Poetics of the Steel Plate Engraving: Letitia Landon and <i>Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book</i>

Abstract

The central argument of this detailed reading of Landon’s editorship of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book of 1832 turns on the technology of the (capitalist) steel plate and its composition through the accumulation of lines rather than through mimetic techniques. I suggest that Landon foregoes the mimetic contract in favour of a metonymic contract of juxtaposition deriving from her decision to prioritize the poetic line and the second-order poetics of stereotype and cliché (both terms of print technology). She employs a technique of adjacency and a continual play on the meaning of the line in order to set in motion a questioning of British assumptions about trade hegemony and the colonial imaginary that many of the poems invoke. I suggest that this is a genuinely new and original poetics.