Andrew McCann

Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

The publishing history of Maria Edgeworth’s second novel, Belinda, registers the anxieties of a society intensely involved in debates over the abolition of slavery and the proper management of British colonies in the West Indies. By the time the novel went into its third edition in 1810, the depiction of interracial marriage in the previous two editions (1801 and 1802) had been all but erased, principally at the suggestion of Edgeworth’s father.1 In these earlier editions of the novel Juba, the African servant of a Jamaican plantation owner, marries an English farmer’s daughter and settles with her as a tenant on an English estate. The 1810 text removed the trauma of miscegenation for a reactionary audience not by omitting the Juba character completely, but by replacing him in this conjugal scenario with the ubiquitously named James Jackson. As Suvendrini Perera points out, this alteration appeased the most recalcitrant antiabolitionist fears about racial mixing and the integrity of British women in a metropolis overrun by freed slaves.2 The revisions do not efface Edgeworth’s own abolitionist sympathies, which are evident elsewhere in the novel, but they do affect the politics of the text in ways that might at first seem unexpected.

Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s

In E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, John Thelwall embodies the pathos of thwarted heroism that typifies the radical milieu of the 1790s in the imaginings of the British left. ‘Thelwall took Jacobinism to the borders of Socialism; he also took it to the borders of revolutionism’, writes Thompson eulogistically.1 As one of the London Corresponding Society members prosecuted for treason in 1794, and as the orator who addressed an estimated crowd of one hundred and fifty thousand in Copenhagen Fields in 1795, Thelwall has at least a consistent profile in histories of the labour movement and in materialist social histories of the 1790s. Besides political philosophy and public activism, however, Thelwall also published several collections of poetry, though as a figure in the development of Romantic literary forms and as an inheritor of the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, he is marginal at best, typically warranting a dismissive footnote, or at most figuring in the background of studies on Coleridge, Wordsworth or early Romanticism more generally.

Walter Benjamin's sex work: prostitution and the state of exception

Hitherto critics have developed a very articulate sense of how The Arcades Project draws on a psychoanalytic theory of sexuality to reframe a Marxist analysis of commodity culture, as Sigrid Weigel puts it. This essay argues that the issue of sovereign violence, implicit in patriarchy, is a crucial and neglected facet of how The Arcades Project frames the ‘erotic phenomena of modernity’, one that emerges most clearly through Benjamins engagement with the figure of prostitution. If Benjamin, at moments, can imagine his own political awakening as a sexual flight from the bourgeois habitus into the labyrinth of the polis, with the prostitute at its centre, it is a flight that also falters precisely at the moment that it encounters the compromising entanglement of sexuality with those forms of life abandoned by the law. The tensions in Benjamins work, between autobiography and critique, between prostitution as a figure for a broader sense of objectification and sexuality as a specific site of power that insists on the literal presence of the others body, point to the anxieties attending his particular version of materialism as it encounters its own foundations in the exclusions fundamental to modernity.

The savage metropolis: Animism, aesthetics and the pleasures of a vanished race

In Dialectic of Enlightenment , Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that the autonomy of aesthetic production in a modern society preserves a sense of premodern enchantment. This relationship between aesthetics and enchantment was literalized in periodical literature about indigenous peoples in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. But in this specifically colonial context, forms of aesthetic affect linked to the textual evocation of animism also assumed the anachronistic nature of animism and, by extension, the extinction of the cultures embodying it. This was the precondition for its aestheticization. The production of aesthetic pleasure for a largely urban readership, in other words, both assumed and normalized the epistemic and paramilitary violence of colonization. Because the act of reading located animism in the imaginative experience of modern subjects, where its effectiveness depended upon the suspension of disbelief, it also constituted the literal passing of animistic worldviews as a fundamental condition of its own modernity. This dynamic, I argue, is assumed in Freuds writing on the relationship between animism and the uncanny, and embodied in the work of prominent colonial writers such as Marcus Clarke, Henry Gyles Turner and George Gordon McCrae. Exploring it enables us to offer a very tangible account of the relationship between popular print culture in nineteenth-century Australia and the destruction of indigenous culture at the hands of settler colonialism.

Introduction: Literature and the Public Sphere in the 1790s

In recent years the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury British literature has been invigorated by work on the public sphere which takes its cue principally from Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. As James Chandler reminds us, this orientation to notions of publicity is not new to British literary studies.1 In the 1950s and 1960s Raymond Williams made the idea of the public central to such studies as The Long Revolution and Culture and Society 1780–1950. Nevertheless it has certainly taken the English translation of Habermas, and of his Marxist revisionists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, before the category of the public could emerge as the basis of a historicism capable of competing with the rhetorical reading practices that have dominated the study of Romanticism, at least in the American academy.2 Yet just as Habermasian notions of the public have gained currency in the study of Romanticism, so too have they been quickly called into question from a number of political and disciplinary perspectives.

Domestic Revolutions: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Limits of Radical Sentimentality

At the end of the eighteenth century figures like Burke and Thelwall, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, could both use sentimental conventions to convey their social visions, testifying to the centrality of sentimentality in political discourse and debate. Thelwall’s 1793 The Peripatetic is representative of this ‘politico-sentimentality’ in its radical form. Thelwall, as we have seen, depicts the processes of land enclosure, property monopoly and the ensuing displacement of rural populations leading to the creation of an urbanized proletariat, as assaults on an idyllic image of family life. The pathos of the transition from the rural idyll to urban decrepitude and enervation solicits a kind of sympathy that, Thelwall assumed, embodied an intuitive, but apparently communally normative sense of justice — a sympathetic responsiveness analogous to what Hume referred to as the ‘intercourse of sentiments’. In Thelwall’s deployment of sentimental conventions sympathy and a nascent political consciousness were synonymous. We recognize a similar version of politicosentimentality in Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems and in works like ‘The Ruined Cottage’.

Drug Eluting Stents Versus Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts for Left Main Coronary Disease: A Meta-Analysis and Review Of Randomised Controlled Trials

BACKGROUND Revascularisation of left main coronary artery (LMCA) disease can be potentially managed with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) or coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG). Recent randomised controlled trial (RCT) data have added to the literature on this subject and this meta-analysis aims to assess the state of the data to assist in guiding patient treatment decisions. METHODS A systematic literature search of Cochrane Library, EMBASE, OVID, and PubMed Medline was performed. Randomised controlled trials of patients with LMCA disease undergoing PCI with drug eluting stents or CABG were included. Clinical outcomes and adverse events were assessed and analysed. RESULTS Four suitable RCTs of adequate quality and follow-up were identified. The incidence of major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) at 3 to 5 years of follow-up was significantly increased with PCI compared to CABG (23.3% vs 18.2%, OR 1.37; 95% CI: 1.18-1.58; p=<0.0001; I2=0%) and was largely driven by more repeat revascularisation procedures among patients treated with PCI. There was no statistically significant difference in rates of mortality, myocardial infarction or stroke (either individually or when these outcomes were combined as a composite endpoint). CONCLUSIONS Coronary artery bypass grafting and PCI both represent reasonable treatment modalities for LMCA disease in appropriately selected patients. However, where CABG is feasible it offers superior long-term freedom from repeat revascularisation. Longer-term follow-up is required to further clarify the durability of mortality outcomes, especially in patients treated with PCI.

Edmund Burke’s Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788

Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France probably did more than any other single text or event to galvanize radical political culture in Britain. Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, among many others, produced major responses to it, while journals like Daniel Isaac Eatori’s Politics for the People, or A Salmagundy for Swine and Thomas Spence’s Pig’s Meat: or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude used what they read as Burke’s euphemism for the people — ‘a swinish multitude’ (RRF, p. 173) — as the basis for their ironic addresses to the British working class. One of the things Burke’s radical critics repeatedly pointed out was the performative, manipulative and distinctly literary quality of his writing and speeches and, relatedly, the ways in which these appealed to the sensibility, not the reason, of his audience. Paine’s condemnation in Rights of Man is perhaps the best known of these critiques: As to the tragic paintings by which Mr Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect.

Gothic Consumption: Populism, Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading

Anti-Jacobin writers in the 1790s were extremely suspicious of the market for cultural commodities. They saw the public consumption of literary texts, political pamphlets, popular journals and philosophical tracts as the means by which a gullible and manipulable audience could be swayed from passivity to the violence and atavism of revolution. In anti-Jacobin discourse the image of the ragged crowd, an aggregation of individualized, serialized subjects, typically signifies a demographic that is impressionable, malleable, fickle in its affiliations, easily distracted, and motivated by the hedonistic laws of monadic pleasure. This crowd, lacking any stable commitment to moral norms, is also a collection of potential consumers awaiting writers, hacks or demagogues prepared to empower or gratify it. Far from embodying any genuine sense of unified and rationally considered political purpose, the crowd is the form in which anti-social individualized desire becomes available to cognition: multiplied by that indeterminate number, the multitude, individual desire takes on its visible manifestation in cataclysmic outbreaks of popular violence.