Katie Trumpener Research Articles

Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Michael Edson.

<i>Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry</i>, ed. Michael Edson.

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters

Jeff Strabone. Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities

Since the 1990s, the harp-clutching Celtic bard has become an increasingly prominent part of English literary studies. That decade saw a number of factors, including the revival of Macpherson’s Ossian and the advent of Scottish and Welsh devolution, combine in a new scholarly focus on what Katie Trumpener termed ‘Bardic Nationalism’. Jeff Strabone’s monograph places itself firmly in this tradition, right down to the cover design, which features de Loutherbourg’s particularly rugged bardic specimen. His book demonstrates how this sub-field has enriched our understanding of Romantic literature, reviving interest in marginalized writers, providing new perspectives on canonical authors and posing difficult questions about literary imperialism. However, this book also exemplifies some of the problems endemic to the field as it stands, ones that will continue to get worse unless it commits itself to more thoroughly interdisciplinary practices. Strabone argues that ‘archaic native poetry, newly discovered and printed in the eighteenth century, provided historiographical support for the construction of the modern nation’ (p. 2). Whilst this is not news, what is innovative is Strabone’s focus on form and metre, elements that can fall by the wayside in a field preoccupied with sociocultural generalizations. Strabone, furthermore, has a talent for throwing out big ideas that are useful to think with. Take, for instance, his argument (p. 152) that increasing mediation of historical texts led to a reappraisal of historical time itself, and a growing Romantic sense that elements of the past were irretrievable. Counterexamples come to mind (and are alluded to by Strabone), but this and other ideas would nevertheless benefit from further attention.

Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry ed. by Michael Edson

Reviewed by: Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry ed. by Michael Edson Billy Hall Michael Edson, ed., Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017). Pp. 241. $95.00 cloth. The eleven essays in Michael Edson's collection, Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, offer a "series of snapshots, or case studies" that indicate the "quirky particularism" of the subject matter but remain serious in their effort to drag footnotes and endnotes more fully into the critical consciousness (xxix). Readers will find essays that range over eighteenth-century British poetry and collections of earlier poetry published in the eighteenth century, including canonical poets and works (i.e. Pope's Iliad, Butler's Hudibras, Chaucer, and Milton) as well as lesser-known figures (William Falconer's Shipwreck, the "Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester," and Thomas Percey's The Hermit of Warkworth). The volume doesn't offer, nor is it particularly interested in offering, a tightly framed historical narrative of eighteenth-century poetry; instead, its ambition is to recover the historical and critical contribution of annotation by mapping a network of relations between poetic texts and prose annotations. Rather than cling to a shared thesis, the contributors adhere to a common commitment—investigate how the critical engagement with textual annotation adds to the disciplinary fields of book history, material culture, print culture. Buttressed by increasing pressure to reevaluate academic engagement with literary objects made newly and widely available by digital repositories, the collection's strength lies in its potential ramifications for scholars working on a range of topics that can take these materials into account. And while I closed Edson's collection feeling mildly frustrated by how the authors in this collection often reduce poetry to a backdrop upon which the historical and interpretive arguments about annotation play out, this was offset by all this book taught me about the curious, chaotic, and at times bizarre activities of eighteenth-century annotators. While Edson breaks the collection into four parts, he is quick to point out that this organizational structure is flexible and doesn't require linear progress through the essays. Moreover, this flexibility reflects the methodological framework of annotation as the essays, like the annotations they study, operate more like a network of ideas than a narrowly defined historical and critical narrative of eighteenth-century poetry. Part I, "Georgic Annotations," contains Edson's exceptional "Introduction" that, along with the first chapter "Annotating Georgic Poetry" co-authored with Karina Williamson, does the useful work of laying out earlier scholarship on annotation and articulating the conceptual stakes of this subfield. Three analytical concepts/modes seem to underwrite the contributor's approach to the historical and critical work of reading annotations: (1) the dual role played by annotations as both a tool for interpretation and the object of interpretation; (2) the various ways of configuring the relationship between a poem and its annotations—marginalizing, overwhelming, displacing or clarifying; and (3) how annotations impact readers when authors, editors and readers negotiate between interpretive freedom and didactic instruction. These methodological principles constitute the backbone of the collection as it ranges across genres, temporal spans, and geographical boundaries. The three essays in Part II on "Nationalism, Antiquarianism, and Annotation" borrow Katie Trumpener's notion of "bardic nationalism" to explore the antiquarian practice of annotating ballads and the establishment of national [End Page 364] identity. Jeff Strabone's "The Afterlife of Annotation" argues persuasively that annotations of eighteenth-century poetry shift in focus from historical documents read by educated antiquarians to poems and ballads that marked the beginnings of an English nationalism. Building on Strabone's linkage of annotation to literary nationalism, Thomas Van der Goten's "Topographical Annotation" argues that "antiquarian notes are synecdochal expressions of the collaborative networks of scholars, collectors, and correspondents […] the rhetoric of which echoes the cultural patriotism of the respective families, institutions, and societies that endorsed such projects" (83). The glue that binds these two essays together, along with Alex Watson's reading of Robert Southey's notes to Madoc, is how the inclusion of annotations aids the reader's interpretation of a poetic text by constructing a narrative lens from which to view the work. Part III: "Varieties of Annotation" dives...

Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young

Reviewed by: Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature ed. by Timothy Young Courtney Weikle-Mills Story Time: Essays on the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature. Edited by Timothy Young. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 280 pp. Paper $30. The subject of this volume, published by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, is the wealth of American storybooks and manuscript materials for children housed in the library's Betsy Beinecke Shirley [End Page 126] collection. Fitting to its title, the sumptuous book, which features fifteen essays and seventy-one images from published and unpublished children's works, is a truly delightful "story time" in itself. Its pages contain tales of dueling librarians and authors; collaborations between writers not best known for children's literature (namely Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps); immigrants becoming illustrators; and even "wayward animals," llamas who intrude into Karl Marx's famous analysis of Robinson Crusoe via an illustrated adaptation (79). Underneath these stories are implicit ones—about the importance of one dedicated collector, Shirley, and about the thrill of discovery in the archives (this reader would have loved to have been with Jill Campbell when she discovered the source of those llamas!). Unsurprisingly, the pieces, all written by contributors who spent time at the Beinecke, are impeccably researched. Several bring to light unstudied items, demonstrating their connection to key developments in American children's literature. For instance, Elizabeth Frengel suggests that the artist's dummies for Ludwig Bemelmans' Castle No. 9 (1936) display an early use of the concept Maurice Sendak would later call "counterpoint," the technique recognized by scholars as the hallmark of the modern picture book (49). Laura Wasowicz, curator of children's literature at the American Antiquarian Society, mines Shirley's "significant cache of picture book artwork" from the behemoth nineteenth-century publisher, the McLoughlin Brothers, to uncover some of the earliest American illustrators to be credited for their work (173). A running theme in essays by JoAnn Conrad, Pádraic Whyte, and Brian Alderson is the seminal work done by immigrants in the development of American publishing and especially illustration, which, as these scholars point out, built upon the taste of powerful Brooklyn librarian Anne Carroll Moore and Horn Book creator Bertha E. Mahony for fantastical stories. The essays attend to milestones so thoroughly that the collection could be used to support a survey for undergraduates. Essays cover a historical range from Puritan "joyful death stories" (Timothy Young) to classic picture books like Blueberries for Sal (Katie Trumpener) and Mo Willems's satires of modern parenting (Heather Klemann). Martin's essay on Hughes and Bontemps outlines the emergence of modern African American children's literature through the making of one book, Popo and Fifina (1932), with robust attention to context. I can also see the volume being well suited for graduate students, in that it models strong research and writing. Though Young's introduction does not assert a unifying intellectual contribution for the volume, choosing rather to emphasize the productivity of the essays' multiple approaches, the pieces taken together make a compelling statement about how children's literature involves a host of collaborators, including authors, illustrators, publishers, educators, librarians, and, of course, collectors. [End Page 127] The volume also makes an implicit case that children's literature scholarship is, at its best, an interdisciplinary endeavor, including archivists and authors, as well as scholars. Four of the essays are by curators at the Beinecke and elsewhere, and the contributors also include author Gregory Maguire and writer/publisher Patrick Kiley. This implicit endorsement of interdisciplinarity is significant because, as Beverly Lyon Clark (whose essay in this volume traces the illustrations of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women) has argued in Kiddie Lit, children's literature scholarship has sometimes divorced itself from the work of librarians and authors in order to make the case for its objectivity as a field. Yet the interrelationships that shape the world of children's literature are now emerging as an exciting focus of scholarship. Leonard S. Marcus's piece stands out in this regard, outlining how Bank Street educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, publisher...

An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850. Siobhan Carroll. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 290.

<i>An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850</i>. Siobhan Carroll. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. 290.

“We wed not with the stranger”: Disjunctive Histories, Fluid Geographies, and Contested Nationalities in Romantic Fictions of Wales

I. Perfect IN A STRIKING SCENE FROM JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART'S 1819 NOVEL PETER'S Letters to His Kinsfolk, the eponymous Welsh protagonist Peter Morris meets a fictionalized version of William Blackwood, who immediately attempts to recruit Morris as a correspondent. Dr. Morris! said he You must really be a contributor--we've a set of wild fellows about; we are much in want of a few sensible, intelligent writers, like you, sir, to counterbalance them--and then what a fine field you would have in Wales--quite untouched--a perfect (1) At first glance, Blackwood's casting of Wales as a new the silver mining town in modern Bolivia that furnished imperial Spain with much of its mineral wealth, reads as a straightforward commentary on Wales's colonial potential. For Blackwood, real-life proprietor of the arch-conservative and massively influential Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and doyen of the Scottish Tory literary scene, Wales's potential wealth is not mineral, but sociopolitical. Untouched by contemporary commentators, Wales offers the enterprising Tory cultural critic deep deposits of hitherto-untouched material. There is, however, another way to read Lockhart's metaphorical conception of Wales as a new Potosi. Although Potosi remained a powerful symbol of Spanish imperial wealth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also came to represent the corrupting influence of greed and the destabilizing potential of colonial mismanagement. In 1776, Adam Smith cited Potosi in his seminal The Wealth of Nations as a source of serious economic trouble, not only for the imperial Spanish government, but for the global economy as a whole. (2) Smith was hardly alone in his symbolic appropriation: later writers conceived of Potosi as a dire precedent for avarice and colonial disaster that Britain would do well to avoid, and the very name of the city itself became a shorthand for political waste and corruption. (3) Given his familiarity with the works of Smith, Lockhart and informed readers of the period would have been aware of this figural use for Potosi. When the fictional Blackwood advises that Wales is a potential Potosi, then, he is (perhaps unknowingly) calling attention not only to its rich stores of cultural and political wealth, but also to the frightening prospect that its wealth might be misappropriated and, as a result, destabilize an empire. This essay seeks to determine just what about Wales so threatened Lockhart and other writers like him, who figured the principality as both inviting and dangerous. Critics like Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris have shown that the nationalist historical novel was the dominant fictional subgenre in Scotland and Ireland specifically, and the so-called Celtic periphery of Britain more generally, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By comparison, novels written or set in the third country of the Celtic fringe, Wales, have received little critical attention. (4) Whatever the reasons behind the relative lack of critical interest in the Welsh Romantic novel, I hope to demonstrate here that this neglect has obscured an important and original tradition of conceiving nationality and national history. Furthermore, this underexplored tradition disrupts extant critical models of the Romantic national novel that cast Celtic Romantic literature as somehow complied in or readily appropriated by an Anglocentric British nationalist and imperialist cultural initiative. As Trumpener and Saree Makdisi among others have argued, Romantic-era apologists for British nation-building and empire-building frequently invoked historical precedent (alongside economic pragmatism and other factual arguments) as empirical justification for or legitimation of the centralization and expansion of the British state. (5) In practice, as Trumpener shows, this justification often took the form of argument by way of historical literary analogy: for example, English critics repeatedly and explicitly compared the British literary tradition to the literary traditions of ancient Greece and/or Rome. …

Children’s Literature and New York City Ed. by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan (review)

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and New York City Ed. by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan Vanessa Joosen (bio) Children’s Literature and New York City. Ed. by Pádraic Whyte and Keith O’Sullivan. Series: Children’s Literature and Culture; 98. New York: Routledge, 2014. 206 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-82302-9. As a city that clearly speaks to the imagination of many readers and viewers, New York is a popular setting for literature, art, movies, and TV-shows. The broad array of titles discussed in this book show that children’s literature is no exception. The image of New York that arises from this large corpus—ranging from picture books to young adult literature—is complex and diverse. As the editors highlight in their introduction, New York “is as much an imagined space as it is a real place” (1). The approach of the researchers is as diverse as the primary works they are analyzing. The book opens with a traditional historical section: first, a bio- and bibliographical description of Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Margaret Wise Brown and their works and, second, a reflection on childhood and modernity in Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet (by Julie Anne Stevens). The consequent chapters provide more innovative approaches to studying the city in children’s literature. Editor Keith O’Sullivan applies Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of “striated space” to Nick McDonell’s Twelve: Manhattan appears as a city organized in a Cartesian way, yet the novel also reveals the city’s wilderness and reveals existential issues in a teenager growing up in New York. Fellow editor Pádraic White matches queer studies with urban studies in his analysis of John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, linking the transformation of the adolescent protagonist to the evolution of the city. One article that resonates is Jo Lampert’s discussion of post-9/11 books; she relies on trauma studies, showing that the “literary journey becomes the nation’s journey” (111) as the novels often bring lonely people together. Central Park features prominently in Jenny Bavidge’s ecocritical reading of children’s books about New York—the Park functions as “a utopian, pastoral space” (63) in which children and animals thrive, but is not opposed to the urban narrative about New York. Jane Suzanne Carroll combines sartorial studies (the study of clothes) with carnival theory and urban studies in her analysis of, among other things, the New York classic par excellence, The Catcher in the Rye. Sonya Sawyer Fritz provides a unique analysis of “urban mobility” in children’s books about New York. In the light of many contemporary parents’ [End Page 92] inclination to protect their children for fear of accidents and abduction, it is striking how characters like Harriet the Spy could roam the city freely, without adult supervision. It is a pity that the author doesn’t include more recent examples for comparison to assess the extent to which contemporary authors reflect on the increased limitation of children’s urban mobility. Several chapters—such as Katie Trumpener’s on Curious George and Valerie Coghlan’s on dystopian/utopian visual narratives—have a strong visual component. It is a real shame that the volume contains no illustrations at all. Quite a few authors cast a critical eye on New York’s social and racial tissue: some articles have it as their central focus, from Suzanne Marie Hopcroft’s article on homeless teenagers to Karen Sands-O’Connor’s one on Caribbean immigrants, yet social and racial issues surface in various other pieces as well. Helen Conrad O’Brien reads The Cricket in Time Square, for example, as a story about integration and being accepted. Music is central to O’Brien’s article, connecting it to Roni Natov’s discussion of rock singer/poet Patti Smith’s Just Kids and her deconstruction of gender binaries. Like many articles in the volume, Natov invokes Eric Tribunella’s concept of the “child flâneur.” It would have been interesting to reprint this important article in the book, or have a more systematic discussion of it at one point, since it has...

Adam Smith’s Problems: Sympathy in Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl and Edgeworth’s Ennui

Adam Smith’s Problems: Sympathy in Owenson’s Wild Irish Girl and Edgeworth’s Ennui Katarzyna Bartoszyńska It is a critical commonplace to read Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809) as national tales that use allegories of marriage to model a successful reconciliation between England and Ireland in the aftermath of the Act of Union. The national tale was a clearly political mode, one with the primary goal of representing Ireland anew to a class of English readers who saw the Irish as hopelessly backward and savage, and thereby articulating a model for the Union on the level of sentiment. This aim was hardly covert: it is openly declared, for example, on the title page of The Wild Irish Girl, which quotes Fazio Delli Uberti’s Travels Though Ireland in the 14th Century: “This race of men, tho’ savage they may seem / The country, too, with many a mountain rough, / Yet are they sweet to him who tries and tastes them.”1 The link between this project of propaganda and the Act of Union was clearly recognized at the time—perhaps most explicitly by Walter Scott, who wrote that Edgeworth’s depictions of Ireland “have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.”2 In both The Wild Irish Girl and Ennui, national reconciliation is symbolized by the marriage between the British narrator and an Irish woman. The narrative preceding the weddings serves to enumerate various lessons about Irish culture and history, and to illustrate how an Englishman can come to love the country and the people. Philosophical theories of “sympathy” and fellow-feeling— particularly those of Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—provide the framework for this process. The two novels are often read together: their plots are noticeably similar (even within the subgroup of national tales that end in marriage), making the [End Page 127] differences between them appear as explicit markers of divergent approaches to the broader political problems that they address. Indeed, Robert Tracy went so far as to suggest that Ennui was written, or at least revised, in response to the massive success of The Wild Irish Girl.3 Various commentators, including Tracy, Ina Ferris, Seamus Deane, Julia Wright, Katie Trumpener, and Claire Connolly have examined the political implications of both works, particularly as they relate to the colonial context: they consider what the novels suggest about the legitimacy of power, or the intrinsic national character of the Irish, or how they reflect on their historical moment. Despite this sustained critical attention, the ways in which these two novels engage with theoretical frameworks of fellow-feeling have not been fully explored. Rather, the novels are generally seen—and even mocked—as oversimplified allegories, manufacturing easy, sentimentalized solutions to real political problems.4 When seen through the lens of theories of sympathy, however, a different view emerges. Both Edgeworth and Morgan are searching for an intellectual framework upon which to build a politics of fellow-feeling—and failing to find one. Instead, both authors find themselves forced to rely on various novelistic tricks in order to ensure happy endings for their texts. Reading these novels with an eye to their treatment of sympathy as a philosophical problem opens up a way to make sense of the ambivalences and quirks of the texts that bedevil more conventional readings. In The Wild Irish Girl, the power of emotional contagion becomes a threatening, gothic force, suggesting a more sinister view of the supposedly charming Glorvina. Likewise, the bizarre plot twist at the center of Ennui, which serves to confound any allegorical readings of national identity, makes perfect sense [End Page 128] when considered from the perspective of sympathy, as it is a literal example of Smith’s theorization of the process. What is more, the identity swap enacted by the novel can be viewed as a way to bridge the divide within Adam Smith’s own work, the...

United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution) ed. by Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, and: Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press by Rhona Brown, and: The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766–1816) ed. by Jennifer Orr

Michael Brown, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble, eds. United Islands?: The Languages of Resistance (Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution). No. I. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 272. $99. Rhona Brown. Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press. Famham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 280. $134.95. Jennifer Orr, ed. The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766-1816). Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. Pp. 242. $70. Over the last two decades there has been been a serious readjustment of Romantic studies away from anglo-centrism towards a more view of relations between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This archipelagic turn, if I may add another methodological twist to recent scholarly tergiversations, has been propelled by a growing awareness about varieties of nationalism in our own time. Among the landmarks in this process are Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1998), Ina Ferris's The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (2002), Ian Duncan's Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2007), and Murray Pittock's Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008); the list could go on. All these books are important contributions in different ways, but each of them has wrestled with the recognition that if the Romantic period saw the idea of nation emerging into a recognizable modern sense, that sense does not map easily onto the complications and irregularities of the cultural experience of the time. Pittock, for instance, is committed to the idea of Irish and Scottish traditions as distinct from an English Romanticism identified with literary London and its provincial others (most obviously in the Lake District), but he is also committed to a sense of irreducible relatedness in Irish and Scottish traditions. The term archipelagic, first drafted into use in Renaissance studies, usefully signals the interculturalism of what otherwise might too readily be constituted as national traditions, acknowledging also that the very word tradition may too readily imply an originally evolving autonomous entity. It might be added, of course, that the roles of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, not to mention the regional English, for instance, in literary London warrant further study. Going to the great wen was not always an act of disaffiliation. It is instructive, for instance, how many Scots were involved in the London radical movement of the 1790s, as the historian Bob Harris has shown. They include Robert Watson (some-time secretary to Lord George Gordon), Robert Thomson (radical songwriter and brother to the eminently respectable George Thomson, editor of Burns), both of whom fled to France in the 1790s, and the founder of the London Corresponding Society itself, Thomas Hardy. None of these abandoned their Scottish interests in order to concentrate on London or even global radicalism. Indeed after the LCS had been driven underground, Hardy became a major figure in the setting up of the William Wallace Society, while Watson, by this time styling himself the Chevalier Watson, brought the Stuart papers back to Britain from Rome. Hardy played a major role in helping Thomson and Watson set themselves up when they returned to London after the defeat of Napoleon, visiting Watson to see the Stuart papers, and helping Thomson with the application to the Literary Fund and with the publication of a sadly execrable poem on Wallace. A sense of the complexity of these literary relations between the four nations characterizes each of the three volumes covered by this review. Rhona Brown's excellent study of Robert Fergusson aims to rescue him from being seen simply as John the Baptist to the Christ of Robert Burns (to use a formulation of Robert Crawford's). Previous studies have tended to discount Fergusson's English poetry in favor of the presumed authenticity of the Scottish vernacular poetry. Brown does valuable work in showing the diversity of resources on which Fergusson drew for the volume he produced before his death at the early age of 24. …

British Historical Fiction before Scott. Anne H. Stevens.

Anne H. Stevens, British Historical Fiction before Scott (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) xi + 201 $84.00 Anne H. Stevens' British Historical Fiction before Scott traces late 18th and early 19th origins of novel subgenre is often assumed begin with Walter Scott. Examining eighty-five historical fictions written in fifty-two years prior publication of Waverley (1814)--some familiar enough students of era, but many not--Stevens demonstrates that Scott's celebrated historical novel emerges from period of novelistic experimentation with fiction and history. Thus British Historical Fiction before Scott is aligned with work of critics such as Peter Garside, Rainer Schowerling, Katie Trumpener, Ina Ferris, and James Buzard, who all variously challenge Georg Lukacs's statement in The Historical Novel (1937) that long list of second and third-rate writers who produced historical fiction before Scott are not worthy of serious investigation. Studying early historical fiction alongside emerging institutions into which it was received, Stevens argues that novelists, reviewers, publishers, circulating libraries, and readers collectively worked to codify genre of historical novel by first decades of nineteenth century (2). The theoretical basis for this argument is provided by work of figures such as film theorist Rick Altman, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and literary critic Franco Moretti. Drawing on this diverse body of work, Stevens situates her corpus of early historical fiction within literary marketplace she defines as a place of competition, antagonism, and rivalries [...]. Combatants take their positions on field in relation actors already present. For new literary genre or movement enter field, it must clear space for itself [...], asserting its newness and distinction from already-existing genres or movements (26). Consequently, for Stevens, emergence of historical fiction corresponds Altman's theory of generic cycles or what he calls 'the Producer's Game' (21): early experiments breed imitators, some of whom achieve popular success by variously following and/or modifying conventions established by earlier experiments and making innovations of their own, and whose works are then imitated and innovated upon in turn. As those experiments variously succeed or fail in literary marketplace, process of genrification (49) occurs: authors imitate those experiments that win favor of reviewers, publishers, and readers, failed experiments are relegated obscurity, and conventions of genre begin stabilize. Moving from earliest practitioners of historical fiction (Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole, William Hutchinson, Clara Reeve, and Sophia Lee), imitators they inspired, and finally literary bodies that published, reviewed, circulated, and consumed that fiction, British Historical Fiction before Scott effectively uses theory of the Producer's Game illustrate process whereby historical fiction coalesces into genre during half-century prior Scott. The virtues of British Historical Fiction before Scott are many. The prose is lucid and eminently readable, volume carefully edited, and argument clearly structured. The research--which includes careful study of eighty-five novels and forty-two circulating library catalogues, findings of which are summarized in series of useful tables--is impressive and, as result, argument well supported. The attention lesser-known novels and novelists provides much-needed service scholarship on late 18th and Romantic-era novel, and inclusion of such neglected figures and texts alongside their more canonical counterparts makes for rich, complex reading of literary landscape. The chapters zoom in and out dramatically examine micro- and macro-dynamics of historical phenomenon they trace, providing, on one hand, close considerations of novels such as Leland's Longsword (1762), Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764/65), Hutchinson's The Hermitage (1772), Reeve's The Old English Baron (1777/78), Lee's The Recess (1783, 1785), and Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) in chapters 2 and 6, and, on other hand, offering panoramic surveys of historical fiction in circulating library, after success of The Recess, and among reviews in chapters 3, 4, and 5, respectively. …

Popular Culture and Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth-Century England: The World of Robert Anderson, ''The Cumberland Bard''

This study sets out to extend and challenge existing historiography on late eighteenth century British popular culture, customary sports, class and cultural identity, focusing upon the rural geo-political borderland of England. It suggests that prevailing class-based and more London-biased studies need to be balanced with more regionalist-based work, and shows the importance of northern regional leisure variants. The textual and historical analysis draws largely on the published works of a neglected working-class dialect poet, Robert Anderson, living and working in Cumberland, arguing that he represented a strain of ''bardic regionalism,'' a variant of Katie Trumpener’s ''bardic nationalism.''

Real Money and Romanticism by Matthew Rowlinson

Matthew Rowlinson. Real Money and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+249. $89.00. An Coleridge famously remarked in Statesman's Manual, but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of senses; principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and former shapeless to boot. Following Coleridge, critics have often denigrated allegory, reading literature in philosophical or historical contexts symbolically, in Coleridge's terms, partak[ing] of reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates whole ... as a riving part in that unity of which it is representative. To be sure, critics appreciate fact that, in practice, symbolic analysis is itself highly figurative, even allegorical. As Frye noted in The Anatomy of Criticism, the instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine comment about a poem (e.g., 'In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be portraying tragedy of irresolution') he has begun to allegorize. In 1970s, Paul de Man showed that criticism undermines its symbolic pretensions by revealing its allegorical dimensions in moments of rhetorical self-consciousness. New-historicism demonstrated how literary works resist their own historicization by making history itself appear as allegory. Still, such acknowledgments are rare. We tend to assume--symbolically--that Keats's poems or Austen's novels tell us about capitalism or interiority or secularism rather than admit that such associations come from us. Real Money and Romanticism takes an overtly allegorical approach to its historical subject: Romanticism's relation to financial history. For a long time, suspension of cash payments at Bank of England, which made Britain a paper economy from 1797 to 1821, warranted little more than a few footnotes in Romantic studies. The last few years have seen several articles on subject and three books: Robert Mitchell's Sympathy and State in Romantic Era (Routledge, 2007), Mary Poovey's Genres of Credit Economy (Chicago, 2008), and now Rowlinson's. But whereas Mitchell and Poovey read both literature and economics historically, that is symbolically, as illustrations of an overarching historical narrative, Rowlinson is interested in what historical method leaves behind, its waste, curious relationality or allegories that exist between forms of value: and literature and connections between them. Rowlinson takes as his starting point Marx's dictum that money is a social relation. Money exists as difference between values of commodities in exchange. It comes into being when that relation is reified in a system of price or credit, and when commodities disappear persists in a symbolic or sublime form. This story has been told since before Greeks. Yet, following recent work in anthropology and sociology, as well as a panoply of critical theorists from Freud and Mauss to Derrida and Zizek, Rowlinson turns this story inside out: monetary objects (coins, bills, records, accounts, books) survive their conversion into and retain traces of social relations that form abandons. Thus, when a check is endorsed, it can pass as from one recipient to another. But in retaining form of a written contract, endorsed check retains traces of original exchange and its status as is exposed as a further relation dependent on it. Rowlinson calls these surviving monetary objects curiosities; while he does not cite recent important work by Ina Ferris, Katie Trumpener, and Susan Manning, there is much in Rowlinson's argument that will, I think, attract anyone interested in theoretical implications of Romantic antiquarianism. To this already difficult theoretical argument Rowlinson adds an equally controversial historical one. …

The Cambridge companion to children's literature

Preface M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel Chronology Eric J. Johnson Part I. Contexts and Genres: 1. The origins of children's literature M. O. Grenby 2. Children's books and the constructions of childhood Andrea Immel 3. The making of children's books Brian Alderson 4. Picture book worlds and ways of seeing Katie Trumpener 5. The fear of poetry Richard Flynn 6. Retelling stories across time and cultures John Stephens 7. Classics and canons Deborah Stevenson Part II. Audiences: 8. Learning to be literate Lissa Paul 9. Gender roles in children's fiction Judy Simons 10. Children's texts and the grown-up reader U. C. Knoepfelmacher 11. Ideas of difference in children's literature Lynne Vallone Part III. Forms and Themes: 12. Changing families in children's fiction Kimberley Reynolds 13. Traditions of the school story Mavis Reimer 14. Fantasy's alternative geography for children Andrea Immel, U. C. Knoepfelmacher and Julia Briggs 15. Animal and object stories David Rudd 16. Humour and the body in children's literature Roderick McGillis Guide to further reading Index.

Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (review)

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons Julia M. Wright (bio) Sarah Prescott. Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. xxiv+206pp. £18.99. ISBN 978-0-7083-2053-2. This book is valuable not only for its major contribution to the recovery of eighteenth-century Welsh writing but also for its nuanced analysis of Welsh writers’ stance on the “four nations” problem. Sarah Prescott’s introduction is a deft and historically sensitive account of developments in discussions of this problem after J.G.A. Pocock’s groundbreaking 1975 “Plea” (“British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 [December 1975]: 601–28), beginning with the historians, including Linda Colley, and then turning to the literary scholarship that followed. Prescott notes in particular Welsh writers’ tendency to read the union of Wales and England “as a reuniting of Britain rather than an appropriation of Wales by England” (111), the ways in which the Welsh antiquarian project served that vision by reinforcing the value of Welsh culture and history and seeking to preserve the Welsh language, and the significance of religion, both as cultural institution and as a rhetorical resource, to eighteenth-century Welsh writing. The first chapter is a close examination of the Welsh in London. As scholars are becoming increasingly aware, London was a generative site for the formation of national identity through the formal and informal expatriate clubs that met in the city (on terms that recall Benedict Anderson’s important essay, “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in [End Page 558] The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World [London: Verso, 1998], 58–74). Addressing in detail the London-based “Society of Ancient Britons,” Prescott traces the group’s position on the relation of Wales to Britain in terms of language, religion, and two national symbols, St David and the leek in particular, through a range of literary materials, from sermons to poems. This body of work suggests an uneasy ambivalence about Wales’s participation in the idea of Britain. On the one hand, these Welsh authors generally supported the existing regime, partly through “the providential message of Protestant British triumph” (7); on the other hand, they lamented the replacement of Welsh by English as the official language of Wales and worked to promote its preservation (9–13). The second chapter is a rich examination of the work of Jane Brereton, a poet clearly deserving of more critical attention for her literary merits and her engagement with national, class, and gender tensions. Prescott suggests, “it could be argued that Brereton’s commitment to the dynastic claims of the Hanoverian monarchs does not so much detract from her Welsh identity, but rather refracts this identity through a lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers” (31). This chapter is marked by such alternations between nature (“Welsh identity”) and culture (“lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers”), as well as the hesitant phrasing of “it could be argued.” Such tension between Herderian nationalism, in which the nation determines individual character, and foundational literary critical ideas, in which authors are original and complex, often bedevils scholarship concerned with the recovery of Celtic-Periphery writing. This tension is also in the literature itself, and Prescott does much to introduce a richly suggestive poet who mediates between the cultural forms of dominant English culture and the icons of Welshness, such as distinctive landscapes and the figure of Merlin. Chapter 3 offers valuable insights into the antiquarian recuperation of the bard in the mid-eighteenth century, focussing on Evan Evans and suggesting that scholars to date have been too quick to see his “translations [as] mostly executed for an English audience” (58). Prescott considers instead the “combative motive for antiquarian recovery and memory” (59) outlined in the work of Katie Trumpener and Jane Aaron. In this context, Evans’s refusal to adapt his texts to normative English standards of taste and his representation of the bards as “freedom fighters” constitute a defiant gesture (59, 67). The core of this chapter is a critically well-situated discussion of Thomas Gray’s The Bard, in the context of the larger English co-optation...

Milton’s Heirs: Epic Poetry in the 1790s

Milton’s Heirs: Epic Poetry in the 1790s Joseph Crawford (bio) Joseph Crawford Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, UK Joseph Crawford Joseph Crawford is a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His first book. Raising Milton’s Ghost will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2010. He is presently researching the historical contexts of early gothic literature in English. Footnotes 1. William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, ed. M. Celeste Williamson (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968) 31. Subsequent citations will be cited in the text by page. 2. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735) 26. 3. Jean Terrasson, A Critical Dissertation upon Homer’s Iliad (London, 1722) 1: 84; Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 146. 4. John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953–1982) 1: 810–14. 5. Amongst these scriptural epics were Samuel Wesley’s History of the New Testament (1701) and History of the Old Testament (1704), Abel Evans’s Prae-Existence (1714), the anonymous The Last Day (1720), Thomas Newcomb’s Last Judgment (1723), William Roberts’ Judah Restored (1774), Elizabeth Smith’s Brethren (1787) and Israel (1789), Mary Scott’s Messiah (1788), Elizabeth Hands’s Death of Amnon (1789), and Ann Holmes’s Adam and Eve (1800). 6. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (London: Oxford UP, 1989) 7. 7. To this list should perhaps be added Helen Maria Williams’ 1784 epic, Peru. Although less overtly concerned with the American Revolutionary War than the poems of Dwight or Barlow, Williams’ celebration of peace-loving Americans resisting invasion by warlike Europeans had obvious resonances with recent events, especially given Williams’ own opposition to the American war. 8. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 158. 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) 1: 183. 10. The first reviewers of Southey’s Joon of Arc criticized it for having been written too quickly, suggesting that such haste implied “so slight an opinion of (perhaps) the most arduous effort of human invention.” See Christopher Smith, A Quest For Home (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997) 115. 11. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 137–39, 164–65. 12. Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) 167–93. 13. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) 107. 14. James Ogden, Emmanuel (London, 1797) 130, 110. 15. James Burges, Richard I (London, 1801) 2: 70. 16. James Ogden, Revolution (London, 1790) 42; James Pye, Alfred (London, 1815) 60–61; Richard Cumberland, Calvary (London, 1792) 68–69. 17. Sarah Pyke, Israel (London, 1795) I: V, 2: 8, 2: 147–48; Robert Southey, Joan of Arc (Bristol, 1796) 94. 18. Samuel Wilcocke, Britannia (London, 1797) 12. 19. John Ogilvie, Britannia (London, 1801) 527–34. 20. Hannah Cowley, The Siege of Acre (London, 1801) 88, 124. 21. Walter Savage Landor, Gebir (London, 1798) 60. It was once commonly asserted that the plot of Gebir was inspired by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, but Simon Bainbridge has shown this to be improbable, as Landor began writing it as early as 1796. See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 32. 22. Of all these epics, The Niliad is the only one of which I have been unable to locate any surviving copies. My information on it comes only from a mention of it in the Critical Review XXV, new arr. (1799), which mocks Hildreth’s use of Classical machinery: “In an epic poem upon a victory so peculiarly attributed to providence, it was injudicious to derive its success from the heathen gods, as, according to the most ancient and orthodox opinions, those deities were the fallen angels. Mr Hildreth has therefore given the glory to the devil” (354–55). 23. John Marchant, “Dedication,” in John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1751) v–vi. 24. George Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 16. 25. DNB 14: 618; Curran 164. Copyright © 2010 by the Trustees of Boston University

Is There a Bull in This Nation? On Maria Edgeworth’s Nationalism

OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES MARIA EDGEWORTH HAS BEEN RECOVERED for the history of British novels as the inaugurator of the Irish national tale, a sub-genre that facilitated the tradition's transformation in the early nineteenth century. The strand of Edgeworth studies that has affected this shift importantly connects her political and aesthetic interests, making visible her contribution to the literary tradition within which she worked. It also, however, continues to accord Edgeworth a peripheral status--either on account of the marginality of the sub-genre she shaped and that limited her work, or on account of the liminality of her political views: a liberal nationalist, Edgeworth is usually understood to be stranded in limbo between Enlightenment projects and Romantic sentiments. In Ina Ferris' The Achievement of Literary Authority, for example, the national tale enables a move from an ahistorical universalist conception of man and society (that she believes dominates eighteenth-century novels), to a recognition of cultural heterogeneity and of historical process (that she sees as key to Romantic counter-Enlightenment). Edgeworth, she explains, inaugurates the national tale with Castle Rackrent (1800), where she presents the story of three generations of Irish landlords narrated by one of their servants--Thady Quirk--complete with his specific dialect, pronunciations, and idioms, and framed by a preface, explanatory footnotes, and a glossary by an English editor. But Ferris proceeds to focus on the way in which early nineteenth-century reviewers marginalized Edgeworth, and since Ferris' main concern here is to explain Scott's rise to literary authority, she does not question the hierarchy that these reviewers established. Nonetheless, the reasoning for Edgeworth's marginalization chronicled by her is especially revealing, insofar as it sets up the national tale as an imperfect (inferior, marginal) example of a novel. Edgeworth's work, these early nineteenth-century reviewers argued, is too domestic and evinces insufficient knowledge of, and discomfort with, public discourse (by contrast with Scott, who confidently incorporates official trans-national history into his narratives); additionally, Edgeworth's characters lack emotional individuation, a result of what reviewers saw as her eschewal of feeling (again in contrast with Scott, who endows his characters with a more complete subjectivity). (1) Thus, insofar as the national tale focuses on local (national) history and typical (national) character, it fails to measure up to the more global attitudes (towards social relations as well as towards personality) that the British novelistic tradition manifests at its best. (2) If Ferris credits Edgeworth with rejecting Enlightenment universalism, Katie Trumpener suggests that the extent of her rejection is insufficient; this, in Trumpener's account, makes Edgeworth's national tales peripheral to the work of her compatriots. Trumpener argues that Edgeworth's novels successfully criticize early nineteenth-century travel narratives that import an ostensibly universal standard of measurement into a landscape of great historical and cultural complexity. (3) At the same time, however, these novels continue to embrace the progressive and utilitarian concerns of Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland (of the 1770s) and thus fail to offer a full critique of Enlightenment reason. Other early nineteenth-century Irish authors, such as Sydney Owenson and Charles Maturin, tie Enlightenment reason with English imperialism, and criticize this combination with a cultural nationalism founded on the irreconcilability of local specifics and abstract systems. In such novels the territory-topos symbolizes a combination of local material conditions and past intellectual achievements, and is used to differentiate a local heritage, to mobilize sentimental attachments to this heritage, and to interpellate readers for traditionalist values. …

Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (review)

Reviewed by: Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh Gerard Carruthers Ian Duncan , Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Pp. xix, 387. $39.50. Ian Duncan's book confirms the fact that Scottish fiction in "the Age of Scott" is now a site of mature critical enquiry. For too long, Scottish critics tended to read Walter Scott as simply and fatally codifying a Unionist ideology in his writing. For its part, Romantic criticism tended to see work by Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt as rather too Scottish—and thus of peripheral concern to the main agenda of nationally transcendent Romantic creativity, where in any case poetry took center stage. Since the 1990s, however, much has changed. Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism (1997) saw the novel in the British Isles of the early nineteenth century as essaying states of development in British civilization and its residual forms of primitivism in ways that made the novel as multivalent as any poem and far from simply (as in much previous criticism) a cheerleader for Whig historical progress. In the Scottish and Irish contexts, Luke Gibbons, Cairns Craig, Leith Davis, Ina Ferris, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Duncan himself, and a host of others, have now established a formidable body of critical writing in which the "historical," "national" narratives of nineteenth-century novels are also interpreted as response to the challenges of modernity. Scott's Shadow brings into focus, the title signals, the way in which tradition and modernity compete with one another in the novel as conceived in Edinburgh in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The opening chapter, "Edinburgh, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," very wittily points to the way in which the publishing firm Blackwood's (prominent among several such companies) arguably made Edinburgh the cultural center of the English-speaking world for a time, as well as the way in which Edinburgh not only produced much cultural capital through printed books and periodicals but also made itself anew as a "national" capital suited to a new imperial "British," or [End Page 333] (more neutrally) a new international, age, in which it was part of an economic and political unit that was far from simply "Scottish." At the same time, "Scottishness" became a new kind of commodity. As Duncan puts it: "The national obsolescence of Scotland, its consignment to a 'classical' antiquity, [could] be prevented by cultivating that past, by converting the foundation of national identity from politics to culture" (17). In one manifestation of Scottish cultural transformation, Duncan provides the best critical analysis of John Gibson Lockhart's Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819) yet published, using it to examine the formation of a Tory Romanticism. Lockhart's idea of Scott as rarefied "Wizard of the North" tended to sever Scott from his Enlightenment and even Whig-tinctured cultural roots. At the end of his chapter, Duncan's depiction of Lockhart's romantically grotesque transmogrification of his father-in-law into a kind of zombie is both hilarious and astute. What Duncan is essaying is Lockhart's long influential projection of Scott as gothic spirit of the age par excellence disembodied from the contemporary and also truly historic concerns of the nation. Duncan's third chapter, "Economies of National Character," provides much welcome new material on Elizabeth Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) and Susan Ferrier's Marriage (1818) as especially informing the implicit debate in novels of the period as to whether the stock Scottish character should become a satirical or heroic figure—both of these types having complicated implications in terms of what they signal of Scotland's imagined state of economic development. Which way was the Scottish novel to go in this period? Was it to pursue pawky regional humor or sublime national heroism? Duncan, in his next chapter, answers that it does both. In his astonishing reading of Scott's Rob Roy, he demonstrates by way of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that "modernity, far from abolishing the difference between civilization and barbarism, preserves it—produces it—inside itself, in a relation of perpetual violence" (107). With this more complex interpretation, which begins to rescue...

The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel

Rebecca Carol Johnson is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. Her research focuses on the development of Arabic and European novels as an inquiry into the global circulation of form. Her interests also include the poetics, politics, and practice of translation. Her translation of Sinan Antoon's novel, I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, is forthcoming. Richard Maxwell teaches comparative literature at Yale University. He is author of The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992) and editor of The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities (2003), and, with Katie Trumpener, The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period (forthcoming). He is working on a study of historical fiction from 1660 to the present. His essay “Pretenders in Sanctuary” appeared in the June 2000 issue of MLQ. Katie Trumpener is professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University. Her first book, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997), surveys the novel's rise in Ireland, Scotland, and the early British Empire. A forthcoming book compares the East and West German cinemas. Her current book project is a comparative study of European modernism.

Abolition Poetry, National Identity, and Religion: The Case of Peter Newby's The Wrongs of Almoona

Abolition Poetry, National Identity, and Religion:The Case of Peter Newby's The Wrongs of Almoona Michael Tomko (bio) British antislavery poetry spoke with two voices: one seeking to liberate enslaved Africans, and one struggling to maintain a national movement that cultural historian David Turley has described as an uneasy allegiance divided like English society as a whole. So even though eighteenth-century abolitionism appealed to cosmopolitan benevolence for the enslaved, Linda Colley has argued that it also helped forge a "Britishness" complicit with national and imperial domination.1 Critics such as Moira Ferguson, Tim Burke, and Alan Richardson have investigated how this dual agenda in abolitionist literature shaped cultural models and popular understandings of race, class, gender, and national identity. Ferguson has shown that "in order to successfully propagandize and gain support, white British women writers felt they had to fashion verse in keeping with campaign demands"; these nationalist demands often entailed not only the subordinating representation of Africans as "unproblematized, unvoiced, unthinking, and unnamed" victims but also the promotion of conformist positions on gender and imperialism.2 Likewise, Burke and Richardson have critiqued an incipient racialism that distorted abolitionist literature by working-class and women writers from Liverpool and Bristol, respectively.3 These reconsiderations have complicated our understanding of abolitionist literature by showing the ideological ambivalence of marginalized writers negotiating the pressures of nation and empire as well as the interrelated formal complexity of their often neglected works. This essay expands this revision of abolitionist culture to discuss religious identity, a particularly important but also potentially fractious element of an abolition movement that brought together mainstream Anglicans, nonconformist dissenters, and evangelicals. To elucidate this tense interaction of religion, ideology, and aesthetics, I will focus on The Wrongs of Almoona, or the African's Revenge (1788), published in Liverpool anonymously under the pseudonym "A Friend to All Mankind."4 A historical narrative poem set in 1655 [End Page 25] Jamaica, this provocative text has attracted critical notice amid the recent recovery of abolitionist texts, but the anonymity of its author and its fraught message have rendered it something of a mystery in accounts of abolitionist culture.5 By here identifying the author as Peter Newby, an English Catholic poet from Lancashire, this essay seeks not only to deepen our understanding of this particular text but also to consider the role of abolitionist anti-Catholicism in the national and imperial project.6 Anti-Catholicism helped secure the abolition alliance and define a sense of Britishness even as the concurrent reform movement for "Catholic emancipation" (the campaign from 1778–1829 to abolish sectarian penal laws and grant civil rights to Catholics) sought to reintegrate Catholics into British civil society. I will argue that Newby's nervous attempt, like those of women and working-class writers, to meet the nationalist expectations of the abolitionist movement breaks down under the pressure of his own countervailing sense of historical oppression and alienation at the hands of British sectarianism. The result is a textual "split consciousness" at the level of poetic structure that registers the hopes and anxieties of marginalized writers struggling with the nationalist discourse of the abolition movement. This "doubleness" in The Wrongs of Almoona arises from Newby's experience of what Katie Trumpener calls "internal colonialism," a critical term that has received relatively little elaboration in studies of British literature from this period.7 This essay expands the scope of internal colonialism in two ways. First, while Trumpener examines only Scottish and Irish forms of internal colonialism, figures ranging from Edmund Burke to Samuel Taylor Coleridge also viewed English Catholics as a "nation within a nation" who occupied an equally difficult place in national society and culture. Second, my analysis brings Trumpener's study of the national tale and its marriage plot's "act of union" into dialogue with Homi Bhabha's study of the "forked tongue" or "double articulation" of colonizing discourse. For Bhabha, the colonial project results in a split or "partial" colonized subject that is "almost the same, but not quite." In speaking or writing back, however, the divided subject's ambiguity subverts colonizing discourse through "mimicry"—parody, ludic irony, or sly civility.8 On the one hand, through...