An Appreciation of Marshall Brown

Abstract

Those of us who first met Marshall through his wonderful essays on matters far and wide in European literature of the eighteenth century and the Romantic era were not surprised, once we met him and got to know him personally, to find confirmed and to cherish in him the qualities of mind promised by the critical writing: intellectual rigor and boundless curiosity woven together by warm enthusiasm for the complexities of cultural and social life. More important for this occasion is the way those qualities extend beyond Marshall personally, and even beyond his own considerable body of writings, as a gift to the profession at large, institutionalized in his thirty years as editor of MLQ. During an age of diversity, volatility, and sometimes sharp-toned polemic, MLQ remained open to a shifting world, with a commitment to flexibility and nuance—a continual reminder that intellectual rigor and discipline are most fully animated in their hospitality to an open play of mind on the questions that matter most to us.Marshall is a generous collaborator, not least in his generative editing of MLQ. Working with Marshall on the MLA panel that became a special issue and then an expanded anthology from the University of Washington Press, Reading for Form, was Susan’s joy. In 1996, when critiques of literary form and formations, incorrectly summed as “formalism,” were so pervasive that care for this was discreditable as a thin, rear-guard defense of an insular domain of criticism installed by New Critics (again, a cartoon), Marshall approached Susan to see if we could convene a fresh conversation. This became a panel, in a large, packed room, at the 1997 MLA convention, and ultimately, with Marshall’s inimitable powers of pitching and practical suasion, a celebrated anthology of extraordinarily wide-ranging essays on everything from medieval poetry to Paradise Lost; to eighteenth-century couplet practice; to the poetics of William Blake, Laura Moriarty, Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Celan; to the impact of form in Jane Austen’s fiction; to the freightings of syntax in Victorian fiction; to revelations of form that emerge in computation; to the subtle temporalities of modernist fiction (Wolfson and Brown 2006). Many of the essays in the book that emerged from this issue (most, in fact) are now standard reading, in the contributions to the introduction to the occasion, and wonderful essays by Ellen Rooney, Virgil Nemoianu, D. Vance Smith, Heather Dubrow, Ronald Levao, J. Paul Hunter, Susan Stewart, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Kaufman, Frances Ferguson, Garrett Stewart, Franco Moretti, and Catherine Gallagher. The special issue “Reading for Form,” it became blazingly clear, is not something left behind in the variable progress of literary studies but has abided as a fertile preoccupation for careful readers to bring to an impressive array of registers and concerns. It was Marshall’s foresight, his power to attract interest and participation, his skilled editing, and his plain old professional know-how that made all this happen, to durable effect and influence.