Scholarly Fantasy and Material Reality in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon

Abstract

The feminist and anti-amatory sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon (1796 and 1813), offers an example of ways in which a book reveals important meanings when studied as a physical object. Literary definitions of the “text” or the “work” have not traditionally treated the book-as-object as essentially meaningful: in traditional accounts, the “text” is an arrangement of words that can appear in any physical presentation, and the “work” is an abstract mental entity in the mind of the author. Influential post-structuralist usages are equally abstract: Roland Barthes writes that “the Text is a methodological field”;1 Fredric Jameson writes of “textual structure” that “must be reconstituted, a deep-textual machinery whose characterization ranges from systems of tropes … to the narrative apparatus.”2 The physical book that is present is almost always understood as a vehicle for the conveyance of a text, a sign of a mental intention, imaginary object, or field of reproducible signifiers with which customers may play, if they like it, and buy.