Alex Benchimol

Small nations, the press and the digital challenge

This editorial begins by discussing the current challenges faced by the Scottish press, in the run-up to the referendum on independence. It focuses on a gradual transition to a new business model that is combining print and digital content. The particular dilemmas faced in Scotland are also being addressed elsewhere, but in quite distinctive ways. A brief overview of comparable nation-states (Denmark, Norway) and stateless nations (Catalonia, Quebec) sets the stage for the five case studies that follow.

William Cobbett’s geography of cultural resistance in Rural Rides

Taylor and Francis Ltd GNCC041028.sgm 10.108 /0890549042000280801 Nineteenth-Ce tury Contexts Original Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 6 30 000September 20 4 AlexB c imol (Dr) Depr me t of English Li ratureUniversity of GlasgowGlasgowG12 8QQ a.benchimol@ .arts.gl .ac.uk The publication, over the past decade, of a rich variety of theoretically and historically informed scholarship on William Cobbett attests to his critical importance in providing the new academic formation of Romantic period studies with a cohering narrative of radical historical recovery.1 More than most figures that have featured prominently in the new scholarship, his life and writing have come to define a notion of plebeian cultural resistance that strongly resonates with the general thrust of new work in the field. Some of this new work in Cobbett studies, in particular Leonora Nattrass’ William Cobbett (1995), focuses on his significance as one of the great stylistic prose innovators of the early nineteenth century, a writer with a powerful grasp of the political possibilities of his rhetorical voice. Other notable work, like Kevin Gilmartin’s Print Politics (1996), emphasizes the materiality of Cobbett’s intellectual practice as his primary means of engaging with the multiple rhetorical deceptions of political corruption in the period. Both of these aspects of Cobbett’s intellectual identity, the stylistic and material, are vividly brought together in his most famous single text of cultural criticism, Rural Rides (1830). In what follows I will engage in a contextual reading of Rural Rides that highlights the wider political imperatives animating its geography of resistance. Building in particular on the innovative argument of Gilmartin in the above work, I hope to demonstrate that Cobbett’s survey of a rural English society in manifest crisis was an example of a new materialist practice of cultural criticism in the nineteenth century that both encouraged and relied upon an activist readership in the plebeian public sphere to complete its aims of social transformation.2 Also, with the aid of an underutilized work of theoretical cultural history on the period, Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle (1982), I will attempt to locate the complex ideology driving the text’s narrative of opposition, arguing that Cobbett’s “materialist Arcadian” vision serves as a compelling example of what Raymond Williams has described as a residual cultural practice where the “idea of rural community” becomes “in some limited respects alternative or oppositional to urban industrial capitalism” (Williams 122).

Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism, cultural studies and the radical public sphere

Romantic period studies, as it is now practiced from Canberra to Cambridge and Los Angeles to London, is a field that has been experiencing something of a revolution in its aims and methods over the past two decades, despite the lack of a coherent theoretical narrative to accompany this global academic development. The most conspicuous sign of this transformed intellectual agenda – from a preoccupation with poetictextualist issues to an eclectic approach that borrows as much from developments in cultural studies, social history and critical theory as from literary criticism – was the publication in 1999 of a major scholarly companion on the period that set as one of its organizing aims the ‘rediscovery of neglected historical figures and events’ that would in turn lead to a ‘shifting’ of ‘our angles of vision’. The manner in which An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age established itself so rapidly as a standard reference source illustrates merely the endpoint of a process of intellectual consolidation in the field; a process initiated and sustained over twenty years through the publication of clusters of ground-breaking studies by scholars using methodologies that continuously challenged the critical orthodoxy of Romanticist literary scholarship. Moreover, the companion’s attempt to highlight ‘the fiery debates, crushing commercial pressures, and chance events of a historical period that was felt to be seething with conflict’ not only marks out the cultural materialist aspects of the project – as likewise its deliberately broad conception of cultural production in the period – but also underlines the ideological debt that this revisionist formation in Romantic period studies owes to an older, more explicitly politicized form of scholarship. British Marxist cultural studies was an academic movement that first flowered in the 1960s, became institutionalized in the 1970s, and began to fade under the dominant ideological onslaught of Thatcherism in the 1980s just when the current movement in Romantic period studies was emerging. In the absence of any contemporary narratives exploring how Textual Practice 19(1), 2005, 51–70

Debatable Geographies of Romantic Nostalgia: The Redemptive Landscape in Wordsworth and Cobbett

The impressive accumulation of historicist and materialist interpretations of romantic culture since the publication of Marilyn Butler’s seminal Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries in 1981 has helped to answer her central question asked in the introduction: ‘in quite what sense is English literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries a product and a part of social experience?’.1 In her overview of the field, Butler also cautioned against the ‘isolationism of so many of the commonest approaches of the literary scholar’, but a different kind of isolationism has kept some of the most radical revisionist scholarship of the past twenty-five years from making the necessary transition from a practice of historical recovery to a re-engagement with the work of major figures in the romantic canon.2 In this chapter, I would like to make a small gesture in that direction by comparing the construction of a politics of social geography in William Cobbett’s most significant single work of extended cultural criticism, Rural Rides, with the effort by William Wordsworth to develop a lasting structure of moral and social values from the thinly inhabited mountain landscapes depicted in his longest and most philosophically ambitious poem, The Excursion. 3 Further, I hope to demonstrate that these rival geographies provide a compelling illustration of the way symbolic interpretations of landscape in the period were used to engage with urgent social and political issues, giving another meaning to romanticism’s ‘debatable lands’.

Rewriting Carlyle and Scottish cultural history

Carlyle and Scottish Thought. By Ralph Jessop (London: Macmillan, 1997) xvii + 266 pp. £40.00 cloth.