The Curious Case of Benjamin Fitzgerald (1778–1828): Ancestry and Racial Anxiety in Fitzgerald

REVIEWS

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries we have grown used to using the term “fellow creatures” to refer to non-human animals — from dogs and cats to horses and hippopotamuses. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the term was also used to refer to non-human animals. But from the late eighteenth century (when the term began to be used for several decades with much greater frequency), through the nineteenth century, and through most of the twentieth century too, “fellow creature” was a term used to connect like to like — horses to horses, sheep to sheep, or, much more commonly, humans to other humans. Why the change in the late eighteenth century? And why the further change in the late twentieth century? This paper argues that political activism played a key role — and that the activism of those leading the fight against cruelty towards animals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was implicitly in competition with the struggles to improve the lot of black Africans, the poor, women, and other oppressed categories of humans — causes that sought to end the treatment of these groups as “no better than animals.”

Reviewed by: Star Spangled Songbook: A History in Sheet Music of "The Star-Spangled Banner." eds. by Mark Clague and Andrew Kuster Douglas Shadle Star Spangled Songbook: A History in Sheet Music of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Edited by Mark Clague and Andrew Kuster. Historical introductions by Mark Clague. Ann Arbor, MI: Star Spangled Music Foundation, 2015. [Foreword, p. v–vi; introd.: "A People in Song," p. vii–xiv; performance suggestions, p. xv–xviii; teaching suggestions, p. xix–xxi; plates, p. xxii–xxv; score, p. 3–258; editorial procedures, p. 259–61; source descriptions and critical notes, p. 262–80; bibliog. and other resources, p. 281–82. ISBN-13: 978-00692-55720-4 (hardback), $34.99; ISBN-13: 978-0-692-30273-6 (spiral paperback), $24.99.] The Star Spangled Songbook, edited by Mark Clague and Andrew Kuster, offers a rare combination of scholarly erudition, accessibility, and practical value. This collection of seventy-three songs is equal parts critical edition, teaching resource, and performance-ready score. As Michael Scott on NBC's sitcom The Office might have described it, the volume is a "win-win-win." Born out of Clague's desire to produce a usable recording of The Star-Spangled Banner and its melodic source (a British tune called The Anacreontic Song) for the undergraduate classroom, the songbook proj ect expanded significantly as he was lured by the manifold historical transformations of the tune as well as of Francis Scott Key's famous text. The end result is a richly textured exploration of the intersections between American political and musical history from the late eighteenth century to the present. The songbook itself comprises ten thematic sections that trace a loosely chronological path. Clague's cogent introductory essay provides rationales for his selections, and a detailed road map for following the book's course. The first four sections precede Key's composition of the The Star-Spangled Banner text. These sections include works by The Anacreontic Song composer John Stafford Smith (1750–1836), drinking and fraternal parodies of the song, early American political parodies of the song, and other American patriotic songs like William Billings's Chester and Joseph Hopkinson's Hail Columbia, which served as the country's de facto national anthem throughout the nineteenth century. Sections five and six concentrate on Francis Scott Key (1779–1843), with several settings and arrangements of The Star-Spangled Banner, including a martial rendition by James Hewitt (1770–1827), and settings of other Key texts. The next three sections take a more distinctly political turn with The Star-Spangled Banner contrafacta composed on such topics as abolition, secession (during the Civil War), and labor. The final section focuses on The Star-Spangled Banner as the United States national anthem—not codified by law until 1931. In all cases, the selections are judicious, and the sections are generally balanced in size and scope. The small section three, however, might have benefited from the inclusion of patriotic contrafacta of famous tunes like God [End Page 144] Save the King and Derry Down, both of which traversed the landscape of broadside balladry alongside The Star-Spangled Banner throughout the period (see Glenda Goodman, "Musical Sleuthing in Early America: 'Derry Down' and the XYZ Affair," CommonPlace 13, no. 2 [Winter 2013], http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-13/no-02/goodman/ [accessed 18 May 2017]). Another famous tune from the era, Yankee Doodle, appears in section five of the volume as an anonymous 1814 contrafactum, The Battle of Baltimore. Contrafacting was a ubiquitous practice in the English-speaking public throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the most fulfilling journey one might take in the Star Spangled Songbook might follow the contrafacta of the tune Americans would recognize more or less as the national anthem. I use this clumsy phrase because the songbook makes clear that The Anacreontic Song was the source of several parody contrafacta, including The Star-Spangled Banner, while The Star-Spangled Banner itself became a new source text for later contrafacta. Anyone unfamiliar with the anthem's origins in drinking songs might be surprised to see the words "We ask not if matter and spirit can join / We find them combin...

SOVEREIGN, SACRED Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany. By Matthew Head. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xxi, 326 p. ISBN 9780520273849 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520954762 (e-book), $65.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, appendix, bibliogra- phy, index.What better can temper manly rude- ness, or strengthen and support the weak- ness of man, what so soon can assuage the rapid blaze of wrath, what more charm masculine power, what so quickly dissipate peevishness and ill-temper, what so well can while away the insipid tedious hours of life, as the near and affectionate look of no- ble, beautiful woman? . (J. C. Lavater, Physiognomy, 1775-1777) (p. vii).With this epigram, Matthew Head points readers to the new perspective unfolded in his Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany, that the late eighteenth century in Germany repre- sented view of women, gender, and music distinct from that of earlier periods and especially from the role of music in the idealization and confinement of women commonly considered in German romanti- cism of the nineteenth century. Head argues instead that women in the late eigh- teenth century were seen as civilizing, cultivating force over men, and that, as result, some women were granted greater cultural agency, especially through the fine arts. Head states: [I]n highlighting discourse-an ideology-of female sover- eignty in polite culture and the fine one could argue that (some) women achieved symbolic power, and cultural capi- tal (p. 7).Head thus captures what he presents as special moment in the history of women's relationships with music, moment that al- lowed for women's greater agency in soci- ety due to the view of women as civilizing influences on men. Head further argues that this agency was particularly communi- cated through music performance by women and through music composition by both women and men. He characterizes such view as a focus on music as part of the culture of sensibility (p. 13) which also valued man's capacity to feel as woman, at least within the dominion of sen- sibility and the fine arts (p. 15).Head's Sovereign Feminine is significant contribution to the musicological discourse on gender, particularly on representations of, and participation of, women in music performance and composition. Head en- gages the significant dialogue about music and gender that has been ongoing in musi- cology since the early 1990s (marked by Susan McClary's Feminine Endings [Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], which Head appropriately recognizes as groundbreaking, p. xvii). But, as Head highlights in his preface, even with this far greater attention to gender in musicology and with the influence of feminism in the field, there have been almost no studies of gender in the late eighteenth century.After framing the book within the larger discourse on music and gender in the pref- ace, Head presents his thesis and approach in the introduction. Through the example of Sophie von La Roche's novel Die Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (Leip- zig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771), Head highlights the brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when figures of womanhood enjoyed ex- alted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization (p. 4). Head also introduces Berlin Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814), highly influential voice in discourses on music in the period, but one who has been largely forgotten in modern musicology. Head employs Reichardt's writings, musical activities, and compositions as unifying thread throughout the book, as Reichardt provided significant arguments for and support of the view of the sovereign feminine.The remainder of the book, with the ex- ception of brief afterword, includes six case studies to support and illustrate Head's conception of the sovereign feminine. …

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

The establishment of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in the late eighteenth century, whose chief goal was to introduce the civilizations of Eastern societies to the West, encouraged a series of enquiries by British writers and travelers on the history, culture, art, antiquities, and literature of Eastern countries, including Afghanistan. This chapter analyzes the writings of three enterprising British explorers who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It focuses on the travel accounts of George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson, men separated in time, interests and ambitions, but whose work, when examined collectively, delivers from personal observation an expansive picture of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such detail has not been found anywhere else, even within indigenous sources, which makes their writings essential and indispensable resources for studying the history, culture and society of Afghanistan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Together, their enquiries concerning ethnographic, cultural, and social life in Afghanistan have formed a topographical and cultural template for future researchers.

Reviewed by: The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America by Megan Walsh Carla J. Mulford (bio) The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America megan walsh Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017 259 pp. Walsh's The Portrait and the Book embraces new methods in studying the history of print media and argues that American reading and visual tastes were driven by the market in illustrated British and European books. This sounds straightforward enough, but it is actually breathtakingly important. Walsh helps us recognize how much our attention to the words of our beloved historical books has enabled us to write literary history in the absence of the more palpable cultural investments of early readers. They loved illustrations! By tracing illustrated imports and [End Page 611] American reprints of British and European books, Walsh demonstrates that readers sought to participate in a visual media culture that evolved, in the hands of American printers seeking to meet the needs of American readers, into a specific form of nationalist (and antinationalist) literature. Her important contribution to study of the early national era relates to her insistence that Americans' visual literacy has been occluded in discussions of the literature, discussions that tend to feature themes like sentimentalism and coquetry or critiques of enlightenment. Walsh argues that early readers would have sought not just the written words but accompanying images as marks of their culture. Walsh's notion of Americans' visual literacy includes not just actual illustrations in books but the writerly method of ekphrasis, graphic verbal descriptions of scenes and works of art. Speculating on readers' "imaginative experience of reading illustrated books," Walsh argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "Americans made use of verbal descriptions of images in order to speak to one of the most pressing visual questions of their day: the profound trade gap in illustrated books" that existed between North America, on the one hand, and Britain and Europe, on the other (12). Her primary goal is to illustrate for her own readers the literary culture of North America as it formulated its own cultural goals from the middle eighteenth century onward. As Walsh tells the story, illustrations in books from Italy, France, and the Netherlands were common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Britain lagged behind. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, "British books were suddenly bursting with images" (2). The result was that "formal experimentation, especially the emergence of the novel, was inextricably tied to authors' and printers' use of visual paratexts" (2); "[f]rontis-pieces in particular influenced readers' conceptions of novels" (2). Even as frontispieces began to be used more regularly, other kinds of illustrations in novels tended to fall off during the second part of the eighteenth century. Yet changes in technology made many different kinds of illustrations possible, so that "by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the demand for engravings, both in books and as stand-alone prints, was booming" (3). In British North America during this same time, printers and booksellers tended to import books from abroad and sell them in their shops. Books that would sell well—Bibles and literary materials—were imported with greatest frequency. By the end of the eighteenth century, [End Page 612] printers often reprinted British books for American readers. This began, of course, with Benjamin Franklin's "reprinting" (really a much watered down version) of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, but the practice gained momentum and solidified in the very late eighteenth century, and American consumers grew fond of British books and British-authored books. "It was this investment with the culture of the mother country through the patterns of consumer culture that gave the United States its own distinctive culture," Walsh notes, "a culture built on appropriation, adaptation, and reinvention" (5–6). Walsh summarizes the printing techniques used by American printers, pointing to two kinds of printmaking methods, relief printing (in both wood and then in metal, by the mid-eighteenth century and later) and intaglio printing. Printers tended to prefer intaglio printing, which employed a "relatively durable and precise technology to produce the illustrations commonly found in expensive...

Advanced Uses of Mode Mixture in Haydn's Late Instrumental Works. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 9, numéro 1, 1988, p. 1-209) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

A History of Trigonometry Education in the United States: 1776-1900 Jenna Van Sickle This dissertation traces the history of the teaching of elementary trigonometry in United States colleges and universities from 1776 to 1900. This study analyzes textbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reviews in contemporary periodicals, course catalogs, and secondary sources. Elementary trigonometry was a topic of study in colleges throughout this time period, but the way in which trigonometry was taught and defined changed drastically, as did the scope and focus of the subject. Because of advances in analytic trigonometry by Leonhard Euler and others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trigonometric functions came to be defined as ratios, rather than as line segments. This change came to elementary trigonometry textbooks beginning in antebellum America and the ratios came to define trigonometric functions in elementary trigonometry textbooks by the end of the nineteenth century. During this time period, elementary trigonometry textbooks grew to have a much more comprehensive treatment of the subject and considered trigonometric functions in many different ways. In the late eighteenth century, trigonometry was taught as a topic in a larger mathematics course and was used only to solve triangles for applications in surveying and navigation. Textbooks contained few pedagogical tools and only the most basic of trigonometric formulas. By the end of the nineteenth century, trigonometry was taught as its own course that covered the topic extensively with many applications to real life. Textbooks were full of pedagogical tools. The path that the teaching of trigonometry took through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not always move in a linear fashion. Sometimes trigonometry education stayed the same for a long time and then was suddenly changed, but other times changes happened more gradually. There were many international influences, and there were many influential Americans and influential American institutions that changed the course of trigonometry instruction in this country. This dissertation follows the path of those changes from 1776 to 1900. After 1900, trigonometry instruction became a topic of secondary education rather than higher education.

This is the first monograph devoted to Ducray-Duminil, one of the most popular novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His literary career spanned decades, from his first novel in 1787 to a volume of fairy tales in 1819, and he demonstrated considerable political flexibility, moving from writing republican short fiction during the Terror to praising the Restoration in 1815. The volume begins with a biographical sketch to give the reader a sense of the range of Ducray-Duminil’s activities — for in addition to being a novelist, he was also a journalist, playwright, musician, songwriter, and poet. Łukasz Szkopiński then takes a structural approach to the novels in order to move away from the prevailing view of nineteenth-century critics that Ducray-Duminil’s work was homogenous, although he nevertheless admits that there is a ‘caractère réitératif’ (p. 58) to Ducray-Duminil’s plot construction: many of his protagonists are young people faced with family secrets, persecution, and increasingly dramatic obstacles to being reunited with loved ones, but they are always rewarded in the end when good triumphs and vice is punished. The analysis considers the various narrative strategies that the author uses to involve readers, an important element of the novels, and explores characterization, with a particular focus on Roger (from Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt) and Jules (from Jules, ou, Le toit paternel) as some of his more complex or unusual characters. Questions of morality and didacticism in the novels are considered, alongside the theme of education. Szkopiński rightly highlights the fact that, despite the didactic content and the young age of many of the protagonists, these novels were not written as littérature de jeunesse but were intended for all readers. There is also a detailed exploration of the use of the merveilleux. For the main part, Ducray-Duminil follows the French tradition of explained supernatural, despite his inclusion of dreams of a prophetic nature that fall outside of this. The mutual affinities between Ducray-Duminil and Ann Radcliffe are highlighted, although Daniel Hall’s work on French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) is surprisingly absent from the bibliography. In many ways the novels of Ducray-Duminil are ‘l’expression de son temps’ (p. 275). His recurring themes of social identity, bigamy, secret marriages, and disguised identities are to be found in numerous other novels of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era, even if no other writer had quite the success that Ducray-Duminil had. Victor, ou, L’enfant de la forêt, to give but one example, went through thirty-seven editions in the course of the nineteenth century (the last in 1893). The study concludes by sketching out Ducray-Duminil’s literary legacy, most visible on the stage with Pixerécourt’s adaptations, but Szkopiński also explores writers such as Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, for whom Ducray-Duminil was an influence. Overall this is a useful volume for those interested in fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: it puts Ducray-Duminil in a broad context and helps us to understand better how he marked a whole generation of readers.

Sea Changes:Maritime Men and the Law in the Global Atlantic World Molly A. Warsh (bio) Mark G. Hanna. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2015. ix + 448 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Kevin P. McDonald. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. xii + 206 pp. Illustration, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 372 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Empires, religion, spices, slaves. Disease and death. Crusaders, traders, renegades, dissenters. Hybridity, metropoles, and peripheries. These are some of the keywords of three decades of pathbreaking Atlantic World scholarship in works that have revealed how the exchanges of the period from 1500 to 1800 knit together the people, places, and practices brought into contact by these disparate actors and impulses. Historians have traced how early Iberian imperial momentum gave way to the incursions of ambitious Northern European powers. The centrality of the trade in enslaved Africans; the devastation and, in places, recovery, of America’s indigenous people; the explosive politics and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—these are all well-established narratives in our understanding of the emergence of the Atlantic World. What remains to be discovered? The answer provided by the three books under review here can be broadly characterized as twofold: first, “illegal” activity at sea—by so-called “pirates” or by press gangs unlawfully seizing mariners—played a critical role in the elaboration of politics and economies on land. Second, these seagoing men forged global pathways and practices that broaden our understanding of the boundaries of the Atlantic World. Although these books are very different in style and approach, each embraces seafarers as political actors. As Hanna and McDonald tell it, pirates are not renegades but colonial service providers; Perl-Rosenthal’s sailors are [End Page 524] rough and tumble diplomats at the forefront of citizenship debates. Through his consideration of the legality of various types of actions at sea, each author asks us to consider how the maritime world was both distinct from, and critical to, the development of the societies along its shores. Hanna and McDonald both focus on global piracy and colonial commerce from the perspective of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British Atlantic. McDonald’s embrace of world history as a meaningful challenge to the Atlantic World paradigm opens the door to questions of greater scope than his brief text (130 pages plus appendices) allows him to explore. Hanna offers a lengthy study of the centrality of illicit maritime activity to the economies and politics of colonial British America, leaving little doubt that “piracy” was business as usual by another name until the imperial goals and function of the British Empire shifted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In tracing this trajectory, neither Hanna nor McDonald departs from Roy Ritchie’s classic study of Captain Kidd and the changing politics of piracy in England in the early eighteenth century; indeed, both acknowledge their debt to him. Perl-Rosenthal also looks at maritime men on the wrong side of ineffective laws, but in his case, the drama is neither imperial tensions nor global trade rivalries, but rather nation building and citizenship claims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His protagonists are not pirates, per se, but seafarers determined to prove their allegiance to the new American nation on the fraught waters of post-Revolutionary years. In his telling, U.S. sailors forced the elaboration of new forms of national identification amidst impressment controversies in the wake of the American Revolution. Determined to claim nationality based on personal politics rather than birth or native language, U.S. mariners helped forge an unprecedentedly broad view of citizenship on land that was expressed in maritime passports for American citizens regardless of race. McDonald’s book is the most global-minded of the three, and his explicit intellectual engagement with world history...

In the late eighteenth century in Britain, the term “approach” became a noun, with a very specific architectural meaning as “a variety of road peculiar to a house in the country, designed as an experience in perspective to “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (J. C. Loudon, 1806). In this essay I use the concept of the architectural approach to the estate as a means to approach the domestic interiors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the narrative and psychological interiors of the novels that house them. The country house tour brought the tourist inside the house; the guidebooks and architectural treatises and novels, increasingly devoted to describing those interiors, brought the reader in as well. And all the approaches – narratival and linguistic as well as experiential – privileged a winding line to form new combinations of perceptions, bringing new kinds of interiors into view.

In his search for the intellectual foundations of America’s contemporary New Age and alternative medicine movements, John S. Haller Jr, concentrates on the Swedish polymath Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), whose meditative and non-mechanistic worldviews were, the author maintains, deeply implicated in the phrenology, spiritualism, mind cure, Christian Science, and homeopathy movements of the nineteenth century, as well as the osteopathy, anthroposophy, holistic health, and New Age healing practices of the twentieth century (p. xv). Haller attempts to elucidate these connections by examining the thought and healing systems that Swedenborg and Mesmer offered their contemporaries before tracing the uptake and evolution of these philosophies between the late eighteenth century and the present day. In the course of the book, Haller makes clear his conviction that the epistemic space occupied by contemporary complementary medicine in America was first made available by Swedenborg and Mesmer, who fought during the eighteenth century to rescue a vitalist view of mind and body from annihilation at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism. The first two chapters of the book provide an intellectual biography of Swedenborg, detailing the family background and early years of a man who came to demonstrate genius in areas as diverse as engineering, geology, physics, metallurgy, philosophy, and physiology. Haller shows how Swedenborg’s eclectic interests led him slowly towards a vitalistic worldview, and how a spiritual crisis on a trip to London in 1745 saw him eventually evolve from philosopher to theologian, and finally to mystic (p. 33). The third chapter concentrates on the healing system introduced by Mesmer, arguing for a strong affinity between the spirit-infused universe of Swedenborg, and that of the Swabian physician, who believed that magnetic tides coursed through both the universe and the human body dictating illness and health. Haller argues that both men affirmed the existence of an unseen dimension to the Universe (p. 68) and that although Mesmer’s theory was naturalistic, it was ambiguous enough that, like the writings of Swedenborg, it too could be interpreted as offering access to the spirit realm (p. 69). Looking at the manner in which animal magnetism was spread and filtered by various other practitioners, Haller shows how both its mystical and medicinal aspects evolved through the related practices of phrenology and phreno-mesmerism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Turning from Europe to America, Chapters Four and Five attempt to trace Swedenborg’s and Mesmer’s legacy in socialism, Owenism, Fourierism, and various communal experiments (Chapter Four), as well as the emergence, from the mid-nineteenth century, of movements such as spiritualism, theosophy, anthroposophy, and psychical research (Chapter Five). Chapter Six deals with the mind–cure or mental science movement, which manifested in Christian Science and the Emmanuel movement, while Chapter Seven looks at biomedicine’s kindred spirits such as homeopathy, Kentianism, osteopathy, and chiropractics. The final chapter considers the continuation of all these traditions within New Age healing. Haller’s concentration on the American manifestation of Mesmer’s and Swedenborg’s ideas allows him to document, in some detail, the New Age movement’s complex genealogy, but also means that he is necessarily brief in his descriptions of the spread of American movements, such as spiritualism, to Europe and beyond. While this brevity is entirely understandable, there are some instances where broad statements about the reception of such movements are unsupported or non-illuminating. The claim that Europeans were more sceptical of spiritualism than Americans (pp. 144–5), for example, begs a range of questions, including ‘in which European countries was this the case’ and ‘why’? While Haller’s book provides a useful synthesis of the disparate mystical, spiritual, and communitarian movements that have, in some sense, been heir to the ideas of Swedenborg or Mesmer, it remains doubtful whether his account adds any analytical depth to our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American alternative medicine and religious practice. Much of the material Haller uses, and the trajectory and links that he highlights, have long been apparent in the work of historians such as James Webb, Laurence R. Moore and Brett E. Carroll, who have all written on occultism and spiritualism in the American context. The attempts at scientification that Haller highlights among New Age healers, which he stresses serve to undermine the mechanistic science from which they draw authority (p. 231), have also been dealt with elsewhere and in more depth by sociologists such as David J. Hess, whose book Science in the New Age (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) provided a probing analysis of the relationship between science and the New Age movement.

A rare combination of theoretical acumen and dense historicist research, Disaffected Parties makes two crucial interventions in how to understand the political and literary landscape of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, Havard orients the period around a long shift to the right in English politics, culminating in what he calls a Tory cultural politics. Looking at the way such literary figures as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen engage, often obliquely, the construction of this cultural politics produces a narrative of the period that is long and continuous; the book thus “takes a diagonal approach to the Romantic age,” one that displaces “the centrality of the French Revolution.” Second, Havard’s analysis reveals a skewed political topography in which there are no clear lines to mark the distinction between the inside and outside of English politics. The most redolent example of this is the importance that Ireland assumes throughout. In his chapter on Laurence Sterne, for instance, Havard refers to Ireland as a “cracked mirror” of English politics which is at once its “constituent element and awkward appendage.”Unusually for a work that takes much of its concept of the political from continental philosophy (in this case through Jacques Rancière), this book is intimately concerned with the nitty-gritty of party politics (la politique) rather than with more abstract or ontological questions about the political (le politique). By paying attention to the details of partisan political wrangling, Havard illustrates how the limits of the political scene are drawn. Writers who expressed a frustration with, disdain for, or disaffection from party politics, he notes, nevertheless maintained an off-center and potentially transformative relation with it. Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) “leaves politics behind . . . by exposing the unassimilated demands not encompassed within emerging principles of unity,” for instance, while Byron’s removal from party politics, and from England itself, in fact “enabled him to trouble English politics as a figure of continued political agitation.” In both of these cases, the removal, or disaffection, of the author from particularized and partisan positions produces a different form of engagement in politics that is not easily mappable within conventional accounts of the political scene, or of the relationship between literature and politics.Havard also demonstrates the ways in which Boswell, in his attempt to make Samuel Johnson into a representative of the new cultural Toryism of the 1790s, and Austen, in constructing a far-reaching cultural conservatism in Mansfield Park, both reveal Toryism as a cultural movement that stretched far beyond partisan or parliamentary politics. Literature and politics, however, do not quite neatly overlap. Johnson’s own authoritarian reputation, and “obsessive, even borderline unhinged attachment to an unquestionable source of legitimate power,” clashed with Boswell’s attempts to assimilate him to the new post-Revolution cultural Toryism. Similarly, the “playful, wilful, anarchic impulses” of Austen’s novels sit uneasily within the Tory cultural politics her novels otherwise seem to underwrite. In all the major literary examples Havard uses throughout Disaffected Parties, the relationship between literature and politics is described as having the same kind of skewed topography as that he identifies between England and Ireland. This is ultimately the biggest payoff of Havard’s close attention to the partisan turmoil of late eighteenth-century England.What I have described of Disaffected Parties so far are chapters 2 to 6—the book takes a relatively long time to get to these chapters. The Introduction sets up the conceptual grounds of the book, before a long chapter on the prehistory of disaffection in the eighteenth century looks at writers from earlier in the century who do not quite fit into the conceptual pattern Havard outlines in the rest of the book. While Havard’s careful historicism in the later chapters made the structure of disaffection clear, in the more abstract conceptual terms of the Introduction this was not always the case. Indeed, in several places the conceptual framework had to be anchored by repeated references to the example of Byron. The first chapter does dig into historical detail, and the distinction between Swiftian disaffection—which involves a desire for utopian alternatives that involve a complete removal from society—and the disaffection of writers later in the century is useful. However, the chapter ends with a discussion of the relatively obscure late eighteenth-century political periodical Egeria (1802–1803), which is not clearly motivated enough, and the longer and broader view given by this chapter is not as compelling as the densely argued examples later in the book.That a book gets better as it goes is minor criticism indeed, and should merely serve as a recommendation to all readers to read all of this book. It gives new perspectives on often read and often taught authors, as well as a historical instance of partisanship and disaffection which goes some way to encouraging us to address political problems in our own time. In the spirit of this book, any such work would have to begin with close attention to the details of contemporary party politics, asking even the most disaffected of literary critics to look seriously at polemical partisan writing.

In the inaugural publication of his Annals of Europe and America, which appeared serially in the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics & Science from 1807-09, Charles Brockden Brown commented on the difficulties of history writing, remarking that the chain of successive and dependent causes is endless and that an active imagination was necessary for representing the past. An individual, wrote Brown, be said to be imperfectly acquainted with the last link, who has not attentively scrutinized the very first in the series, however remote it may be.1 Although this early American novelist used his knowledge of to write narrative, his self-conscious commentary about history writing may seem unremarkable given our familiarity with romantic history writers such as Washington Irving and William Prescott and the more modern assumption that the historian seeks truth but can never really obtain it in an absolute shape or form.2 Yet recent debates about and the boundaries between fact and fiction in history writing have returned scholars to this familiar territory, causing historians to re-evaluate assumptions of progress and reasoning associated with methods of late Enlightenment historiography and the empirical foundationalism of history's literary form.3 Most prominently, the publication of Robert Berkhofer's Beyond the Great Story has renewed the long-standing disagreement over representation and the role of poststructuralist theories in understanding the rhetorical and ideological aspects of inquiry. As Betsy Erkkila has observed, the very moment when literary critics are turning to history as the solid ground of their cultural analysis, historians are experiencing an increasing crisis about the ontological status of history itself.4 Historians are, in other words, reassessing more closely than ever long-standing Enlightenment assumptions about the form and purpose of history. At the heart of such debates is the degree to which historians are willing to examine-and accept-history as a literary artifact and to concede certainty and meaning. While such debates often focus on the inherent contradictions of opposing views and the value of inter- and intradisciplinary inquiry, minimal attention has been given to the ways late eighteenth-century historians and novelists grappled with issues concerning representation and truth and how such inquiries correspond with our own.5 That is, if, as Peter Novick has observed, the objectivist point of view has remained the ideal: It has been the key term in defining progress in scholarship,6 several questions linger about and aesthetic issues at the end of the eighteenth century and how they relate to contemporary debates about representation and narrative meaning. For example, if early national history writers understood the question relative to then overlapping perceptions of writing and fiction, to what extent were those modes of writing distinguished from each other in the late eighteenth century? Did romantic ideas, in other words, about the role and meaning of history intersect or overlap with late Enlightenment ones and alter methods of representation? By extension, if greater self-consciousness is one of the windfalls of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century historiography, to what degree does discourse from that period about historical objectivity and bias relate to our own debates about the fictive nature of history writing? Are boundaries, historiographical or otherwise, always in place, or can past ways of approaching, or writing about, history resemble and inform the present? That is, if it is possible that we postmoderns have unfairly characterized the Age of Reason as essentially rational or objective, have we also given too much credence to poststructuralists and their claims or assumptions about narrative meaning and linguistic representation? …