Andrew Elfenbein

Romantic genius : the prehistory of a homosexual role

1. The Danger Zone: Effeminates, Geniuses, and Homosexuals2. William Beckford and the Genius of Consumption3. The Domestication of Genius: Cowper and the Rise of the Suburban Man4. Anne Damers Sapphic Potential5. Lesbianism and Romantic Genius: The Poetry of Anne Bannerman6. Genius and the Blakean Ridiculous7. A Sight to Dream of, Not to Tell: Christabel, Pornography, and Genius

Cognitive Science and the History of Reading

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism.

Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England

Few decades in British history have a character as distinctive as that belonging to the Regency. Virginia Woolf describes it vividly: In that strange land money is poured out lavishly; bank-notes drop on to breakfast plates; pearl rings are found beneath pillows; champagne flows in fountains; but over it all broods the fever of a night-mare and the transiency of a dream. The brilliant fade; the great mysteriously disappear; the diamonds turn to cinders, and the Queens are left sitting on three-legged stools shivering in the cold.1

Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Several recent critics have treated eighteenth-century lesbian literary representation as a depressing catalogue of rejection and demystification. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, lesbianism in Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (begun 1760, published 1796) demonstrates “the violence by which, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, sexuality is constructed.”1 In Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (1705), Terry Castle discovers the founding metaphor for lesbian literary history: “The kiss that doesn’t happen, the kiss that can’t happen, because one of the women involved has become a ghost (or else is directly haunted by ghosts), seems to me a crucial metaphor for the history of lesbian literary representation.”2 Lisa L. Moore makes the most systematic case for lesbian abjection by arguing that eighteenth-century novels disseminate a “story of virtuous bourgeois femininity...in which the dangerous, potentially sapphist female friend provides the heroine with the opportunity to risk and then refuse sexual immorality.” The lesbian needs to be “banished, mutilated, or killed off ” in order that “the insularity and virtue of the domestic space” may be “firmly asserted.”3 This essay argues that eighteenth-century writers were not quite so hostile to lesbianism as these critics suggest. The lesbian subject position was too rich and interesting a resource to eighteenth-century writers for its sole purpose to be channeling violence, insubstantiality, or scapegoating. The consistency with which suspicious women are banished might be seen less as a universally sanctioned judgment than as a routine bow to respectable opinion, an obligatory but potentially empty gesture. By making sure to include it, eighteenth-century authors opened up a broad canvas to examine and experiment with forms of agency available to nonheteronormative women. The critics that I cited focus on the novel, the vehicle for emergent middle-class mores, rather than on the drama, which had a long legacy of representing nonbourgeois modes of sexuality. The drama, in other words, posed potentially more of a challenge to sex/gender hegemony than the novel did because it was less defined by bourgeois tradition. In this essay, I will look at how three eighteenth-century comedies of manners, Hannah Cowley’s The Town Before You (1795), Henry Seymour Conway’s False Ap-

Research in Text and the Uses of Coh-Metrix

Graesser, McNamara, and Kulikowich (2011) describe the value of the Coh-Metrix system for providing multilevel analyses of textual difficulty. This comment article discusses the broader usefulness of Coh-Metrix for text researchers in providing information about multiple variables in textual features. Coh-Metrix may encourage researchers to develop a greater variety of texts because it highlights where texts may vary. It also is free and easy to use. Its most useful contribution may be allowing researchers to discern which textual features are most critical to comprehension for different populations at different moments in development.

The Desirable Difficulties of Studying Romanticism

Academics have inherited conventions for the presentation of literature in anthologies that do not take into account difficulties in comprehension that undergraduates have with difficult material, such as Romantic poetry. This article describes two experimental surveys given to undergraduates to learn what instructional materials they find most useful.

How to Analyze a Correspondence: The Example of Byron and Murray

The psycholinguistic study of conversation and perspective‐taking offers a critical vantage‐point on traditional analysis of personal letters. The correspondence of John Murray and Lord Byron provides a case study in “good enough communication” that allows business transactions to continue despite significant gaps in common ground and core values. I pay particular attention to strategies of co‐reference and to routinized non‐response, the tendency of Byron and Murray not to acknowledge significant parts of each others letters. “Good enough communication” is an alternative to the transparency and clarity traditionally privileged in studies of the history of business communication.

Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

Inevitably, my fantasies about this reviewing process (serene quiet; leisurely contemplation; pithy condensations of evaluative wisdom) have come up against tougher realities (hectic schedules; huddled masses of books; sinking feelings of arbitrariness). I have become particularly aware of how meager a metavocabulary we have for describing the act of critical evaluation itself, on which we nevertheless depend as a discipline. “Objective,” “subjective,” “neutral,” “engaged”: these words are depressingly crude descriptors for the array of mental grooves, personal relationships, institutional determinants, and future dreams that coalesce to enable the uncomfortable act of judging the work of those one has never met. Given this lack, I prefer to let my critical biases remain implicit, although I will include some generalizations about what I read at the end of this essay. SEL’s word limit put tight constraints on my instinctive chattiness: there was no room for editions; journals; reprints of previously published books; books that were not primarily about nineteenth-century British literature, history, or culture; or books that were not likely to acquire a large audience. I found it especially hard to do justice to the problematic genre of the collection of essays. These tend to work best when they have an obvious focus, as in a single author or even single work. Those with broader scopes are so diverse that they rarely lend themselves to easy summary: apologies in advance to all those I will not be able to acknowledge.