...like Rip Van Winkle than sublime quester. On awaking from the enchanted sleep that followed the completion of my own second book, I discovered both evidence and remedy for lost time, in the form of eighteen boxes from SEL. The assignment was a gift, and I hope that some of my excitement comes through in the following pages.

In the spirit of personal discovery, I report that the governing model for this year's scholarship--with a few important exceptions--is less cultural studies than intellectual history, reconceived under the aegis of Pierre Bourdieu. The generalization is meant to suggest how, in some of the year's best work, the study of practice has sponsored a return to theory, albeit on a very different basis than was the case back when theory was the name of the game. More locally, I note that while the shadow of the long nineteenth century keeps lengthening, rumors of the death of Romanticism have been greatly exaggerated, at least to judge by the number and quality of this year's publications. I counted thirty-seven single-authored books and essay collections whose focus lies mainly or wholly within the traditional thirty-to-fifty-year span; not a few of those take the problematics of Romanticism--ethos, geist, or movement--as their explicit subject. (Interestingly, this was also a pretty good year for Victorian poetry, not a big seller of late.) The larger projects in which these studies engage will, I hope, be illuminated in the body of this essay, where I have suspended genre and period divisions to suggest clusters of common interest. My next few pages, however, describe trends and publishing events that need to be addressed separately from the more thematic discussions that follow.

While it seems both polemically useful and descriptively accurate to say that Romanticism lives on as a "field," it is harder to guess whether classroom practices or publishers' series play the larger role in constituting that field: Cambridge and Palgrave, between them, account for most of the books I counted. And the term "field" remains useful insofar as it operates like Ludwig Wittgenstein's family resemblances. Not only does twenty-first-century Romanticism include a lot more women than it once did; it is more cosmopolitan, more generically and sociologically diverse, less retiring, less ideological. Jane Austen's place in it is by now a moot point; chapters on her novels appear, unremarked, among others on William Wordsworth, William Blake, Lord Byron--and Anna Letitia Barbauld, who features prominently in the Romanticisms of Mark Canuel (The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment), Colin Jager (The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era), Susan B. Rosenbaum (Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading), and Daniel E. White (Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent). But who would have thought Robert Southey would ever stage such a comeback? Hot on the heels of Pickering and Chatto's five-volume Poetical Works, 1793-1810, edited by Lynda Pratt, this year sees the publication of a major new biography, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, by W. A. Speck, as well as the first-ever all-Southey collection of critical essays, Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism, also edited by Pratt. Southey makes notable appearances in books by White, Tim Fulford (Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756-1830), and Kevin Gilmartin (Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832). Another figure whose "recovery" shifts the field is peasant-poet Robert Bloomfield, author of The Farmer Boy and subject of a collection edited by Simon White, John Goodridge, and Bridget Keegan, Robert Bloomfield: Lyric, Class, and the Romantic Canon, that includes particularly interesting essays by Donna Landry on "Georgic Ecology," and Fulford and Debbie Lee on "Patronage, Pastoralism and Public Health." Walter Scott, exclusively a novelist until a few years ago, is enjoying a second career as a poet, with chapters in Simon Dentith's Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain and William R. McKelvy's The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880. Monographs on the former Big Six are few and comparatively modest (two collections of essays on Blake are discussed in a later section). Jason Allen Snart's The Torn Book: UnReading William Blake's Marginalia focuses on Blake's annotations to the works of Bishop Berkeley, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johann Kaspar Lavater, and Emanuel Swedenborg, less to interpret them than to register "his experience of the control that typographic elements could exert on the reader" (p. 21). Akiko Okada's Keats and English Romanticism in Japan offers a short reception and translation history, while Russell Weaver's Questioning Keats: An Introduction to Applied Hermeneutics is dominated by a polemic against "standard academic discourse," by which Weaver means virtually all criticism as currently practiced (p. 2). And yet the major exception to the rule on Romantic single-author studies, Simon Jarvis's book Wordsworth's Philosophic Song, is also one of the year's most eccentric and exciting books. Plus ca change ...

In a surprise twist, this year there are as many monographs on Victorian poets as on Victorian novelists. Janet Gezari's fine book Last Things: Emily Bronte's Poems offers precise, beautifully observed close readings of Bronte's poetry in contexts that interweave Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille with Romantic poetics and Victorian cultures of mourning. John Schad's short study Arthur Hugh Clough, part of the series Writers and Their Work, is the first book on its subject in thirty years. Acknowledging that Clough is "a thin poet," Schad comments perceptively on how this very thinness renders the process of thinking, in all its ambivalence and inconsistency. There are also two noteworthy multiple-author studies of Victorian poets. Amy Christine Billone's Little Songs: Women, Silence, and the Nineteenth-Century Sonnet argues plausibly that female sonneteers following Charlotte Smith initiated "the first clearly recognizable female lyric tradition in Britain," not because male poets wrote no sonnets but because the compression of the form "presented nineteenth-century women writers with a paradox that reflected their situation" (p. 156). Kirstie Blair's more ambitious Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is discussed below among studies of literature and science. I pause here to notice that chapters or essays on individual Victorian poets appear in the collections Identity and Cultural Translation: Writing across the Borders of Englishness: Women's Writing in English in a European Context, edited by Ana Gabriela Macedo and Margarida Esteves Pereira; "And Never Know the Joy": Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry, edited by C. C. Barfoot; Auto-Poetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-Century British and American Fiction, edited by Darby Lewes; and Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, edited by Keith Wilson; and in book-length studies including Dentith's Epic and Empire; Linda M. Austin's Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917; Stefanie Markovits's The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature; Jerome McGann's The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World; Roger Ebbatson's Heidegger's Bicycle: Interfering with Victorian Texts; and Patricia Murphy's In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women. A variorum edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet cycle The House of Life, edited by Roger C. Lewis, has been published by Boydell and Brewer.

Although Victorian novelists held onto their share of the market, nonfiction writers and trans-genre polymaths such as William Morris also did quite well. It was a banner year for Charles Darwin, who got two big books, and who seems to have joined ranks with John Ruskin and Morris as representative philosopher-sage (edging out Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman, if a single year's publications suggest longer-term trends). Ruskin, the subject of Sharon Aronofsky Weltman's Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education, is also a major presence in Jonathan Smith's book Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Carlyle is represented by John Morrow's new biography, and by the Strouse edition of Past and Present, as well as volumes 33 and 34 of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Morris's voluminous publications are cataloged, described, and illustrated in Eugene D. LeMire's A Bibliography of William Morris, handsomely produced by the British Library. We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96, edited by Tony Pinkney, reprints thirteen journalistic interviews. Morris's utopian fiction is the subject of a monograph by Marcus Waithe (William Morris's Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality) and a fine chapter in Carolyn Lesjak's Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. George Eliot is a pervasive albeit elusive presence in most of this year's studies of the novel, so it is handy to have George Newlin's Everyone and Everything in George Eliot, a taxonomy and "topicon" of George Eliot's fiction and nonfiction prose. The only publication on autobiography as a genre is a collection of conference proceedings, Fiction and Autobiography: Modes and Models of Interaction, edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Gortschacher.

The most notable reference work of the year is Franco Moretti's massive two-volume collection The Novel--actually an abridged English translation of the five-volume Italian version. The scope of the collection far exceeds the purview of this essay, but the leading scholars of our field are prominent there too: contributors include Moretti himself, Catherine Gallagher, Ian Duncan, Nancy Armstrong, A. S. Byatt, Bruce Robbins, and John Brenk-man, alongside Mieke Bal, Homi Bhabha, Umberto Eco, and Fredric Jameson. They share space with scholars of ancient and most modern languages, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, historians, art historians, media theorists, political scientists, and fiction writers. Volume 1, a "look from the outside," examines the novel as "anthropological force," and includes essays on such topics as "everydayness" (Moretti), "The Rise of Fictionality" (Gallagher), and "Forms of Popular Narrative" (Daniel Couegnas). Volume 2 reconsiders classic problems such as the relationship between epic and novel, realism versus supernaturalism, the representation of space and time, the classification of novelistic topoi, and the relationship between character and ideology. Both volumes juxtapose longer synoptic chapters with shorter case studies. Patrick Parrinder's almost equally sweeping Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day surveys prose fiction from 1485 to the twenty-first century, including lesser-known authors such as Susan Ferrier and George Bowling along with more usual suspects, and focusing on how the realist novel recycles, revises, and recombines such familiar stories as the sufferings of Job, the deeds of Robin Hood, and the fortunes of Dick Whittington.

As in other recent years, studies of the novel mostly downplay questions of genre, but two noteworthy exceptions are Margaret Bruzelius's Romancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to Sebald and Gregory Castle's Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, which dates its modernism from Jude the Obscure and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Romancing the Novel is a brash, epigrammatic portrayal of the "masculine romance plot or adventure novel" (p. 14) invented by Scott and elaborated by Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Ursula Le Guin, and--startlingly--W. G. Sebald. Bruzelius's definition of romance as a conservative fantasy that "ostensibly celebrates the wild and unusual" while inevitably enacting "a return to the ordinary" (pp. 23, 204) is not particularly surprising, but she is a shrewd guide to this fantasy's recurrence, uncovering the same basic plot in the works of Freud and Melanie Klein. Castle, for his part, argues (against Moretti and others) that early modernist novels such as Jude the Obscure belong to the longer history of Bildung even if they apparently reject its nineteenth-century emplotment. Castle invokes the Adornian concept of negative dialectics to find in Hardy and other early modernists "a resurgence and rehabilitation of [Enlightenment] Bildung grounded in an immanent critique of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and its totalizing dialectical processes" (pp. 25-6). Castle has provocative things to say about the differences between English and Irish responses to Bildung's "pragmatic ideological discourse" (p. 13), and about women novelists such as the Brontes as precursors to the modernist project.

While studies of prose fiction continue to focus on the latter two-thirds of the century, Austen commands the single largest share of this year's publications. The outstanding event here is the near-completion of the nine-volume Cambridge Austen, which seems likely to become the new scholarly standard. Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and the Juvenilia all appeared this year, leaving only the volume on Later Manuscripts still forthcoming. Of these, the Juvenilia, which includes some previously unpublished marginalia, is probably of the most scholarly significance. Appearing simultaneously is Deirdre Le Faye's massive Chronology of Jane Austen and Her Family, a minutely indexed research tool including more details of day-by-day transactions than could be included in Le Faye's previous Family Record. This is also the place to mention Robert L. Mack's edition of The Loiterer": A Periodical Work in Two Volumes Published at Oxford in the Years 1789 and 1790 by the Austen Family. The roundup of Austen scholarship concludes with Janet Todd's brisk, efficient Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen; a reprint of Brian Southam's Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist's Development through the Surviving Papers; and two monographs, aimed respectively at nonprofessional Janeites and their academic counterparts. These are Susannah Fullerton's entertaining, anecdotal social history Jane Austen and Crime and Michael Kramp's Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man, a study of Austen's male characters as types of representative masculinity, which rather oddly combines a historicist emphasis on sensibility with a Deleuzian accent on "deterritorialization."

The other important multivolume edition to report is the ongoing Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of James Hogg, now up to seventeen titles, of which this year's include miscellaneous prose and verse Contributions to Annuals and Gift-Books, the narrative poem Mador of the Moor, and volume 2 of Collected Letters, covering the years 1820 to 1831. Unlike the Cambridge Austen, the Collected Works of James Hogg is a major reclamation effort, both driven by and contributing to the recent growth of interest in Scottish Romanticism. Back volumes are being issued in very reasonably priced paperbacks. Also new in paperback is Broadview's facsimile edition of the 1829 Keepsake, a literary annual whose contributors that year included Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey, Felicia Hemans, Walter Savage Landor, both Shelleys, and 'The Author of Waverley." Edited by Frederic Mansel Reynolds, this edition also includes a helpful introduction by Paula R. Feldman.

Speck's Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters, which emphasizes Southey's work as a historian and polemicist, heads the list of significant new biographies. Among these should also be mentioned Ralph Pite's Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life, which challenges some contentions of the standard Hardy biography by Michael Millgate (dedicatee of Thomas Hardy Reappraised, one of the year's best essay collections). Dane Kennedy's biography of Richard Burton, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, is intended "to demythologize and rehistoricize Burton's life" and to examine "the cross-pollination that occurred as a result of the constant traffic of peoples, goods, institutions, and ideas" between urban Victorian society and the larger empire (pp. 6-7). Unlike Burton's, the career of George Smythe, a journalist and politician associated with the Young England movement, "has remained unplumbed beyond a few over-familiar paragraphs in biographies of Disraeli" (p. 5); Mary S. Millar's book Disraeli's Disciple: The Scandalous Life of George Smythe contends that Smythe was the model for many of Disraeli's fictional characters.

I proceed now to more circumstantial accounts of the year's critical studies, which I have arranged--mostly to amuse myself--under headings that suggest the ways in which our current preoccupations recapitulate the discipline's Romantic origins. I hope they also point to how the most interesting of these conversations transcend disciplinary subdivisions. But the usual caveats apply: space being at a premium and my predilections what they so obviously are, many good books will get less attention than they deserve. To do even so much, I have kept comments on essay collections to the bare minimum, and have omitted all mention of annuals, anthologies, paperback reprints, critical "companions," and study texts such as the Casebook series: please see the Books Received section for a complete list.

I. POETIC FAITH

A range of critical temperaments and agendas converge on their challenges to the "secularization" narrative of nineteenth-century culture, according to which the waning of religious authority gives rise to the institutionalization of literature. Mark Knight and Emma Mason state the case most succinctly in Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction, which proposes that "the so-called secularization of religion in the latter part of the nineteenth century is best understood as a diminution of the power and reach of the Established Church rather than the decline of Christian ideas and culture" (p. 7). If God never actually disappeared, it makes sense to claim that religion is "no less essential than other categories of thought (such as class or gender) that we commonly use as a basis for thinking about and interpreting cultural history" (p. 5). The authors' approach to restoring this facet of culture emphasizes communities and representative figures rather than broad narratives of influence. In their chapter on Unitarianism, for example, they explore the responses of writers as diverse in other respects as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Joseph Priestley, Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Felicia Hemans, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and also suggest how Unitarian and Quaker convictions shaped a feminist political agenda. While not a thesis-driven study, this thoughtful, informative book will be especially valuable to scholars and students for whom religion is no longer a primary fact of experience.

Altogether more ambitious, and among the most stimulating books I read this year, is Jager's The Book of God. Beginning from roughly the same point as Knight and Mason, Jager draws on recent social and cultural theorists of "multiple modernities" to premise that secularization be defined not as a gradual erosion of belief but as a process of "'differentiation'--that is, the emancipation of a variety of forms of cultural authority from religious control" (p. 28). His interest is in how one such form, Romantic literature, freed itself from institutionalized religion by reconstructing meaning--"a world ruled over by intentionality" (p. 221)--on the model suggested by theological arguments for "design," or what Blake derisively called "natural religion." Both in the eighteenth century and in their uncanny recent revival as "intelligent design," such arguments combine inductive method with the intuitive appeal to a world so ordered that its order cannot be accidental. Jager's point is not that all Romantic writers subscribed to this view (Blake, for one, proves otherwise); instead, in a dense historical argument that begins with David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and William Paley, divagates into Blake, Barbauld, and Mansfield Park, and culminates in Wordsworth, Jager shows how "intentionality itself--[or] more specifically ... the feeling that the reader is in the presence of intention without being able to say just what...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.