Romantic Circles Research Articles

A Critical Turn Inwards in The Woman of Colour (1808): On Teaching Romanticism Now

This encounter with The Woman of Colour (1808) began with a 2019 call by Romantic Circles Pedagogies for essays on “Romantic” teaching. The COVID-19 pandemic intervened, as did a personal tragedy that was yet not my own. The essay I eventually wrote was reshaped by this tragedy, as were my reflections on the experimental assignment in life-writing that was to be the essay’s focus. My tone, while meditative and personal, compelled me to pose new questions about The Woman of Colour and to recognize limits in my prior readings of the novel (2019; 2020). The Woman of Colour is shown to push past the limits of what (white) readers can say or know about the protagonist, Olivia Fairfield, both because of and despite the author’s use of a strong epistolary “I.”

Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, eds., <i>Editing and Reading Blake</i>

I remember being introduced to a senior scholar at a summer Huntington Library lawn party a generation ago and his inquiring politely, “Well, what’s your angle?” Stephen Dedalus’s inner panic to “say something” flashed to Steelyard the Lawgiver’s Island in the Moon reassurance that “every person has a something” as I fumbled to come up with a dissertation abstract. Those more than thirty years past rise again in contemplating the analogous age differences between the two sets of contributors to this Romantic Circles electronic collection, which presents the efforts of four “younger Blake editors and scholars” and three “established” ones. The latter, Mary Lynn Johnson, W. H. Stevenson, and David Fuller, are doubtless familiar to subscribers of this journal for their three different “successful print editions” of “texts designed to appeal to first-time readers of Blake,” while the former, Rachel Lee, J. Alexandra McGhee, and co-editors Wayne C. Ripley and Justin Van Kleeck, “have all worked as project assistants to the Blake Archive and received their graduate training from its editors” (introduction, par. 4; Johnson, par. 2). With the concise print elders accounting for less than a third of the volume (in my printout, anyway, and not counting the errata sheet for Johnson and Grant’s second edition, for which there is no editorially supplied print option), and the organizers’ point taken that “Stevenson, Johnson, and Fuller all see their editions being used in connection with the Blake Archive” (introduction, par. 7), the juxtaposition carries the sense of staged generational baton-passing to celebrate the expanding empire of the Blake Archive.

Ukraińska wizja Słowiańszczyzny

The research is dedicated to the development of Slavic idea in the Ukrainian romantic circles of adherents, namely in the secret circle, called Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which worked in Kyiv during 1846–1847 years. That comradeship represented its own original understanding of Slavic problematic. After it was eliminated by the regime of Russian Imperia all Slavophil movements were stopped and theirs participants were persecuted and arrested. That’s why the author of the article treats the 1847 year as a year of arresting Kyiv’s conspirators and as a time of change in the development of Slavic ideology.

Pedagogical Elements: A Celebration of Romantic Teaching

ABSTRACT For the past five years, Romantic Circles and NASSR have sponsored a pedagogy prize, choosing three to four finalists to share their pedagogy through dynamic, short presentations at an open panel during the NASSR conference. All finalists have formerly had their pedagogical contributions published on the “Pedgagogies” section of the Romantic Circles website (http://www.romantic-circles.org/pedagogies/contest), an act of publication that seeks to value the often invisible intellectual labor of constellating—and revitalizing—Romanticism for ourselves and the next generations of readers. This past year, our four finalists taught a Romanticism that dwells within the vicissitudes of place—and pursued the questions about “nature,” travel, migration, colonization, and connection that often follow. Their pedagogies dramatically highlighted race, gender, anthropogenic climate change, and other power dynamics of difference; and they found ways to create “community-at-a-distance” both by leveraging digital networks (the creation of blogs, websites, and Prezi presentations) and by asking students to read through wonderfully new assemblages of text, image, and other media.

“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill

“Whate’er These Words Cannot Express”: In Memory of Michael O’Neill

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Przełomowy moment w rozwoju słowianofilstwa

The research is dedicated to the development of Slavic idea in the Ukrainian romantic circles of adherents, namely in the secret circle, called Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which existed in Kyiv during 1846–1847 years. That comradeship represented its own original understanding of Slavic problems. After it was eliminated by the regime of the Russian Empire, all Slavophil movements were stopped and theirs participants were persecuted and arrested. That is why the author of the article treats 1847 as a year of arresting Kyiv’s conspirators and as a time of change in the development of Slavic ideology.

Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 208 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewTimothy Morton. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 208 pp.Marc MazurMarc Mazur Search for more articles by this author Marc Mazur is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Western University and is currently finishing his dissertation, “Unread: Books on the Margins of History.” He has been published in Analectica Hermeneutica and has a forthcoming article that will appear in Romantic Circles Praxis.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 44, Number 3Spring 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/696926 Views: 461Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review: Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James by Michael Anesko Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 by Oliver Herford

Book Review| March 01 2018 Review: Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James by Michael Anesko Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 by Oliver Herford Michael Anesko, Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 133. $70.Oliver Herford, Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 268. $100. Stuart Burrows Stuart Burrows Brown University Stuart Burrows, Associate Professor of English at Brown University, is the author of A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, 1839–1945 (2008). His articles have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, The Henry James Review, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Romantic Circles, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. In progress is a book-length study tentatively titled “Henry James and the Invention of the Present.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2018) 72 (4): 546–550. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2018.72.4.546 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stuart Burrows; Review: Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James by Michael Anesko Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890–1915 by Oliver Herford. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2018; 72 (4): 546–550. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2018.72.4.546 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

NINES, RAVON, Romantic Circles, Review 19, Romantic Textualities, Popular Romanticism,The Public Domain Review

Previous articleNext article No AccessNINES, RAVON, Romantic Circles, Review 19, Romantic Textualities, Popular Romanticism,The Public Domain ReviewPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 48, Number 4Autumn 2017The Annual Review Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC48040235 Views: 3Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

From Coppet to Milan: Romantic Circles at La Scala

Previous articleNext article FreeFrom Coppet to Milan: Romantic Circles at La ScalaCarmen CasaliggiCarmen CasaliggiCardiff Metropolitan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 48, Number 1Winter 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC48010059 Views: 194Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: A Romantic Circles Edition. General Editors: Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer

The Collected Letters of Robert Southey: A Romantic Circles Edition. General Editors: Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford, and Ian Packer

The “Gothic Complex” in Shelley Revisited

About forty years ago, when I was a new Ph.D., Percy Bysshe Shelley (as opposed to Mary Shelley) and Gothic were not considered important subjects of study, at least not together, and Gothic as one of P.B. Shelley's styles was relegated to his two highly imitative early novels of 1810-11, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, along with some early poetry. For last few decades this dissociation has been only gradually [right arrow]corrected by sporadic studies (such as those by Finch, Rajan, and Whatley) that have seen Gothic motifs in several Shelley masterworks long after his early novels. But not until recently has pervasiveness of Gothic in Shelley been fulsomely and continuously examined to point of generating ongoing debate about what that migration reveals. In 2015, a volume in Romantic Circles Praxis series published several new essays on Shelley and Gothic (see Brookshire), and range of debate is not stopping there. It is thus only fitting for me to offer another possible answer to a surprisingly current question: what does it mean in Shelley's thinking and for Gothic that it migrates across his work as widely and as persistently as it does? In one of those Romantic Circles essays, I offered beginnings of such an answer by proposing what I called the Gothic in Shelley (Hogle 2015), but even I did not realize then just how far it goes in a great deal of his work. I would therefore like to use this opportunity, in honor of Robert Fangbaum's pioneering work on Romanticism, to modify my past short-sightedness and, I hope, deepen my sense of that complex to offer some better explanations of why schemes from Gothic--descended, yes, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764)--are really essential to Shelley for iconoclastic questioning and reworking of Western assumptions that he aims to incite in his readers. First, let me note briefly that I do not think what I call Gothic complex explains every use of Gothic figures in every one of Shelley's works; hence great insights in what is revealed in recent scholarship on this subject by other authors (especially Rajan). But I do believe that this coalescence, which I see as a series of steps often taken by Shelley, and speakers or characters of his, in writings from Zastrozzi onwards, is a method he uses amazingly often to jolt his audience out of stultified modes of thought towards transformations that begin to offer a different vision of world, yet without discounting lingering human attachment to older ways of thinking. The steps in this Gothic complex are usually five, as I see them, and readers can witness an instance of all five at work in this passage from Shelley's flagrantly Gothic Zastrozzi: Scarcely knowing where he was, or what to believe, for a few moments Verezzi stood bewildered, and unable to arrange confusion of ideas which floated in his brain, and assailed his terror-struck imagination. He knew not what to believe--what phantom it could be that, in shape of Zastrozzi, blasted his straining eye-balls --Could it really be Zastrozzi? Could his most rancorous, his bitterest enemy, be thus beloved, thus confided in, by perfidious Matilda? For several moments he stood doubting what he should resolve upon. At one while he determined to reproach Matilda with treachery and baseness, and overwhelm her in mid-career of wickedness; but at last concluding it to be more politic to dissemble and subdue his emotions, he went into breakfast-parlour which he had left, and seated himself as if nothing had happened, at a drawing which he had left incomplete. Besides, perhaps Matilda might not be guilty--perhaps she was deceived; and though some scheme of villainy and destruction to himself was preparing, she might be dupe, and not coadjutor, of Zastrozzi. The idea that she was innocent soothed him; for he was anxious to make up, in his own mind, for injustice which he had been guilty of towards her: and though he could not conquer disgusting ideas, unaccountable detestations, which often, in spite of himself, filled his soul towards her, he was willing to overcome what he considered but as an illusion of imagination, and to pay that just tribute of esteem to her virtues which they demanded. …

Reassessing Mary Tighe as a Lyrical and Political Poet: The Archival Discovery of Tighe's Verses Transcribed for H.T. (1805)

This essay reassesses Mary Tighe as a political poet by examining the overtly political poems in her formerly unpublished two-volume illustrated manuscript collection Verses Transcribed for H.T. (1805), now available as an electronic edition at Romantic Circles. Prior to the publication of Verses, the only clearly political poems Tighe wrote appeared to be her famous ballad “Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure” and “There Was a Young Lordling, Whose Wits Were All Toss'd Up”. Verses lyrics such as “Cleuen An Elegy”, “Written on the Acquittal of Hardy &c—Dec:r 1794”, “Song to My Harp 1798” or “Verses Written When a Detachment of Yeomen Were Sent Against the Rebel Army” reflect Tighe's larger engagement with national politics—notably, the 1794 Treason Trials, the 1798 Irish Rebellion and the 1801 Act of Union. They also encourage political readings of Tighe's seemingly apolitical poems, such as “Address to My Harp” or “La Cittadina”, whose title in Verses emphasizes the poem's references to the 1799 debates on the proposed Act of Union: “La Cittadina: Written Jany 1799”.

Amelia and John Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts

ROXANNE EBERLE Amelia andJohn Opie: Conjugal Sociability and Romanticism’s Professional Arts t('T'O-7-HAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER MAKE TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF W British literary Romanticism?”1 In posing that question, Anne Mellor added her voice to other feminist scholars interested in exploring not only the work of women writers but also the significance of gender to Romanticism’s long-standing characterizations of the imagination, literary endeavor, and the natural world. Twenty years later, Mellor prompts us to go further, asking, “So what comes next?” She calls for “editions of letters and journals, as well as modern editions, densely annotated. . . . We also need full-scale biographies [and] good single-author studies of the entire literary careers of almost all the leading women writers of the Romantic period.”2 The question for biographers working within the field, and one I pose here, rephrases Mellor’s query to: “What difference did gender make to the ways in which authors lived their lives and constructed their careers during the British Romantic period?” My work contributes to sociability studies by detailing an important aspect of Romanticism that is urban, public, and deliberately engaged with the marketplace.3 In the essay that follows, I ex­ plore Amelia and John Opie’s negotiation of courtship and married life during the vexed mid 1790s, when it still seemed possible to imagine alter­ native social conventions in literature and to enact them within the public 1. Romanticism & Gender, i. 2. “Romanticism, History, Historicism: A Conversation,” 156. See also Roxanne Eberle, ed., “Interview with Anne Mellor,” Romantic Circles: Praxis Series, January 2014, http://www .rc.umd.edu/praxis/mcllor_mterview/index.html. 3. See Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds. Romantic Sociability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 319 320 ROXANNE EBERLE and private spaces ofLondon. Although historical hindsight has led scholars and historians to chart the falling fortunes of progressive politics after the beginning of hostilities with France in 1793 and the Treason Trials of 1794, the rest of the decade saw the publication of texts willing to challenge both social and narrative conventions, including William Godwin’s PoliticalJus­ tice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), and Mary Hays’s Memoirs oj Emma Courtney (1796). A poet, novelist, and essayist, Amelia Alderson Opie was born in 1769 and lived long enough to visit the Crystal Palace when she was in her eighties.4 Throughout that long life, she consistently sought out the most exciting conversations of her day. Her childhood and young adulthood was spent in Norwich, among rational dissenters, Warrington Academy tu­ tors, and political radicals. Amelia began corresponding with Godwin in 1794, and whenever in London she was an active member of progressive sociable circles. In 1796 Godwin introduced her to Hays and Wollstonecraft and she cultivated a friendship with the latter, who quite possibly in­ troduced her to the portrait painter John Opie. John had first painted Wollstonecraft in 1790/91, and quickly become one of Godwin’s friends in the mid 1790s. Any consideration of the courtship and marriage of the Opies necessarily engages with these intersecting circles of professional arts sociability, encompassing the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, the theater world of Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Sarah Siddons, and the Royal Academy Exhibition Halls frequented by John. In marrying John, Amelia found new opportunities within London’s professional arts community, even as many of her former associates strug­ gled to sustain careers, and their marriage has sometimes been characterized as symptomatic of the failure of 1790s political idealism.5 6 Kenneth Johnston invites biographers to reconsider the narrative of progressive retreat so dominant in Romantic studies, which for a long time led to an exclusive focus on those writers who successfully negotiated literary careers despite harboring radical sympathies in the 1790s, William Wordsworth and Sam­ uel Taylor Coleridge most notably/’ Johnston redirects attention to the “almost famous,” including Amelia. But she was actually quite “famous” 4. Throughout the rest ofthe essay I refer to Amelia andjohn Opie by their first names in order to avoid...

Romantic Circles

Romantic Circles

Mediating Monstrosity: Media, Information, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST TWO DECADES, ROMANTICIST SCHOLARSHIP addressing interactive electronic hypertext environments has relied heavily upon Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) in an almost uncanny manner. In 2001, for example, Eric Sonstroem and Ron Broglio began collaborating to create FrankenMOO, an immersive electronic environment derived from Shelley's novel and hosted on the Romantic Circles website at the University of Maryland. Like any MOO, or Multi-User Dimension, Object Oriented, FrankenMOO is designed to employ the internet to offer real-time interactions between multiple writers, readers, and users. As Sonstroem describes them, MOOs offer the freewheeling interactivity of a connected set of chat rooms, but they frame this unstructured interaction within a relatively fixed and hierarchical textual landscape. (1) Sonstroem and Broglio designed FrankenMO0 to be much more than simply a recreation or critical and theoretical interpretation of Shelley's novel and certainly something other than simply a MOO whose themes are derived from Frankenstein. (2) Equipped with an Encore Xpress HTML interface, the Romantic Circles Villa Diodati MOO relies heavily upon the precise use of the original language from Shelley's novel for character, location, and object descriptions, and Franken MOO's interactive figures actually utter lines directly from the various versions of her original text. (3) In an even more recent example, in April 2009, Smart Curran's Romantic Circles Electronic of Frankenstein went live online after fifteen years in the making. Collaborating with Jack Lynch, Sam Choi, Laura Mandell, and a number of other scholars, Curran has produced with his multimedia hypertext Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of Shelley's novel one of the most comprehensive single editions of any text in any form, print or electronic, to date. (4) But why have recent Romanticist research and scholarship come to focus attention so heavily and specifically on Shelley's Frankenstein in the production of these immersive electronic environments, hypertext online resources, and digital humanities initiatives? Is there something unique about this novel which allows it to be employed for such projects or, perhaps, actually draws or even prompts scholars to turn to it while pursuing this type of work? A related question might be the following: why have scholars not turned as often in this form of research to other equally rich and complex texts from the Romantic era such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798, 1817), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), William Wordsworth's Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), or Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen Mab (1813) to name but only a few possible alternatives? Indeed, while electronic editions of rather expansive and complex texts ranging from Erasmus Darwin's Temple of Nature (1803) to Coleridge's and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798-1805) certainly exist, few, if any, electronic resources come even close to approximating the scope and scale of projects involving Shelley's Frankenstein. (5) Sonstroem perhaps sums up the magnitude of such Frankenstein-based projects best: We hoped [with FrankenMO0] to create a monster that was beyond our control. (6) creators of FrankenMO0 and the collaborators of the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of Shelley's novel have provided some answers to these and other related questions concerning the reasoning behind turning to Frankenstein for the source of their various research projects. Lynch, for example, has noted that Curran's group chose to focus attention on Frankenstein because these collaborators understood Shelley's novel itself in terms of the logic of hypertext. As Lynch explains, The novel is a natural for hypertext: every page is filled with pointers to other texts, both within the novel itself and beyond Shelley's text to a world of contemporary contexts, and, as a result, Curran's edition of the novel is probably best understood as an immense variorum. …

Further Letters of Joanna Baillie ed. by Thomas McLean

Book Reviews Further Letters ofJoanna Baillie. Edited by Thomas McLean. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. Pp. 296. $67.50. In Thomas McLean’s introduction to his collection, Further Letters ofJoanna Baillie, he notes the “rather remarkable and frustrating fact” that none of Baillie’s letters written during the first thirty-seven years of her life have as yet been discovered—due to “(alas) her habit of burning old correspon­ dence” (23). But clearly this habit changed between the time when Baillie was identified as the author of A Series of Plays in 1800 and her death in 1851, because another 234 missives have now emerged from archives all over the world, adding to the trove of Baillie letters published by Judith Bailey Slagle in her two-volume collection in 1999. Moreover, since the publication of McLean’s edition of letters in 2010, another thirty unpub­ lished letters have surfaced, which suggests that many more libraries— public and private—may eventually divulge Baillie correspondence. With this in mind, McLean has created (with the help of Regina Hewitt, Laura Mandell, and Mike Quilligan) an online chronology of Baillie’s correspon­ dence, which is available free of charge on the Romantic Circles website. McLean’s book provides an important addition to the burgeoning schol­ arship on Baillie, and his introduction helpfully suggests the insights he be­ lieves this new edition of letters gives into her relationships with contem­ poraries such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Lady Byron, Sir John Herschel, and William Wordsworth (“He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say,” Baillie wrote in 1837 [181]). The collection also provides “examples of Baillie’s generosity to both friends and strangers in difficult circumstances” (26); her support of young writers; her “interest in the United States” (23); and her “uneven relationship with Sarah Siddons” (24). In addition, McLean writes, the Baillie letters in this collection “enhance our understanding ofBaillie’s rela­ tionship to Scotland” by extending “our knowledge of Baillie’s relation­ ships with contemporary Scottish writers, including Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Hector MacNeill, as well as Thomas Campbell, scientist Mary Somerville, and Captain Alexander Dirom” (25). But the “most significant addition to our conception ofBaillie and the contemporary the­ ater world,” in McLean’s view, comes from Baillie’s letters to George and SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 449 450 BOOK REVIEWS Sarah Bartley; while nine appeared in The Collected Letters, seventeen more have come to light. George Bartley was “best known for his Falstaff,” and Sarah Bartley (when she was Sarah Smith) “was briefly hailed as the succes­ sor of Sarah Siddons” (24). One of the reasons Baillie was so interested in this pair is that “the Bartleys hoped to perform Baillie’s work in North America during their 1818—19 tour,” including her 1798 tragedy on hatred, De Monfort (25). A famously retiring person who surprisingly attended the theater very little—including the productions of her own plays—nevertheless Baillie heartily entered into dialogue with other writers, especially female play­ wrights of the first third of the nineteenth century. This group is larger than one might expect: Mary Berry, Barbarina Dacre, Elizabeth Fletcher, Catherine Gore, Felicia Hemans, Margaret Holford, Frances (“Fanny”) Anne Kemble, and Barbarina Wilmot. Ever a supporter of and advocate for other women novelists, poets, and essayists as well, Baillie penned letters to Susan Ferrier, Anna Jameson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Rose Lawrence. Although Baillie declared to John Richardson in 1827 that she was “no reader at all, and could pass my life without books nearly as well as any countrywoman on the moors of Drumclog” (122), this self-assessment is not borne out by the letters. In fact, it is clear that if Baillie were going to make an evaluation of a friend’s or acquaintance’s work, her analysis would arise only after she had engaged the work with seriousness—and, in a num­ ber of cases, had read it several times. For instance, to Marry Berry she writes in 1828: “I have read your ‘View of the Social Life, &c,’ twice, and it has lost nothing, but rather gained, on the...

Populating the Ambient Space of Texts: The Intimate Graffiti of Doodles. Proposals Toward a Theory

Populating the Ambient Space of Texts: The Intimate Graffiti of Doodles. Proposals Toward a Theory

Shelley After Atheism

Shelley After Atheism Colin Jager (bio) Colin Jager Rutgers University Colin Jager Colin Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. His interests include secularism, religion, cognitive science, and the relations between philosophy and literature. He is the author of The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (U of Penn­sylvania P, 2007). Recent articles have appeared in Public Culture, Theory and Event, Romantic Circles, and Pedagogy. Footnotes Thanks to David Collings, William Galperin, and audiences in North Carolina and Wisconsin for their responses to earlier versions of this essay. 1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Resolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 9. 2. On The Necessity of Atheism, see Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 42; on the hotel register, see Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 232; Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice not Understood (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977) 141; and Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Harper Collins, 1974London: Harper Collins, 1995) 340, 342. Byron apparently tried to scratch out Shelley’s entry. News of the inscription reached England by way of Robert Southey. For good measure, Shelley entered “L’Enfer” (Hell) under “destination” in the register. 3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca; Cornell UP, 1981) 102. 4. Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc; Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” lines 107, 127– 29. Shelley's Poettγ and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). Hereafter SPP. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin, 1997) 562. The poem first appeared in the Morning Post in September of 1802. On the popularity of Chamonix for religious pilgrimage, see Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 196; Holmes, Shelley 340; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 87–90. 6. Ryan, Romantic Reformation 197; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Holder and Stoughton, 1989) 334–35. 7. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Hereafter RE. 8. Scrivener 7, 79. Also Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969) 7. 9. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Earl R Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971). 10. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment; and David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Particularly in the early- modern period, accusations of atheism tend to travel under other names: Epicurianism, Naturalism, Hobbsianism, Spinozism. Sometimes it was simply shorthand for heresy or heterodoxy. 11. Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton; Princeton UP, 1990) 53. 12. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis; Hackett, 1980) 16. Orig. pub. 1637. 13. Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). Much of modern atheism conveniently forgets that “religion” is a cultural and historical construct; as a glance at the relevant anthropological literature suggests, it is not a natural kind. See Colin Jager, “Romanticism/Secularization/Secularism,” Blackwell Literature Compass 5 (2008), and E. N. Anderson, “Attachment and Cooperation in Religious Groups,” Current Anthropology 51.3 (June 2010): 421–23. 14. Berman 3, 110. Also Priestman, Romantic Atheism 7. 15. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religious Belief and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, forthcoming. See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). 16. See Gavin Hyman, “Atheism in Modern History,” in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 27–46 (42). 17. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007). 18. One reason, perhaps, why the “debate” initiated by the so-called “New Atheists” (Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et. al.) is so boring. 19. Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford...