Frame Tale Research Articles

Phenomenology of the Middle Eastern Frame-Tale Collections

The frame tale is a fascinating device of storytelling, whether oral or literary. The Middle Eastern frame-tale collections differ in nature from most corresponding collections in the Western literatures that are the subject of many of the existing historical and theoretical discussions. First and foremost, all of the Middle Eastern frame-tale collections are of considerable antiquity and owe their existence to the creativity of authors whose identity is lost in the mist of time. Although their diligent composition betrays the conscious hand of an intellectually gifted author, even the documented precursors of Middle Eastern frame-tale collections in the ancient Indian literatures can hardly be connected to an author known by name. Moreover, over the long history of their international dissemination, they have come to be regarded as products of popular tradition. And second, the same assessment applies to the tales the collections embed. While it remains speculative to which extent these tales themselves derive from oral or popular tradition, many of them have become part of popular tradition, whether as embedded constituents of their respective frame tales or as separate tales. My considerations begin with an assessment of the Middle Eastern frame tales and frame-tale collections in terms of a focused definition. Although frame tales might at times embed only a single tale, my special interest is with the large collections that embed several, sometimes many, tales. I then proceed to discuss the phenomenology of the frame tales, their functional potentials, and the special relation between a given frame tale and its embedded tales. As I will repeatedly point out in my presentation, it is particularly this relation that deserves more attention than it has previously attracted. Key words: Frame-tale, Embedding and embedded tales, The Thousand and One Nights, Kalīla wa-Dimna, The Seven Sages, Khurāfa

From the Frame Tale to Framing Intertextuality

The application of the term framing to Arabic texts is commonly confined to the frame tale type of which the Arabic tradition produced one of the most popular works, The Thousand and One Nights. This issue transcends the study of the Nights and the associated story-within-a-story trope, moving toward a recon­stitution of the study of the frame tale as part of literary framings more broadly conceived, which include multiple notions and applicabilities. In so doing, “Framing Narratives” aims to fill in a lacuna both in the study of frame tales in the Arabic and other Middle Eastern traditions such as Kalīla and Dimna, Barlaam and Josaphat and the Seven Sages in their different versions and the broadening of the framing category itself. This introduction presents a comprehensive and cumulative definition of framing narratives including notions of mise en abyme, mise en reflet/mise en série, paratext, and parergon, among others. The overall issue will contain definitory and structural-functionalist attempts, with additional foci on the translingual variation of frame narratives, and the intertextual variation of frames, connecting the realms of adab and poetry, philosophical and anthological genres, and scripture. Key words: Framing, frame narrative, Arabic literature, Kalīla wa-Dimna, The Thousand and One Nights, allegory of the man in the well, Gérard Genette, Werner Wolf, contextualist narratology

Rupture and Temporary Endings

In the early decades of the fifth/eleventh century, a young poet from Córdoba, Ibn Shuhayd al-Andalusī (d. 426/1035), composes a satire on inspiration and literary theft, after being accused of plagiarism. It came to be known as The Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons. It opens with an apostrophic frame, activating, from the onset, interstitial locations and alerting the readers to its unorthodoxy both as an intellectual attitude and a narrative strategy. In this epistle, the author revisits the old Arab myth that personifies inspiration as demons who live at the Mount-Parnassus-like Valley of ʿAbqar. The recrudescence of this myth, however, serves a particular purpose: it is designed to satirize the persistence of the classics, and to agitate the structures that make them legible. In the tales, the auto-diegetic protagonist experiences a writer's block, and is introduced to an attendant jinn who becomes the poet’s co-author and travel companion. As this recurs, episodic suspension becomes the structure that sustains the program of the work: it allows for new beginnings to emerge throughout the work and enables a series of (time) travels to the valley of ʿAbqar. Conceived within an Arabo-Islamic environment that places great value on the ability of art to persuade, The Epistle of Attendant Jinn and Whirling Demons’s satirical outlook comes with an urgent claim. Ibn Shuhayd is not asking for pleasant, disinterested appreciation, but for public reparation. Multiply imaginative and meticulously scholarly, Ibn Shuhayd’s epistle demands to be read through a twined lens. The present study takes this affinity seriously, tracing resonances of the epistle in Ibn Shuhayd’s scholarly writing to sketch how the poetic form and and the scholarly project jointly speak to a critical moment in the Arabic literary imagination. Key words: frame tale, apostrophe, inspiration, travel, al-Andalus, sariqa (literay theft), satire, praise, eidolopoeia

The Parallel Worlds of the Book of Job and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

ABSTRACT The book of Job (hereafter italicized to differentiate it from the character of Job) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are both famous for breaking the rules of genre and language. Both stories are told through a frame tale that brackets a series of debates. These debates are full of occasionalisms, visual jokes, homographs, homophones, double entendre, and even triple entendre. Both make use of similar literary devices, such as parody, fourth-wall jokes, and unexpected cliffhangers. Job and Alice go through similar character development, in which they must question their presuppositions and learn simple honesty about how complex societal systems work in the world. This article argues that the breaking of genre rules helps Job and Alice become honest voices of protest, challenging the rules of authority and those who blindly defend them.

Feeling Solitary in the Seductive Republic: Narrative Deviance in Elizabeth "Harriot" Wilson and William "Amos" Wilson

Abstract: This essay examines two prominent literary narratives and tropes at the turn of the nineteenth century that constellate around the seduction plot and the hermit narrative. These two ostensibly discrete narrative forms have a curious history as they play out in the printed iterations of the Elizabeth Wilson and William Wilson stories, two siblings whose lives were marked by differing forms of tragedy. By bringing together a tale of seduction, execution, and hermitic living, I show how the account of Elizabeth Wilson's execution for infanticide shifted from being a seduction plot to a frame tale for a hermit narrative about her brother. This narrative turn moves from an account that focuses on the policing of female sexuality to instead emphasize the curious life of a man who refuses social intercourse. But that shift actually signals something more complicated about how the early Republic sought to instill ways of feeling about gender and deviance.

New Data Concerning the Historical Development of the Frame Tale of the Nights

Abstract The anonymous thirteenth-century Arabic compilation of wisdom texts, Fiqar al-ḥukamāʾ, contains a hitherto not discussed version of narrative elements that are otherwise known from the frame tale of the Nights, notably both The Thousand and One Nights and its shorter Maghrebi sibling, The Hundred and One Nights. As the Fiqar al-ḥukamāʾ is little known, the present contribution at first introduces the work’s manuscripts and its content before discussing the tale in question.

Un]Licensed Riot: Prodigality, Hypocrisy, and Guild Discourse in Chaucer s Cook s Tale

Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale demonstrates the characterization of a riotous apprentice, the narrative depiction of conflict between that apprentice and his master, and that master’s issuing of a questionable “papir” of “acquitance” (4404 & 4411) to suggest provocatively linked definitions of class and depictions of order and transgression specific to the guild-oriented mercantile culture of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century London. Considered within the context of the General Prologue’s depiction of Roger the Cook who tells the tale, and the description of the Four Guildsmen who employ him, the narrative suggests the emergence of the binary pairing of prodigality and hypocrisy, both of which contribute to the breakdown of the social cohesion and concept of “degree” so important to Chaucer’s Canterbury frame tale. Considered against the backdrop of what William Woods’ (1996) analysis of The Cook’s Tale describes as a “social structure defined by commerce” (190), and in relation to general work on Chaucer’s use of language (Cannon 1998) and terminology specific to The Cook’s Tale (Blenner-Hassett 1942; Call 1943), it becomes clear that Chaucer’s fragment indicts both the laterally mobile prodigal apprentice and the decadent hypocrisy of the Master through the linked subversion of license and guild authority.

Alchemical Waters Run Deep

Abstract In the course of the 9th and 10th centuries, the Arabo-Islamic world acquired a massive amount of knowledge from the antique and late antique traditions. In order to reconstruct the historical circumstances in which this transfer of knowledge took place, we are often forced to rely on the narratives that frequently accompany technical texts. The frame tale attached to The Treasure of Alexander (Ḏaḫīrat al-Iskandar) is a complex narrative that glues together an anthology of technical texts in ten chapters. Its alchemical section contains, among other things, instructions for preparing four different ‘sharp waters’, characterized by an increasing degree of intensity. Such ‘waters’—possibly acid and corrosive substances—were supposed to be used in the treatment and dyeing of different minerals and metals. This paper offers a critical edition and English translation of the passages dealing with the four ‘waters’ and their role in different alchemical procedures in The Treasure of Alexander. Special attention is paid to those textual clues that may link the contents of The Treasure to the Graeco-Egyptian alchemical tradition of ‘divine water’.

Women Bridled and Unbridled: Contagions of Shame and Maladies of Governance in the Decameron

This article revisits a subject that has been treated plenty: misogynist discourses in Boccaccio's Decameron. Nevertheless, I submit that such medieval normative discourses are both spread and contained by the brigata ladies themselves as they seek shelter and safety away from a plagued Florence. In their determination to preserve their lives, however, the ladies are reluctant to risk their honor, which is intertwined with Dante’s definition of nobility (i.e., "una vera salute") and of women's shame as recorded in the Convivio . With shame and nobility shaping both womanhood and women's governance in the Decameron, I examine the dynamics of female shame-honor in the text and its silencing and reining effects in gender politics. My study focuses on the speeches of two queens—Filomena and Emilia—and how these are challenged by the stories they tell themselves. Day 9, under Emilia's rule, provides us with analogies between human and non-human animals (e.g., horses and mules) which in turn threaten Filomena's preventative measures in keeping women’s safety and honor as observed in the frame tale and Day 2. It is these contradictions and many other stories (2.9, 7.2, 8.1, 9.9 and 9.10 analyzed to a greater extent herein) that expose women's situated vulnerability as much as their complicity. Last but not least, my article ends with a coda that evinces yet another layer of shame with a very different function and effect, namely the authorial shame-modesty staged in the vernacular masterpieces of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. With each poet exhibiting a distinct source of their vergogna, this article points to the tre corone shame variants as symptomatic of their vulnerable poetic status as they dare to produce and innovate Italian vernacular literature.

Scheherazade in Istanbul: A study of the popular Turkish TV series Binbir Gece

One Thousand and One Nights is a composite, transnational work, consisting of popular stories originally transmitted orally within its embedded cultures and developed over several centuries. Ever since its translation into European languages in the nineteenth century, or perhaps even before, it has been adapted and appropriated into different forms and mediums and thus has reached different corners of the world. This project was inspired by the level of popularity of One Thousand and One Nights, often known as The Arabian Nights, in the world today. Although only a relatively small number of people might have read all the tales, we can safely assume that most people do have an idea of what the Nights are, whilst some could even name one or two films, series or cartoons that they think are based on the Nights. Indeed, only a very limited number of stories included in editions of the Nights have been adapted into films or TV series. There are two main characteristics of the Nights that help identify adaptations and adoptions in popular culture: embedded storytelling using a frame tale, and the ‘feminist’, emancipating heroine Scheherazade. The popular Turkish TV series Binbir Gece (One Thousand and One Nights) (2006–09), which this article focuses on, not only makes use of these two popular features; it also offers a fresh and contemporary adaptation of the frame story of Shah Shahriyar and Scheherazade and elements from many other tales from the Nights, such as the emphasis on the importance of education for women, or the evil of cunning women. After analysing the degree of adaptation of the frame story in this series, this article sheds light on its global reach, reception and popularity.

A Missing Link in a Thousand and One Nights Scholarship: A Narrative Grammar for the Frame Tale?

Abstract This article argues that scholarship has been missing the pre-Scheherazade dynamic scenes that set the stage for further action and narrative. These preludinal sites function as the stepping stone for action, a series of encounters that initiate and perpetuate instability and disequilibrium. It draws attention to the unnamed queens as prototypes for Scheherazade, the abducted bride, the three ladies of Baghdad, and many other women in unfolding varieties of rebellion or compromise. As there is little talk and more voyeurism in this prelude with its focus on the bedroom and garden scenes, readers and kings are spectators, and the spectacle unfolds as in cinematic close-ups. Hence, this significant turn to the spectacle contravenes common approaches to the frame tale as only an enveloping framework that accommodates an ongoing marvelous story-machine. Although cursorily passed on in scholarship, the bedroom and garden scenes offer us not only a powerful incitement for action, but also a sweeping challenge to authority which the named kings could hardly overcome. The discussion re-situates sites of trial and defiance in context of a flowing narrative. The article proposes therefore to come up with a narrative grammar that engages with current narratology.

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Intertextuality: Eastern Themes

The Name of the Rose , first novel by Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and semiotician was published in 1980. The story happens in the Middle Ages (14th century) in an abbey, having a large and wonderful library. This historical detective story is a complicated novel full of intricate signs and symbols. In this paper, some of the themes of The Name of the Rose found in Eastern texts are discussed that indicate intertextuality and the immense amount of knowledge that Eco had of literature. It is stated that the frame tale is very much similar to Kalila va Demna and some of the subplots of the novel have similarities with stories from ancient Iran and the Middle East. Keywords: The Name of the Rose , Eastern literature, narrator, narration, frame tale

“When a Stranger Sojourns With You in Your Land”: Loving the Refugee as Neighbor in the Canterbury Tales and Refugee Tales

ABSTRACT Inspired by Chaucer’s frame tale narrative, the recent volumes entitled Refugee Tales narrate the perilous journeys of modern-day displaced and stateless persons seeking asylum in the UK. This article examines the Refugee Tales’ goal to create a “spectacle of welcome” through the lens of the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor” and the related Levitical command that, “when a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong” (Leviticus 19:33–4). As a third-term in the sovereign formula of “friend/enemy,” the refugee threatens to uncouple power from the very criteria on which it depends: history, territory, bare life. And these concerns are arguably as important in the late-fourteenth century as in our own global political age. Does Chaucer think of the refugees he witnessed in his own life? Considering, then, the neighborly relations of literary texts — relations that are contiguous rather than genealogical — this article seeks Chaucer’s own refugee stories by delving into the narrative chasms of the Knight’s Tales’ absent narratives, the residue of Boccaccio’s Il Teseida, and the critically-contentious backstory to the Knight as storyteller.

The African American Ecogothic of E. Levi Brown’s “At the Hermitage”

The African American Ecogothic of E. Levi Brown’s “At the Hermitage” Matthew Wynn Sivils (bio) The August 1893 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine contained works by the likes of Richard Harding Davis, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Thomas Nelson Page. It also included a short story by an otherwise unknown author named E. Levi Brown who had contributed an enthralling southern gothic tale called “At the Hermitage.”1 But who was E. Levi Brown? In the 127 years since the story appeared in Harper’s—one of the elite literary magazines of the day—both it and its author have fallen into the shadows. Apparently Brown emerged just long enough to publish this single, masterful story before receding back into the fog of obscurity. Magazine advertisements promoting the August 1893 issue of Harper’s offer a meager, if tantalizing, set of clues. The June 23, 1893, issue of the American Stationer describes Brown as “the wife of a colored minister in the South who has constructed a tale of unusual power out of the dark superstitions of her race.”2 And a largely identical mention in the United States Miller reads, “Mrs. E. Levi Brown . . . the wife of a colored minister in the South, has constructed a tale of unusual power out of the superstitions of her race. It presents a view of the Southern negro from the standpoint of a more intimate and sympathetic knowledge than has belonged to previous writers in this field.”3 These snippets of ad copy, repeated almost verbatim across a few periodicals of the time, serve as the only hints to the mystery of Brown’s identity.4 William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden reprinted “At the Hermitage” in their 1907 story collection, Shapes That Haunt the Dusk, but in their brief introduction to that volume they strangely refer to the author as “Mr. Brown” and offer no additional leads.5 Following this reprint Brown seems to have disappeared entirely, leaving behind no further work and no further clues [End Page 143] to her identity. Did she write other stories? Where in the South did she live? Who was her minister husband mentioned in the ads? These and other questions remain unanswered. For now, “At the Hermitage”—a story of skill and nuance that seems the product of an experienced writer—remains Brown’s only known work. Harper’s own advertisement, in its July 1893 issue, provides essentially the same information as the others but further underscores the novelty of Brown’s race: “Especially interesting by reason of its merit as well as of its authorship, will be Mrs. E. Levi Brown’s story, entitled, ‘At the Hermitage,’ based upon the dark superstitions of her race—a narrative of idiomatic simplicity and thrilling interest.”6 But simplicity is hardly an apt descriptor for “At the Hermitage.” It’s a complex tale that—in ways similar to many of the stories of her contemporary Charles W. Chesnutt (e.g., “The Dumb Witness” and “The Sheriff’s Children”)—presents a southern gothic fantasy mixed with the all-too-real miseries of African American life in the postbellum South. There’s certainly nothing simple about how Brown abandons many of the tired conceits so common to regional tales. She eschews the frame tale format, first-person narration, cartoonish stock characters, and the peculiar brand of humor meant to appeal to bigoted tastes. Instead, in a story that boasts three African American women as its principal characters, Brown crafts a narrative both original and horrific. The fact that “At the Hermitage” is a newly rediscovered short story originally published in the pages of Harper’s in 1893 and presented at that time as a tale by the “wife of a colored minister in the South” makes it a notable work.7 But when we read the story and find within it Brown’s deft confluence of racial, gendered, and environmental concerns, we recognize it as masterpiece of southern gothic fiction, one that when read by the light of twenty-first-century criticism reveals a multitude of critical possibilities. One compelling approach to “At the Hermitage” is to consider how it delivers a narrative ripe...

Angry Men: On Emotions and Masculinities in Samarqandī's <em>Sindbād-nāmeh</em>

Ẓahīrī Samarqandī's Sindbād-nāmeh, written ca. 1160-1164 CE, is the oldest extant Persian version of the frame tale known as "The Seven Sages." Through a comparison with near-contemporary ethics, this article argues that the Sindbād-nāmeh provided "working through emotion" tales for its male readership. Some of the tales in the Sindbād-nāmeh typically presented as warning against the dangers of haste are, on a deeper level, narrating the consequences of anger, or in some cases, fear. Furthermore, stories framed as 'wiles of women tales' also warn against other 'vices of the soul' such as excessive appetite or desire, while other tales address male sexual anxieties.

Early Buddhism and Incommensurability

Early Buddhism and Incommensurability Christopher I. Beckwith (bio) Charles Goodman (henceforth G)'s Response to the thoughtful paper by Adrian Kuzminski ("Early Buddhism Reconsidered") in this volume is actually devoted mainly to my book Greek Buddha (2015). Half a century ago, Thomas Kuhn famously coined the term incommensurability to refer to the inability or unwillingness of many scholars in a given field to understand substantially new ("revolutionary") work. He describes their reactions against it and their attempts to suppress or discredit it. The reason for their response is that new discoveries advance science by challenging and displacing old beliefs and practices. Kuhn accurately describes G's Response. When I wrote Greek Buddha, I assumed that the potential readership would be people interested in a major topic of intellectual history that has been neglected for a long time, people who are able and willing to think about an alternative to the problematic received views. In general, that has proved to be the case. Kuzminski, the author of an excellent book on later Pyrrhonism (especially Sextus Empiricus) and later Buddhism (especially Nāgārjuna), states in his paper that my book makes a significant contribution toward solving the problems it addresses. Unfortunately, by contrast, G takes selected bits out of their contexts in my book, puts them into new contexts of his own making, and then deconstructs his own creations. Thus at the very beginning of his Response, G gives a story that he has written himself, but attributes it to me, saying: "The second, more elaborate narrative summarizes the views stated or clearly implied by Christopher Beckwith in his book Greek Buddha." However, I do not say or imply anything like it, as may be revealed by even a cursory reading of the relevant sections of the book, including my explicit conclusion on that particular topic on page 121. G's basic argument throughout is that the truth about ancient Buddhism (i.e., actual "Early Buddhism") is already known from the portrayal of antiquity in texts of late Normative Buddhism, which are centuries younger [End Page 1009] than the dated sources for Early Buddhism and represent a radically different system. But unless Normative Buddhism, including its modern form, preserves the exact words of the Buddha, it has changed, like all religions. Normative Buddhism is first attested in around the first century C.E., half a millennium after the Buddha. Normative Buddhist texts portray something drastically different from the dated, contemporaneous Early Buddhist testimonies—the hard data on that form of Buddhism. Several long sections of Greek Buddha analyze, in great detail, the account of Early Buddhist sects in Megasthenes (fl. 305–304 b.c.e.) and the religious content of the early third century b.c.e. Major Inscriptions of Devānāṃpriya Priyadarśi. (In my book, I establish which inscriptions were not inscribed by the Mauryas but by a much later ruler of the Normative Buddhist period named Aśoka.) These sources show that Normative Buddhism—a radically changed belief system compared to attested Early Buddhism—developed under the Sakas and Kushans. G says not a word about my book's in-depth coverage of this. As far as I know, Greek Buddha is the first monograph devoted to carefully examining, studying, and thinking about the dated Early Buddhist inscriptions and manuscript data with the goal of discovering what Early Buddhism was really like. Throughout his Response, G's authorities are undated late Normative Buddhist texts. These texts are filled with marvels recounted in the traditional-modern Buddhist "frame tale" based on the late canonical literature of early Normative Buddhism (which is unattested until some 500 years after the Buddha), the magical fantasies that fill the hagiographical literature of medieval Buddhism (mostly a millennium or more later than the Buddha), and the modern "popular" misinterpretation of Buddhism that non-devotional Buddhologists have been fighting against for at least a century. Normative Buddhism certainly deserves study for its own sake. However, my book has nothing to do with the late Normative Buddhist stories about Early Buddhism except to note that it is not based on them and does not discuss them. The limited time and space available to me for...

\u201cSe lieie la favola\u201d: Apuleian Play in Basile\u2019s Lo cunto de li cunti

A literary review of the book Lo cunto de li cunti, ovvere lo trattenemiento de peccerille or The Tale of Tales by Giambattista Basile. It refers to the book the first collection of stories in the history of Western literature consisting of fairy tales. It analyzes the misfortunes of Princess Zoza of Valle Pelosa recounted in the frame tale of Cunto.

The Weaver of Tales: Garrone and Tale of Tales (from Screenplay to Film)

This essay compares the movie Tale of Tales by Matteo Garrone with the collection of seventeenth-century fairy tales Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile on which it is based. After highlighting the specularity of Garrone and Basile’s poetics (attention to deformed bodies, coexistence of attractive and repelling, etc.), the analysis focuses on adaptation strategies (restoring of the frame tale, importance of female figures, linguistic choices). It is also stressed the role of light into the movie, which is crossed by violent light contrasts in Caravaggio’s style, representing the struggle between good and evil. The unpublished screenplay of the film in its Italian and English versions is analysed in detail in terms of narrative architecture, characters and linguistic aspects. The analysis exhibits the complexity of the work done by Garrone, who successfully captured the multiple levels of significant of Basile’s collection, remodelling them according to his own and unique poetics.

Fictionalising the Romantic Marketplace: Self-reflexivity in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Frame Tale

The following paper presents the frame tale as a particular genre of early-nineteenth-century literature that openly negotiated the late Romantic period's displaced correspondence between imaginative production and the economic market. The frame tale is best described as a type of narrative fiction that consists of a frame story (such as a storytelling session) in which multiple sub-narratives in a network of reciprocal exchange are embedded. By discussing two frame tales by the Scottish author James Hogg, the following analysis will show how the resurgence of this particular genre in the early nineteenth century is indicative of Romantic literature's active interest in discussing the relations between literary and economic signification. In this reading, the frame tale emerges as a prime indicator of Romanticism's ghostly link between literature and the marketplace. In both The Queen's Wake (1813/1819) and the Three Perils of Man (1822), Hogg conjures intricate fictional spaces of reciprocity as mirrors of the print market in which these texts were themselves published. By means of a mise-en-abyme of narrative exchange, Hogg's frame tales bridge the gap between literature and economics in a way that illuminates both the economics of literature and the literariness of economy in the early nineteenth century.

“A Story Telling and a Story Reading Age”: Textuality and Sociability in the Romantic Frame Tale

MARK ITTENSOHN “A Story Telling and a Story Reading Age”: Textuality and Sociability in the Romantic Frame Tale I N RECENT YEARS, ROMANTIC STUDIES HAS COME TO DEVOTE MORE AND more attention to the period’s conception of sociability in connection with the production and dissemination of literary texts.1 What is often stressed in contemporary scholarship is that behind Romanticism’s ro­ mance with individualism and solitariness lay an environment of sociable and interpersonal exchange that decisively conditioned the parameters un­ der which texts were actually produced. As William St. Clair notes: “[w]hatever the initial transfer from mind to paper, the creation of a text was seldom a solitary activity. ”2 In Romantic Sociability, their recent standard volume on the topic, Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite stress that the elucida­ tion of individual modes and forms of sociability during the Romantic pe­ riod has two chief benefits. First, it helps further contextualize Romantic works, since, as they note, various types ofinterpersonal exchange “formed i. The best classic examples are without a doubt Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). More recently, these studies have been joined by more broad and internationally wide-ranging works such as: Angela Esterhammer, Ro­ manticism and Improvisation, 1750—1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Tim Fulford, Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries: The Dialect of the Tribe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community 1762 to 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gilllian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Russell and Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770—1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Susanne Schmid, ed., Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit um 1800 (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2008); Susan Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 2. St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 158. SiR, 55 (Fall 2016) 393 394 MARK ITTENSOHN the sociable contexts in which literary production was discussed, circulated and sometimes created.”3 Second, and more importantly, Russell and Tuite emphasize that an engagement with the period’s conceptions of interper­ sonal exchange reveals sociability as a “kind of text in its own right,” one that was not solely restricted to real life exchanges (dinner parties, debating clubs, salons), but that came to be reiterated in particular text-types of the period such as diaries, letters, and, above all, periodical publications.4 Such observations not only generate additional knowledge about the period, they also carry considerable revisionist traction. Romantic sociability, these views suggest, has too long been overshadowed by an overt emphasis on textuality and its function as a substitutional medium. It is commonly acknowledged that the Enlightenment conceived of writing as an effective aid to sociability since it enabled conversation across geographical or national-political boundaries.5 Such perceptions no longer subordinated the written to the spoken word, but merged them into a pro­ ductive symbiosis, thereby reworking such classic conceptualizations as Plato’s in Phaedrus where texts are figured as particularly incompetent social beings.6 As critics ofthe early Romantic period have emphasized, however, this more or less equated relationship between the written and the sociable was undergoing a broad shift in cultural response by the turn of the cen­ tury.7 In 1790s Britain, the production and dissemination of textuality was steadily rising, aided by increased literacy rates and new publishing technol­ ogies, while the traditional eighteenth-century values ofsociability seemed, by contrast, to lose their footing. Haunted by governmental repression of free speech and radical thinking, and in many ways sublimated by the pos­ sibilities of (anonymous) textual production, the famous model of coffee­ house sociability, so vital to the project ofthe eighteenth-century Republic ofLetters, moved more and more into the cultural margin.8 In 1790, for in­ stance, the Edinburgh journal The Bee suggested to its readers that the tex3 . Russell and Tuite, “Introducing Romantic Sociability,” in...