Numéro 45, february 2007

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Although Blake combined the “sister arts” of poetry, painting, and music in much of his early illuminated work, scholars have (with a few exceptions) rarely considered the musical aspect of his multi-media practice in detail. This tendency to “forget” about Blake’s musical artistry is entirely understandable, because the melodies that Blake wrote for many of his early poems did not survive his death in 1827. Building upon B. H. Fairchild’s groundbreaking work in Such Holy Song (1980), this multi-media essay examines Blake’s musical practice in relation to the poetry and designs of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Beginning with a biographical discussion of Blake’s musicianship, the essay considers the role music played as an integral and holistic aspect of Blake’s “composite art.” Subsequently, the essay addresses some of the interpretive challenges facing modern composers who attempt to set Blake’s poetry to music; and it explores some of the ways in which music can inform modern pedagogy of the Songs. In an appendix, the essay places Blake’s verbal and visual media into a musical context by providing access to relevant MP3 music files taken from Kevin Hutchings’ CD Songs of William Blake (2007).

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This article discusses the influence of mid-eighteenth century Arctic missionary narratives on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and James Hogg. I suggest that these narratives offer a new context for the literary Arctic and undermine established readings of polar landscapes as the ultimate example of Romantic sublimity.

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True to her origins in a prominent Dissenting family, Anna Aikin Barbauld was cautious in her appraisal of existing (and often oppressive) authority structures. Her work is underscored by her understanding that established power structures are incomplete, sometimes incoherent, and usually dangerous to those that attempt to subvert them. Her poetry shows a sophisticated awareness of hierarchy as a frame of mind that needs to be disrupted and re-modeled, as a poor mental construct that pervades much of our thinking about social roles, gender, and—of course—religious practice. But rather than choosing the path of radicalism and radical idealism, Barbauld accepted the fact that realities do not always respond quickly to new critical understandings. Her poetry engages us in experiences that provoke questions and encourage further inquiry—that seek to establish what might be called a “Dissenting frame of mind.” By juxtaposing the languages of science and nurture, and by transforming ordinary experiences into extraordinary ones, Barbauld disrupts reader expectations and provokes re-evaluation of assumptions, prejudices, and “the normal.” The key to change, for Barbauld, is the ability to “think again.” And her poetry is crafted to help readers do just that.

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This essay explores the seemingly disjointed relationship between politics and aesthetics in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), questioning why the first articulation of conservative traditionalism would be announced in a shockingly new, experimental style. One of Novalis’s aphorisms suggests that Burke’s Reflections inverts common assumptions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics: “Many antirevolutionary books have been written for the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.” As Novalis observed, Burke’s Reflections defies the formal conventions of political prose; Burke outlines his defense of traditional British institutions in an idiom that approaches the excesses of modernist montage in its patchwork of genres. His unsystematic style juxtaposes and blends, often in seemingly incongruous ways, diverse literary genres and rhetorical forms: the legalistic-latinate idiom, the captivity narrative, the biblical epistle, the political tract, the gothic novel, enthusiastic prophecy, chivalric romance, and tragedy. While these disparate literary forms erupt unpredictably in the Reflections, they do so in a fragmented, at times even grotesque manner, revealing what Burke himself admitted, that his conservative project is premised on an invented tradition devoid of all referential consistency and stability. In the face of an economy that was changing the very nature of value as such, Burke aesthetically revives fragments of tradition from the past and arranges them in an anti-utilitarian way that might conserve what he understood to be their pre-capitalist, non-relative value.

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Even a cursory reading of the eleventh chapter of Judges suggests obvious parallels between the Jephthah story and Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion; however, Blake’s six illustrations of Judges (including two of Jephthah and his daughter) irrefutably document his appropriation of the story. No critic has connected the Jephthah story of virgin sacrifice to Oothoon’s fate, nor have Blake’s illustrations of the Judges narrative received much attention. My argument is that Blake’s contrary reading of the book of Judges should inform our critical reading of Visions. This intertextual analysis emphasizes the poem’s representation of the female body as a site of sacrifice and how both Blake’s illustrations and the poem position readers for this spectacle of virginity and violence. Reading Blake’s illustrations of the Jephthah narrative—visual revelations of issues of sexual power—amplifies the poem’s cultural power, its iconic representation of a patriarchal obsession with virginity, demonstrable in late eighteenth-century British culture but with ties to biblical, Hebraic representations of virginity and violence. Blake’s culturally-targeted revision of Jephthah’s daughter defies eighteenth-century British cultural strictures about female purity and marital customs by transforming the daughter virgin’s lament at not being able to marry into Oothoon’s redefinition of sexual purity. Further, my reading refutes the widespread critical opinion that in the ending of the poem, the heroine Oothoon offers free love that is, in Mellor’s words, a “male fantasy,” serving the interests of the “male libertine, ”and underscores the poem’s critique of mandated female virginity and culturally-endorsed violence. Finally, Finally, the illustrations and the poem document Blake’s engagement with this biblical book where Israel’s destiny unfolds through accounts of judges who again and again misjudge, who enact sexual violence and fail to see its connection with their own violent ends. Blake’s Visions begins and ends with a chorus of daughters—in between it chronicles the horrors of exploitation, rape, slavery, cultural imperialism and links those to individual sexual repression, like Theotormon’s troubled image of Oothoon, like Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, truly a “sick man’s dream.”

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Rather than dutifully producing conventional elegies bemoaning the loss of the exemplary woman poet immediately after Felicia Hemans’s death in 1835, Letitia Elizabeth Landon daringly objects to the disjunction between Hemans’s life and her public image. Landon dissents from regarding Hemans’s poetry as unblemished in its depiction of women’s traditional domestic role and instead hints at the subversive, indirect discontent she detects in Hemans’s verse — long before twentieth-century critics. Women writers must surely have enjoyed witnessing their gender’s growing success in the literary market, but, since women were competing against one another directly in the public sphere, it was inevitable that some regarded each other as competitors and experienced envy of others’ achievements. After her sister’s death, Harriet Hughes might record that Hemans “would rejoice in [the gifted writers of her own sex’s] success with true sisterly disinterestedness,” but Landon does not appear to have adopted such a “generous” stance (121).

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A number of unpublished letters among the papers of the London Greek Committee in the National Library of Greece throw particular light on the significant period, in 1823, when Byron was considering how best he might contribute to the cause of Greek independence. The letters discussed here are: (1) Alexandros Mavrokordatos from Tripolitza, to Byron in Genoa, dated 2/14 July 1823 (vol. v, fo. J) ; (2) James Hamilton Browne from Tripolitza, to Byron in Kefalonia, dated 13 September 1823 (vol. v, fo. H); and (3) Edward John Trelawny from Tripolitza, to Byron in Kefalonia, dated 14 September 1823 (vol. v, fo. I). Browne’s letter contained two interesting enclosures, which are also considered here: (4) ‘Substance of a conversation held with Colococtroni in his palace’ (vol. v, fo. K), and (5) ‘Substance of a conversation which took place with the Officers of Mavrocordato, who remain here’ (vol. v, fol. L). I also look briefly at the following letters: (6) Spiridion Trikoupis from Hydra, to Byron in Kefalonia, 15/27 August 1823 (vol. v, fol. C); (7) Andreas Louriotis from Hydra, to Byron in Kefalonia, 15/27 August 1823 (vol. v. fol. D); and (8) Mavrokordatos from Hydra, to Byron in Kefalonia, 15/27 August 1823 (vol. v, fol. E).

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This essay examines the interrelations of religion, civilization, and imperialism in Shelley’s The Last Man. Though Shelley may envision the negative effects of imperialism in this novel, I argue that she does not critique the discourse of civilization itself, which helped justify imperialist designs. Furthermore, by viewing the aesthetic in Shelley’s novel as enmeshed with the political, I see Shelley’s aesthetic imperialism curiously aligned with the Evangelicals’ version of middle-class religion. Shelley would reject the Evangelicals’ arguments for the moral norms of Christianity as the means of civilization, but her aesthetic imperialism, through its emphasis on the self-regulation and discipline produced by literature and culture, also becomes a means to train the uncivilized in these bourgeois values.

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In 1794, Britain experienced a public crisis in representation when twelve men were tried for “Constructive Treason” based upon their agitation for Parliamentary reform. The British nation is “constituted” by the conjunction of king and both houses of Parliament rather than by an originary document: under “constructive treason” an attack on one part of this “Happy Constitution” (Parliament) can be metonymically construed as an attack on another part (the monarchy or simply the dignity of the king himself). This essay takes the trial for High Treason of twelve radical reformers as its subject, with special attention to the inclusion of autodidact and radical author Thomas Holcroft among the accused. Rather than reading a literary text for its hidden political content, this essay instead reads public documents surrounding the trial for their figurative turn and as the sign of an emergent cultural debate over the relation of language to meaning with material and literary implications. Although the 1794 London Treason trials ended in acquittals or in dismissal of the charges, their impact upon the accused, and more broadly upon the project of the radical novel of purpose, was significant. Because the charge of constructive treason was successfully undercut by the radicals’ accusations that this was an overly-imaginative projection by the government, the English Jacobin novelists’ own project of enlisting active political imaginings through fictions was also made suspect. On the one hand, post-1795 the government and loyalists turned away from direct legal confrontations and toward the powers of imaginative literature in their future efforts to deauthorize the project of radical reform. On the other, the radicals’ success in tainting the government’s charges as overly speculative reflected back upon the Jacobin’s own projections and designs. Finally, the public discourse and documents surrounding the 1794 Treason Trials themselves are an important moment in the collision of the material with the imaginative at the turn of the century. The case of the 1794 Treason Trials and their implications for Jacobin fictions suggest particular benefits to the study of a broad range of materials beyond the usual parameters of “literature” as more than contextual documents.

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Contemporary discussions of English Romantic philosophers and their theories often include such names as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Lamb, but rarely do they treat of George Gordon, Lord Byron. While Byron’s reputation was not built upon complex philosophical explications of literary theory, the passion of his life did not preclude that of his mind. He has left us with no overtly philosophical work, and yet, many of the digressions in Don Juan are directed at the poets and philosophers of his time and some others seem to point us to a coherent system of thought about literature and how it works. Specifically, Juan’s voyage at sea contains several passages which parody Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Some of these similarities have been explored, but are frequently treated as if Byron were simply creating a pastiche of contemporary literature. However, Coleridge had used the Rime to elucidate a portion of his understanding of how literature works. It seems possible that Byron is purposely answering Coleridge in the second canto of Don Juan. Thus, we may be able to use Byron’s natural imagery and poetic technique to piece together a philosophical statement from that most unphilosophical of Romantics, Lord Byron.

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The publication of Ann Yearsley’s only novel, The Royal Captives in 1795 is an important moment for our current understanding of what it was possible to publish during the political chaos of the 1790s.Yearsley’s later career has been largely ignored by critics; her biographer makes only a brief mention of the novel’s existence, and few others have engaged with it at all. Yet in 1795, Yearsley burst into novel writing, earning an astonishing £200 from the Robinsons for what would be her only novel. Cheryl Turner has noted that this sum is significant in itself; it was rare for such a sum to paid, particularly for a novel, and few women ever earned this much. It was nearly as much as Frances Burney earned for Cecelia, and was more than Elizabeth Inchbald received for Nature and Art. The first aim of this paper will therefore be to give Yearsley’s novel the fullest treatment it has yet received. It will also consider more generally Yearsley’s later career, in particular the performance, then publication of her only play Earl Goodwin early in the decade, before placing The Royal Captives in the context of the wider British reaction to events in France. By making use of Yearsley’s letters to her friends and patrons in Yorkshire, Eliza Dawson and Wilmer Gossip, in which she relates her thoughts about novel-reading. this paper will seek to create a sense of Yearsley’s project as a novelist, and how this engages with national debates. The novel itself will be considered alongside contemporary reviews and more recent critical responses which will provide the context for a reading which aims to demonstrate the fundamental radicalism of The Royal Captives. The paper will then conclude with an assessment of the wider implications of Yearsley’s move into novel writing, where it is suggested that a reconsideration of mid-1790s print culture is needed.

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By the time John Keats began to write his great mythological works, the use of the classical world in poetry had become somewhat scorned in English literary circles, after the allegorical excesses of the eighteenth century. In Keats’ imagination, however, the Greco-Roman pantheon served not as a source of aesthetic embellishment but as part of a new, organic mythology of his own creation. For Keats, the self-exploration of a personal consciousness most closely approximates divinity, and such divinity depends upon interaction with the immediate, earthly space surrounding an individual. In this essay I explore Keats’ use of myth to access this personal identity, which he does frequently through three poetic techniques. The first I call “mythological sense,” meaning the apprehension of mythological allusions acting as a sixth sense for the narrator as he perceives his surroundings. The second is the physical boundedness that constricts mythological poems. The third is his use of embodied figures, initially anonymous mythological forms which appear first as objects in the narrator’s sensual experience, their mythological identifications secondary and often revealed only after their physical significance has been explored.

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When Wordsworth and Coleridge occupy scanty plots and lime-tree bowers, they do so briefly and out of necessity, but Keats consistently describes islands, burrows, bedrooms, and pavilions dense with leafy and/or commercial luxury. More important, he posits such spaces as models for good verse, which, he contends, should feel “like a little copse.” To describe Keats’s regard for packed luxury (that is, circumscribed sensory excess), I choose the term luscious, a word whose etymological links to lush, plush, delicious, lascivious, and, of course, luxurious, render it uniquely suited to an aesthetic defined, paradoxically, by great (sensory) wealth in little space. The following essay argues that this un-Wordsworthian turn to crowded interiors represents not only a Keatsian thematic preoccupation but also, perhaps counterintuitively, Keats’s most significant formal legacy. Keats’s early connection to Leigh Hunt affiliates him with the luxury-loving bourgeoisie. However, less interested in domestic spaces than poetic ones, Keats rediscovered and redefined the catalogue, or poetic list, in an effort to translate gracious living into luscious verse.

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In the 18^th-19^th-century ‘criminal conversation’ legal action, a spouse could sue his wife’s lover for economic compensation. The wife was not party to the action, even though she was implicitly ‘on trial’. This article argues that the absence of the wife’s perspective permitted the court to manipulate her image conservatively and enabled English Marriage Law to evade enlightenment pressure for reform. The counter-pressure she may have exerted is deflected elsewhere. This article shows that women’s private defences could infiltrate the public imagination obliquely, if not the legal process directly, using as examples three very different letters: a purloined love letter from an adulterous wife, a fictional letter of frank testimony from Wollstonecraft’s Maria, and a forensic analysis under a masculine pseudonym from an indignant ‘victim’.