Miranda Burgess

Sydney Owenson's Tropics

Readers of Sydney Owensons 1811 novel The Missionary: An Indian Tale have usually understood it generically: as a romance of imperial reconciliation or a tragedy of failed imperial sympathy. This essay argues that Owensons treatment of Anglo-Indian relations is best read in conjunction with works of tropical medicine, which, like The Missionary, seek to intervene directly rather than to theorize, recommend, or describe. In emphasizing the pragmatics of The Missionary, this essay seeks to reorient readers’ attention toward Owensons sentence-level poetics, more specifically her enchainment of metonymies, which produces for its readers a syntactical as well as lexical experience of equivalence without prioritization and speed without rest. In contrast to the strictures on disease and contagion in medical writing about India, Owensons metonymies celebrate as well as enact the circulatory motions of the Anglo-Indian sphere her novel depicts.

Jane Austen on Paper

ABSTRACT This essay explores the economy of Romantic-period paper circa 1790s to 1810s. The material history of paper preoccupied writers in the period, not only because of its volatile role in mediation. I discuss articles from British and Caribbean newspapers, economic histories of the paper trade, and essays on papermaking by Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld. These contemporary sources demonstrate that, in times of scarcity consequent on war and economic isolation, British writers used figural discourses of whiteness to promote paper conservation. At the same time, these writers glanced uneasily at the complexly racialized, mobile history of paper, including the participation of Jews in rag gathering and the use of cast-off clothes from enslaved people of color, sailors, and condemned prisoners in the making of paper furnish. Paper’s whiteness suffered continual threat from the traces of this history (materialized by writing and print) and from the instability of its figurations. The precarious whiteness of paper and its dependency on rags link the paper trade practically and figurally with the Atlantic slave economy. I argue that Jane Austen’s novels metonymically address the racialized economy of paper, querying the dependency of the industry—and Romantic literate culture—on racialized networks of injustice.

Introduction: Romantic Mediations

This brief introduction contextualizes the essays that follow with respect to the NASSR Conference at which versions of them were first presented. It defines in multiple ways the term “mediation” as it was addressed at the conference and as it appears in scholarship of the Romantic era.