This essay uses the scriptural figure of jubilee to approach agrarian reform proposals made by Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence during the 1790s. It does so in light of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, which calls for the incorporation of ideology and culture into the study of economic history. Using Piketty’s concept of “social property,” I show how Paine and Spence envision jubilarian transformations of the idea of private property via the installation of permanent redistributive mechanisms. Jubilee, I argue, is distinct from two better-known images of historical change in the 1790s, millenarianism and perfectibilism.

This article reads Romantic literature through the medium of the commonplace book. It asks how Romantic readers doubly articulated place in this genre, within both the volume and the social world around it. I trace what happens to conceptions of women’s writing and authorship when we reconceptualize reading and writing as blended, inseparable activities that do not terminate in publication but move iteratively through cycles of reading and writing, print and manuscript. The focus is on one of a pair of nineteenth-century commonplace books written by Louisa Wildman and her husband, owners and inhabitants of Byron's former home, Newstead Abbey.

The article explores the changes to British print culture in the 1820s which enabled mass production of gift annuals, decorative and illustrated anthologies of poems and stories. It argues that gift-annual poetry extends the characteristic self-reflexivity of Romantic poetry to the technological moment of the 1820s and to questions of value raised by the materiality of books in the commercial marketplace. In the aesthetic interventions and experiments of gift-annual poems, annual poets are self-consciously engaging with the accelerated mechanical reproduction and the increased circulation of literary books for profit in a capitalist marketplace.

Reviewed by: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee Christopher Hanlon (bio) Maurice S. Lee. Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. 277. $39.95 hardcover. A curiosity about his own ways of navigating textual superabundance shapes so many junctures of Maurice Lee’s Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. For example, about 60 pages in he develops a reading of The Scarlet Letter culling from searches he’s conducted within The American Periodical Series and Accessible Archives, the results of which reveal that from 1830 to 1850, the word “scarlet” had a way of turning up alongside the word “slavery” (247 times, he explains, “some of them potentially meaningful” [65–66]). But then, turning on himself, he reminds us that “the New Historicism and its legacy do not offer much guidance for weighing the significance of competing material” (67), a problem exacerbated by the advent of searchable online archives at just the moment when almost all of us were adopting New Historicist interpretive practices that privilege the outlier anecdote—or the forgotten, quirky historical/textual fragment—over wider historical trends. In such circumstances it can be useful, Lee suggests, to run the numbers. His quick demonstration of the statistical arbitrariness of his own reading of The Scarlet Letter’s adjacency to certain nineteenth-century ways of talking about slavery reveals that those 247 hits represent a 2.2% chance that the words “scarlet” and “slavery” will accompany one another in texts printed between 1830 and 1850; but then, [End Page 360] “scarlet” is about as likely to appear near words like “bank” or “clock,” though no one’s currently falling all over themselves to read The Scarlet Letter as an allegory of banking. Maybe they should. Overwhelmed questions the lingering humanistic disdain for algorithmic taste, standardized taxonomies of literary understanding, and quantitative structures of knowledge. With droll dexterity, Lee offers a literary history of those anxieties, depicting the nineteenth century as a period of misgiving over proliferating text as well as angst over the status of the literary in a culture being reshaped by the superabundance of print culture. “Before Big Data and Big Tech, before DH and the dominance of STEM fields,” Lee explains, “the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information that shaped the content and uses of literature” (4). My experience of this book is of simultaneous arrest, unease, and reassurance. I am fascinated by its detailed literary histories of the ways writers and readers responded to textual excess or quantitative taxonomies, but I’m also disquieted to see how many of my own anxieties—about the state of my profession and its mission in an academy increasingly enamored of the quantitative and a society that often seems unable to focus—turn out to replay much older qualms. At the same time and in just that sense, there’s something encouraging about Overwhelmed, which questions antipodal understandings of the literary and the informational by exploring their increasing entwinement during the nineteenth century. Lee’s first chapter approaches the nineteenth-century experience of reading in a culture defined by growing proliferations of print. The experience of textual overabundance prompted a nostalgia for what Lee calls “desert island reading,” the sort of reading whose paradigmatic affective state is that of absorption in a single book. The emblematic nineteenth-century desert island work, appropriately enough, was Robinson Crusoe, about which generations of readers waxed fondly as a childhood reading experience that could provide later conduit back to an age of innocence prior to overabundance. Both the chapter’s other focal points, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson, meditated over the burgeoning of print, if in contrasting ways. Coleridge voices his own anxiety over the waning of close reading and the threat posed to the literary by the merely informative. But for his part, Emerson engages the textual proliferation of his day by acknowledging his own lack of “system” as a reader even as he gives other readers a pass to skim, surface-read, or simply wander within information superabundance—willfully missing the forest for the trees—making...

A New Republic of Women’s Letters Michelle Levy (bio) It is the assumption of this essay that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as “preliminary” rather than integral to the study of literary work. —Jerome J. McGann (1988)1 This article seeks to probe mcgann’s extensive considerations of materiality, textuality, bibliography, and digital remediation as a means of resituating women within what he has termed “a new republic of letters.”2 It does so not by addressing McGann’s substantial body of work on individual women writers—on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Mary Robinson, Ann Batten Cristall, and Christina Rossetti—but rather by extending McGann’s powerful insights into a consideration of how we as scholars can participate in the material transformation of the archive, in this case, the archive of women’s writing. Calling for a full implementation of McGann’s understanding that textual criticism and bibliography are “conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature,”3 this article seeks to establish that scholarly attention to female literary production, transmission, and preservation is imperative for the study of women’s literature. Although McGann’s comments are presented in gender-neutral terms, it is arguable that our attention to women writers is disproportionately impacted by the devaluing of textual studies and bibliography. McGann’s reorientation of attention from text to artifact, from linguistic to bibliographical codes, from product to process, from canon to archive, and from literary to book history provides a necessary foundation for resituating women within a new republic of letters. McGann’s theoretical interventions as they relate to female authors have perhaps been most strongly felt by Early Modern textual scholars of women writers. Largely, this is because feminist scholars of this earlier period have [End Page 519] had to contend with complex and messy textual artifacts, mediated practices of authorship, and collaborative models of production and circulation, for which McGann’s theories of social textuality (also known as the “new textualism”) have been immensely useful. In the later eighteenth century, when many more women began to print their writing, it might seem that we have more transparent and traceable methods of textual dissemination. But, as we are learning, the history of the circulation of women’s writing appears to be as complicated for women of our own period, given the wide variety of print and nonprint publication venues available to them. This essay asks how McGann’s theories of materiality can help us to understand the ways in which gender has shaped both the surviving archive of women’s writing and the scholarly uses of their archives, in the practices of bibliography and textual editing. Canon and Archive In “Philology in a New Key,” McGann draws upon Aleida Assmann’s distinction between two forms of cultural memory, canon and archive (see Figure 1).4 For Assmann, canon and archive provide two means of remembering, with the canon reflecting the cultural repository of “actively circulated memory” and the archive being home to “passively stored memory.”5 Assmann notes that “the archive may be recovered and reclaimed for the canon,” but she cautions that the canon necessarily occupies a finite cultural space.6 Feminist literary scholars, who have spent the last fifty years seeking to migrate women from archive to canon, have been all too aware of this finitude. One measure of the limits placed on canonicity is authorial selections in student anthologies like the Norton Anthology of English Literature. We know that the Norton, over its sixty years of existence, has increased its representation of Romantic women writers: the percentage of pages devoted to female authors of the Romantic period began, in 1962, at zero percent, and has risen, by 2012, to twenty-two percent, an increase in page numbers from zero to two hundred.7 However, the entirety of this increase is due to more pages being added to the anthology as whole; furthermore, over the same period of time, the number of pages devoted to male writers has also increased, from just under six-hundred pages to [End Page 520] seven-hundred. In other words...

Reviewed by: Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism by Kir Kuiken Matthew C. Borushko (bio) Kir Kuiken. Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 264. $45.00. In Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism, Kir Kuiken ably takes up the perennial question of the relationship of Romantic literature to its political moment. Kuiken situates this political moment within two intersecting narratives: the first is the emergence of a new understanding of sovereignty, and the second is the secularization of the modern world. The former is Kuiken’s focus, as Romanticism both “witnessed” and “participated” in foundational changes in the notion of sovereignty (2). The mechanisms through which Romanticism engages ideas of sovereignty, and thus engages politics, are the diverse conceptions of “the imagination” in the period that Kuiken unpacks in chapters on the writings of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. In the “Introduction: Toward a New Political Romanticism,” Kuiken defines “the imagination” not as a faculty or “subjective capacity” but rather as both a locus of conditions and a constellation of questions connected to authority, legitimacy, and other concepts that at the same time inform the very possibility of political sovereignty (6). With the divine right of monarchy effectively in retreat, the Romantics confronted their new political reality by constructing alternative forms of sovereignty in and through their aesthetic experiments. The concepts of anteriority and antecedence are crucial here and help us grasp the contours of how Kuiken links the political and the aesthetic. While divine right rested on a transcendent and thereby always-already prior ground of authority, the new forms of sovereignty—secular and democratic—possessed no such ground but needed to claim something like it: to claim, that is, an anteriority that is not anterior. Kuiken nimbly summarizes this “tension” or “aporia” of modern sovereignty and connects it to the process of the Romantic imagination: The Romantics attempt to address this anteriority through the imagination precisely because it mirrors, represents, and formalizes an a-legal, unconditional ground. By being prior to laws of judgment, laws of nature, and political law, the imagination enters into a relation [End Page 413] with what Agamben has called a ‘zone of anomie,’ a space prior to any particular determination of law. (10–11) Indeed, Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and State of Exception, along with Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign inform Kuiken’s introduction. However, it is Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism that Kuiken engages most directly, and indeed most pointedly insofar as Kuiken pitches Imagined Sovereignties against Schmitt’s interpretation of the Romantic imagination. Schmitt’s reading of Romanticism is that it places the subjective imagination’s free play at the center of authority, thus enabling an escape from politics when everything becomes aestheticized: “In short,” Kuiken writes, on Schmitt’s reading “the Romantics substitute the subjective imagination in place of real ethical and political commitments” (13). Against Schmitt’s charge of avoidance (specifically, the avoidance of “the exception as the proper ground of modern sovereignty”), Kuiken proposes new avenues though which Romanticism does engage the exception (12). For one, Romanticism involves a “theory of the sovereign as constituted by something that cannot be made the object of his autonomous will” in a manner similar to how a poet’s creations will have effects long after she is gone (14). Second, Kuiken also argues that Romanticism offers an alternative to absolute sovereignty: While the Romantics still ground sovereignty on the notion of the unconditional, they nonetheless invoke a relation to it that does not necessarily treat it as an absolute, which would in turn produce a figure of absolute sovereignty. Rather, a sovereign’s relation to the exception or the unconditional exposes him to an exteriority that he cannot master and reveals that the very thing he requires for legitimacy exceeds his grasp. (14) Finally, for Romanticism it is literature that is “perhaps the most important element of its intervention into political theory” because its fiction-making power is analogous to the fiction-making that the sovereign of necessity undertakes (15). Kuiken is explicit on the analogy at the heart of his project: “The motifs...

John Braham and "The Death of Nelson" Susan Rutherford (bio) Mr. Braham gave "The Death of Nelson" amidst the cheers of the Company. Musical World, May 1, 1847 A top his column in trafalgar square, admiral lord horatio nelson gazes over London's cityscape. His stance is calm and self-possessed, the corners of his mouth tightened in a slight moue of concentration, his empty right sleeve pinned neatly to his chest whilst his remaining hand rests on the sword angled behind him; his right leg, slightly bent with its toes protruding from the very limit of his pedestal (as if he might step serenely into space), gives a casual elegance to his posture. Such is the view accessible mostly to the birds swooping around his figure, because Nelson is surprisingly small (5.5m) in relation to the column and its massive base (46.5m).1 From the pavement, we see only that nonchalant, easy shape: a look-out, or so it might seem, for the nation's future. This monument, erected in 1843 and one of London's most prominent landmarks,2 was the product of an industry that had assiduously constructed and sustained the Nelson myth since the admiral's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Its message of patriotic heroism had been vigorously disseminated through diverse channels: festivals, books, pamphlets, pictures, statues, china, memorabilia, objets d'art, and music. One such latter contribution (perhaps the most influential of all the musical manifestations) to this concretization of Nelson's image was John Braham's song, "The Death [End Page 525] of Nelson." Nelson's Column, a fixed structure in space suggesting a living being, was thus partly brought into being by Braham's conversely fluid, temporal evocation of the admiral's death. Indeed, in this article I ask whether the song might be heard as an aural monument: an edifice in rhythmic motion and tonal architecture that promoted shared reflection, facilitating the visitation of different aspects of the events at Trafalgar from the sailors' first sight of the French to the death of their hero and commander in the midst of an important victory. Above all, it gave repeated, insistent voice to those vital words that shaped Nelson's legend—"England expects that every man this day will do his duty"—words which would be similarly inscribed (in abbreviated form) on the bas-relief illustration of the stricken Nelson on the pedestal of the column.3 In so doing, the song invites consideration of the links between both its creator (Braham) and its subject (Nelson), and music's role in commemorative art both as offering a visceral experience of recall, and as shaping the metropolitan landscape. John Braham Nelson needs little introduction; not so the other protagonist here, John Braham (1774–1856).4 Yet he was once the best-known singer of his day, beginning his professional career as a boy treble at Covent Garden in 1787. Following adolescence, he re-emerged as a tenor under the tutelage of Venanzio Rauzzini, making his second London debut at the age of twenty-three in Stephen Storace's Mahmoud at Drury Lane in 1796. Something of his remarkable impact can be gleaned from his immediate employment at the King's Theatre, which staged Italian operas and hired, in the main, only Italian singers. Braham subsequently became among the earliest British singers to build a successful career in Italy from 1797, performing at various theaters including La Scala, Milan. In 1801 he returned to London, becoming the country's leading tenor for the next forty or so years. He made— and lost—a veritable fortune; appeared in some of the most historically significant musical works of the period, including the first British performances of Weber's Der Freischütz (1824) and Oberon (1826); combined singing with composition and impresarial activities; and was fêted and castigated in turns by the press. Unusually, he was both Britain's most accomplished elite singer and the one with the surest popular reach. [End Page 526] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Monument of Lord Nelson, Guildhall, London; sculptor James Smith; engraving published in Richard Clarke's The...

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of departure for thinking about the material turn in both contemporary theoretical discourse and book history together. Both, I think, attempt to understand the meanings and effects of material actors. Taken together, however, they can provide greater insight into the meanings of texts as objects, and a more complete sense of what is in our archives. Finally, I argue that book history's disciplinary habits of moving between a text's material presence, or bibliographic code, and its linguistic code, might provide a model for literary critics pondering current theoretical work in new materialism and the agency of things.

Secret Agents: Agency without Responsibility in The Mysteries of Udolpho Hope Rogers (bio) Early in ann Radcliffe’s the mysteries of udolpho (1794), the novel’s heroine, Emily St. Aubert, decides to leave the convent in which she has been staying since being orphaned by the death of her father. She considers taking the veil and remaining there, but is swayed from this inclination by her desire for Valancourt, a young man she met while travelling with her father: “It was the remembrance of Valancourt, of his taste, his genius, and of the countenance which glowed with both, that, perhaps, alone determined her to return to the world.”1 Her motive for departing the convent—the hope that Valancourt will become her husband—is directly stated, save for the narrator’s “perhaps,” which oddly refuses to commit to the causal relation. Radcliffe then backtracks further. After enumerating Emily’s many reasons for liking Valancourt, she reminds readers that he has made no formal declaration and therefore qualifies that “even the hope of seeing him again was so distant, that she was scarcely conscious of it, still less that it influenced her conduct on this occasion” (89). The passage starts out with a seemingly straightforward instance of agency, in which interest motivates choice and choice prompts action: Emily wants to be with Valancourt, decides to leave the convent, and actually does so.2 But the passage ends with something far muddier: Emily is “scarcely conscious” of her interest—“the hope of seeing him again”—and “still less” aware that her choice is informed by that interest. To be sure, a stronger statement of agency would hardly be proper. As Radcliffe subtly reminds us, a young lady could not show an active preference for a young man who had not declared his own affections without violating the bounds of decorum. [End Page 539] Thus, Emily’s almost unconscious chain of thought and action, which many would not call agency at all, is the most that is permitted. But practically speaking, it makes little difference whether her agency can be avowed as a clear progression from interest to choice to action: her desire is accomplished regardless. In fact, because her motive remains latent, Emily retains a certain freedom upon leaving the convent. She has not left to reunite with Valancourt; she has simply left. Her future actions are thus unencumbered by the constraints of a stated intention, an autonomy that later leaves her free to refuse Valancourt when the relationship no longer appears desirable. I call attention to this conspicuously murky, subdued form of agency because locating agency has been a major problem for critics of the novel. Radcliffe often seems to portray Emily as helpless or ineffectual. Emily’s subsequent engagement to Valancourt is thwarted when her aunt and guardian Madame Cheron3 marries the sinister Montoni, who whisks them off to Italy, where he imprisons them both in the Gothic castle of Udolpho. Emily suffers there, until she is suddenly and effortlessly freed. Similarly, the many plots that have arisen throughout the novel—multiple murders apparently committed by Montoni, Valancourt’s corruption in Paris, and the suspicion that Emily’s father may have been an adulterer—are conveniently explained away or forgotten to make way for the novel’s happy ending. In all of these instances, Emily seems to succeed without really trying. Accordingly, critics have contended either that Emily is passive4 or that her actions are irrelevant to the plot.5 In contrast, I argue that Emily [End Page 540] is in fact always an agentive heroine, but that her agency in this novel is, as I have suggested, constantly fragmented. As Claudia L. Johnson writes, the legitimacy of female action and desire was conspicuously called into question during the early Romantic period of the 1790s. The maintenance of gender roles was highly politicized, and female virtue in particular was tied to “the development of tractable, forbearing, and caring political subjects” on which the survival of the nation was said to depend. Written in this milieu, Johnson suggests, Radcliffe’s fiction shows progressive impulses straining against reactionary pressures,6 so that the drive for female independence clashes with...