Terence Allan Hoagwood

Don Juan and Regency England

Byrons mock-epic poem was inspired by the cosmopolitan environment of Venice, but could not help but take account of the society in England he had left behind. This book examines the ways in which the poem reflects the social, political and artistic climate of Regency England.

Keats and Social Context: Lamia

Practical criticism founded on a social-historical theory is still relatively unusual in studies of Keats: thematic approaches and text-based methods of formalism remain dominant (with exceptions that I shall be discussing below). What results are interpretations of particular poems, or sets of poems. An argument about method can open a different hermeneutic field. So long as the questions we ask of critical works are themselves written within one critical school, then commentary on a particular poem will be subject to that schools parameters. The present essay therefore constitutes an argument about criticism, in order to open a new range of subsequent commentary. I offer at the end of this essay a commentary on Lamia as an example of the kind of practical interpretation that a historical method can engender; but the space for that kind of commentary must first be opened by an argument about interpretation. To analyze present and past studies of Keats is to discern some assumptions and convictions that limit and predetermine interpretive conclusions. To define these problematic and limiting assumptions is to clear space for alternative approaches. Hegemonic convictions reign in part by virtue of their invisibility; local customs have a way of looking like universal laws of nature, or common sense. To define the limits of currently dominant assumptions in Keats criticism, or in studies of Romanticism, can (negatively) alienate those assumptions, distancing and relativizing them; it can also (positively) generate constructive alternatives.

Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts

Literary works of the Romantic period have often been viewed primarily as expressions of escapism, disillusionment or apostasy on the writers part. In contrast, this book argues that political repression had an important effect on the production of romantic texts.

Countee Cullen's CHRIST RECRUCIFIED

Despite controversy about how Countee Cullens poetry relates to racial politics, and despite Cullens not having included the poem in any of his books, “Christ Recrucified” warrants study for its ...

“Varied Forms Pass Glitt’ring”: Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse

Three salient characteristics of Violet Fane’s poetic work appear with clarity and brevity in “Lancelot and Guinevere,” and the first is a contrast of male and female points of view:

Scholarly Fantasy and Material Reality in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon

The feminist and anti-amatory sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon (1796 and 1813), offers an example of ways in which a book reveals important meanings when studied as a physical object. Literary definitions of the “text” or the “work” have not traditionally treated the book-as-object as essentially meaningful: in traditional accounts, the “text” is an arrangement of words that can appear in any physical presentation, and the “work” is an abstract mental entity in the mind of the author. Influential post-structuralist usages are equally abstract: Roland Barthes writes that “the Text is a methodological field”;1 Fredric Jameson writes of “textual structure” that “must be reconstituted, a deep-textual machinery whose characterization ranges from systems of tropes … to the narrative apparatus.”2 The physical book that is present is almost always understood as a vehicle for the conveyance of a text, a sign of a mental intention, imaginary object, or field of reproducible signifiers with which customers may play, if they like it, and buy.

Scandal as Commodity and the “Calumniated Woman”

The January 1836 monthly issue of Fraser’s Magazine for Town and, Country features an illustration titled “Regina’s Maids of Honour” (figure 3.1), a Daniel Maclise drawing of celebrated women writers at tea, “every one a lovely she.” The picture and William Maginn’s accompanying article, “List the First,” parallel the previous year’s collection of male “Fraserians,” which depicts Fraser’s founder Maginn addressing a roundtable of the decade’s best-known literary characters; twenty-seven men busily toasting the New Year include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Theodore Hook, Barry Cornwall (Bryan Waller Proctor), Father Prout (F. S. Mahony), William Jerdan, Thomas Crofton Croker, John Gibson Lockhart, Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. M. Moir, James Hogg, John Galt, Egerton Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Count d’Orsay, and William Harrison Ainsworth, among others. Like its male counterpart, Fraser’s “List the First” formulates an intriguing, albeit smaller, canon of Fraser’s contributors; its eight women writers include Mrs. S. C. Hall (Anna Maria Hall), L. E. L., Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), Harriet Martineau, Jane Porter, Caroline Norton, and Lady Blessington. Predictably, Maginn identifies the women writers in gendered terms indicating domestic gentility rather than literary genius; Mrs. Hall is “fair and fine,” L. E. L. is “painted con amore,” Lady Blessington is “bright and fair, enchanting, [and] winning,” and Norton is a beauty—“nobler, brighter, dearer, did ne’er on human eyeball blaze.”

“The Very Roads of Literature”: Women Editors of Nineteenth-Century British Literary Annuals

Perspectives drawn from bibliographical analyses of the text as a product of human work must necessarily view the product from the enabling source and examine sociological environments that allow texts to circulate. Yet the history of scholarship on authorship, reading, and publishing is relatively new.1 We emphasize our debt to such scholarship, as we explore methods of textual interpretation that view publishing history as part of the continuous link between material text and reader. The burgeoning middle-class consumerism that drove the nineteenth-century literary marketplace created early opportunities for women through the production of literary annuals and periodicals, and this moment in literary history provides an opportunity to examine gender politics informing women writers, editors, and texts in this moment of literary history.

“The Fate of Woman At Its Root”: Elizabeth Barrett’s A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelow’s A Story of Doom

From the moment she began writing A Drama of Exile, Elizabeth Barrett planned for her two-volume Poems to begin with that long dramatic poem. With the poem barely completed, she wrote to R. H. Horne on 20 December 1843: “it must take a first place in the book. … The object is the development of the peculiar anguish of Eve—the fate of woman at its root.” Eight months later, the book was in print and winning her praise in letters from Thomas Carlyle and Harriet Martineau. Clear evidence shows, however, that she knew the poem would not be liked widely, and its daunting presence as the first poem in the two-volume Poems—a placement on which she insisted—had nothing to do with calculations of popular success. On 1 October 1844, three months after the book appeared, she writes to Cornelius Matthews: “I am glad that I gave the name of ‘Poems’ to the work instead of admitting the ‘Drama of Exile’ into the title-page and increasing its responsibility; for one person who likes the Drama, ten like the other poems.”1

Voluptuous Opportunities: Visual Images in the Keepsake

Analysis of the sort that Sappho and Phaon and its history call forth illustrate a methodology of literary criticism that is the larger purpose of “Colour’d Shadows.” That method involves analyses of a process of production and reception: William Lane’s Minerva Press captured Mary Robinson’s 1813 edition of Sappho and Phaon within a canon of romance novels, where the fictions of love and stereotypes of women as frail, dependent creatures conquered revolutionary ideology textually encoded in Robinson’s previous 1796 edition. Lane’s militaristic, conservative politics intervened when he, as a publisher and proprietor, issued Robinson’s text because its presence among Minerva books imprints conservative views upon the readings of the poems. Marketed by Lane as domestic products to engage women reader’s emotions, the poems are draped with anti-intellectual meanings by the Minerva Press, and not by Mary Robinson. Paradoxically, this industrial depersonalization of literature, of which Sappho and Phaon is a telling example, coincides historically with the Romantic rhetoric that personalizes the concept of literary meanings; this relationship is paradoxical because, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have said, under conditions of industrial productivity “the individual disappears before the apparatus which he serves”1 The apparatus manufactures and bears meanings, in the web of paratextual matter described by Gerard Genette as materials that “surround [a text] and extend [it], precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.”2