The University of Huddersfield English Literature and Creative Writing PhD Scholarships

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Opportunities in Yorkshire for those applying to study for a PhD in Romantic writing. Via Ildiko Csengei.

The University of Huddersfield English Literature and Creative Writing PhD Scholarships

The University of Huddersfield is set in the heart of Bronte country, with good transport links to Shakespeare country, London, and the rest of the UK. English Literature and Creative Writing at Huddersfield has a strong international record of research excellence and is ranked fourth in the UK for the quality of its research publications (REF 2014). This international team has a diverse range of interests including British and American contemporary literature, Renaissance studies, Victorian studies, the Romanticism and the long eighteenth century, philosophy and literature, and the twenty-first century composite novel. Our research staff includes distinguished poets, novelists and script-writers who lead a cohort of creative writers. We are home to the Ted Hughes Network, which promotes the work and life of this important poet and those closely associated with him. We have a close connection with the Huddersfield Literature Festival. The University of Huddersfield’s unique location and excellent transport links make the UK’s vast public and private research resources easily accessible.

We provide our research students with excellent facilities, world-leading researchers as supervisors, and a vibrant research community. The University of Huddersfield has recently been awarded the Higher Education Academy’s Global Teaching Excellence Award 2017. Research students are provided with robust institutional support that includes training in areas designed to enhance employability and research success.

We are offering the PhD scholarships listed below to cover up to 75% of tuition costs for applicants with a record of excellent achievement and a strong research proposal. Additionally, we are happy to supervise strong applicants in any of our research areas.

  • Ted Hughes Network Scholarship: proposals related to the work of the poet Ted Hughes
  • The University of Huddersfield’s Contemporary Poetry Project Scholarship: proposals related to post-war British, Irish, and American poetry, especially the work of Philip Larkin
  • The Lady Anne Clifford Scholarship in Renaissance Women’s Writing: proposals related to women’s writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
  • The Canal and Rivers Trust Literature and Travel Scholarship: proposals exploring the intersections between literature and travel in the nineteenth-century
  • The New Pastoral Scholarship: proposals engaging with any form of creative writing that explore aspects of nature writing in contemporary Britain
  • Shakespeare and Renaissance Environmentalism Scholarship: proposals related to representations of nature in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, or the non-dramatic poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
  • Eighteenth-century and Romantic Literatures of Feeling Scholarship: proposals related to affect, feeling or sensibility in eighteenth-century or Romantic literature, and the emotions of war
  • The Life-course and Literature Scholarship: proposals with an ageing studies perspective in the study of contemporary literature and culture
  • The Walter Haigh Scholarship in Late-Victorian & Edwardian Literary Studies

We welcome informal inquiries. Please contact the staff member whose research most closely aligns with your area of interest: more details here.

To apply follow the links below. All relevant applications will be considered for one of the scholarships listed above.
English Literature PhD
Creative Writing PhD

 

Further information here.

Conference Report: Writing Romantic Lives at Edge Hill University

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Thank you to Oliver Thomas for this report from the BARS-sponsored conference ‘Writing Romantic Lives‘, which took place at Edge Hill University on 25 November 2017.

You can see the conference Twitter feed here.

 

Conference Report: Romanticism Lives!

by Oliver Thomas, MA student at Edge Hill University

 

 

The BARS-sponsored Writing Romantic Lives symposium was aptly titled, as the sterling keynote speech from Dr Felicity James demonstrated. Including fascinating elucidations on her own researches, James succinctly and stylishly laid the groundwork for the event. Our foci were collaboration, autobiography and its myriad forms, and the writing of lives, in the sense of writing the self and writing’s relationship to the (Romantic) Self.

Thus we embarked on our first engaging panel. Marvin Reimann’s presentation, ‘S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and the Dynamic Process of Self-knowledge’, expounded on a powerful theme resonant throughout the conference, that the formation of a Self is a fluid concept dependent upon the construction of an ideal state defined against an original state, and the continuous transgression from one to the other. Jérôme Chemin of the Université de Lorraine illuminated this and other metaphysical concepts in his paper ‘From Poetic Experience to Metaphysics’. Chemin clarified the murky relationship between the Biographia Literaria and Coleridge’s better known poetry. The final paper of this panel saw a moving, powerfully personal account from Lilach Bornstein – ‘Christabel in Tel Aviv: A Group Reading Coleridge in Hebrew’ – that furnished those attendant with an appreciation of the analytical nuance offered by fresh eyes working collaboratively.

Lunch is a time to munch and mull over ideas. In the comfort and calm of Edge Hill’s quiet campus, that is exactly what happened. The culinary spread served amply and was enjoyed by all, with the mango and brie parcels bringing surprising delight to this attendee. The real substance of such a lunch, however, is never the food, but the thought, and around the room, much thought bounced and blossomed despite the late autumn darkness outside.

Some of that darkness stole into the conference in the next panel ‘Death and the Self’, chaired by Jo Taylor, and featuring three students from the conference’s physical host for the day, Edge Hill University. Melanie Senior’s paper on ‘Hysteria and the Romantic Woman’ offered an incisive examination how hysteria has been used to marginalise female romantic  writers, simultaneously demonstrating the resistance that authors such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft performed to overcome this prejudice. Amy Warbuton’s presentation on ‘Gothic Aural Experience in Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho’ followed: Udolpho is a tale ringing with echoes, the misheard, the warped and the restricted.  The focus lay in the ways the Gothic voice contributed to Emily St. Aubert’s degeneration. Anthony Gordon’s ‘A Life Devoted to Killing Death’ demonstrated the critique of attempting to avoid immortality offered by Beddoe’s Death’s Jest-book.  Beddoe’s text exemplifies the struggle against its subject, Death, and the (apparent) futility of the obsession with that struggle, and the danger to the self such an obsession can cause.

Michael Bradshaw, of Worcester University, chaired the next panel, ‘Romantic Connections’. Emilee Morrall examined ‘Personal Reflections in Charlotte’ Smith’s Moral Tales’. Her paper showed how this once marginalised and forgotten Romantic writer could now emerge into the critical limelight. This time it was her children’s tales which were under primary consideration, and Morrall examined minutely Smith’s personal reflections embedded within those works, clarifying them in an analysis that was at once reflective and convincing, and tied in very neatly with the keynote speech and its theme, writing lives (in all the senses that those last two words may be interpreted).

A distinct and challenging personality to a room of academics came next. Corrina Readioff revealed James Lackington, bookseller, as a master self-marketer. His mercurial alterations of his Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (there were several editions of this book) demonstrated eloquently the continuous process of self-promotion (and possibly self-fashioning) involved when writing such a memoir.

One effective way of rating the potency of the matter under discussion, is the discussions over coffee had between panels. I’m pleased to say I have seldom drunk a coffee (or tea) so steeped in knowledge, and my hungry student mind had a buffet of brilliant brains to learn from in that room.

The final panel, ‘Novel Approaches’, gave us two speakers who masterfully rounded off the evening’s panel discussions. Adam Neikirk  opened with a short reading from the novel at which he has been working, an effort to write a fictional autobiography in the voice of Coleridge (a kindred concept to the Dead Romantic Interviews competition, another part of the conference) which he described as ‘A novel in “Development Xanadu”’. This kind of literary ventriloquism and mimicry was a theme latent throughout most of the conference that, like Coleridge’s sacred river, burst forth via Adam’s talk. Adam’s endeavours were applauded and more than one attendee pointed out that, while he may be unsatisfied with the unfinished fragment of a novel he had in hand, to publish such, would be most Coleridgian.

On the subject of rivers and mountains, our conference ended with a truly inter-disciplinary, multimedia presentation from Rebekah Musk entitled ‘Beholding Shelley’s Euganean Hills.’ Musk gave a strikingly powerful insight into the imagined and physical world of a poem, and how these qualities relate to one another. Her work was infused with a level of detail and precision that was genuinely engaging and refreshing after the lofty literary and philosophical discussions of the day. In more ways than one, we came back to earth. Rebekah’s primary insight was that the eye of Shelley’s poem presented a composite vision, in which the language, and landscape, shifts and changes while the speaker remains rather still by comparison.

The symposium came to a close with the announcing of the winners of the Dead Romantic Interviews competition and a workshop from Andrew McInnes and Felicity James on academic publishing that was both engaging and insightful. There was a thematic harmony between the Interviews contest and the symposium. Its impact was as international as the conference itself, as the Canadian winner demonstrated well with her video message. The message included a brief reading from her entry which had resurrected the sharp-minded, no-nonsense Mary Shelley, author of that grandest of Gothic Romantic works, Frankenstein. For this observer, the competition synchronised the competitive and the collaborative for, as with many academic endeavours, it engendered a community spirit extending far beyond the winner, as well as enlivening Romantic studies with fresh creative engagements. The competition embodied the three themes within the study of Romanticism the conference set out to discuss; Writing the Self, autobiography and collaboration. Romantic studies, like the monster crafted by Mary Shelley, lives!

– Oliver Thomas

The BARS Review, No. 50 (Autumn 2017)

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George Cruikshank, ‘Death or Liberty!’ (1819). ©Trustees of the British Museum. Used under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

The Editors, led from this number forward by Mark Sandy, are pleased to announce the publication of the 50th number of The BARS Review, the eighth available in full online through the new website.  The list of contents below includes links to the html versions of the fifteen articles, but all the reviews are also available as pdfs.  If you want to browse through the whole number at your leisure, a pdf compilation is available.

If you have any comments on the new number, or on the Review in general, we’d be very grateful for any feedback that would allow us to improve the site or the content.

Editor: Mark Sandy (Durham University)
General Editors: Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton), Susan Oliver (University of Essex) & Nicola J. Watson (Open University)
Technical Editor: Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow)


Reviews

Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell, eds., Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture
E. J. Clery
Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830
Jane Taylor
J. A. Downie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Natasha Simonova
Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade
Jon Mee
[Robert Southey], Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, ed. Carol Bolton
Diego Saglia
Kristina Mendicino, Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism
James Vigus
Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno, eds, Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century
Viona Au Yeung
Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund, eds., Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood
Carly Stevenson
Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Christopher Donaldson
Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien, eds., The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 2: English and British Fiction 1750-1820
Yi-cheng Weng
Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager, eds., The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Rachel Sulich

Spotlight: Rethinking Liberty in the Romantic Era

Jon Mee, Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty
John Bugg
Fiona Price, Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott
Simon Edwards
Daniel M. Stout, Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel
Alexander Dick
Jennifer Orr, Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Romantic-Period Ireland
Bridget Keegan

BARS Chawton House Travel Bursary

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All scholars working on Romantic-Period women’s writing are invited to apply for the 2018 BARS Chawton House Travel Bursary.  The BARS Executive Committee has established this award in order to help fund expenses incurred through travel to, and accommodation near, Chawton House Library in Hampshire, up to a maximum of £500.

The names of recipients will be announced on the BARS and Chawton House Library websites and social media.  Successful applicants will be asked to submit a short report to the BARS Executive Committee and Chawton House Library Trustees within four weeks of the completion of the research trip and to acknowledge BARS and Chawton House Library in resulting publications.  Successful applicants must be members of BARS before taking up the award: see How to Join.

Please send the following information in support of your application (up to two pages of A4 maximum in word.doc format):

  • Your full name and institutional affiliation (if any).
  • The working title and a short abstract or summary of your current project.
  • Brief description of the research to be undertaken at Chawton House Library.
  • Estimated costing of proposed research trip.
  • Estimated travel dates.
  • Name of one referee (with email address) to whom application can be made for a supporting reference on your behalf.
  • Name and contact details (including email address and Twitter handle) of whomever updates your departmental website or social media, if known. And your Twitter handle, if applicable.

Applications should be directed to the BARS bursaries officer, Dr Daniel Cook (d.p.cook@dundee.ac.uk) at the University of Dundee.  The deadline for applications is February 1st in any given year.  Informal enquires about the Chawton House Library collection and this scheme can be directed to Dr Gillian Dow (G.Dow@soton.ac.uk).

For more information about Chawton House Library, including access to the online catalogue, see https://chawtonhouse.org.

Five Questions: Beatrice Turner on Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs

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Beatrice Turner is Research Facilitator in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.  She completed her undergraduate education and Master’s degree at Victoria University of Wellington before moving to the UK to pursue a doctorate at Newcastle University.  She is broadly interested in Romantic afterlives and periodicity, and has worked on nineteenth-century children’s literature, the Godwin-Shelley circle and the Coleridge family; the latter two threads come together in her first monograph, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820-1850, which was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in the children of canonical Romantic-period writers?

Quite a few years ago now, my Master’s supervisor at Victoria University of Wellington, Harry Ricketts, read me Hartley Coleridge’s sonnet ‘Long Time a Child’.  I can’t remember what we were talking about – probably Swallows and Amazons, and definitely not Romantic poetry – but the line ‘For I have lost the race I never ran’ seized me absolutely.  It seemed to express a complexly doubled feeling about being entered into something unconsciously, or without having a choice, and about failure being a form of both resistance and of capitulation, which I found very powerful.  I set out to read more, and found again and again in Hartley’s poetry this compelling idea of the child who is both literally and literarily produced by his father: he feels simultaneously a flesh-and-blood child and a text, something birthed in a poem.  I’d have called myself someone who was interested in children’s literature, if anything, up until then, but when I decided I wanted to do a PhD, I found I couldn’t get Hartley’s poems out of my head.  So Hartley was the starting point, but from there it made sense to turn to his sister Sara, and other children of Romantic authors.  What I found was that Hartley’s not unique but emblematic, as I say in the introduction: that doubly-born feeling recurs in the work of all four authors I wrote about, and the reproductive failure it triggers seemed to resonate across the period.

2) What do you feel are the most important things that we can learn about the period between 1820 and 1850 by studying it as an age of ‘writing back’, characterised, at least for the biological children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Godwin, by ‘cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual disruption’?

‘Writing back’ is what I came to call the move, which I see in all four children’s work, to look back towards their fathers and to reckon with their textual selves as produced by those author-fathers.  It’s a term that for me helped articulate the sense of productive or reproductive failure all four children register in their own writing and some extent in their cultural moment at large.  It’s this failure which I think brings the period into view as a period, with its own distinctive anxieties.  I spent a long time going back and forth with Palgrave (sorry Ben!) about the title because I wanted both ‘reproduction’ and ‘retrospection’ in there (which is also how I ended up with a rather unintentionally alliterative title): to me, those two terms are particularly useful for thinking about the decades between 1820 and 1850.  It’s a period defined in many ways by looking back, assessing, memorialising (this is one reason why biography and history and reviewing culture are so prominent) – but also by the problem of reproduction, by this anxiety of inheritance.  What can you create when you yourself are a hybrid production of a set of discourses which are intensely invested in childhood?  I think this anxiety registers across the period, not just in the work of the four children, from Hazlitt’s concern in The Spirit of the Age that there’s no-one capable of climbing the monuments left by previous generations, to Shelley’s sense that the ‘age of theory and enthusiasm’ has given way to a more cautious and less optimistic one of ‘facts and practicabilities’.  Writing back, then, is the mode in which such anxieties might be articulated, and a way of registering the felt gap  – or disruption – between the two generations.

3) To what extent do you think that there were general modes through which the Romantic heirs you consider engaged with the writings of their fathers, and to what extent were their responses distinctly individual?

One of the things that unites the four children is their strong resistance to being reified into symbols by their fathers’ texts and by Romantic-era discourses of childhood and creative production, so it feels particularly unfair of me say that the reason I chose to focus on the four is because of what they represent.  All four are doubly born – both as their fathers’ children, and as their fathers’ texts.  I think we can use their predicament, and their responses, to read this wider moment.  In that sense, all four are working in a similar mode, and asking versions of the same question: whether what I’m crudely calling the Romantic inheritance was one that allowed its children the space or the material for their own creative authority.  The conclusion reached by Hartley, Sara, Shelley, and Godwin Jr was that it didn’t, that aesthetically and psychically fulfilling production (whether as an author or a parent) was not possible if you were a child of Romanticism and its various discourses.  But it’s also true to say that each reaches this conclusion through different generic and formal modes, and sometimes to different ideological ends.  All four textualise their own lives to some extent, but only Hartley explicitly and self-consciously writes autobiographically, and I think this is because Hartley is so directly taken into and produced by his father’s verse – responding in kind, as the child-text STC creates, is almost the only option.  Sara achieves her most powerful readings of her father by a kind of stealth, through her work as his editor, while her maternal poetry, in which she speaks with raw feeling and sometimes something like malice, remained largely unpublished and possibly unread in her lifetime.  Shelley and Godwin Jr are both novelists, rather than poets (I do think there’s something interesting in the way both sets of siblings followed their fathers’ preferred formal modes), but they are also working to uncover different things.  Hartley and Sara’s labour I read as being to uncover the ways in which a form of childhood which is presented as entirely natural is actually produced through artifice and subject to stringent cultural surveillance.  Shelley and Godwin, however, are concerned with showing how the Godwinian idea of family relations which are entirely and self-consciously culturally constructed runs into its own generative dead-end, producing increasingly deformed and sterile versions of family feeling.

4) Mary Shelley is well-known as a writer in her own right, but Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge and (perhaps especially) William Godwin Junior are less familiar even to educated modern readers.  Which of their works would you particularly recommend to those interested in exploring them?

It’s hard to restrict myself to just a few – I think all three deserve to be much more widely read!  Hartley’s sonnets are really beautiful.  He’s the master of the overlooked, the miniature, the apparently inconsequential, and the feelings that can hide within an idle thought or a glimpsed object.  The messier and more complex the emotion he’s working with, the more formally neat and gem-like the sonnet.  ‘Long Time a Child’ is the most anthologised, but ‘Let me not deem that I was made in vain’ is probably my favourite: it works through a clever sequence of negative statements and images to construct a self-portrait defined by absence or negative space, and is quietly heartbreaking.

Sara’s work is becoming more widely-read I think, thanks in most part to Peter Swaab’s excellent selections of her poetry and criticism, as well as recent monographs by Alan Vardy and Jeffrey Barbeau, to which my chapter’s indebted.  A lot of her poetry (unpublished in her lifetime for fairly obvious reasons!) is about profoundly ambivalent maternal feelings, and I think poems like ‘To Herbert and Edith’ and ‘To a Little Invisible Being’ offer a useful corrective to the ‘angel of the hearth’ narrative of nineteenth century motherhood: Sara is precise about the physical, emotional, and creative sacrifice attendant on mothering a Romantic child.  I’d also recommend her introductory essay to the 1847 Biographia Literaria as a fascinating, clear-eyed assessment of her father’s power as a thinker and failure as an author.

As for Godwin Jr, I think all Romanticists, and especially anyone working on the Godwin-Shelley circle, should read his short story ‘The Executioner’.  It’s a gothic psychodrama about a man who’s tricked into executing his biological father by an evil foster-father (a barely-disguised Godwin).  It’d be worth reading anyway as an astonishingly raw expression of Godwin Jr’s sense he doesn’t belong in the Godwin family and as a version of the family romance fantasy, but it’s also a skilful psychological narrative.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Right now I’m combining my interest in Romantic ideas about childhood with my love of pop music, writing an essay for a volume on Romanticism and David Bowie along with Matt Sangster, Jo Taylor, and Emily Bernhard Jackson.  I’ve also gone back to Godwin, and I’m thinking about how he felt about owning, gifting, and borrowing books, and the way they can function as affective objects, in the context of his frankly baffling ‘Essay on Sepulchres’.  That’s for an essay collection which I’m co-editing with Eliza O’Brien and Helen Stark, called New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures.  Thinking about Godwin and books and feelings is a sort of precursor to my next big project, which is about the relationship between literary biography and literary criticism in that same in-betweeny 1810 – 1840ish period – there’s obviously something in me which is drawn to the definitionally awkward and the marginal!

Archive Spotlight: The Royal Irish Academy and Global Connections in Martha Wilmot’s Russian Journals

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Today we welcome Dr Pamela Buck to the BARS blog. Pamela is an Associate Professor of English at Sacred Heart University. Her research focuses on British women writers and material culture during the French Revolution and Napoleonic period.  She is currently working on a book project concerning the souvenir as an object of political and cultural exchange in Romantic women’s travel writing. Here she tells us about her research at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.

 

Global Connections in Martha Wilmot’s Russian Journals

 

In July 2016, I traveled to Dublin, Ireland to examine the works of Martha Wilmot (1775-1873) in the Wilmot-Dashkova Collection at the library of the Royal Irish Academy.[1]  Wilmot was an Anglo-Irish writer from a well-connected, wealthy family in County Cork.  In 1803, she traveled to Russia after receiving an invitation from Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, who met Wilmot’s father while on a tour of Ireland in 1779-1780.  One of the foremost women of the Russian Enlightenment, Princess Dashkova was instrumental in the coup that had brought Catherine the Great to power.  During Wilmot’s five years in Russia, an intense friendship formed between the two women, and Dashkova often referred to herself as Wilmot’s “Russian mother.”  Wilmot spent her time observing society at the royal courts in St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as at the Princess’ country estate.  She also kept detailed journals and letters of her stay that provide a fascinating look at Russian customs and political life.

 

Portrait of Martha Wilmot (The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot. Edited by Edith Londonderry and H. M. Hyde. London: Macmillan, 1934)

 

Today, about half of Wilmot’s letters and journals exist in print.[2]  In previous research on her published work, I note that she collects a multitude of objects on her journey, including Dashkova’s memoirs, which she published in 1840, a fan belonging to Catherine the Great, snuffboxes, diamonds, imperial portraits, and court costumes.[3]  I argue that she circulates these objects to strengthen Britain’s understanding of Russia and encourage a possible alliance against Napoleon, whose growing empire threatened to subsume Europe.  The goal of my archival project was to learn how Wilmot’s unpublished writing might further document the circulation of material objects between Britain and Russia and show her participation in the emerging global networks of her time.

With the generous help of Assistant Librarian Sophie Evans, I examined three collections of Wilmot’s papers: the six notebooks that comprise the journal of her stay (12 L 17-22), her letters to Ireland (12 L 24), and letters written with her sister Catherine, who visited from 1805-1807 (12 L 29). The manuscripts, which are often silk or clothbound, tied with ribbons, and illustrated with sketches and translations of Russian poems and songs, indicate that she considered them lasting keepsakes and that she hoped they would give her readers a more vivid sense of this relatively unknown culture.  Interestingly, manuscript 12 L 24 consists largely of copies of her work made by her mother, suggesting that it was widely circulated and popular amongst family and friends.  The parts most frequently copied, and likely considered the most engaging or important, were her discussions of the Princess’ lavish gifts, the threat posed by Napoleon’s empire, and Russia’s relations with the East.

 

Silk envelope (By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA)

 

Examining Wilmot’s manuscripts indeed enabled me to understand more fully how the exchange of gifts between her and Dashkova helped facilitate an alliance. For example, in an entry dated December 2, 1803, Wilmot relates how “Today the P gave me a little medal of the statue of Peter the Great” and told her the story of his reign.[4]  An entry of April 4, 1804 recounts the gift of “a snuffbox which belonged to the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, Princess Daschkaw’s godmother.”[5]  Connected to prominent Russian leaders, the objects enhance Wilmot’s understanding of the country and its imperial power.  An entry from December 28, 1804 indicates that the Princess desires a mutual alliance when she gives Wilmot a shawl she received from Alexander I in exchange for her English one.[6]  As Katrina O’Loughlin points out, these sentimental items are emblematic of women’s sociability, allowing them to exhibit their feelings for one another.[7]  The journals thus show how the material objects that strengthen Wilmot and Dashkova’s personal friendship reinforce the political ties between their countries as well.

My research on Wilmot’s work also revealed unexpected connections between Britain, Russia, and the East. Russia attempted to bolster its national image by identifying with Western nations such as Britain, but also through its domination of the East.  This too occurred through material culture.  In a July 23, 1803 entry, Wilmot recounts viewing “specimens of the curiosities of different countrys” like India, Turkey, and China at the Princess’ Academy in St. Petersburg.[8]  Confiscated and placed in a museum, these objects indicate the political and cultural power Russia exerted over Eastern countries.  Dashkova also shares such objects with Wilmot, who notes in a January 3, 1806 entry, “The Princess has been rummaging today, and has rooted out a million things, from every quarter of the globe, but particularly from China.  She has given us pagodas, a musical instrument, purse, boxes, etc.”[9]  Giving Chinese objects to Wilmot may be another way in which Dashkova hopes to convince Britain that Russia would prove to be a powerful political ally.  However, the goods may also suggest that Russia could help Britain partake in prosperous trade with the East.  British attempts to establish a trading port in China had been unsuccessful, and they eagerly sought ways to fulfill the consumer demand at home for Eastern luxuries.  Regardless, the collection and exchange of these objects reveal both Russia and Britain’s desires to strengthen their empires and redefine themselves as global nations.

 

Traveling case (By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA)

 

Although virtually unknown in literary studies today, Martha Wilmot’s work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of women writers and their involvement abroad during the Romantic period. The Wilmot-Dashkova Collection also contains Catherine Wilmot’s own journal and letters of her stay in Russia, which provide a more critical view of Russian cultural and political practices, and letters from her 1801-1803 journey to France and Italy, which offer an inside look at Napoleon’s empire.  While Martha Wilmot chose not to publish her journals, her portable writing case, also preserved in the archive, suggests that she considered herself a legitimate travel writer. The collection would appeal to scholars interested in the intersection of gender, politics, and material culture in the Napoleonic period. With its rare insights into relations between East and West, it would also appeal to those with an interest in global Romanticism.

 

– by Pamela Buck

 

[1] I thank Sacred Heart University for supporting this project through a University Research and Creativity Grant.

[2] Martha Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, eds. Edith Londonderry and H. M. Hyde (London: Macmillan, 1934).

[3] Pamela Buck, “From Russia with Love: Souvenirs and Political Alliance in Martha Wilmot’s The Russian Journals,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture, eds. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (Basingstoke: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 133-48.

[4] Martha Wilmot, “Journal of stay in Russia” (12 L 17), 151.

[5] Ibid., (12 L 18), 103.

[6] Ibid., 292.

[7] Katrina O’Loughlin, “‘Your Russian Mother’: Friendship and Global Relations in the Dashkova Archive” (presentation, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Conference, Tokyo, Japan, June 13-15, 2014).

[8] Martha Wilmot, “Journal of stay in Russia” (12 L 17), 68.

[9] Wilmot, “Journal” (12 L 20), 8.

Archive Spotlight on The Derbyshire Record Office: A Marriage of the Romantic and the Scientific

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Thank you to Val Derbyshire (University of Sheffield) for this intriguing and charming account of her experience carrying out research at the Derbyshire Record Office – and the letters she spent time reading there. You can also read Val’s BARS blog report from the Thelwall Conference here.

‘Unrestrained Epistolary Intercourse’: A Marriage of the Romantic and the Scientific

by

Val Derbyshire, PhD Researcher, School of English, University of Sheffield

Mary Ann Flaxman, Detail of portrait of Eleanor Anne Porden, undated.

Mary Ann Flaxman, Detail of portrait of Eleanor Anne Porden, undated.

I first stumbled across the works of Eleanor Anne Porden (1795-1825), Romantic poet and first wife of Arctic explorer, John Franklin (1786-1847) quite by chance whilst working a night shift on an out of hours helpline at Derbyshire County Council.   I quite often used these night shifts – which were invariably quiet – to study for the MA I was completing at the time.  During one shift, I was  researching an assignment on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and reading Jen Hill’s excellent study from 2008, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination (New York: University of New York Press, 2008), when I came across Hill’s analysis of Porden’s The Arctic Expeditions: A Poem (1818).  Hill’s research had accessed the personal correspondence between Porden and her fiancé, Franklin, which were held just down the road from where I was sitting, at the Derbyshire Record Office.  Like all good explorers, I decided to follow in Hill’s footsteps and read this correspondence for myself.

It took me a couple of years, however, to get around to it.  Indeed, I was in the middle of my PhD and undertaking a work placement at the University of Derby before I finally viewed the letters for myself.  My brief at the University of Derby was to design a new MLit course for students concerning the long Eighteenth Century.

The focus was to design a course which would permit students to study texts with a ‘distinctly Derby’ theme.  With this in view, I visited the Record Office to transcribe the love letters between Porden and Franklin.  These letters would then feature as part of the students’ course reading.

Derbyshire Record Office, New Street, Matlock – home to a large collection of personal correspondence between Eleanor Anne Porden and John Franklin.

Derbyshire Record Office, New Street, Matlock – home to a large collection of personal correspondence between Eleanor Anne Porden and John Franklin.

The holding is situated at the top of a very steep hill in Matlock, Derbyshire (a town which was visited by both Mary Shelley and her fictional progeny, Victor Frankenstein, although one suspects Shelley probably visited the more picturesque Matlock Bath, dubbed ‘Little Switzerland’ by the locals).

Matlock Bath, dubbed ‘Little Switzerland’ by locals – the more picturesque side of Matlock town and home to a park and pleasure ground which has been in use since the 1780s.

Matlock Bath, dubbed ‘Little Switzerland’ by locals – the more picturesque side of Matlock town and home to a park and pleasure ground which has been in use since the 1780s.

The archive contains an immense number of letters from Porden to literary friends as well as the romantic correspondence between herself and Franklin.  Franklin’s letters alone in this holding number in the hundreds.  With this in view, I focused my research upon the period from 1815 to 1823, which covered Porden’s first meeting with Franklin, her publication of Coeur de Lion (1822), her somewhat surprised receipt of Franklin’s marriage proposal upon his return from his first expedition to the Arctic, the death of her much beloved father, her marriage to Franklin, concluding at the point of her demise in 1825 from tuberculosis which was accelerated by the birth of her daughter (Eleanor Isabella, born 1824).

The letters are immensely rich and rewarding to read.  They contain extracts of original poetry, tinges of regret at the creative projects she left unfinished (which she refers to as ‘a ghost’ which ‘haunt[s]’ her with ‘so many delightful phantoms of other years’[1]), and charts her relationship with her fiancé.  This in itself is a journey worthy of exploration.  Porden travels from a starting point of grief at having just lost her father, surprise at Franklin’s unexpected proposal of marriage, through a peculiar epistolary courtship, which warms as time progresses, but ultimately becomes as cold as the Arctic itself at Franklin’s suggestion that she should relinquish her literary career after their marriage.  Indeed, some of the letters seem to express extreme doubt upon Porden’s behalf that they should proceed with the marriage at all.

The ‘love letters’, if you can term them this, commence upon Franklin’s return from his first fraught voyage to the Arctic.    During this initial exploratory trip, 11 of Franklin’s 20 men died, primarily from starvation, although it is speculated that one may have been murdered, and hints of cannibalism sullied the reputation of the voyage.  Upon Franklin’s return, his first action is to write to Porden from the Hudson’s Bay Ship, Prince of Wales, Atlantic Ocean, ‘at the distance of 600 miles from the Orkney Isles’[2].  Here, in an opening romantic gesture, he informs Porden that he has named some of the Arctic archipelago after her: ‘I can only now say that I have named some islands in the Arctic Sea ‘Porden’ as a tribute of my regard for your family.’[3]

Porden’s response, however, is perhaps not the one Franklin anticipated.  On mourning stationery, with a thick black border, Porden informs that her ‘poor father was laid in his grave just one month ago’, although she thanks him for ‘fixing our names upon the globe [and] shall feel proud to see them figure in the map which will be prefixed to your work.  Proud, less perhaps for my own sake than that of those who are no more.’[4]

Once safely back on terra firma, Franklin wastes little time in proposing marriage, in a meeting in London which Porden describes as ‘exquisitely […] painful’, although she does concede ‘that there is no one else in all my acquaintance, who, if I am any judge of my own feelings, could have spoken to me on the subject you have done, without meeting an instant and positive denial’.[5]  It’s hardly the language of love, and, indeed, once Porden has accepted his proposal, the epistolary courtship proceeds in a strangely formal manner.

However, by the end of December 1822, Porden seems to have embraced her new future and begins to send more informal letters to her fiancé.  Sending him ‘a fine saucy message’, she begs that he will write frequently to her, in order that they may ‘arrive at a more intimate knowledge of each other’s feelings and sentiments from unrestrained epistolary intercourse’.[6]  It becomes, however, a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, as aspects of Franklin’s character emerge, which, it becomes clear, Porden would really rather not know.  The most pressing of these is his rather patriarchal view that she should relinquish her literary career upon their marriage.

In a very formal and lengthy epistle dated 23rd March 1823, Porden remonstrates with Franklin upon his belief that she should cease writing, informing him that she was ‘asking no favour’ and ‘claiming no concession’ with the continuance of her literary career.  ‘My tastes and habits had been fully known to you from the first moment of our acquaintance’ and I could not have supposed that any man, to whom they were in the slightest degree disagreeable, would ever have thought of addressing me’.[7]  ‘[I]t was the pleasure of Heaven’, she tells him, ‘to bestow those talents on me, and it was my father’s pride to cultivate them to the utmost of his power.  I should therefore be guilty of a double dereliction of duty in abandoning their exercise.’[8]  At the close of this letter, Porden offers Franklin a way out of their engagement:

If on the contrary you find that your imagination has sketched a false portrait of me, that your feelings are changed, or, no matter what the causes, that you have taken a rash and inconsiderate step, do not hesitate to tell me.[9]

Although the tone of subsequent letters fluctuates, it almost seems as if Porden is seeking an exit herself from this moment onwards.  During the ensuing months prior to their marriage, Porden’s letters are suffused with doubt, and the resulting letters question disparities in their religious beliefs, and her sociable nature and many friendships as opposed to his more solitary leanings.

The wedding, however, duly took place in August 1823.   In a final romantic gesture, Porden wore a wedding dress, which had flowers discovered in the Arctic by Franklin and his team, and detailed in the descriptions of his voyages, embroidered upon the hem.  Unfortunately, the gesture was somewhat wasted on Franklin who ‘did not discover the compliment paid […] until it was pointed out to me’.[10]  The incorporation of the flowers, ‘Eutoca, […] Richardsonil and Hoodil’ into the wedding ceremony demonstrates perhaps more than anything how this was a marriage between the Romantic and the Scientific natures of the participants.[11] Porden’s letters are personal, charming and ever seeking a point of connection with her fiancé.  Franklin’s are much less easy to read and are slightly clinical in tone, although there can be no doubt of the ‘sincere esteem’ he entertains for her.[12]   Here, it can be seen how the participants struggle to locate neutral territory and balance the conflicting demands of romance with scientific and literary endeavour.

The archive is voluminous, with the Derbyshire Record Office holding much of Porden’s writings, both personal and professional, as well as Franklin’s huge correspondence.  If researchers have an interest in this, there can be no better place to start an exploration of both the romantic and the scientific than in a small archive at the top of a Matlock hill.

Plate delineating species of Arctic Flowers, some of which would feature upon the hem of Porden’s wedding gown. From John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (London: John Murray, 1823).

Plate delineating species of Arctic Flowers, some of which would feature upon the hem of Porden’s wedding gown. From John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (London: John Murray, 1823).

 

[1] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to Mr.Elliott dated 12th July 1822, held in the Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8-13.

[2] John Franklin, Letter to Eleanor Anne Porden dated 19th October 1822, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[3] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 22nd October 1822, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[4] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 22nd October 1822, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[5] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 5th December 1822, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40

[6] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 22nd December 1822, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D311/8/3/1-40.

[7] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 29th March 1823, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[8] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 29th March 1823, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[9] Eleanor Anne Porden, Letter to John Franklin dated 29th March 1823, Derbyshire Record Office holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

[10] John Franklin, Letter to John Richardson dated 7th July 1823, Derbyshire Record Office, holding number D3311/12.

[11] John Franklin, Letter to John Richardson dated 7th July 1823, Derbyshire Record Office, holding number D3311/12.

[12] John Franklin, Letter to Eleanor Anne Porden dated 10th July 1823, Derbyshire Record Office, holding number D3311/8/3/1-40.

The BARS First Book Prize 2017: Judges’ Report

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This round, we had 19 nominations from publishers and BARS members, 12 from UK presses, the remainder from USA and Canada. As judges, we were really impressed by the high quality of the work submitted, which says a lot about the flourishing state of Romantic Studies. There was a lot of animated discussion and argument before the panel made its final decisions. Although it was hard work, we got a lot of pleasure from reading these books. Congratulations to all concerned, especially to the winner and runners up!

– Nigel Leask (Chair) (Glasgow); Nicola J. Watson (Open University); Anthony Mandal (Cardiff); Helen Stark (QMUL)

 

WINNER

Julia S. Carlson, Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

julia-s-carlson-romantic-marks-and-measures

Romantic Marks and Measures is a rich and evocative work of scholarship, building on a variety of historical materials ­­– maps, travel guides, elocutionary and prosodic studies, and literary works – to argue the case for a cartopoetic reading of Wordsworth’s poetry and his adoption of blank verse as a turning point (in particular, in the Lyrical Ballads, The Excursion and The Prelude). As well offering a fresh reading of Wordsworth’s punctuation, metrics and poetic revisions, both in print and manuscript, the book is also distinguished by its learned account of transformations in Romantic period cartography. Its two main sections are cleverly bridged by an interchapter that makes the case for a new perceptual turn grounded in marks and measures, which in turn is shown to be an informing presence in Wordsworth’s poetics. A final chapter on Thelwall’s elocutionary work casts new light on his ‘therapoetics’ and his critique of the ‘measure’ of Wordsworth’s Excursion. This is an impressive debut and a strong contribution to interdisciplinary studies, displaying prosodic and interpretative rigour in reading Wordsworth’s ‘lines and points’. As well as a major intervention in Wordsworth studies, Romantic Marks and Measures really has the potential to redefine our sense of ‘natural’ representation, both in the field of topography, and in Romantic prosody and print culture.

 

RUNNERS UP

Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonized Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Siobhan Carroll - An Empire of Air and Water

An Empire of Air and Water is a tour de force of interdisciplinary excavation and remapping, which stakes new ground for the Romantic imaginary by drawing together a range of eclectic literary sources and putting them into dialogue with wider cultural projects during the Romantic Century. Carroll’s book examines the presence of ‘atopias’ – spaces which resist categorisation, habitation and conceptualisation: these are polar regions, the oceans, the atmosphere and subterranean spaces. Each of the core chapters offers a nuanced and intriguing piece of a wider puzzle that collects around the British imperial project and its various technologies (as well as those of its competitors). These atopias function variously in extending the Romantic imagination upwards and outwards, while also resisting human endeavour through its evocation of a gothic past that always lurks beneath the surface. Carroll includes readings of numerous literary works, by Mary Shelley, Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Inchbald, Sophia Lee, and a number of lesser-known writers.

 

Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

devin-griffiths-the-age-of-analogy

Via a highly theorized discussion of analogy, Devin Griffiths seeks to place a new ‘comparative historicism’ at the heart of literary and scientific studies in the century between Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles.  Although only about half of the book actually focuses on Romantic period writings, it makes renews our sense of the importance of Romantic narrative and methodological influences on Victorian literature and science. A theoretical introduction reviews the current state of literature and science studies, including a persuasive discussion of analogy in the work of Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Badiou. The main argument is set up via an illuminating study of the poetry of Erasmus Darwin, unduly neglected in Romantic Studies. A chapter on Walter Scott contains original research on ‘popular antiquarianism’ and ballad collecting, as well as reviewing the role of Scott’s novels in developing ideas of historical analogy in nineteenth-century literature. Two chapters are devoted to Tennyson and George Eliot, and a closing chapter on Charles Darwin (with a highly original focus on his Orchid book) identifies selective adaptation as a form of ‘harmonious’ analogy. Clearly written and full of critical flair, Griffiths’ ambitious book harvests a decade’s worth of reading and scholarship, and will have a major impact on both Romantic and Victorian studies. It also reinvigorates our sense of the relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of literature and science in the long nineteenth century.

Call for Expressions of Interest: BARS European Engagement Fellow

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The British Association for Romantic Studies is pleased to announce that it is funding a new fellowship, the BARS European Engagement Fellow. The Fellow will be expected to work part-time on Project RÊVE, the core activity of the newly formed ERA (European Romanticisms in Association). ERA brings together scholarly associations, archives and heritage organizations across Europe with common interests in long Romanticism to work together on the European dimensions of Romanticism. RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition) is designed in the first instance as a series of monthly blogposts devoted to iconic Romantic objects and places which exemplify some transnational aspect of Romanticism in Europe.  Its ambition is to feature 100 objects, eventually housing them in a searchable database set up as a virtual museum. Launched in July 2017, the first six blogposts for RÊVE can be accessed here: http://www.euromanticism.org

The Fellowship is suitable for a doctoral or post-doctoral candidate. It will be held over six months in the first instance, starting from 1 January 2018 and running until 1 July 2018. It will be paid monthly at an hourly rate of £15.00 and will entail on average 10 hours of work per month.  Any travel expenses will also be covered. Tasks will include:

  1. Correspondence with identified contributors across Europe to commission and collect RÊVE blog-posts
  2. Editing and uploading blog-posts
  3. Publicising RÊVE by increasing its profile online, through social media, and through conferences
  4. Managing and developing the ERA website, in particular adding links to other organizations and events, and information on ERA conferences
  5. Helping with and attending ERA/RÊVE events as and when they arise.

There is also the opportunity to become a contributor to RÊVE. The Fellow will be co-opted, initially for 6 months from 1 January 2018, onto the BARS Executive with a brief to help expand the current BARS initiative to develop new European links. S/he will be expected to work with the project director, Professor Nicola Watson of the Open University (nicola.watson@open.ac.uk).

We are looking for someone with energy and enthusiasm, proven research interests in any aspect of Romantic culture, the ability to manage and use social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress), some familiarity with or willingness to learn about managing and developing websites, and excellent communication and organizational skills. It would be an advantage to bring at least one other European language beyond English. In return we are offering an unusual opportunity to work within a Europe-wide network of universities and museums on a new idea, the virtual, transnational museum.

Please send a letter expressing your interest and describing your research, skills and experience, supported by a one-page curriculum vitae to Professor Nicola Watson at nicola.watson@open.ac.uk by 11 December 2017.

Five Questions: 2017 BARS First Book Prize Winner Julia S. Carlson on Romantic Marks and Measures

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julia-s-carlson-romantic-marks-and-measures

 

Julia S. Carlson, the winner of the 2017 BARS First Book Prize, is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati.  She completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and her graduate degrees at the University of Michigan.  She has published numerous essays on Romantic poetry, poetics, cartographies and sensation; is a member of the Multigraph Collective, co-authors of the forthcoming Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation, 1700-1900 (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and is one of the co-editors of Romanticism on the NetShe received the First Book Prize for Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (Penn Press, 2016), which we discuss below.

1) How did you begin the research that led you to write this book?

My research on this project began after a Comparative Literature seminar in which we read Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard and the poems of Emily Dickinson followed by a facing-page edition of Wordsworth’s Prelude, a sequence which primed me to observe typographic and topographic differences between the 1805 and 1850 texts.  Why the abundance of dashes and near absence of exclamation marks in the Norton 1805 Prelude, so clearly belied by the original manuscripts, I wondered?  Why the late twentieth-century editorial resistance to the mark of passion, and what contemporary ideas and practices shaped Wordsworth’s marking?  To explore this question, I went deep into the stacks of Harlan Hatcher Library to read surprisingly animated disputes among grammarians, elocutionists, and rhetoricians on the use and significance of the “wondering point,” the “blank line,” and other “Typographical Figures of Speech.”  I was interested, too, in the poem’s self-reflexivity: its thematics of marking and attention and its vocabulary of mark, point, spot, line, and trace—terms used to signal places in the landscape and accent the growth of the poet’s mind.  Particularly evident in the episode of crossing the Simplon Pass, these terms for geometric and cartographic symbols made me wonder how the Alps were rendered in period maps and why they’d been neglected in the criticism.  This led me to the Map Library, with its then panoramic view of the streets, squares, and houses of Ann Arbor, where, with the help of librarian Karl Eric Longstreth, I stood gazing at maps of Switzerland published between 1768 and 1844, struck by the radical shifts in symbol, style, and perspective with which they construed the rivers, roads, and slopes that meet in the narrow confines of the Pass.

2) Your book positions Wordsworth’s poetry ‘within a matrix of inscriptional projects not traditionally considered to be part of the Romantic canon: the charting of terrain and the notating of language by cartographers, elocutionists, prosodists, and the writers of tours and guidebooks.’  What for you are most significant insights into Wordsworth’s poetry that this positioning reveals, and what do you think are the most important things we can learn about the galaxies of topography and typography that you examine through relating them to Wordsworthian verse?

The notational lexicon Wordsworth uses in composition and revision puts his poems in dialogue with and differentiates them from contemporary visual and verbal grammars, with implications for our understanding of poetic language and form.  For example, Wordsworth’s reflexive use of line and point in The Prelude, which registers the scientific, ideological, and aesthetic interests of the Ordnance Survey of Britain, reveals tensions and affinities between the experimental project of epic autobiography and the new cartographic portrait of the nation.  Thus we see that the ostensibly more natural language by which Wordsworth’s attempts to inscribe feeling and place is inflected by a technical semiotics, and conversely, that that the retention of hill portraiture in the first series of topographical maps of England and Wales—its expressive pictorialism —is indebted to the Wordsworthian aesthetics of Ruskin and Arnold.

Poems and maps were highly interactive and formally reinforcing.  In another context, that of picturesque tours and guidebooks, short excerpts of long blank verse poems intended to bring nature “closer to the eye” were published side-by-side with increasingly large-scale charts and outline views of mountain ranges, and also within complex itineraries.  My critical cartopoetics reveals that what we’ve come to know as Wordsworthian “nature lyric” is not a phenomenon of consciousness that transcends the function of pointing to the landscape, as Geoffrey Hartman has argued.  Short blank verse nature poems were formalized in dynamic relation to other line systems, such as surveying and hill portraiture, and within specific indexical and diagrammatic contexts that heightened attention to the marks and measures of landscape and cultivated the interpretation, and correlation, of heterogeneous scales and views.

The poems’ formalization in the context of sign systems that tried to graph speech patterns—elocutionary punctuation—is revealed in subtle effects such as the double-long dashes that Wordsworth began to use in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads.  Considered historically, the marks indicate Wordsworth’s experimentation with elocutionary punctuation and his thematic development of elocutionary concerns within the poems.  Not merely signs of suspenseful pause or the silent passage of time, however, the marks are iconographic as well—tracings in the print medium of the “finger of mortality” (“The Brothers,” 126) that has scored the landscape.  As such, they offer countermappings of place, controlling the reader’s movement through the poems and enhancing her affective response to a landscape conventionally, and less meaningfully, marked in the picturesque guidebooks the poems indict.  Wordsworth’s reflexive handling of the long dash across the blank verse of the book shows how what Richard Payne Knight called “blank and unmark’d metre” is hardly such, but depends upon a complex interplay of spatiotemporal marks that engage the acoustic and visual imaginations of readers.  What we learn, therefore, about the “galaxies of topography and typography” is that they become, in the period, more interrelated as they strive to be both more systematic and more expressive in their encoding of the national language and landscape.  They were related aspects of a diagrammatic and accentual turn in British culture that produced new forms of the spatial and temporal organization of print, new kinds of literacy, and new modes of feeling.

3) How did you come to decide on the final structure for your book, with three chapters focusing on the burgeoning of cartographic practices pivoting around a transitional interchapter into four further chapters on the marking of language within a thriving print culture?

The topographical and typographical systems through which I was reading Wordsworth are intertwined in his poetry, so it was tempting to consider them together in each chapter.  Ultimately, I thought this would make for too dense a narrative, so I explored the graphic representation of landscape in the first half of the book and the graphic representation of speech in the second; the interchapter articulates the two, foregrounding the many connections between them in the culture and in Wordsworth’s verse.

4) To what extent does your study focus on Wordsworth because he was a poet particularly alive to marks and measures, and to what extent might the approach you take in your book be extended to other poets or literary writers of the period?

Wordsworth, the poet who founded his verse on the “plainer and more emphatic language” spoken by rustics who were in daily communication with the enduring objects of nature, was more deeply invested in marking and measuring both landscape and speech than any of his contemporaries.  That said, the book also discusses other writers—Coleridge, theorist of punctuation and of “mingled measures”; Southey—poet of experimental meters; Thelwall—teacher of elocution and radical prosodist.  There are other poets too for whom the marking of speech on the page is a matter of self-reflexive reference: Byron in Don Juan for one.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m co-editing a collection for Cambridge with Sally Bushell and Damian Walford Davies called Romantic Cartographies. I’m also co-editing a special issue of Essays in Romanticism on historical poetics with David Ruderman and Ewan Jones.  And my new monograph project is Reading with the Hands: Impression and Inscription in Romantic-Era Britain, which explores, among other things, the development of tactile print systems for the blind.