Orianne Smith, the inaugural winner of the BARS First Book Prize, is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  She has published widely on topics including gender in the Romantic period, the Gothic, Romantic war poetry and the connections between religion, superstition and magic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  She edited Hubert de Sevrac (1796) for the Works of Mary Robinson (2009-10) and she is currently working on an edition of Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a novel (1790) for Broadview.  Her award-winning first monograph, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826, which we discuss below, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

1) How did you first come to realise that you wanted to write about the relationship between revolution and prophecy in the works of British women writers of the Romantic period?

It was a happy accident.  During my second year in graduate school I was taking a course on seventeenth-century sectarian writers and wrote my final paper on the wild, wacky and truly wonderful Civil War prophetesses.  Like most students I was still working on the paper on the day it was due and I needed a conclusion.  It occurred to me that there could be an interesting connection between these seventeenth-century women who claimed the authority of God during a period of revolution and Romantic women writers who also assumed the mantle of the female prophet in the wake of the French Revolution.  I wrapped up the paper with this thought, but the idea of a British tradition of female prophecy stuck with me.  Afterwards I mentioned it to my dissertation director, Steve Jones, and he encouraged me to explore the idea more fully.  That was in 1999!  A few sentences at the end of a paper turned into my dissertation and then, in 2013, my book.

2) In what ways did the project evolve between your initial conceptions and the publication of your monograph?

There were two very significant shifts in my thinking.  Originally, I thought of visionary writing in largely secular terms, as essentially a power grab by women writers who used the prophetic register in order to validate their stance as social and political commentators.  My perspective early on was that their visionary discourse consisted of something like 90% politics and 10% religion (at best).  I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all approach was not nuanced enough to accommodate the diverse ways in which Romantic women writers engaged in prophecy.  And it did not take into consideration the fact that most of the women in my study were in fact deeply religious and believed that they had a moral imperative to intervene at this critical juncture in human history.  My project truly began to take shape once I began approaching each of the women writers in my study on their own terms and not mine.

The other important shift took place when I was revising the dissertation into a book.  I had happily spent most of my time as a graduate student buried in the archives, reading everything written by and about my five case studies (Piozzi, Williams, Radcliffe, Barbauld and Shelley) as well as a range of historical documents (including sermons, prophecies, letters and diaries) and eighteenth-century scholarly activity (including eschatology, philology, aesthetic theory and moral philosophy).  This was incredibly useful material, but during my revisions I felt like I needed to take a step back and think through the special qualities of prophetic language.  Under what conditions did prophetic discourse succeed and (perhaps more interesting to me) why did it fail?  How was it different from ordinary language?  I began reading widely in speech act theory, as articulated by J. L. Austin in the mid-twentieth century and by later critics such as John Searle, Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu.  I also found Angela Esterhammer’s work on the Romantic performative particularly illuminating.  Speech act theory helped me think through the complex relationship between Romantic women writers who engaged in visionary discourse and their audiences, as well as the specific contexts in which these prophetic performances played out.

3) Religion is often a neglected factor in literary studies, partly because the kinds of aesthetic assumptions on which modern criticism is grounded implicitly seek to marginalise or replace it.  What do you think are the main benefits of approaches like yours in this book which place religious discourses back at the centre of cultural debates?

The main benefit is inherent in your question: religion belongs at the centre of cultural debates and restoring it is necessary if we want to have a more capacious understanding of literature and history.  That said, I think that religion has already made a comeback in literary studies.  You are right though to note that there are some inherent tensions between academic/critical and religious discourses.  I wonder sometimes if that is because of the uncomfortable similarities between the two.  For example, I have always intensely disliked the idea of a literary canon, with its suggestion of a set of timeless sacred texts carefully preserved for the edification of generations of students.  For the record, I do not consider myself to be a high priestess of literature!  To push the analogy even further: some theorists are invoked with something akin to reverence in the academy and I’m sure all of us have read works of criticism that seem truly inspired.  Are literary critics and cultural commentators scientists or prophets?  I would like to think that my work as a researcher is grounded in neutral, quasi-scientific inquiry and yet admittedly my best ideas are hardly ever the result of careful scaffolding and plodding from A to B.  Often they feel more like stolen fire or some sort of gift from the gods (yes, I appear to be channeling my inner—hopefully more responsible!—Victor Frankenstein in my answer here).

As I mentioned above, I didn’t set out to write a book on the influence of religion on Romantic-era writers, and I was certainly no expert on the subject when I began.  What I learned during the course of this project though is that while religious belief is about faith, it is also fueled by the imagination, the ability to imagine another super-natural world and to communicate this to others.  Those of us who make our living analyzing works of the imagination are therefore uniquely equipped to analyze the influence of religion and religious narrative on the figures we study.  And I am now convinced that, at least in our period, it is impossible to conduct literary analysis without some attention to the author’s beliefs, spiritual as well as secular.

4) To what extent do you see the figures you principally examine (Hester Lynch Piozzi, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Radcliffe, Anna Barbauld and Mary Shelley) as employing a common set of prophetic tropes, and to what extent do they each invent their own particular visionary modes?

That’s a great question.  I believe that all of the figures in my study were aware of, and attracted to, a genealogy of female authority that they used to position themselves as visionary writers and thinkers.  In the wake of the French Revolution these writers tended to draw on a Christian tradition of female prophecy, which was explicitly political and revolutionary, with a clear connection to the visionary discourse engaged in by the sectarian female prophets of the Civil War decades.  Later in the period, well after the revolution and the millenarian expectations that it inspired, I found a distinct shift from Christian to pagan modes of prophetic discourse in the work of second-generation Romantic writers like Mary Shelley.  Within this very general framework, however, each of these writers reinvented or explored the model of the female prophet in radically different ways.  Piozzi was especially drawn to the notion of female prophecy as theatrical performance, taking inspiration from her friend Sarah Siddons as well as the famous Italian improvisatrice Corilla.  Williams seemed to hit her stride as a visionary writer when she moved to Paris in 1790, and switched from writing poetry and her one novel Julia to political commentary, describing and prophesying the events unfolding around her.  Radcliffe had better luck than Williams with integrating female prophecy into the genre of the novel, casting the heroines of her Gothic narratives as prophets and revealing how their appreciation of God’s ordering of the natural world inspires their visionary activity.  Barbauld was one of my favorite case studies because of her utter fearlessness in her approach to visionary discourse.  Throughout her career, in her poetry and prose, Barbauld represents herself as a poet-prophet along the lines of Milton, leading the nation in a period of profound spiritual and political crisis.  I believe Shelley was perhaps more attuned than the rest to the notion of a matrilineal genealogy of prophecy with a beginning and an end, and in some ways saw herself as the last of the female visionaries in this tradition.

5) What new topics are you currently researching?

I’ve gone to the dark side.  Well, at least in terms of my interest in the intersection of religion and literature!  My next book is an exploration of representations of gender, witchcraft and magic in Romantic-era poetry and prose.  This is a natural extension of my first project and the research I did then on female enthusiasm.  From the Civil War decades through the Romantic period writers pondered the source of enthusiasm, and wondered if female enthusiasts were divinely or diabolically inspired.  My first book explored the limits and potential of divine inspiration for Romantic women writers and my second book will take up the diabolical angle.  So far it has been a lot of fun!  I’m currently working on the connections between Macbeth, Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and Baillie’s Witchcraft, focusing on the ways in which the ties of kinship and community are disrupted and subverted by the villainesses.  I am still very interested in performative language, but I’m particularly intrigued by speech acts that founder or flail around or are willfully ignored by the characters in the works I’m studying.  I have found Eve Sedgwick’s idea of periperformatives—speech acts which populate the area around a performative and behave like bad neighbors, seeking to undo or weaken the illocutionary force of a performative—very useful in this project.

Maureen McCue is a Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University and can be found on Twitter @maureen_mccue.  Before joining Bangor, she completed her BA at the University of Montana and an MPhil and a PhD at the University of Glasgow.  She has published articles and presented papers on subjects including Samuel Rogers, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, Italian art and culture, literary tourism and the development of aestheticism.  Many of these figures and themes feature in her first book, British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840, which was published by Ashgate last November, which is one of the four books on the shortlist for this year’s BARS First Book Prize, and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in Italian art and its reception in the Romantic period?

I’ve always been fascinated by Italian medieval and Renaissance art as well as classical statues, and as an undergraduate I had a sense that Dante and other Italian authors had deeply influenced Romantic and Modernist writers.  But it was during a seminar with Alison Chapman when I was doing my MPhil at the University of Glasgow and we were discussing the passage in Corinne where Corinne is crowned at the Capitol that I was struck not only with the idea that a writer could invoke or rework earlier literary traditions in a text (such as Petrarch being crowned at the Capitol), but also that an author would pinpoint a specific painting, in this case Domenichino’s Sibyl, as a sort of shorthand to her reader.  My fascination increased when I learned that Staël had commissioned a portrait of herself after the Sibyl, blurring the lines between her text, Domenichino’s work, her character and herself, and that this new portrait then took on its own significance in the public sphere.  I kept coming across references to paintings but it wasn’t until Dorothy McMillan mentioned Napoleon’s campaigns in passing that things clicked into place for me and I decided to pursue the PhD.  Those two aspects – the literary and the political – were two anchors that allowed me to have a rather catholic approach to the sorts of print culture that I included, which I hope reflects the spirit of the age.

2) In your introduction, you write that ‘Part of the reason that Romantic reactions to Italian Renaissance art have thus far not been studied in depth is that traditionally scholarship has emphasized the visionary qualities of Romantic poetry over the visual experience.’  What do you think an emphasis on visual experience adds to our understanding of what’s going on in the literature of the period?

It gives us a more holistic view of both the period and the literature itself.  While there is much pleasure and value to be found in reading a poem or a novel for its own sake, being aware of the visual aspects of a text or the value the period placed on the visual helps us remember that these writers were responding to a world outside of themselves.  It reminds us that on the one hand their writing and the publication of their writing was informed by long-established cultural values (i.e. Italian art is important) and on the other, contemporary market demands (i.e. illustrated books sell better).  Being aware of the period’s visual aspects makes it come alive for us in meaningful ways and can often provide new avenues for exploration.

3) What events led you to pick 1793 as your start date and 1840 as your end date?

While I try to register significant developments earlier in the 18th century, such as the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768, I chose 1793 as the start date for the study because it was the year the Louvre opened as a public museum, as well as the year Great Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary Wars.  This is a major sea-change in European art culture as it signals the radical idea that art should be available to all, rather than squirreled away in a private chamber.  1840 as an end-point is slightly more arbitrary, but I do have the sense that by 1840 we’re beginning to enter a new phase of art criticism, production and consumption, and that the relationship between (contemporary) visual and verbal texts has shifted.  The Romantic discourse loosened the canon of what was valuable in art and why, and it began to celebrate the Italian primitives in their own right for the first time.  To go beyond the 1830s would thus have changed the nature of the book.  As the 1840s is the decade of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843) and the Pre-Raphaelites (1848), it becomes clear that the Romantic reception of art has sparked a new generation’s imagination and innovation, both in the visual arts and in literature, but that discourse becomes quite different to the one proceeding it.

4) To what extent was the reception of Italian Old Masters in the early nineteenth century a modern print-cultural phenomenon, and to what extent did it build on earlier discourses?

These two aspects really go hand in hand.  In the book, I’ve traced the ways in which an already established discourse regarding the importance of Italian art was modified and distributed to a wider audience via new, contemporary print innovations and culture.  The earlier discourses on art had two main audiences, both of whom had somewhat different needs and purposes for art.  One was the ruling class, whose tradition of the Grand Tour and of connoisseurship was wrapped up in ideas about civic humanism and taste.  The second were artists, most particularly members of the Royal Academy, who used Italian Renaissance art as the gold standard to aspire to, which, if reached, would ensure their dominance over contemporary European art.  Both of these audiences were elite and closed, but the value they placed on understanding and being able to discuss art became available for the first time as a result of contemporary print culture.  Through periodicals, catalogues, engravings and literary texts, reader-viewers were exposed not only to the art works themselves but also the discourse surrounding them.  Furthermore, Italian culture more broadly was such a central topic in so many overlapping arenas – such as new galleries and exhibitions, European politics, dissenting education, and travel and literature – that the print culture which addressed these areas reshaped the dominant discourse on art and made it accessible to a wide audience beyond the confines of the Royal Academy and the aristocracy for the first time.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m at the start of two new projects at the moment.  My first project is to write a book about William Hazlitt’s art criticism. Hazlitt figures prominently throughout British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art.  While this new project builds on that knowledge, I hope to articulate the ways in which his early philosophy informs his art criticism, or, more specifically, how his art criticism can be seen as an extension of his An Essay on the Principles of Human Action.  I’m especially looking forward to exploring his thoughts on a wide range of art, so that his enjoyment of prints or reproductions will be considered next to his criticism of contemporary British artists or of Titian, for example.  Being able to explore some of his less familiar works, such as his Conversations with Northcote or his Journey to France and Italy, will also help me gauge his influence on later art critics such as Anna Jameson, Edmund Gosse and John Ruskin.

My second project is about the ways in which the circulation of prints and illustrations create new or redefine cultural and social spaces.  This project is very much in its infancy and still feels a bit abstract, but I’m hoping to bring together factual information about prints and illustrations (i.e. how much they cost, what was popular, how people collected and displayed them) with a more nuanced understanding of their cultural and social capital.  I keep two examples at the back of my mind, which together are my North star as I embark on this journey.  One is the scene in Jane Austen’s Persuasion where Anne Elliot meets a thoroughly absorbed Admiral Croft on the street in front of a printshop window.  In addition to including a tirade by the Admiral against the anonymous artists for portraying unrealistic and impractical boats, this encounter both conveys critical information to Anne and allows her to ask some nearly direct questions to the Admiral which she may not have been able to do in a more confined social space.  The second example I keep in mind is the fact that people collected prints such as illustrations and cartoons and kept them in albums.  Often these would be circulated to dinner party guests after the meal.  What I find fascinating however is the fact that if you didn’t have an album you could rent one for the evening.  Clearly the social, cultural and entertainment value of prints are not to be underestimated.  The two examples help me to remember how fully this contemporary cultural phenomenon of the print shaped social dynamics.  It’s obviously still early days for both these projects, but luckily I’m on research leave for the next six months and should gain some traction.