Clara Tuite

Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity

The love story of Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb has traditionally functioned in literary history to confirm Byrons seductive fatality and Lambs banality. This essay engages the Lamb-Byron affair in order to highlight the complexity and symbolic power of Lambs performances as a social and literary celebrity. It argues that the social and textual performances that mark the affair as a public event raise critical issues about the relations between private and public in the romantic literary marketplace, about the sociality of romantic literature and love, and about the interrelations between romantic literature, romantic love, and romantic-period scandal.

Sanditon: Austen's pre–post Waterloo

Written in 1817 and not published until 1925, Austens posthumously published novel fragment, Sanditon, has always enjoyed a privileged relation to temporal discontinuity. My essay re-examines the question of Austen and history by engaging Sanditon in relation to a historicity of participant-witnessing and productive anachronism. I take as my starting point a particularly rich example of one of those oblique, sparing, and, consequently, ironically overdetermined world-historical signifiers that inhabits Jane Austens textual world – a passing reference to Waterloo by the Speculator, Mr Parker, which satirically marks the commodification of history and the new cultural obsolescence of Trafalgar that obtained in the wake of the summer of 1815, when the battle of Waterloo ended the twenty-two year war with France. Mr Parkers bubble of Waterloo registers the contemporary practice of souveniring relics from the field of Waterloo, and enacts capitals strange prerogative for spatial and temporal disjunction that blooms post-Waterloo when commerce is liberated from the protection of national borders. The essay examines these new spatio-temporal logics of commercial speculation that characterize the post-Waterloo moment, as witnessed in Austens posthumously published fragment, with its seaside milieu of invalids and projectors who are producers and consumers in a service economy of domestic tourism predicated upon the commercial exploitation of nostalgia and the pleasures of corporeal debility. Relating the nostalgic futurity of Mr Parkers commercial projections for “sad invalids” to the enigma of a retrospective style in this belated text – its original moment of production projected still in the extant manuscript unique to Austens mature oeuvre – I consider Sanditon as a participant-witness to this pre-post-Waterloo moment marked by the somatic and commercial activity of a nostalgics of speculation and a preposterous anticipation of retrospection.

Introduction : the gender of whig historiography : women writers and Britain's pasts and presents

Almost from its inception, what Herbert Butterfield famously called ‘the whig interpretation’ of English history was framed in ways that occluded women from the narratives of British nationhood. The whig interpretation of history defined British nationhood in terms of changes in the political landscape. The ‘forging’ of Britain was thus formed around particular sites—the ‘ancient constitution’ of the Saxons, the unbroken continuity of limited monarchy, the providential role of the Church of England, parliament and the rule of Common Law (and the extension of these institutions into Empire)—all of which formed a chronology of the liberty of middle-class English men. However, from its inception too, women were active participants in such an interpretation. Women (and some men too) sought to reframe and critique these narratives, to ensure that they were represented in the discourses of nation building, thus challenging the fundamental paradigms that have formed British historiography since the Glorious Revolution.