BARS Blog

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, politics and religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing. She has published articles on Sarah Butler and Charlotte Brooke and edited Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St Omer for the Chawton House Library Series. Her particular passion is William Blake, on whom she has published several articles and book chapters and who is the subject of her first monograph, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy, which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in William Blake?

Back when I was doing an MA in Modernity and Culture and thinking naïvely that I might do a PhD on imagist poetry or something, I took a module run by the eminent Coleridge scholar Jim Mays on intertextuality which featured Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton and Allen Ginsburg’s Howl. Mays had chosen the Tate facsimile edition of Blake’s Milton as the set text but you couldn’t get it anywhere and I became mildly obsessed with hunting it down. After traipsing all over London I finally tracked down a battered copy in the Tate gift shop and then opened it to find the strangest work of literature I’d ever come across. It was the sense that this mad vision was always on the point of making transcendent, mind-blowing sense that hooked me and it’s that same quality that still has me coming back to Blake today.

2) How did Blake’s understanding of the role of the prophet differ from the way we’d commonly conceptualise that figure today?

I think that as literary scholars it’s hard to escape the habit of treating prophecy primarily as a rhetorical stance or mode out of a kind of squeamishness with its claims to have access to a “divine vision” or whatever you want to call it. But to track the shifting significance of prophecy in Blake’s oeuvre means accepting that for him prophecy was a kind of action you do in the world. Yet if we accept that his prophetic poetry is performative and its purpose was to change the world then by his own standard his life’s work was an utter failure. In the book I wanted to try to capture how this trauma plays out across his career, as he tries to recover that unity of action and purpose he had felt in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the French Revolution.

3) In your Introduction, you argue that Blake’s ‘awareness of divergent temporalisations of prophetic action allowed him to adjust his use of the prophetic form as his understanding of his authorial mission evolved over time’.  Where in his milieu would you locate the starkest of these adjustments?

I’m not sure if this is the ‘starkest’ but maybe the most consequential of the shifts I discuss is from the Old Testament model of prophetic temporality to an apocalyptic model. In the popular consciousness they tend to be treated as interchangeable but there is an important distinction in how these models understand the relationship between prophecy and time that had major consequences for Blake and his sense of himself as a prophet.

For the Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, who influenced Blake’s earliest articulations of the power of prophecy, the outcome of the prophet’s judgment was a matter of negotiation between God, his prophet, and his people. In other words, the future could be changed if the people listened to the prophet and altered their course. For apocalyptic prophets, on the other hand, the future is set. The end of the present world is coming and you can’t do anything about it. All you can do is wait for the fireball of righteous judgment to consume you like that guy in the car in Independence Day. So when Blake moved towards an apocalyptic model with works like “A Song of Liberty” and America he was expressing more than his confidence, he was signalling his certainty, that the end for all the corrupt regimes of Europe was imminent come what may. But then it didn’t happen. In the book I consider the ways he attempted to reinvent his prophetic system over and over again across the rest of his career, moving between these models, as he tried to think through how and why he had been so wrong.

4) Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics are one of the book’s inspirations: what for you were the most exciting elements of Blake made visible by the book’s development of Ricoeur’s insights?

Ever since I was a Philosophy undergrad I’ve had a thing for Ricoeur because his theory of hermeneutics has always struck me as a profoundly humane way of thinking about our predicament, flailing around trying and failing to understand each other and our world. Ricoeur is often lumped in with Derrida as just another post-structuralist for whom the notion of truth is subject to deep suspicion. But for Ricoeur it’s not that there is no truth, just that it is multifaceted, perhaps endlessly so, since we are constantly changing and our perspective on the truth changes with us.

One of Ricoeur’s explanations of the hermeneutic method, in particular, helped me to conceptualise both my own analytical process and also Blake’s poetic practice. Ricoeur describes our attempts to grasp the truth when we perform hermeneutics as moving in a spiral pattern with each attempt approaching the truth at a different level or angle. Failure is therefore built into this process since each revolution reveals only part of the truth and the whole truth remains stubbornly elusive. For me, this is how Blake came to understand his own prophetic method, which is (if you are familiar with his later work especially) often maddeningly repetitive. I argue that these repetitions in his poetry reveal it to be a reiterative hermeneutic practice through which he attempts to work through his previous failed attempts to discern that visionary truth he was chasing throughout his career.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Something completely different! I’m currently putting together a Medical Humanities podcast with a UCD colleague (Alice Maugher, School of History) called The Demon Drink, which looks at Ireland’s fraught relationship with alcohol from the 1600s through to 1922 (the founding of the Irish state). The podcast should be coming out in late-July/August. This developed out of my work on my second monograph which is focused on drunkenness in eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish literature.

Daniel Cook is Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee. His research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, book history, authorship and appropriation studies, the gothic and the fantastical, the history of the novel, poetic genres, and Scottish and Irish writing more broadly. He has worked extensively on authors including Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, James Hogg and William Wordsworth. His first monograph, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830, was the subject of the first BARS Five Questions interview. In the past twelve months, he has published two new monographs: Reading Swift’s Poetry (with Cambridge University Press) and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (with Edinburgh University Press). We discuss the second of these books below.

1) How did you first become interested in Walter Scott?

I first read Scott as an undergraduate, about twenty years ago. On an introduction to fiction course we looked at Redgauntlet, with a particular focus on one of Scott’s best inset stories, “Wandering Willie’s Tale”. The form of the book fascinated me, perhaps more than the characters, at the time. That said, the minor villain Dan Cooke has stayed with me, for sure. He barely gets a line or so, but he plays a crucial role in the plot (sort of). Since moving to Scotland my interest has deepened. I’ve written essays on Scott the poet (“Lay of the Last Minstrel and Improvisatory Authorship”), Gothic Scott (“Walter Scott’s Late Gothic Stories”), and even Scott the editor (“Publishing Posthumous Swift: Deane Swift to Walter Scott”). With Lucy Wood I co-edited a special issue for Studies in Scottish Literature titled “Reworking Walter Scott”, which takes a historical look at Scott’s legacy among writers and artists. In the past year or so I’ve even scripted my own comics adaptation of three of Scott’s short stories (“Wandering Willie’s Tale”, “The Highland Widow”, and “The Two Drovers”), which is in production with Dundee Comics Creative Space, thanks to funding from the Stephen Fry Public Engagement Awards.

2) In your introduction, you write that ‘Scott the short story writer is and is not The Author of Waverley’.  How would you characterise the major similarities and divergences between these aspects of Scott?

When I embarked on the project I had the assumption that Scott the novelist loomed over Scott the short story writer, that the novels came first, and the short stories were byproducts. Put simply, my aim was to pull out the short stories and read them as a collective, thereby demonstrating a new side to Scott’s authorship. But I now think the opposite is true – the short form informed and even shaped the novels. Looking at the seventeen shorter pieces in great detail I’ve been struck by the persistence of very specific techniques across the entire body of Scott’s works, both prose and verse. Despite their obvious lengthiness, Scott’s novels rely on the same skill exhibited in the short stories and narrative poems: elliptical narration. By that I mean the narrator leaves telling gaps in the story, skips around the story’s setting, briefly focuses on the less relevant details then suddenly jumps forward, and so on. I still think of Scott as an historical fiction writer de rigeur, but really he is a master of misdirection – he’s a teller, not a show-er. Nowhere is this skill better showcased than in the smaller pieces, despite their compressed space. Short story historians tend to locate the modern short story in the late nineteenth century, when the “condensed novel” structure of earlier works gave way to economical precision. I think Scott’s case complicates this, but in a conflicted way: Scott’s shorter works thrive on their “shortness” but they are condensed in other ways, such as characterisation and scene-setting. The best and most elaborate example is “Donnerhugel’s Narrative”, which is taken from Anne of Geierstein. We appear to be reading a cautionary fairy tale, but the story rapidly becomes a fable of prejudice. The seemingly demonic sorcerer and his equally mysterious daughter are not the villains. The gossipy neighbours are. In delivering the tale, Donnerhugel keeps second-guessing his audience, altering as he goes, dropping key elements, and so on. The narrators of the short stories are not the masterful narrator of the Waverley novels. Many of the short stories, and certainly the novella The Surgeon’s Daughter, thrive on the multi-chapter, multi-location structure used in the Waverley novels. But the execution differs.

3) Your book takes a chronological approach to Scott’s briefer prose productions.  To what extent do you see Scott as honing his craft as a writer of short fictions over the course of his career, and to what extent is the picture more complicated than that?

Scott experimented in the shorter form early on, at around the same time he began work on what would become his first novel in 1814, Waverley. In some ways these early pieces mimic the fashionable periodical pieces they shared space with – in the Edinburgh Annual Register and Blackwood’s Magazine, among other places. But they’re also very metafictional. “Christopher Corduroy”, in The Sale-Room, is a character sketch (itself a fashionable genre) of a bibliophilic uncle of a bibliophobic narrator. The editorial voice intervenes to pass judgement on the nephew. It doesn’t quite work. Two early Blackwood’s pieces show more promise – “Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals” is at turns an animal fable and a real-crime story, while “Phantasmagoria” is a downbeat Gothic story delivered by the ultimate Gothic narrator, a sentiment shadow. Here, we see Scott’s fascination with authors as characters develop. “The Inferno of Altisidora”, his very first short story (Edinburgh Annual Register, 1811), displays similar ideas but it’s more wedded to a single genre. With Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott’s first and only short story collection, the author really hits his stride. Chrystal Croftangry himself is a fascinating, flawed man, and the stories he weaves (from various fictional storytellers) take in a full range of genres, modes, and forms. The stories examined in my book were produced in a fairly compressed period, from 1811 to 1832, but the developments are quite stark to see. It’s a joy to see the inner workings of an author we take for granted.

4) In making clear the range and interest of Scott’s short fiction, your book presents a range of fascinating alternatives for scholars constructing syllabi.  How have your experiences of teaching this material been, and are there works you’ve examined for this book that you haven’t yet taught, but are excited to explore in the seminar room?

One of my main objectives in writing the book was to consolidate and promote further a wide interest in Scott’s most famous short stories – “Wandering Willie’s Tale” remains one of the most widely anthologised pieces. I would assume that is the Scott short story assigned in classes, if any are. “The Two Drovers” and “The Highland Widow” are ideal for a variety of syllabi, whether on Scottish literature or Romantic studies courses, or even courses on the short story. Another motive was to get Scott on other types of courses, such as Gothic literature, fantasy literature, and the like. “The Tapestried Chamber” and “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” have been staples on my postgraduate modules (The Gothic Tradition and Gothic Legacies) for the past three or four years. They sit well with Margaret Oliphant’s “The Library Window” and Charlotte Riddell’s “The Open Door” – they are all tales of terror (in the softest sense), rather than horror stories. “The Tapestried Chamber” is a ghost story without a ghost (that is, we focus on the aftermath of the experience on the haunted general). “The Library Window”, similarly, is not a ghost story per se (or is it?), but the unsettling effect is the same. “Donnerhugel’s Narrative” would pair well with Walter Sholto Douglas’s (Mary Diana Dods’s) “Firouz-Abdel: A Tale of the Upas Tree” in a course interested in early Scottish fantasy. Bizarro (unpublished until 2008) has been virtually ignored by critics – it’s a really clever expose of cultural prejudice masquerading as an old-fashioned rogue tale, so I would be intrigued to see how that works in the classroom. Usually I place Scott in a period- or national-survey type of module, but I really think he’s ideally suited to a more genre- or form-based style of teaching.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

In addition to the Scott comic (Walter Scott’s Scottish Tales), I’ve just finished editing a tie-in selection of texts. Simply titled Walter Scott’s Five Short Stories, this will be produced by UniVerse, with illustrations by Faye Williams, and made available for free online. Very soon I’ll be wrapping up a long gestating volume for Oxford World’s Classics, Scottish Literature, 1730-1830, which I am very excited about – it will be the first book in the series to feature Gaelic texts (in the original and in translation), and scores of newly recovered authors working in an array of genres and styles that no one will be expecting to see. I’m hoping it will open up completely new vistas of research for other people, as well as being a handy teaching tool. The old favourites are there, of course – but even the Robert Burns section has a surprise or two in store. Beyond that, my focus in 2021 has been on, and will continue to be on, Gulliver’s Travels. I’m back working with my old collaborator Nicholas Seager on another essay collection for Cambridge University Press. This one is The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels, which features some amazing and innovative work by leading scholars from around the world – each essay packs a punch, just as we hoped. For Norton I’m editing a brand new edition of Gulliver’s Travels itself. And later this summer I’ll be starting my next book project – also on Gulliver’s Travels! – as soon as I can get into the archives. Beyond that, I’m editing a collection of essays on Austen (Austen after 200), alongside Kerry Sinanan and Annika Bautz. In the mid-term I’ll be returning to one of my favourite novels – Frankenstein. And I’d love to explore Scott in a European context – alongside Nodier, Gautier, Nerval, Hoffmann, and Fouqué, among other short-form authors.