KIM WHEATLEY. Romantic Feuds: Transcending the 'Age of Personality'.

Abstract

In the past 30 years, radical changes have taken place in Romantic scholarship in the wake of the revisionary history begun by scholars like Jerome McGann and Marilyn Butler. Our literary historical priorities have shifted from a preoccupation with a limited number of isolated writers towards an appreciation of the sheer variety of individuals and institutions that made up the self-conscious and conflicted culture of the Romantic period. Kim Wheatley’s Romantic Feuds is, amongst other things, a contribution to this long revolution—specifically to the ongoing and increasingly popular study of the material and intellectual culture that grew up around the expanding practice of reading. Central to that culture (and especially to its conflicts) were the large and influential periodical reviews and magazines—the older Critical Review, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, Blackwood’s and Leigh Hunt’s Examiner—which are central to Wheatley’s discriminating and insightful analysis of some exemplary feuds carried on inside and outside the periodicals themselves.