shareholder in the Cambrian Iron and Smelter Company, an ‘enterprise dedicated to the creation of the blast furnaces, the coke ovens and the slag heaps that would soon disfigure a largely unspoilt valley’ (p. 93). In the vein of getting and spending, Tianyu Ma returns to an old Wordsworthian favourite in ‘Boons, Authority, and Imagination: A Reading of “The World Is Too Much with Us”’ (ANQ 31[2018] 82–7), investigating the usage and evolution of the word ‘boon’ as a means of exploring what Ma terms the poem’s call to ‘activity and authority’ (p. 82). The poem, Ma concludes, calls for its readers to exert their imaginations to engage with nature. Alan Richardson dispenses woodsy wisdom in ‘Lucy on the Trail with Violets’ (WC 49[2018] 108–10), claiming ‘the crucial role played by common knowledge in reading and appreciating poetry has rarely been remarked upon and remains relatively unstudied even as of this writing’ (p. 108). Richardson goes on to express his belief that poetry is easier to read when you have some knowledge of the world, a sentiment he briefly links to Wordsworth’s remarkable ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways’ [1798]. While Richardson’s argument is either absent or commonplace, it did helpfully remind me of the sheer complexity of affect in Wordsworth’s ‘simple’ lyrics. Clifford Siskin, meanwhile, returns with gusto to the question of Wordsworthian ‘system’ in ‘Renewing Wordsworth’ (WC 49[2018] 113–22). For a number of critics, including, most famously, Matthew Arnold, the trick to appreciating Wordsworth was to rescue him from his system—the historically inflected but unique models of poet and reader that Wordsworth expounded on across his career, one that helped found and spread the ‘system’ of culture and aesthetics we still live under. Uncovering this system at its instigation, Siskin characterizes Wordsworth as ‘the Enlightenment Poet of system’ (p. 121). But while Siskin’s argument is never less than compelling, it relies heavily upon canonical works of blank verse, a reliance that creates a false sense of uniformity. For Siskin’s argument to carry through, Wordsworth’s errancies and divergences, the extraordinary multiplicity since disciplined by two centuries of critical and editorial work, also need to be grappled with. David Stewart does just that in his quest to uncover that most subtle and retiring of creatures, the Wordsworthian sense of humour, in ‘Wordsworth, Parody, Print, and Posterity, 1814–1822’ (ERR 29[2018] 601–18). Expanding on work done on parody and reception by scholars like Brian R. Bates, Stewart surveys the extraordinary number of parodies made of Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s poetry in the early nineteenth century, marking a substantial change in Wordsworth’s public visibility. He also argues persuasively for the extent to which, in the complexity and instability of his irony and authorial persona, Wordsworth foresaw and pre-empted the ‘range of doubles whose existence he seemed to have anticipated’ (p. 613). Joanna Taylor maps the consequences of sound and listening for Romanticism in her examination of Lakeland soundscapes, ‘Echoes in the Mountains: The Romantic Lake District’s Soundscape’ (SiR 57[2018] 383–406). Considering the unique environmental and geographical features of the Lakes, Taylor re-reads Wordsworth’s poetry as uniquely sensitive to the aural, and stresses the primacy of ‘echo’s role in the development of what I have called the acoustic sublime’ (p. 394). In her novel and far-reaching essay on siblings and the ‘inter-subjectivity that underpins Wordsworth’s poetic self-imagining’ (p. 621), ‘Wordsworth’s Sibling Logic: “We Are Seven” and “Tintern Abbey”’ (ERR 29[2018] 619–37), Talia M. Vestri poses a major challenge to the still-kicking conception of Wordsworth (and, therefore, Romanticism) as consumed with the solitary and the egotistical sublime. Instead, Vestri proposes we focus instead on the many webs of interrelation and community that characterize Wordsworth’s poetry, even at the level of the text—Vestri is particularly shrewd in noting the way in which Wordsworth’s poems ‘have been orphaned from one another’ (p. 621), removed from their volume-siblings in the process of being anthologized. The ramifications of this focus on lateral relations are manifold—most excitingly, Vastri offers a method of reading Wordsworth’s relationship to his siblings, specifically Dorothy, that diverts sharply from the sometimes scabrous biographical readings that have come before. Siblings, rather than proxies to dominate or engage in incest with, become a network of other minds and bodies to think, sense, and live with. The final three poets we consider are Helen Maria Williams, Anne Yearsley, and Lady Nairne. Continuing a trend for 2018, each of these female poets was the subject of a single article only. In a piece for the European Romantic Review (ERR 29[2018] 141–59), John Bugg offers a fresh interpretation of Helen Maria Williams’ ‘Ode on the Peace’ [1783]. Williams’s poem is a sustained meditation on the challenges of peacetime, in which she crystallizes the public mood in Britain in the wake of the American Revolution. Bugg provides a rich context for the poem, considering articles, poetry, and bumptious songs from the period. Williams transcends this context, writing a poem that is ‘an anthology of this fraught archive’ of postwar literature (p. 150). For her, representing peace poetically is a professional challenge. According to Bugg, it is a challenge Williams rises triumphantly to meet. In an essay on Anne Yearsley, ‘Ann Yearsley’s “Brutus” and the Evangelical Epic Poem’ (SiR [2018]57 265–300), Matthew Leoparti offers a new take on the revival of epic poetry in Romantic Britain. Like other epic poets of the period, Yearsley’s key themes were nation and empire. While she certainly expressed imperialist ideas in ‘Brutus’, her fragmentary epic of 1796, she also used the poem ‘to subvert imperialist discourse’ (p. 265). Leoparti considers ‘Brutus’ as an ‘evangelical epic’, comparing it with a range of missionary epics by Thomas Beck, Thomas Williams, Helen Maria Williams and Southey. Compared to these other poets, Yearsley is characteristically uncertain. Leoparti links her uncertainty over the distinction between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’ to her own uncertainty about her place as a working-class poet in a genteel industry, and her own complex relationship with her Anglican faith. In his essay, ‘Gendering the Scottish Nation: Rereading the Songs of Lady Nairne’ (ERR 29[2018] 681–709), George Christian makes an original contribution to the emergent field of Scottish Romanticism. He counters the common sentimental readings of Nairne’s patriotic songs, revealing that her poetry is really full of ambivalent political messages. In her poetry, she ‘continually resists the forces of Anglicization’ (p. 690), and calls for a return to traditional Scottish values of ‘truth’ and ‘conscience’ (p. 692). The aesthetic and political aspects of Nairne’s poetry are in harmony with one another; Christian makes a strong argument for paying greater attention to her. Despite media hype to the contrary, the academic study of Romantic poetry remains rooted in the traditional canon, and scholarship continues to be dominated by a sane and careful historicism. Interest in female poets continues to grow, and it is now clearly the norm for a multi-author study to take in at least one or two female writers alongside the more familiar men. It remains to be seen whether the floodgates will finally open, releasing a steady flow of articles and monographs dedicated to individual female poets. Likewise, it remains to be seen whether studies of Romantic poetry will shuffle off their Englandism, and start to take in a wider range of contexts. The increasing tendency of ecocriticism to place poems in a global climatic context is one step in this direction. 4. Drama Last year’s review ended with the observation that critical output disproportionately focused on London theatres and big-name figures—be they performers or writers. It called for studies which reached to the regions, the uncelebrated professionals, the amateurs of the working and middle classes, the temporary and the itinerate. Unfortunately, in spite of it having been a rich year for theatre research, this is a call which has been only partially answered. Sarah Siddons might not dominate criticism as she did in 2017, but the big Romantic hitters Byron and Shelley still feature prominently. This year’s European Romantic Review devoted an entire issue to Romantic drama (ERR 29[2018]). Drama, according to the issue’s editors, is the Cinderella form of Romantic scholarship—overlooked and dismissed in spite of its ‘urgent’ nature. In curating the issue, the editors aim to start a discussion on Romantic drama and ‘inspire theater directors to put Romantic Dramas on stage’ (Roland Lyssell and Marie-Louise Svane, p. 2). While some may question the desirability of sitting through a production of Byron’s Marino Faliero or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, the under-appreciated importance of theatre in British society during the Romantic period is a theme which will recur in the course of this review. Three of the six articles in the issue consider either British drama or writers. In ‘Staging the Byronic Hero’ (ERR 29[2018] 3–11), Frederick Burwick demonstrates that the Byronic hero was a significant stage presence in the early nineteenth century—whether directly through performances of Byron’s plays and adaptations of his poems, or indirectly via a spate of plays written in the Byronic mode. Actors such as Edmund Kean and Charles Macready exploited audience hopes that the Byronic heroes of the stage would reveal something of the real Byron’s own intrigues by aping the real man’s (supposed) characteristics. Burwick’s main argument is that current critical debate over Byron’s designation as closet dramatist (and, by extension, over his attitude towards the popular stage) is rendered ‘specious and irrelevant’ by the popularity of the Byronic figure in Romantic theatre (p. 2). Scholars of Byron may find that they have limited sympathy with such an absolute dismissal of authorial intentionality. Roland Lysell’s article also makes a closet drama its focus, in ‘Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the Light of Contemporary Concepts of Tragedy’ (ERR 29[2018] 25–35). He contends that Shelley’s poem has more in common with the theatre of the avant-garde than with the classical tragedy of Aeschylus. Thus its indeterminacies—in which objective and subjective, sound and vision, actual and imagined are transfused and confused—would seem less alien to a modern audience than they would have done to one from the early nineteenth century. The last of the Review’s three articles to feature British drama, Marie-Louise Svane, ‘Staging the Orient in Aladdin: London–Copenhagen’ (ERR 29[2018] 37–42), is a neat little piece on the way geographical context can differently affect the stage treatment of the same source text—in this case the Aladdin story as mediated through performances in Copenhagen and London. In Britain, Aladdin is made a pantomime replete with mime, cross-dressing, and buffoonery, whereas in Denmark Aladdin is given mythic significance, romantic grandeur, and a chorus of ethereal singing nymphs. Brits add Widow Twankey, and Danes nymphs. Where the Danish Aladdin is an allegory of poetic creation and relatively free of colonial allusions, British iterations have a distinctly colonial and mercantile overlay—characters are, for instance, named after brands of Chinese tea available on the British market (‘Twankey’ being an inferior-grade green tea). This difference is attributed by the author not to any greater intellectualism on the part of Danish audiences but to Denmark’s declining presence as a colonial power. The way in which performance mutates as its shifts from one geographical setting to another is among the subjects considered in the essay collection, Moving Scenes: The Circulation of Music and Drama in Europe 1700–1815, edited by Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, Philippe Bourdin, and Charlotta Wolff. The two chapters on British theatre are among the more readable. Valerie Maffre, ‘The Evolution of French Adaptations of Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal during the French Revolution and the First Empire’ (pp. 317–30) compares four different French translations of R.B. Sheridan’s School for Scandal, from the faithful (Brunel Delille’s 1789 translation, where the only differences come in the replacement of some of the most particularly English references), to the freewheeling (Chéron de la Bruyère’s translation, also of 1789, makes the hypocrite Joseph Surface the central character, and, in adhering to unity of place and transposing Sheridan’s prose into rhyming alexandrine couplets, presumably makes the play more compatible with French theatrical taste). In a similar vein, Virginie Yvernault, ‘Figaromania in Europe: The Circulation and Appropriation of Beaumarchais’s Plays in the Eighteenth Century’ (pp. 157–70), charts the spread of Beaumarchais’s plays across Europe—including in Britain—noting that the bawdiness of the original tended to be moderated in translation. ‘Notes on a Scandal: Robison, Scott, and the Reception of Kotzebue in Scotland’ (N&Q 65[2018] 314–16) also centres on the reception of a foreign playwright in a British context. Here, Michael Wood proposes that Walter Scott’s disdain for Kotzebue could well be owing to the influence of the Edinburgh denizen John Robison—a conspiracy theorist who, in one work, cites the German playwright as evidence of European plot to overthrow institutions of government and religion. Fairly predictably, 2017 did not exhaust the Frankenstein-related output, and 2018 saw two further pieces on the translation of Shelley’s Gothic novel to popular play. The moment when in ‘a dreary night in November’, Victor Frankenstein brings his creation to life is shrouded in ambiguity. Mary Fairclough’s ‘Frankenstein and the “Spark of Being”: Electricity, Animation, and Adaptation’ (ERR 29[2018] 399–407) details the various ways in which both literary critics and auteurs have filled this gap (the interesting exception here being Peake’s 1819 stage adaptation Presumption, in which the life-giving moment takes place offstage). Fairclough does not believe that Shelley’s description of the Creature having been given the ‘spark of life’ necessarily implies the use of galvanic electricity. She concludes by suggesting that Shelley was deliberately allowing space for creative uncertainty. The essay collection Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, edited by Dennis Cutchins and Dennis Perry, contains two chapters on the early nineteenth-century theatrical adaptations of Shelley’s source text. Lyssette Lopez Szwydky’s chapter, ‘Frankenstein’s Spectacular Nineteenth-Century Stage History and Legacy’, provides a pacey summary of the most interesting of the changes made to Shelley’s novel by Richard Brinsley Peake in his stage adaptation Presumption [1823]. Thus we discover that it is to Peake that we owe the disposal of Walton’s frame narrative, the silencing of the monster, and the addition of Frankenstein’s assistant—all innovations crucial to contemporary imaginings of the monster. One of the more fascinating suggestions proffered by Szwydky is that the monster’s loss of speech was a result of licensing laws. The spoken word had to be kept to a minimum for the play to be permissible on the illegitimate stage. Purging the monster of speech, Szwydky continues, had another positive effect in terms of licensing laws as it rendered the story less morally and politically problematic—leaving only the spectacular where there had been philosophical questioning. In a closely related chapter, ‘A Frankensteinian Model for Adaptation Studies, or ‘It lives!’: Adaptive Symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein’, Glenn Jellenik makes the case for Frankenstein as a paradigmatic model for adaptation studies. Adaptations, he argues, do not exist in binary relationship with their source texts but are vibrantly intertextual—adaptations feed into adaptations and are subject to fresh contextual and intertextual influences. This was a significant year for studies of closet drama—alongside several journal articles (I have already discussed articles on Byron and Shelley’s verse drama) and book chapters, Routledge published what is claimed in the introduction to be ‘the first book to discuss in detail the history, theory, and form of the closet play’: Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form, edited by Catherine Burroughs (p. 3). I will begin with a summary of the standalone pieces before turning to the edited collection. M. Soledad Caballero and Aimee Knupsky, ‘Sharing Contagion: Sympathetic Curiosity and Social Emotion Regulation in Joanna Baillie’s De Montfort’ (RCPS [2018]) is a lengthy essay that attempts to conjoin cognitive science and literary criticism in a bi-directional relationship. In effect this becomes an exercise in reading Baillie’s own dramatic rendering of a ‘passion’ in De Montfort against cognitive scientific research and identifying similarities and divergences. Whether the point of this is to demonstrate Baillie’s psychological prescience and insight or to validate scientific research is not entirely certain. While this essay does not fulfil grand discipline-destroying aims, it certainly contains some useful partial summaries of modern cognitive research. The attempt to identify shortcomings or gaps in modern psychological research through the behaviours of fictional characters is not entirely convincing. Judith Bailey Slagle is likewise concerned with interdisciplinarity in ‘Joanna Baillie and Sir John Herschel’ (WC 49[2018] 85–92). Her article on the friendship between the poet and dramatist Baillie and the astronomer Herschel contains some fascinating snippets of the pair’s correspondence as well of Herschel’s poetry—indeed it is the latter which is the article’s chief focus. Slagle points to a time when an astronomer could be a poet as well as a scientist. In ‘Byronic Indictments: Opposing Transgressions in Byron’s Cain’ (in Peer, ed., Transgressive Romanticism, pp. 151–69), Richard Johnston analyses Cain’s transgressions and contends that they are internally inconsistent. Thus Lucifer’s highly persuasive presentation of God as a ‘bored artist-tyrant’ is undermined narratively, if not logically, by Cain’s subsequent murder of his brother. This, asserts Johnston, renders Cain ‘a quintessential expression of Anne Mellor’s notion of Romantic irony’. In Cain rejection of religion and religious worship are each rendered equally futile. Closet Drama claims it ‘inaugurates a new field’—and it is certainly an important contribution (p. 3). Burroughs’s expert introduction adumbrates the various capabilities of closet drama and its history and suggests a typography for the form—not all closet drama, she stresses, was born as closet drama but some achieved closet drama status and others had closet drama status thrust upon them. Romantic drama features heavily in the collection. Lilla Maria Crisafulli’s chapter shows how Joanna Baillie in Orra (one of her series of Plays on the Passions) presents female loss of reason as a natural response to patriarchal persecution (‘Horror and Terror, Gender and Fear in Joanna Baillie’s Orra’, pp. 97–111). In his chapter on Felicia Hemans, Diega Saglia argues that Hemans imaginatively uses the closet space of her dramas to reflect critically on geopolitical place in the wake of the Vienna Agreement (1816). Hemans’s heroes and heroines either seek a transnational identity or are thwarted by destructive nationalist sentiment (‘Restoration in the Closet: Felicia Hemans’s Drama in the Napoleonic Aftermath’, pp. 112–26). Gioia Angeletti discusses a little-known and surreal playlet called The Hubble-Shoe by the Scottish writer Christian Carstairs. In the absence of any record of whether this play was intended for live performance or private perusal, Angeletti suggests that critics need to come up with new critical paradigms equally able to cope with performed and non-performed drama (‘“Closeted” Discourses in Private Theatricals; The Mystification of Genre and Audience in Christian Carstairs’ The Hubble-Shoe’, pp. 141–52). In a chapter on Byron’s Marino Faliero, Elizabeth Effinger claims that paradoxically close reading can cause readers to ‘listen’ for sonic representations more carefully than they would have done in a live performance (‘Scarred Phonation and the Act of Listening in Byron’s Marino Faliero’, pp. 153–73). Several chapters on the vibrancy and multifariousness of live theatre provide an important counterweight to the quantity of work published this year on closet drama. In ‘Singing Chambermaids and Walking Gentlemen: Teaching Romantic-Era British Theater’ (in Binfield and Christmas, eds., Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, pp. 34–42). David Worrall contends that an appreciation of popular theatre during the Romantic era has the power to upend literary hierarchies, destabilize Romantic notions of authorship, and even force reassessment of the entirety of Romantic society. ‘The 1819 of Percy Bysshe Shelley’, writes Worrall, ‘was not the 1819 of the half-price crowds going to the Surrey, Royal Coburg, or … Adelphi’ (p. 40). This is—fairly obviously—a piece on pedagogical practice, but it is also highly effective and informative proselytization. As such it is a worthwhile read for all Romantic scholars, not just those with an interest in theatre. Gillian Russell’s elegantly written chapter on theatre regulation is the only one in the lengthy Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism to be devoted to the Romantic stage (‘The Regulation of the Theatres’, pp. 250–63). While this seems very limited coverage for such a major art form, this chapter packs an awful lot in. Russell demonstrates how the 1737 Licensing Act and the 1752 Public Entertainments Act (the significance of the latter is too often overlooked) shaped British drama over the next century. Legislation, she contends, was instrumental in politicizing the reception of legitimate drama and in the birth of pop culture; it was a determining factor in dramatic content and styles of rhetorical delivery; and it had a crucial part to play in the contest over the ideological underpinning of theatre itself (profit-making enterprise or public good). Frederick Burwick has the task of providing the theatre chapter in a rival handbook to the Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism: ‘Theatre and Drama’ (in Haekel, ed., Handbook of British Romanticism, published in 2017, too late to be included in last year’s review). The strength of his chapter lies in its use of less well-known illustrative examples—thus, for instance, he cites several cases of theatres facilitating their entry into local economies through the means of inserting punning references to nearby shops and services into their plays and interludes. At times, however, the theoretical framework (he uses a combination of social assemblage theory and performative theory) threatens to overwhelm more substantive content. It is not necessary to use assemblage theory to explore—for example—theatre’s incorporation of current affairs into its theatrical output. Two books make the overshadowed figures who drove the theatrical agenda of the era their subject. Thus, rather than yet another assessment of R.B. Sheridan or Sarah Siddons—however inestimably important to Georgian theatrical life these two luminaries may have been—we have full-length works devoted to Charles Dibdin (covered above in Chapter XI, ‘The Eighteenth Century’) and Thomas Harris. Harris was the manager of Covent Garden—the one who gets forgotten as academics focus repeatedly on the more notorious managers of Drury Lane. In spite of his huge significance to Georgian theatrical culture, very little is known about him. Unlike his flamboyant Drury Lane counterpart, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Harris was a man who kept to the shadows. Thus his first modern biographer, Warren Oakley, writes in his Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris: Spinning Dark Intrigue at Covent Garden Theatre, 1767–1820 that ‘looking for Harris can seem like searching for a past irrevocably lost’ (p. 6). This biography, however, manages brings together a hugely impressive collection of archival sources, many of which should be of use to other scholars of the period. Oakley’s attempts to create a flowing literary narrative are not always helpful. It leads to confusing shifts in and out of the historic present, unconvincing rhetorical flights, and sentences like the following: Harris’s ‘audacious fictions were often completely transparent—such as pretending that his ridiculously young mistress was his daughter in order to ward off others as the protective father—and all the more lovable because of it’ (p. 99). As this is unfootnoted, the reviewer can only suppose that it is Oakley himself who finds Harris’s treatment of his ‘ridiculously young mistress’ lovable. Although not biography in the strictest sense of the term, Ersy Contogouris’s Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth-Century European Art: Agency, Performance, and Representation, a study of the artistic representations of Emma Hamilton, is something akin to it. Hamilton’s clever private mime-like performances of attitudes, or more limited versions of such when sitting for artists, were instrumental in deciding the form of her artistic memorializations. Thus, through performance, a muse was able to become an agent and co-constructer of her image. Emma Peacocke, in ‘“Could Not All This Flesh Keep in a Little Life?”: George IV, Falstaff, and Hal’ (ERR 29[2018] 333–45), follows the precedent of Jonathan Bate’s classic Shakespearean Constitutions by examining the ways in which Shakespeare plays became the lens through which current affairs were viewed. Peacocke is interested in why George IV’s popular Shakespearean counterpart never wholly shifted from Hal to Falstaff, in spite of his ever-increasing girth. Russell Burdekin’s ‘Darkening the Auditorium in the Nineteenth Century British Theatre’ (TN 72[2018] 40–57) is an interesting account of the erratic history of darkening auditoriums—a practice with a longer vintage than we generally believe. In fact, as far back as the seventeenth century, theatres were darkening (or at least dimming) auditoriums to enhance the effect of certain stage illuminations. In 1814 Edmund Kean played Othello not as black, but as a Moor. In doing so he was breaking with 200 years of theatrical precedent, and his performance was met with great acclaim. Atesede Makonnen, in her fascinating article, ‘“Our Blackamoor or Negro Othello”: Rejecting the Affective Power of Blackness’ (ERR 29[2018] 347–55), views Kean’s light Othello as consistent with a historical moment in which the white British population both rejected slavery while simultaneously (perhaps in consequence) imposing or shoring up racial hierarchies. White Romantic critics, she argues, found the degree of emotional and intellectual identification required for a character such as Othello unacceptable—even unachievable—when the tragic hero was conceived as black. Concomitant with this reluctance to sympathize with the black hero was a set of racial stereotypes which held black faces to be less emotionally expressive than those with lighter skin tones. In other words, while freedom was granted, affective influence was denied. Dallin Lewis argues, in ‘Violence, Gender, and the Politics of She-Tragedy in British Abolitionist Literature’ (ERR 29:iv[2018] 459–72), that when imagining a post-slavery future, abolitionist playwrights borrowed the conventions of she-tragedy. In she-tragedy, female death and suffering became the mechanism whereby dispute between two warring males was resolved and new fraternal bonds forged. In Peter Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona [1788] and William Hutchinson’s The Princess of Zanfara [1789] the death of a black woman is the price paid for racial ‘rapprochement’ between a white European man and a black African. There were several Austen-related articles this year. ‘Where Jane Austen Sat: The “Austin” Box at Edmund Kean’s Shylock, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, March 5, 1814’ (Persuasions On-Line [2018]) is a fascinating little piece of historical investigation in which David Worrall identifies the precise location of the seats taken by Jane Austen and party on her trip to the Drury Lane theatre to see Edmund Kean in 1814. The reason this is of interest is that where Austen sat tells us whom she sat with—on which subject Worrall promises to provide more detail in a separate essay. Susan Civale pays tribute to the wit and artistry of the performers of Austentatious, a comedy improv stage parody of an imagined ‘lost’ Austen novel, in an article for Women’s Writing, ‘Austentatious: Comedy Improv and Austen Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century’ (WW 25[2018] 416–28). In the same journal, Christopher Nagle, ‘The Problem of the Jane Austen Musical’ (WW 25[2018] 499–511), asks why, when Jane Austen has been transferred so very effectively to the screen, the same is not true of the stage (he has obviously not been to Austentatious). He proceeds to review three musical versions of Austen novels, one of which (featuring some ‘soaring and intense ballads’) he believes to have defied the usual rule of stage productions of Austen novels and to have been artistically successful. This reviewer enjoyed the song titles. On the one hand this year has produced work on figures and theatres, theatrical forms which have not previously received their critical due. On the other, most studies remain intransigently centred on London and—without wishing to ape current fashionable political rhetoric—more work needs to be done on theatre in the regions. Books Reviewed Aherne Philip. The Coleridge Legacy: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Intellectual Legacy in Britain and America, 1834–1934 . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xvii + 307 . £64.99 ISBN 9 7833 1995 8576. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Barnett Suzanne L. Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xiii + 305 . €93.59 ISBN 9 7833 1954 7237. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bassler O. Bradley. Kant, Shelley and the Visionary Critique of Metaphysics . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 292 . €93.59 ISBN 9 7833 1977 2912. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Beaurepaire Pierre-Yves , Philippe Bourdin , Charlotta Wolff , eds. Moving Scenes: The Circulation of Music and Theatre in Europe, 1700–1815 . Voltaire Foundation . [ 2018 ] pp. 422 . £79 ISBN 9 7807 2941 2063. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Binfield Kevin , William J. Christmas , eds. Teaching Laboring-Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries . MLA . [ 2018 ] pp. 360 . $45 ISBN 9 7816 0329 3488. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bruhn Mark J. Wordsworth before Coleridge: The Growth of the Poet’s Philosophical Mind, 1785–1797 . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 180 . £120 ISBN 9 7811 3848 6447. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Bundock Chris , Elizabeth Effinger , eds. William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror . MUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiv + 297 . £80 ISBN 9 7815 2612 1943. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Burroughs, Catherine, Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form (Routledge, 2018), 278 pp. £120. 9 7811 3809 2563. Cheshire Paul. William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism: A Contextual Study and Annotated Edition of The Hurricane . LiverUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xiv + 258 . £85 ISBN 9 7817 8694 1206. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Contogouris Ersy. Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth-Century European Art: Agency, Performance, and Representation . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. 202 . £120 ISBN 9 7808 1537 4237. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Cope Jonas. The Dissolution of Character in Late Romanticism, 1820–1839 . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. viii + 240 . £75. ISBN 9 7814 7442 1300. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Croft Stephen , ed. John Clare: Selected Poems . Oxford Student Texts. OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. 275 . £11.99 ISBN 9 7801 9841 7880. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cutchins Dennis , Dennis R. Perry , eds. Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture . ManUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 343 . pb £20 ISBN 9 7815 2610 8913. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Davis Jim , Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England . CUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 290 . £22.99 ISBN 9 7811 0749 1717. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Davison Carol Margaret , Marie Mulvey-Roberts , eds. Global Frankenstein . PalMac . [ 2018 ] pp. xxvi + 344 . hb £61.99 ISBN 9 7833 1978 1419, pb £24.99 ISBN 9 7830 3008 6237. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Duff David , ed. The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xxi + 792 . £110 ISBN 9 7801 9966 0896. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Fay Jessica. Wordsworth’s Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community . OUP . [ 2018 ] pp. xvi + 240 . £63 ISBN 9 7801 9881 6201. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Ford Thomas H. 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TI - XII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maaa012
DA - 2020-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/xii-literature-1780-1830-the-romantic-period-lHyHWIbyrt
SP - 609
EP - 709
VL - 99
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -