Vibrant Textuality: Material Texts and Romantic Anticipations

Abstract

This chapter takes the recent upturn of new materialist thought as an occasion for revisiting Jerome McGann’s work on textual criticism. In particular, it looks to some Romantic anticipations of such textual engagements, in a bid to challenge the supposed anti-Romanticism of McGann’s influential argument. Over the course of the chapter, I consider Joseph Cottle and Robert Southey’s editorial work on Thomas Chatterton; I draw attention to Thomas De Quincey’s discussion of Richard Bentley and Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature. What emerges is a sense of the Romantic engagement with “socialised” notions of the material text.