British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The “Literary Lower Empire” by Mark Schoenfield

Abstract

Mark Schoenfield. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The Literary Lower Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 312. $100. Early in British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, Mark Schoenfield discusses Eaton Stannard Barrett's 1813 novel The Heroine. In this novel, Barrett presents the as home for all of the characters from the history of literature. There, characters live and interact with one another, but their continued existence is subject to their earthly popularity, for once a book becomes obsolete on earth, the personages, countries, manners, and things recorded in it, lose, by the law of sympathy, their existence in the moon (vii). With the professionalization of literary reviewing in the Romantic age, work's success or failure was often determined by its reception in small number of influential periodicals. Schoenfield's book echoes Barrett's lunar democracy in its concern for sphere in which identities were forged, manipulated, and dismissed. Throughout this fine study, the author examines the role of periodicals in shaping their own identities, those of authors, and the tastes and opinions of their readership. While the topic of drives the book's traversing of the populous and diverse landscape of Romantic-era periodicals, elucidating their role in constructing and mediating variety of singular and plural identities, Schoenfield also highlights the affinities between the literary, economic, political, and philosophical discourses that periodicals produced. For example, the derogatory bodily allusions to Byron's lameness (hobbling verses) and Hogg's rusticity (His ears were erect, his eye-brows indignant) echo conversations about the Regency crisis, where the King's mental (rather than corporeal) infirmity raised the urgent issue of whether sovereignty was an individual or corporate matter. This attention to rhetorical homologies provides rich sense of the broad cultural implications of particular periodical discussions. At times, however, as in the book's rather abrupt conclusion, the argument's primary focus is somewhat obscured by these larger issues. The first of the book's two parts focuses on the ideological and practical origins of the three most prominent Romantic-era periodicals: the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. Schoenfield adapts Bakhtin's theory of novelistic heteroglossia--an utterance issuing from single agent that is actually composed of multiple voices--to define the communicative nature of the periodical. In contrast to the novel, which is generally the product of single author, the major periodicals exhibited corporate or institutional heteroglossia composed of the various voices of its editor and contributors. Forging unified and singular for the periodical was central to its purpose of organizing diffuse range of topics and information into coherent and identifiable voice: contributors' anonymity was crucial part in this objective. Schoenfield positions this corporate heteroglossia alongside the contemporaneous growth in prominence of the modern corporation and its increasing legal recognition as an artificial person in British society. At the beginning of Chapter Two, which focuses on the establishment of the Edinburgh Review, Schoenfield offers quotation from Coleridge to raise the issue of the corporate nature of periodicals: to account for the differences between individuals while maintaining the concept of shared identity (50). Schoenfield analyzes the articles in the first issue of the Edinburgh to demonstrate how the new publication assessed the resemblance between economic and intellectual value, and how the corporate of the periodical and its systematic organization of knowledge mimicked the structure of social and financial economies. During the monetary crisis of 1797, Francis Homer seized on the public discourse surrounding the adoption of paper money to analogize the sovereignty of the banking system with that of the fledgling periodical in which he was writing. …