Jeffrey Cox

Seven Gothic dramas, 1789-1825

The Gothic drama came at a critical moment in the history of the theater, of British culture, and of European politics in the shadow of Frances revolution and the fall of Napoleon. It offered playwrights a medium to express the prevailing ideological tensions of romanticism and revolution, and also responded to a growing and changing theater audience. In a wide-ranging introduction, Cox explores Gothic dramas links with romanticism and its relation to other social and ideological shifts of the day. The texts are presented so as to reflect the dual life of dramatic works - on the stage and on the page. The plays are annotated and accompanied by biographic and bibliographic sketches.

Introduction: Are those who are “strangers nowhere in the world” at home anywhere: Thinking about Romantic cosmopolitanism

Four years ago, when a small group of us sat down to discuss “Romantic Cosmopolitanism” as a possible theme for the 2004 NASSR meeting, we knew, of course, of cosmopolitanism’s roots in ancient stoic philosophy, of the place of cosmopolitan thinking in the Enlightenment, and of recent debates about the cosmopolitan in relation to globalization, but we little thought that cosmopolitanism and its discontents would play such a prominent role in contemporary world affairs and particularly in politics within the United States. As one listened this past year to attacks upon one candidate, whose ability to speak French and his knowledge of haute cuisine were seen by some as outer signs of a dangerous inner “European” liberalism, or complaints about another candidate, who—despite his elite background—was viewed as embracing a small-town American nationalism (and imperialism for his opponents) opposed to any foreign “innovations” and deaf to world opinion, a Romanticist might well have heard echoes from the days when a well-stuffed and self-satisfied John Bull struggled against vile Jacobins. Understanding Romantic cosmopolitanism, by the time the meeting was held, had become not only an important scholarly task but a means of getting a purchase on contemporary difficulties, as many speakers at the meeting noted directly and obliquely. Our initial discussion, again, did not touch upon such contemporary matters. Instead, we came to this topic through a more typically scholarly route, by thinking and

Audience and exclusion at the margins of imperial history

Abstract This paper identifies several master narratives that govern discussions of religion in modern history, including celebratory, balance-sheet, and Saidian approaches to imperial history, secularization theory, and the male, clerical, celebratory history of missionaries. Except for missionary history, these master narratives marginalize the religious point of view, and with it individuals and audiences who share a variety of religious opinions. The celebratory history of missions ignores or evades the anti-imperialist critique of Western religious expansion, and conceals the predominantly female character of the missionary movement. The paper concludes with the authors attempt to develop a point of view for a study of Western missionary work in Punjab, one that takes the anti-imperialist critique into account without dismissing the religious convictions of missionary men and women, and South Asian Christians.

“Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes”: diversity, opposition, and community in romantic culture

While the romantic period, as traditionally constructed, was defined by a very small canon (the “Big Six”), it was in fact a moment of intense diversity, with cultural production occurring across a wide range of literary genres, with new voices being heard, and with writers confronting their own moment of globalization brought about by the Napoleonic world war and the movements of empire. This diversity was obscured by a tendency, then and now, to define romanticism through opposition, including an opposition to diversity as an explosion of print culture. Behind the narrowing of the romantic canon was a fear of what Blackwoods called “metromanie” as well as an understandable attempt to rescue what matters from a sea of print. Over time, romanticism came to be defined as an exceptional artistic process cut off from the communal life that it both reflected and helped create. I argue that we must rediscover a “communal romanticism” as both the site of romantic creativity and as a mode of scholarly practice able to confront a diverse romantic culture.

Cowley’s Bold Stroke for Comedy

Discussions of the romantic drama and theater often move between lamentations over the decline of tragedy and celebrations of the rise of new, “illegitimate” forms such as the melodrama. What is lost in this double story of the death of tragedy and the birth of popular theater is the fate of comedy. At the time, there was as much concern expressed over the status of the comedy of manners as there was over that of tragedy. Hazlitt in particular doubted whether comedy could be created in an era of leveled manners and mass culture. Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which Romantic‐era playwrights sought to revitalize comedy by focusing on characters from outside the bounds of the normal comedy of manners and by revealing the ways in which mass culture itself provides a new comic subject. Cowley’s success in her play arises from her ability to confront the crisis facing comedy as defined by Hazlitt and to strike a bold solution to it.

John Keats, Medicine, and Young Men on the Make

Keats worked hard to be able to pursue a career in medicine. It is thus striking that he decided to set aside this career path to pursue poetry. Keats’s choice is most often read within his life story, but his decision fits within a pattern of life choices made by his friends and acquaintances. As Nicholas Roe’s new biography suggests, Keats came of age amidst a group of young men on the make. The question all of them had to answer was whether they wanted to make poetry or make a career. To make poetry was to gamble on immortality. To make a career was not only to earn money but to be able, perhaps, to marry and to make a family. Placing Keats’s decisions within the choices made by figures from Thomas Love Peacock to John Hamilton Reynolds, from Horace Smith to Cornelius Webb enables us to understand not only his personal decision but how his generation of rising young men of promise faced the economic realities of being a writer. We can also see how the poetry of Keats and his circle sought to thematize what Leigh Hunt called the “spirit of money-getting” and what Shelley more simply called “Mammon.”

Running in the Shadows: Revisiting In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France

This essay reflects on In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France (1987), revisiting its genesis, aims, and accomplishments. The book appeared at a time when little attention was paid to Romantic drama, and it thus focused widely on drama in three national traditions. While Romanticists have subsequently made great strides in recovering, interpreting, and even staging dramatic texts, we can still do more to put Romantic-era literary drama in conversation with the theater of the day.

Re-Visioning Rimini: Dante in the Cockney School

It has always been easy to laugh at Leigh Hunt’s Story of Rimini, a rather unusual item in the history of prison writing. Even a modern critic such as Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, writing one of the few full critical studies of Hunt, speaks of the poem’s “structural and linguistic flaws” (52). Romantic era defenders of traditional culture met Rimini’s publication with a rousing chorus of jeers. The Quarterly Review assailed Hunt’s “vanity, vulgarity, ignorance, and coarseness” (14 [January 1816]:481); Blackwood’s Magazine called Rimini “indecent and immoral,” and attacked not only its subject but its style: Leigh Hunt’s chivalrous rhymes are as unlike those of Walter Scott, as is the chivalry of a knighted cheesemonger to that of Archibald the Grim, or, if he would rather have it so, of Sir Philip Sydney. He draws his ideas of courtly splendour from the Lord Mayor’s coach, and he dreams of tournaments, after having seen the aldermen on horseback, with their furred gowns and silk stockings. We are indeed altogether incapable of understanding many parts of the description, for a good glossary of the Cockney dialect is yet a desideratum in English literature…. What, for instance, may be the English of swaling? (2 [October 1817]:198).

Alexander Forbes of Brechin. The First Tractarian Bishop by Rowan Strong (review)

One durable feature of the historiography of the Church of England is the celebratory narrative of the achievements of the Oxford Movement. In this story, a church dominated by a somnolent, self-satisfied, socially conservative High Church establishment was revived by the Oxford Apostles—John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Hurfell Froude. Having recovered the vital truth of the Catholic tradition inside the Church of England, they launched the Tractarian movement which helped restore the Church to a central position in Victorian English life.