Nineteenth-century Readers Research Articles

Whose Othello Are We Talking About Anyway?

Abstract This article argues that Tayeb Salih, in his most famous novel, tackles Shakespeare's best-known play in the Arabic world, Othello, but not in the usual fashion. Instead of adapting the protagonist, Salih ventriloquises him to force a fresh understanding of Othello by Western readers, thus challenging what was at the time of his novel's publication a largely nineteenth-century reading of Othello. At the same time, Salih creates a hybridised protagonist of his own, one who comes to understand that he is neither Sudanese nor English. This reading thus sheds light on both Shakespeare's play and Salih's novel, arguing that the novel allows us to understand the play contextually rather than anachronistically. Fundamentally, Salih destabilises Arab notions of identity, arguing that the world has become ‘all mixed up’ and needs to move beyond essentialist identities.

Content Generation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Abstract: This article reconsiders the role of compiling in the modern history of authorship. Nineteenth-century readers viewed compiling as the purest form of "book-making," a mechanistic, market-oriented model of authorship that stood in opposition to authorial genius. The article examines these authorial models' intertwined origins in emergent industrial capitalism, and argues that book-making retained currency as a model into the early twentieth century partly because unattributed text reuse remained common. It also argues that in the aggregate, unattributed text reuse had epistemic and informational effects that anticipated challenges we are grappling with following the development of large language models.

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and the Double Time of Motherhood

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and the Double Time of Motherhood

Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer (review)

Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer (review)

Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough

Reviewed by: Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) Terry Scarborough. Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2021. Pp. xxvii + 165. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-911454-96-0 (hb). In "The Two Dog-Shows," appearing in All the Year Round in August, 1862, the anonymous author seizes on the remarkable contrast between the pampered pooches at the Islington dog show and the abandoned creatures at the relatively new institution, the Lost Dogs Home in Holloway: "At the Islington dog-show all was prosperity. Here, all is adversity. There, the exhibited animals were highly valued, and had all their lives been well fed, well housed, carefully watched. Here, for the most part, the poor things had been half-starved and houseless" ("Two Dog-Shows" 495). The article, while it genuinely admires the charitable work of the Lost Dogs Home, seems to have something else on its mind–the social and class divisions of human life which were a marked feature of the nineteenth-century city. As explained in the recent book The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Worboys et al.), this figurative use of animals to engage in discourses about human social relations was quite common in the nineteenth century, a symptom of the erosion of boundaries between animal and human that had begun the century before. Terry Scarborough takes this idea as his starting assumption in Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Scarborough explores the rhetorical function of animals in Dickens with a specific focus on their role in shaping attitudes towards poverty and those problems closely associated with poverty in the early and mid-nineteenth-century city–filth and disease. Using sanitary reform as a convenient way to describe that nexus of poverty, filth, and disease, Scarborough argues that Dickens effectively created sympathy for marginalized characters by drawing on both sanitary and animal welfare discourses. As Scarborough explains in the context of Dickens's sketch "The Seven Dials," Dickens could manipulate emotional responses to suffering animals "to express the [End Page 112] dilemmas in which the urban poor often became ensnared" (25). In an introduction and five chapters, Scarborough unfolds the rhetorical analysis, looking closely at a few of Dickens's early sketches and four major novels. The decision not to consider Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend is made in the interest of drawing attention to novels less commonly discussed in the context of sanitary reform and of engaging with "the more experimental stages of Dickens's attitudes toward the subject" (x). In a pattern that Scarborough adheres to throughout the book, Chapter 1 opens with a close reading of an article from a general-interest periodical, in which an overt discussion of animal life becomes an occasion for reflections on human poverty and the filthy urban environment. The article Scarborough uses in the first chapter, "List of the Animals in the Gardens of the Zoological Society," from the Quarterly Review, 1836, frames his discussion of several of Dickens's early sketches. In close readings of "Gin Shops," "A Little Talk about Spring, and the Sweeps," and other pieces, Scarborough traces the way Dickens deploys zoological discourses "to tap the conscience […] of the swiftly growing reading public" (11). Scarborough's idea is that in a changing context of animal-human relations, sympathy for one group could be used to develop sympathy for the other. So, for instance, in the case of the chimney-sweeps, Dickens likens the kindly feelings towards sweeps generated by fanciful legends and lore to the kindly (and self-interested) feelings towards animals effected by theories of the transmigration of souls. Scarborough identifies a similar dynamic in Oliver Twist, the focus of Chapter 2. The animal in question is Bill Sikes's hard-used but loyal dog Bull's-eye, who for Scarborough functions as a mediating figure between wary nineteenth-century readers and the socially unacceptable figure of Nancy. Both are "loyal subjects dedicated to the abusive master" (54), but as Scarborough argues, the sympathy that Dickens hopes to cultivate for Nancy can be felt...

Announcement: The Marilyn Gaull Book Award

Previous articleNext article FreeAnnouncement: The Marilyn Gaull Book AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreIn 2021, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association inaugurated the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, which is conferred annually in recognition of the most outstanding monograph, biography, or scholarly edition reviewed during the previous year in The Wordsworth Circle, which Marilyn Gaull founded in 1970 and edited through 2019. The prize is awarded to the book that best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed. To be eligible for consideration, books must be submitted for review by The Wordsworth Circle, where reviews appear in the fourth issue (Fall) of every volume year. Although there is no formal deadline for receipt of materials, authors are urged to submit their work no later than January 31. Submissions are welcome in all areas of British, European, and North American Romantic studies. The awardee will receive a $2,000 prize and will be recognized at the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association lunch at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is pleased to announce the second recipient of the Marilyn Gaull Book Award (2022): Jeffrey N. Cox, for William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo (Cambridge University Press, 2021), reviewed by Kenneth Johnston in The Wordsworth Circle 53.4 (2022): 505–10. The review committee commended Cox’s award-winning study in the following terms:From its cheeky title to its ringing conclusion, William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic by Jeffrey Cox offers a provocative, field-altering assessment of Wordsworth after Waterloo, throwing into relief the networks and relationships hiding in plain sight between Wordsworth and his younger contemporaries. Written with a wry, perceptive sympathy and drawing on Cox’s unparalleled knowledge of early-nineteenth-century publishing circles, this is a timely and, at times, moving book about the challenges of aging, the dynamics of inter-generational tension, and the role of the artist in society. Cox’s book skillfully balances finely detailed close reading with the broader sweep of Romantic print culture and European politics, creating a compelling narrative of Wordsworth as an engaged, sometimes combative, reader of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hunt, and others. The poet who emerges from this study is in some sense a second “early” Wordsworth, deeply embroiled in the worlds of publishing and politics after Napoleon’s defeat. Beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, and meticulously researched, this volume makes the most persuasive case to date for the importance of the “later” Wordsworth to the study of British Romanticism. Marilyn Gaull would have loved this book. The committee takes great pleasure in awarding the 2022 Marilyn Gaull Award to Jeffrey Cox for William Wordsworth: Second-Generation Romantic.The Wordsworth Circle joins the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association in congratulating Jeffrey Cox on his vital, timely, and award-winning contribution to Romantic studies.To be considered for the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, publications should be sent for review to the Associate Editor, Jacob Risinger:Ohio State UniversityDenney Hall 421164 Annie and John Glenn AvenueColumbus, OH 43210Please address any questions to the editor, Charles Mahoney, at [email protected].Previous recipients of the Marilyn Gaull Award:2021: Andrew Stauffer, Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 54, Number 1Winter 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725473 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Walter Scott's Loose Leaves: Books, Scraps, and Dispersive Reading

Abstract Novel studies and book history alike emphasize the significance of Walter Scott's creation of his Magnum Opus edition (1829–33): a repossession, on behalf of a newly individuated author and between the covers of a uniformly manufactured edition, of publications that had previously appeared as the works of sundry authorial eidolons. For a nineteenth-century culture of collected editions, this act of rebinding represented a foundational moment. But Scott's novels also figured prominently within a robust tradition of commonplacing and scrapbooking in which books were understood as things that came apart, literally and figuratively, as well as things that came together. Nineteenth-century readers were keen to cut up, recontextualize, and reboot Scott's printed works inside their own homemade manuscript volumes. Guided by their practices, we are able to see how Scott's own novels—particularly Waverley, Rob Roy, The Monastery—yield an alternative account of the book as something scrappy, loosely bound, and made through scissors and paste methods: a temporary gathering ready to be dispersed once more. This essay explores the implications of this alternative account of the book for our ideas of novelistic form, and in particular for what Elaine Freedgood has called the “diegetic illusion”: a way of conceptualizing texts as though they were tightly bound books, which understands novels as the containers for enclosed, bounded worlds. To trace these implications is to see how the dispersive readings that helped define Scott's nineteenth-century afterlife might also prove useful points of reference for twenty-first-century efforts to decolonize novel studies’ understanding of its object.

РЕЦЕПЦИЯ АНТИЧНЫХ ЭСТЕТИЧЕСКИХ КАТЕГОРИЙ В ПЕРВОМ «ФИЛОСОФИЧЕСКОМ ПИСЬМЕ» П. Я. ЧААДАЕВА*

The relevance of the study is due to the need for an aesthetic analysis of a famous journalistic work of Pyotr Chaadayev, which in the history of philosophy has been studied in detail from the ethical, epistemological, ontological, and theological perspectives, but the aesthetic aspect has been overlooked. The problem of identifying the reception of ancient aesthetic categories in the most famous Russian philosophical letter of the first half of the 19th century is associated with a change of cultural eras and is of interest in terms of preserving the content of the categories of aesthetics that was laid down by Plato and Aristotle. The research methodology includes the text analysis method and the comparison of the content of aesthetic categories of ancient philosophers and Chaadayev. The study revealed that Chaadaev in his letter uses the reception of the Socratic dialogue, adapted for his time, which suggests the author’s commitment to ancient traditions. Chaadaev’s most popular aesthetic categories are the sublime and the base, as well as mimesis (he uses the word “imitation” in his letter). As a result, it turns out that while characterizing Western European culture the philosophical letter’s author correlates it with the category of the sublime, which is close in content to the sublime of the Platonists and Pseudo-Longinus. The opposite category of the base in the Aristotelian interpretation, from Chaadaev’s point of view, best describes Russian history and culture. According to the results of the comparison, the reason for such a bitter picture of domestic existence found by the author seems logical – it lies in the mimesis or imitation, which in Chaadaev’s definition clearly manifests the traces of both Platonic and Aristotelian meanings. As a result, the letter obviously demonstrates the reception of ancient aesthetic categories. However, it can be noted that the entire composition of the work is built on the contrast between the sublime and the base. It was this contrast that created the plot conflict of the letter, which caused a stir among the nineteenth-century readers and leaves no one indifferent to this day.

From the Editor

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorCharles W. MahoneyCharles W. Mahoney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe 2022 review issue of The Wordsworth Circle includes appraisals of 20 books under consideration for the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, which the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association created in 2021 in honor of the founding editor of the journal, to recognize “the most outstanding monograph, biography, or scholarly edition reviewed during the previous year in The Wordsworth Circle.” The charge to the review committee is to determine “the book that best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed.” In its inaugural year, the 2021 Marilyn Gaull Book Award was conferred upon Andrew Stauffer for Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); please see the announcement above. The recipients of both the 2021 and 2022 awards will be recognized at the annual lunch of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the January 2023 meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco.Among the books under review this year are three diverse studies of Wordsworth that were published in 2021: Jeffrey Cox’s William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo, which joins a growing list of studies of the later Wordsworth; Jessica Fay’s edition of The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803–1829, the introduction to which (according to our reviewer) is “so substantial it could almost have appeared as a monograph on its own”; and Cecilia Powell’s Canals, Castles and Catholics: Dora Wordsworth’s Continental Journal of 1828, the first edition to be published of Dora Wordsworth’s travel journal.We are thrilled to include reviews of the first monographs published by Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Shelley’s Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song), Tom Marshall (Aesthetics, Poetics and Phenomenology in Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and Jacob Risinger (Stoic Romanticism and the Ethics of Emotion). It is also a pleasure to review Wild Romanticism, edited by Marcus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke, whose work in a similar register appeared in The Wordsworth Circle vol. 52, no. 3 (2021), a special issue on “Romanticism and Wilderness” guest-edited by James C. McKusick. The review of Orrin Wang’s Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism continues the journal’s promotion of work on Romantic media, as highlighted in last year’s review issue (vol. 52, no. 4) as well as in this year’s special issue on “Romanticism and Data” (vol. 53, no. 3), guest-edited by Yohei Igarashi.In addition to the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association lunch at the 2023 meeting of the MLA, the Association is sponsoring the session “Romanticism and Sexuality” (please see the announcement above), a selection of the proceedings from which will appear in The Wordsworth Circle vol. 54, no. 3 (2023). Looking ahead to the 2024 meeting of the MLA, the Association will be sponsoring a session on “Pan-European Romanticism”; the call-for-papers appears above.Finally, it is a great pleasure to announce that Jacob Risinger (Ohio State University) has joined the journal in the capacity of Associate Editor—a significant addition to the editorial staff. Among his other responsibilities, Professor Risinger will be overseeing the review issue beginning in 2023; please direct all queries regarding reviews and reviewing: [email protected]—CWM Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 53, Number 4Fall 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724441 Views: 21Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Benefits and Limitations of Digital Tools to Retrieve the Emotions of Nineteenth-Century Readers of Philosophy from Manuscript Letters

This article discusses the limitations and benefits of resorting to digital tools and research methodology to explore nineteenth-century manuscript letters, written by readers to the French philosopher Victor Cousin, and to increase our understanding of how ordinary readers responded to philosophy at the time. More broadly, it examines the potential assets of the annotation interface developed in the Reading Europe Advance Data Investigation Tool (READ-IT https://readit-project.eu/ 2018–2021), a collaborative research project focusing on regenerating lost connections about the cultural heritage of reading from large volumes of highly-diverse eighteenth- to twenty-first-century sources in multiple languages. The case study describes challenges raised by attempts to detect and classify differences between female and male philosophical reading experiences as well as emotional responses, something which is largely under-explored. Along the way it provides reflexive as well as epistemological insights into the promises of big data for research on cultural history and literary archives and the current state of knowledge on emotions.

A Bookish Intervention: Thomas Bewick’s British Birds and the Reconfiguration of Illustrated Natural History

This essay argues that the impact of Bewick’s natural histories on nineteenth-century reading culture owed not simply to their engravings but to an innovative manipulation of the affordances of the material form of the book-volume. Governed by a commitment to the printed book as a formative medium in the making of reading relations, Bewick reconfigured the fundamental unit of illustrated natural history, the double-structured unit of description, and altered the dynamics of natural history reading. Repositioning readers so as to bring them into closer proximity both to the book and to the natural world around them, his celebrated bird book brings into view often overlooked linkages between the period’s intensified bookishness, emergent knowledge fields, the reading public, and generic innovation that were to reshape the culture of reading in the nineteenth century.

Hyperion’s Asterisks: Seeing Stars & Star Power

ABSTRACT Hyperion. A Fragment closes Keats’s 1820 volume with fourteen asterisks, but why? Who added them, and to what effect? Romantic period scholars have not interpreted Hyperion’s asterisks as significant typography in the 1820 volume. Most often, the asterisks have been left out of critical studies of the poem or treated as a reiteration of its subtitle. The major critical sticking point has been determining Keats’s authorial intentions. In this essay, I aim to shift our focus from defending Keats’s intentions to considering why Keats’s publishing team, led by John Taylor, would want to end the 1820 volume with fourteen asterisks. I propose that the asterisks mark their hopes for Hyperion’s positive reception and Keats’s career advancement, and not Keats’s incapacity to finish the poem. Hyperion’s asterisks have particular significations and rhetorical effects in the 1820 volume. I want to emphasize that these asterisks were legible to early nineteenth-century readers and that Keats’s publishers sought to capitalize on that legibility with a Gothic twist. I argue that Hyperion’s asterisks connect the potential of Keats’s unfinished poem with legends of star poets and promote his rising star power in the spectacular light of Apollo’s transformation into the sun god of poetry.

Announcement: Marilyn Gaull Book Award

Previous articleNext article FreeAnnouncement: Marilyn Gaull Book AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn 2021, the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association inaugurated the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, which is conferred annually in recognition of the most outstanding monograph, biography, or scholarly edition reviewed during the previous year in The Wordsworth Circle, which Marilyn Gaull founded in 1970 and edited through 2019. The prize is awarded to the book that best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed. To be eligible for consideration, books must be submitted for review by The Wordsworth Circle, where reviews appear in the fourth issue (Fall) of every volume year. Although there is no formal deadline for receipt of materials, authors are urged to submit their work no later than January 31. Submissions are welcome in all areas of British, European, and North American Romantic studies. The awardee will receive a $1,000 prize and will be recognized at the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association lunch at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is pleased to announce the first recipient of the Marilyn Gaull Book Award (2021): Andrew M. Stauffer’s Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), reviewed by Tom Mole in The Wordsworth Circle 52.4 (2021): 524–27. The review committee commended Stauffer’s award-winning study as follows:Andrew Stauffer’s Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library reaches out beyond academic readers to the librarians and budget-holders who are often the unacknowledged legislators of our discipline. His work makes a compelling case for the continuing social relevance of reading Romantic poetry – in its widest sense – as an “embodied mode of attentiveness” (to borrow Rita Felski’s term). The judges thought that Marilyn Gaull would have loved the book’s enthusiasm, boldness, scope, and its keen sense of what might work in the classroom to nurture the love of Romantic literature that we all want to uphold and defend against the relentless presentism of contemporary culture. By immersing twenty-first century researchers and students in the reading experiences of nineteenth-century readers, Book Traces creates a new understanding of the value of the Romantic tradition – not just as another form of curated culture – but as a vital way of kindling empathy across and within different communities of readers. By standing up for the preservation of print collections with passion, intellect, and urgency, Andrew Stauffer has initiated a new chapter in Romantic Studies, connecting the affective power of Romantic poetry in the future with its material past. The depth of scholarship and freshness of his argument is impressive as well as a joy to read, from start to finish. For the inaugural award of this prize, we felt that there was no more significant achievement than a forthright defence of the foundation of our discipline.The Wordsworth Circle joins the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association in congratulating Andrew Stauffer on his vital, timely, and award-winning contribution to Romantic studies.To be considered for the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, publications should be sent for review to the editor, Charles Mahoney:Department of EnglishUniversity of Connecticut215 Glenbrook Road, U-4025Storrs, CT 06269-4025Please address any questions to the editor, at [email protected]. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 53, Number 2Spring 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721551 © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation by Clara Dawson, and: Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation by Clara Dawson, and: Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James by Ashley C. Barnes

Reviewed by: Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James by Ashley C. Barnes Shirley Samuels ASHLEY C. BARNES Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. 240 pp. For Ashley Barnes, to read the American novel carefully, or, perhaps, deeply, is to employ elements that resemble worship. Developing this idea further as she explores nineteenth-century reading practices, Barnes claims that interpreting literature can invoke communion: "Communion … stands as an alternative to the apparently deeper love of mutual revelation that might be figured by the heart-swapping merge Melville imagines" (2). By her title, Barnes invokes and rephrases the classic work by Leslie Fiedler, and she explains it this way: "The great American love story that was canonized by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel is a tale built on the frustrated longing for revelatory union" (5). Using a broad set of interpretive goals—"what does it mean to know and love a text?"—the book sets out to weave a story in between what have been read as the opposite poles of interpretive strategy, namely the poles of ethical and historicist critical practice. It is that gap between an attachment that she celebrates and an approach that folds ethics into historicism that the book repeatedly attempts to bridge; yet, even as it argues for an expansion of possibilities, an intriguing resilience keeps these elements apart. While the author attempts objectivity, the book proposes to guide "a literary ethicist who wants to avoid the bad interpretation of colonizing sympathy or of ideological unveiling" (7). Even as the book argues for a "literary-ethical historicism," a "hybrid of historicism and formalism," it does not quite hide its discomfort with presentations that remain in the camp of historical readings (7). According to that discomfort, historicism might be excused for being somewhat random, but its "crime" lies in the "aha" moments of "ideological unveiling" that do not promote community. In the attempt to assuage what often appears literally as an ideological difference between the histories of Catholic and Protestant ideology in the United States, the book allows value to historicism when it announces that "historical contextualizing can forge real intimacy with literature" (8). Under the influence of [End Page 97] such critics as Rita Felski, the author might be seen to present such a statement as a major concession. I'm sympathetic with the desire for bridge building, even as the title of the book indicates its ambition. Further, the careful use of chiasmic statements indicates the oppositions that the book seeks to unpack and that it investigates through a detailed account of critical perspectives in its first and last chapters. If found neither through the "spirit that vivified a historical text" nor the "historical motor that animated a spiritualized text," then it proposes to describe what remains within the opposition: "the idea that the text's deep power must be either exposed or submitted to" (9). Drawing on nineteenth-century belief practices, the "ideology of transcendence finds its emotional justification in the Protestant standard of revelation" (11), which Barnes finds deeply flawed even as she retains some desire for it. Since "the idea of transcendence has served to extract a text from history" (11), she wonders if it is possible to re-embed texts within their histories and still find a form of communion that invokes, without solving, the fraught relations that continue to divide such Protestant yearnings from the doctrines of Catholicism. Interestingly, the novel becomes the necessary battleground for describing a "historicist literary ethics" that fuels what the author also describes as a "postsecular approach" (11). In her elaboration of this position, Barnes invokes the "familiar genres of the sentimental, the romantic, and the realist" novel (13). The didacticism of the oppositional constructions continues as she comments that the "scholarship on sentimentality … can be reductive and high-handed" (21). Such scholarship especially confounds her because it "treats as naïve the view that reading is an encounter with otherness." The concept of communion, for Barnes, "avoids the potential aggression of revelatory reading" (22). The book's paired juxtapositions include some surprising choices as...

From the Editor

From the Editor

Annette R. Federico. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.

Annette R. Federico. <i>My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.</i>

Crossing the Atlantic: Reading Rooms and Foreign-Language Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Reading rooms, a totally unprecedented kind of institution in a country newly independent from Portuguese rule, started being set up in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro in the late 1820s. Catering mainly for the foreign communities, their fare consisted for the most part in imported printed material. Although it might sound like an exaggeration to claim that Rio was flooded with newspapers, books and periodicals, they became gradually and increasingly available to its inhabitants. The establishment of the British Subscription Library in 1826, the Portuguese Circulating Library in 1837, and the Biblioteca Fluminense in 1847 played a pivotal role in the circulation of British and French periodicals, allowing for the dissemination of news, ideas, key political, social and economic issues, as well as the diffusion of fiction and literary news. This essay reveals the presence and circulation of some of the foreign periodicals in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro libraries and reading rooms and traces their impact on the local Republic of Letters.

From the Editor

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom the EditorCharles W. MahoneyCharles W. Mahoney Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe 2021 review issue of The Wordsworth Circle includes appraisals of 27 books under consideration for the Marilyn Gaull Book Award, which the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association created this year in honor of the founding editor of the journal, to recognize “the most outstanding monograph, biography, or scholarly edition reviewed during the previous year in The Wordsworth Circle.” The charge to the review committee is to determine “the book that best represents the spirit of wide-ranging inquiry, critical acumen, and enduring influence on the field that Marilyn Gaull always championed.” The recipient of this inaugural award will be recognized at the annual lunch of the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the January 2022 meeting of the Modern Language Association in Washington, DC. Also in honor of its founding editor, The Wordsworth Circle will publish a special issue in 2022 in celebration of Marilyn Gaull’s life and career (vol. 53, no. 1).Among the books under review this year are two biographies of Wordsworth that were published in 2020, the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth: a significantly revised, second edition of Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life (first edition 1989) and Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World. Additional books under review that concentrate on Wordsworth include Wordsworth’s Unremembered Pleasure (Alexander Freer), The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability (Emily Stanback), and William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 (Saeko Yoshikawa).There is an exciting constellation of studies of Romantic print and media culture in The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Yohei Igarashi), Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain (Michelle Levy), Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry, Manuscript, Print, 1780–1850 (Samantha Matthews), and Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (Andrew Stauffer). There is also welcome attention to comparative aspects of Romanticism in The Italian Idea (Will Bowers), Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 (Philipp Hunnekuhl), and European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832 (Diego Saglia).In addition to the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association lunch at the 2022 meeting of the MLA, the Association is sponsoring two scholarly sessions, “Romanticism and Data” and “Romantic Epistemologies,” from which a selection of the proceedings will appear in The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 53, no. 3 (2022). Looking ahead to the 2023 meeting of the MLA, the Association will be sponsoring a session on “Romanticism and Sexuality”; the call for papers appears above. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 52, Number 4Fall 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716677 Views: 153 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.