Current Bibliography, 1999

Compiled by

KYLE GRIMES

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Headnote from letterpress version:

This bibliography covers articles, reviews, and book-length studies of Byron, Hazlitt, Hunt, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Keats, and their circles.  With a very few exceptions, the works listed here were published between January and December 1999.  Experienced readers of the "Current Bibliography" will note that the annotations are somewhat abbreviated in comparison other recent editions.  This is partly the consequence of a tighter coordination between the letterpress bibliography and its electronic counterpart accessible on the Romantic Circles website <http://www.rc.umd.edu>.  Electronic publication is considerably more forgiving in the limitations of space, and more detailed descriptions of the listed items are available in the electronic format.  There are numerous other capabilities gained by the closer linking of letterpress and electronic versions of the bibliography—some of these are spelled out in a brief introductory essay to the online publication.

Thanks are due to several persons who have assisted in the production of this resource: Heather Martin has helped with several research questions and techniques;  Eddie Luster has tracked down a number of items not available in my home library; Jilla Smith has been enormously helpful as a research assistant—her dedication, enthusiasm, and good cheer have contributed more than she knows to this project; and Deanna Calvert's proofreading has saved a number of errors—her labor (in every sense of the word) has made the work much better.  Please send corrections to the present or contributions for next year's bibliography to Kyle Grimes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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Current Bibliography

I. GENERAL

CURRENT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alec-Smith, Alex.  "Appendix: Byron in Fiction, A List of Books."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 221-29.

As an appendix to a collection on "Byromania," Alec-Smith provides a list of works divided into four sections: 1. Novels with Byron as a central character, 2. Plays and films with published scripts that have Byron as a central character, 3. Books with characters somehow related to Byron, and 4. Works borrowed from Samuel Chew's bibliography that Alec-Smith has not seen.  The items are presented chronologically within these categories and range in date from 1816 (Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon) to the mid-1990s (Stoppard's Arcadia).

"Bibliography."  Annual Bulletin of Japan Shelley Studies Center 7 (1999): 43-46.

The annual bibliography of the Japan Shelley Studies Center lists some 40 items recently published in Japan about the Shelleys and their circle and about Keats.  Most of the original items are in Japanese (those in English are designated as such); the bibliography itself is transliterated.

Craciun, Adriana, David Worrall, Seamus Perry, Philip Martin, Leonora Nattrass, E. J. Clery, Robert Miles, and Amy Muse.  "The Nineteenth Century: The Romantic Period."  The Year's Work in English Studies.  Vol. 77.  Ed. Peter J. Kitson, et. al.  Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell, 1999.  450-521.

This most recent edition of the Year's Work series covers publications from 1996.

Demata, Massimiliano.  "A Bibliography of Byron's Oriental Reading: Addenda and Correction."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 39-41.

Dowling, Linda.  "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century."  SEL 39.4 (1999): 791-825.

A lucid and very useful prose survey of dozens of recently published books in nineteenth-century studies.  Dowling divides the descriptive bibliography into several rather idiosyncratic categories (e.g. "Irish Writing and Writers," "Colonialism and Imperialism," "Feminism, Gender, Sexuality").  The most germane of these categories for present purposes is no doubt "Romantic Literature and Culture" (pp. 809-18).

Erdman, David V. and Peter Lundman.  The Romantic Movement: A Selective and Critical Bibliography for 1998.  West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1999.

Gross, Jonathan David.  "Current Bibliography."  KSJ 48 (1999): 203-82.

This most recent installment of the annual bibliography appearing in the Keats-Shelley Journal and on the Romantic Circles website <www.rc.umd.edu> offers a detailed survey of the critical work on the late Romantics published in 1998.  Many items offer remarkably thorough and useful annotations.

 

ANTHOLOGIES, BOOKS, AND ARTICLES RELATING TO ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Alderman, Nigel James.  "Romantic Ambitions: Excursions Towards the Professional Imagination (William Wordsworth, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, Poetry)."  Ph.D. diss.,  Duke U, 1999, DAI, 60-05A (1999): 1569, 216 pages.

From Alderman's abstract: "This dissertation charts the emergence of a professional imagination in William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Thomas Carlyle. It argues that these writers went through a historically symptomatic vocational crisis.  That is to say, their decision to be writers was formulated not simply according to what each wanted to do for a living, but rather according to what and who each wanted to be; that is to say, how each could reflexively construct his self as a coherent social and private identity founded upon the practice of writing.  They refused to consider writing a trade, situating themselves in opposition to the increasing dominance of a consumer-driven market.  Instead, they considered their practice not only a vocation, arguing they were duty-bound to follow their desired calling, but also a career, urging its viability as a progressive, biographical trajectory of social advancement."

Almeida, Joselyn M.  "Locating Romanticism's Transatlantic Song."  ERR 10.4 (Fall 1999): 401-23.

Anchoring the discussion in such historical issues as the abolition movement and the emancipation of Spanish America, Almeida focuses the reading on Robert Dunbar's infrequently read epic romance, The Caraguin (1837).  As Almeida expresses it, Dunbar's work "extends the map of Romanticism" since it "provides further evidence for the idea that Romanticism can no longer be read as a movement emerging from a center towards a marginal periphery, and that the Americas constitute an important discursive nucleus in the body of Romantic literature" (402).

Anderson, Kathleen.  "Frances Burney's The Wanderer: Actress as Virtuous Deceiver."  ERR 10.4 (Fall 1999): 424-51.

Armstrong, Isobel, and Virginia Blain, eds.  Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820.  New York: St. Martin's P (in association with the Centre for English Studies, University of London), 1999.

A valuable and diverse collection of essays discussing the history and status of women writers from the eighteenth century through the Romantic period.  An abiding issue throughout all the essays is the vexed relationship between women poets and the English literary canon that was beginning to gel in the wider literary community.  Those essays most germane to students of Romanticism are Anne K. Mellor's "The Female Poet and the Poetess," Maggie Favretti on Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,  Mary Waldron on Ann Yearsley, Roger Sales's "Literary Philanthropy in Regency York," Stuart Curran on Romantic women poets' self representations, Kate Lilley on Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson and Mary Leapor's use of the verse epistle, and Judith Hawley on Charlotte Smith's sonnets. 

Armstrong, Isobel, and Virginia Blain, eds.  Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900.  New York: St. Martin's P (in association with the Centre for English Studies, University of London), 1999.

Arshagouni, Michael.  Bridging the Gap: Reichardt’s Die Geisterinsel (1798) as a Link between the Worlds of Enlightenment and Romanticism.  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 214-30.

Austin, Linda M.  "The Lament and Rhetoric of the Sublime."  NCL 53.3 (December 1998): 279-306.

Backscheider, Paula R.  "Reflections on the Importance of Romantic Drama."  TSLL 41.4 (Winter 1999): 311-29.

In an essay introductory to a special issue of Texas Studies focusing on Romantic drama, Backscheider offers a description of theater during the Romantic period and examines the role of several canonical writers within this context.  The essay is introductory in the most positive sense: it opens upon numerous critical and cultural issues that emerge from a study of the relatively neglected genre of Romantic drama.

Balle, Mary Blanchard.  "Mary Lamb and Sarah Stoddart: An Unlikely Friendship."  CLB 106 (April 1999): 54-65.

Barfoot, C. C., ed.  Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods.  Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. 

This collection of essays, drawn from papers presented at the 9th Leiden October Conference in 1995, begins with the odd fact that both Keats and Carlyle were born in the same year but that they have come to find their canonical places in different literary periods.  This becomes the basis for a broader interrogation of literary periods.

Barth, J. Robert, S. J.  "'A Spring of Love': Prayer and Blessing in Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'"  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 75-80.

Baulch, David M.  "Blake's Vala or The Four Zoas: Hypertext and Multiple Plurality."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 154-61.

Beatty, Bernard. "Calvin in Islam: a reading of Lara and The Giaour." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 70-86.

Beatty identifies a link between Byron's oriental tales and an abiding interest in Calvinism.

Beer, John.  "A Coleridge Puzzle."  N&Q  46.4 (1999): 457-58.

Beesemyer, Irene A.  "Romantic Masculinity in Edgeworth's Ennui and Scott's Marmion: In Itself a Border Story."  PLL 35.1 (Winter 1999): 74-96.

Behrendt, Stephen and Harriet Kramer Linkin, eds.  Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception.  Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999.

A collection of essays that, taken together, strive to effect a comprehensive reassessment of the place of women poets within the canon(s) of Romantic-period writing.  The essays include Linkin and Behrendt's introduction on textual recovery and its canonical implications, Paula Feldman on the processes of canon formation, Behrendt with a survey of women poets, 1802-12, Adriana Craciun on Mary Lamb, Roxanne Eberle on Amelia Opie, Sarah Zimmerman on Charlotte Smith, Catherine Burroughs on Frances Anne Kemble, Linkin on Mary Tighe, William McCarthy on Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Kathleen Kickok on Caroline Bowles Southey, Susan Wolfson on Felicia Hemans, and Tricia Lootens on Letitia Landon.

Benis, Toby R.  Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Bennett, Andrew.  Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

"This original book examines the way in which the Romantic period inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can only be properly appreciated after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualisation of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the gendering of the poetic canon, and for understanding the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, paradigmatic figures of the Romantic poet."

Benthall, R. A.  "New Moons, Old Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode.'"  SIR 37.4 (Winter 1998): 591-614.

Berlin, Isaiah.  The Roots of Romanticism.  Ed. Henry Hardy.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

The first published edition of Berlin's famous Mellon Lectures from 1965.  Excerpts can be found in TLS, 19 February 1999, pp. 13-15.

Berman, Douglas Scott.  "'The Seduction of System': The Critical Reception of William Wordsworth's Preface to 'Lyrical Ballads,' 1800-1820 (Romanticism)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1999, DAI, 60-08A (1999): 2936, 297 pages.

Beshero-Bondar, Elisa.  "Nine New Letters of Robert Southey."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 47-55.

Bewell, Alan.  Romanticism and Colonial Disease.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Focusing on the neglected but surprisingly pervasive issue of a Romantic-era anxiety about infectious tropical disease, Bewell presents the history of the issue, complete with the astonishing mortality statistics for those soldiers and planters and traders who took part in British colonial expansion and with accounts of the understandable fear with which ordinary Englishmen approached any person returned from the colonies.  This historical background provides a basis for fresh and compelling readings of several Romantic literary texts—from the dying crew and the social isolation of the protagonist in the Ancient Mariner to the world-wide contagion of The Last Man.  In short, contagious disease becomes the hinge connecting the expanding colonial enterprise with the psychological anxieties and physical infirmities of the native British population. 

Birch, Dinah.  "Elegiac Voices: Wordsworth, Turner, and Ruskin."  RES 50.199 (1999): 332-44.

Blackwell, Mark R.  "Constant, Napoleon, and the Mechanics of Political Action in Wallstein."  SIR 38.1 (Spring 1999): 63-88.

Blechman, Max, ed.  Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology.  San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999.

Brandes, Melba S.  "'Into the Edmonton Churchyard': My Visit to the Grave of Charles Lamb."  CLB 106 (April 1999): 84-87.

Breen, Jennifer, ed.  The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), by Joanna Baillie.  Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999.

A selection of Baillie's lyric poetry with an introduction linking the poems to Baillie's Scottish backgrounds. 

Broglio, Ronald S., Marcel O'Gorman, and F. William Ruegg.  "Digging Transformations in Blake: What the Mole Knows about the New Millenium."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 144-54.

Brown, Marshall, ed.  Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader.  Durham, N. C.: Duke UP, 1999.

The historical center of this collection lies somewhere before the Romantic period, but Brown includes essays by Jon Klancher on "Godwin and the Republican Romance" and Jerome McGann on "Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho."

Burns, Allan D.  "Landor, Ianthe, and the 'Other Bards.'"  ELN 37.1 (September 1999): 56-64.

Burns suggests that Landor's "Ianthe" is a reference to his beloved Jane Swift; the use of the name "Ianthe," however, raises a number of questions about Landor's problematic relations with Byron and Shelley.

Bushell, Sally.  "Exempla in The Excursion: The Purpose of the Pastor's Epitaphic Tales."  CLB 105 (January 1999): 16-27.

Byron, Glennis, and David Punter, eds.  Spectral Readings : Towards a Gothic Geography.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Carter, Adam.  "'Insurgent Government': Romantic Irony and the Theory of the State." In Irony and Clerisy, ed. Deborah Elise White.  RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/carter/schlegel.html>.

In contrast to the prevailing tendencies in Schlegel scholarship, Carter offers a "sustained attempt to read Schlegel’s fragments on aesthetics and philosophy in relation to his fragments on politics and government—a relation that Schlegel himself repeatedly gestures toward. This must, perforce, take the form of a consideration in Schlegel’s fragments of the relation between politics and irony" (par 1).

Chandler, David.  "'In the end despondency & madness': Werther in Wordsworth."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 55-59.

Chandler, David.  "Joseph Hunter's 1832 Account of Wordsworth."    N&Q  46.4 (1999): 461-68.

Chandler, David. "Wordsworth's 'Are There no Groans?': Source, Meaning, Significance." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/groans.html>.

Christie, William.  "Going Public: Print Lords Byron and Brougham."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 443-75.

Christie's historically based essay examines the strained relations between Brougham and Byron and then considers more broadly the techniques by which each writer generated his public stature: "Byron and Brougham manufactured careers by 'going public.'  . . .  Both became proficient in manipulating and in extending [the public], though where Brougham had to work hard to create the type and size of a public by which he could be supported and his work justified and admired, the public that admired Byron created and collaborated to sustain him" (475).

Ciccarelli, Andrea, John Claiborne Isbell, and Brian Nelson, eds.  The People's Voice: Essays on European Romanticism.  Clayton, Melbourne: School of European Languages and Cultures, Monash University, 1999.

A wide-ranging collection of essays on the general topic of Romanticism, both British and (especially) continental.  Essays include among others Remo Ceserani on "The New System of Literary Modes in the Romantic Age," Gerald Gillespie on "Agents and Agency of History in Romantic Literature," Stuart Curran on "The Print Culture of British Romanticism," Ernst Behler on "The Early Romantic Theory of Language and Its Impact upon Nietzsche and Foucault."

Clancey, Richard W.  "Lamb, Horace, and the Ring of a Classic."  CLB 108 (October 1999): 150-61.

Clemens, Valdine.  The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien.  Ithaca: State University of New York P, 1999.

Clemens provides a discussion—principally psychoanalytic, but also engaging social and historical circumstances—of gothic literature.  The basic argument is that gothic horror identifies, albeit in a masked or inchoate form, collective problems that trouble the society from which the text emerges.  One of Clemens's key texts is Shelley's Frankenstein.

Clery, Emma and Robert Miles, eds..  Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700-1820.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

Colclough, Stephen.  "Clare and the Annuals: A Previously Unpublished Letter from John Clare to L. T. Ventouillac, Editor of The Iris."    N&Q  46.4 (1999): 468-70.

Cole, William.  "An Unknown Fragment by William Blake: Text, Discovery, and Interpretation."  MP 96.4 (May 1999): 485-97.

Cooper, Andrew and Michael Simpson.  "The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake's Eternal Hacking."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 125-31.

Cooper, Andrew R.  "'Monumental Inscriptions': Language, Rights, the Nation in Coleridge and Horne Tooke."  ELH 66.1 (Winter 1999): 87-110.

Cox, Jeffrey.  "Spots of Time: The Structure of the Dramatic Evening in the Theater of Romanticism."  TSLL 41.4 (Winter 1999): 403-25.

Cox identifies "a kind of immediate intertextuality" bestowed on a drama by virtue of its being performed in a particular theater and in close temporal or geographical proximity to other dramatic performances.  As he puts the case, "we must . . . attend to the gifts and constraints of time as plays are placed into the temporal sequence of performance" (404).  Cox's principal example is Coleridge's Remorse, though he touches on numerous other dramas, many of which have long been forgotten.

Cox, Jeffrey.  Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 

"Jeffrey N. Cox refines our conception of 'second-generation' Romanticism by placing it within the circle of writers around Leigh Hunt that came to be known as the Cockney School. Offering a theory of the group as a key site for cultural production, Cox challenges the traditional image of the Romantic poet as an isolated figure by recreating the social nature of the work of Shelley, Keats, Hunt, Hazlitt, Byron, and others as they engaged in literary contests, wrote poems celebrating one another, and worked collaboratively on journals and other projects.  Cox also recovers the work of neglected writers such as John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and Cornelius Webb as part of the rich social and cultural context of Hunt's circle.  This book not only demonstrates convincingly that a Cockney School existed, but shows that it was committed to putting literature in the service of social, cultural, and political reform."  And one might add to this reasonably accurate and comprehensive dustjacket description that Cox implicity reorganizes the now conventional way of arranging the later Romantic writers into various author-centered "circles"—e.g. "The Shelley Circle"—arguing instead for the designation of a distinct, unified, and prolific literary-cultural "School."

Crawford, Rachel.  "Troping the Subject: Behn, Smith, Hemans and the Poetics of the Bower."  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 249-80.

Cronin, Richard.  "Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy."  ELH 66.4 (Winter 1999): 863-83.

Cronin, Richard.  The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

"In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups, one insisting that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced, the other retorting that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language.  This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style."

Davidson, Graham.  "Odes, Ballads and Romantics."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 114-117.

Davies, Damian Walford.  "Blake's Man in the Iron Mask: A Visual Source."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 29-30.

Davies, Damian Walford.  "Wordsworth's Blind Beggar and John Thelwall's Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement."  CLB 107 (July 1999): 114-17.

Davis, Michael, ed.  Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

DePaolo, Charles.  "Hume, Coleridge, and the Phenomenon of Polytheism."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 84-89.

Derry, Stephen.  "John Thorpe's 'old song' in Northanger Abbey."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 28-29.

Duffy, Edward.  "The Romantic Calling of Thinking: Stanley Cavell on the Line with Wordsworth."  SIR 37.4 (Winter 1998): 615-45.

Dugger, Julie Marie.  "Historic Properties: The Rhetoric of British Utopia, 1815-1848 (Reform Movements)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Chicago, 1998, DAI, 59-11A (1999): 4150, 247 pages.

The fundamental argument here is that the reform movements of early nineteenth-century Britain were influenced by utopian literature.  The first chapter focuses on the works of Robert Owen and P. B. Shelley.

Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick, Joseph Viscomi, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.  "Standards, Methods, and Objectives in the William Blake Archive: A Response."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 135-44.

Eilenberg, Susan.  "Copyright's Rhetoric and the Problem of Analogy in the Eighteenth-Century British Debates." In Romanticism and the Law.  Ed. Michael Macovski.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/eilenberg/sebg.html>.

Elfenbein, Andrew.  Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role.  New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Elfenbein's study of the development of an association between homosexuality and literary genius concentrates primarily on the earlier Romantic period.  Indeed, Elfenbein argues that the association only becomes concretized with a "history" (as opposed to a "prehistory") in the work and reputation of Byron. The concluding lines of the Introduction provide a sense of the book's central topoi: in discussing writers—even influential writers—who "did not quite fit in," Elfenbein contends that "The prominence of various modes of homosexual representation in their works, lives, and receptions meant that they positioned themselves far from the established taste of the day.  For the writers in this book genius was not a category that implied serene confidence in their creative powers.  Instead, it was a highly defensive, troubled posture that was either assumed with great pains or anxiously thrust on them.  These anxieties became part of the long history by which homosexuals and homosexuality came to take a leading role in defining the history of literature and authorship" (16).

Esterhammer, Angela and Julia M. Wright.  “Implications of 1798.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 127-36.

Esterhammer, Angela.  “’The Duel’: Kleist’s Scandal of the Speaking Body.” ERR 10.1 (Winter 1999): 1-22.

Faflak, Joel Robert.  "Subjects Presumed to Know: The Scene of Romantic Psychoanalysis (Romanticism, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Thomas De Quincey)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Western Ontario, 1999, DAI, 60-08A (1999): 2938, 350 pages.

Faflak, Joel Robert. "Analysis Interminable in the Other Wordsworth." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/otherww.html>.

Farnell, Gary. "Wordsworth’s The Prelude as Autobiography of An Orphan." RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/orphan.html>.

Fisch, Harold.  The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

Fletcher, Loraine.  Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

Foakes, R. A. "Beyond the Visible World: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads (1798)." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 58-69.

Friedman, Geraldine.  “Rereading 1798: Melancholy and Desire in the Construction of Edgeworth’s Anglo-Irish Union.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 175-92.

Fry, Paul H., ed.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Boston: Bedford, 1999.

Fulford, Tim.  "Cobbett, Coleridge and the Queen Caroline Affair."  SIR 37.4 (Winter 1998): 523-43.

Fulford concentrates on the voluble public discourse surrounding the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820.  The essay describes the sexual politics implicit in that discourse and calls attention to the "continuing significance of Burke."  Perhaps the most trenchant contribution here lies in Fulford's analysis of shifting conceptions of and relationships between writers and their audiences.  Focusing particularly on the contrast between Cobbett's and Coleridge's responses, Fulford argues that "The affair caused both men to alter the modes by which their political writing addressed readers.  It also caused them to modify their conceptions of the reading public and its proper role in the political sphere" (523).

Fulford, Tim.  Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

An extended consideration—in both literary and more broadly social and political contexts—of the notion of "manliness."  The book is clearly relevant in studies of such Romantic-era gender issues as the place of Romantic women writers and the status of such "effeminate" writers as the Della Cruscans or even of Hunt and Keats.  The chapter headings offer a reasonably sound guide to Fulford's interests and argument:  1. Some Versions of Masculinity in Romanticism; 2. Burke: The Gendering of Power; 3. Coleridge in the 1790s: "Lord of thy Utterance"?; 4. "Manly Reflection": Masculinity in Coleridge's Criticism; 5. Sexual Politics: Burke, Coleridge and Cobbett; 6. Wordsworth: The "Time Dismantled Oak?"; 7. De Quincey and Hazlitt: To Have and Have Not the Power. 

Fulford, Tim. "Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's Muses and Feminist Criticism." RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/kublarobinson.html>.

Gamer, Michael.  "Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama."  ELH 66.4 (Winter 1999): 831-861.

Gaull, Marilyn.  “Joseph Johnson: Literary Alchemist.”  ERR 10.3 (Summer 1999): 265-78.

Goodson, A. C., ed.   Coleridge's Writings, Vol. 3: On Language.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

Gravil, Richard. "James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund Burke." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cooper.html>.

Greenfield, Susan C. and Carol Barash, eds.  Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865.  Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999.

Among the essays collected here are Claudia L. Johnson's "Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity" and Julie Costello's "Maria Edgeworth and the Politics of Consumption: Eating, Breastfeeding, and the Irish Wet Nurse in Ennui."

Grimes, Kyle.  "Spreading the (Radical) Word: The Circulation of William Hone's Liturgical Parodies of 1817."  In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Michael Davis (New York: St. Martin's P, 1999), 143-56.

Using evidence drawn from the correspondence of the Home Office, Grimes traces the explosive circulation of Hone's parodies.  The central argument holds that the prime motivation for Hone's blasphemy trials of 1817 was not so much an effort to stifle the "content" of the parodies as a paranoid response to an emergent mode of decentralized and very rapid publication—a kind of emergent form of mass media that seemed beyond the centralized control of ecclesiastical or governmental oversight.

Groom, Nick, ed.  Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Groom, Nick.  The Making of Percy's Reliques.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Grossman, Jonathan H.  "The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen."  NCL 54.2 (September 1999): 143-64.

Focusing specifically on manners, Grossman contends that "the production of etiquette is a primary and defining function of the historical class Austen depicts."  In other words, etiquette is an active, constitutive practice by which the leisure class defines and reproduces itself.

Groves, David.  "De Quincey and the Early Issues of Blackwood's Magazine."    N&Q  46.4 (1999): 473-74.

Hadley, Elaine.  "Home as Abroad: Orientalism and Occidentalism in Early English Stage Melodrama."  TSLL 41.4 (Winter 1999): 330-50.

Haney, David P.  "Aesthetics and Ethics in Gadamer, Levinas, and Romanticism: Problems of Phronesis and Teche."  PMLA 114.1 (January 1999): 32-45.

From Haney's abstract: "Aristotle's distinction between phronesis, or ethical knowledge, and techne, or productive knowledge, is relevant both to Romantic and modern discussions of the relations between aesthetic and ethical experience.  Wordsworth and Coleridge [in contrast to modern treatments] try in different ways to negotiate between the two kinds of knowledge, advocating the ethical force of poetry while acknowledging its status as techne" (167).

Hartman, Geoffrey.  A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

A collection of essays—both evocative and provocative—that span the career of one of the most influential Romantics critics of the past few decades.

Hawley, Michelle Renee.  "Aesthetic Citizenship: Poetry and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1868-1874 (Victorian, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Lord Byron, James Thomson, Robert Browning, Republicanism, Liberalism)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Chicago, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2038, 278 pages.

Hawley's study examines a crucial period in the political development of Victorian England, arguing that in the years 1868-1874 "the legacy of romanticism became central and conflicted terrain."  On the one hand, the radical Romantics (Blake, Byron, Shelley) were the impetus for a popular counter-politics; on the other, a selection of Romantic-era poetry was "swiftly being incorporated into the emergent 'literary tradition' as an affirmative symbol of national culture."

Hennelly, Mark M., Jr.  "'As Well Fill Up the Space Between': A Liminal Reading of Christabel."  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 203-22.

Hirschfield, Lisa. "Between Memory and History: Wordsworth's Excursion." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/memory.html>.

Hobson, Christopher Z.  The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake's Idea of Revolution.  Lewisburg, NJ: Bucknell UP, 1999.

Hodgson, John A. "An Other Voice: Ventriloquism in the Romantic Period." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/hodgson.html>.

Hogle, Jerrold E.  "Introduction: Gothic Studies Past, Present, and Future."  Gothic Studies 1.1 (August 1999): 1-9.

Holmes, Richard.  Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834.  New York: Pantheon, 1999.

Irvine, Robert P.  "Scott's The Black Dwarf: The Gothic and the Female Author."  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 223-48.

Ishizuka, Hisao.  "William Black and Eighteenth-Century Medicine."  Ph.D. diss., U of Essex (United Kingdom), 1999, DAI, 60-03C (1999): 533.

Jackson, H. J. "Lucy Revived." RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/lucy.html>.

Jarvis, Robin.  Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Jarvis argues that the popularity of walking during the 1790s and after had a powerful and heretofore unacknowledged influence on the writing of the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats.  In effect, Jarvis suggests that the physical act of walking fosters a distinctly Romantic creativity that is founded in the movement of the body.

Jarvis, Simon.  "Wordsworth and Idolatry."  SIR 38.1 (Spring 1999): 3-28.

Jefferson, D. W. [Douglas William].  Three Essays: Johnson, Wordsworth, Byron.  Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1998.

Johnson, Ann Lorraine.  "The Nightingale's Song: English Romantic Poetry and Ideology."  M.A. thesis, California State U, Dominguez Hills, 1999, MAI, 37-06 (1999): 1630, 81 pages.

Johnson, Barbara.  "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion." In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, eds. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1998), 221-35.

Johnson, Mary Lynn.  "The Iowa Blake Videodisc Project: A Cautionary History."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 131-35.

Johns-Putra, Adeline. "Satirising the Courtly Woman and Defending the Domestic Woman: Mock Epics and Women Poets in the Romantic Age." RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/courtly.html>.

Johns-Putra examines the gender/genre politics of women writers adopting the culturally and morally normative form of the Juvenalian mock epic.  The central works examined are Elizabeth Ryves's The Hastiniad (1785), "a pro-Whig burlesque in the manner of the notable Whig satirist John Wolcot," Lady Anne Hamilton's The Epics of the Ton (1807), which "appeared as a defence of the Princess of Wales in the aftermath of the Delicate Investigation of 1806 into charges of adultery against the Princess," and The Mousiad (1787), by "Polly Pindar," which illuminates the issue of female pseudonymy.  Taken together, the works "raise questions of gender and genre, and reveal something of the clash between courtly culture and the cult of domesticity that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century."

Johnston, Kenneth R.  "A Response to John Beer."  CLB 107 (July 1999): 138-41.

The response is to Beer's review of Johnston's The Hidden Wordsworth which appeared in CLB 105 (January 1999), pages 39-45.

Johnston, Kenneth R.  "Wordsworth's Mission to Germany: A Hidden Bicentenary?"  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 15-22.

Johnston, Kenneth R. "Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?" RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/antijacobin.html>.

In a wide-ranging, self-consciously New Historicist essay, Johnston considers the potential relations between the early Wordsworth and Coleridge (of Lyrical Ballad days) and the more urban and witty writing of the Anti-Jacobin.  Johnston suggests "that 'New Morality' is to some extent a coded call to Wordsworth, and perhaps also to Coleridge and Southey, to return to the establishment fold—from whence they came by birth and class origin—and join in the work of cultural regeneration which the bright young men of The Anti-Jacobin saw themselves engaged in."

Jones, Bernard.  "1798-1898: Wordsworth, Hardy, and 'The Real Language of Men.'"  ES 80.6 (December 1999): 509-17.

Jones, Steven E. "'Supernatural, or at Least Romantic': the Ancient Mariner and Parody." RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/sejstc.html>.

Joukovsky, Nicholas A., ed.  The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock.  2 Vols.  Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999.

Kaiser, David Aram.  Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Kaiser examines the relationship between aesthetic and political theory.  The historical focus of the book is rather wide-ranging, extending from the Romantic period through such twentieth-century theorists as Adorno and Habermas.  The early chapters on nationalism, the rhetoric of the symbol, and aesthetic culture as expressed in Coleridge and Schiller are especially useful to students of Romanticism.

Kautz, Elizabeth Dolan.  "The Geography of Melancholy: Depression and Healing in the Works of British Women Writers, 1785-1845 (Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley)."  Ph.D. diss., U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999, DAI, 60-08A (1999): 2940, 232 pages.

The writers mentioned in the title "disrupted the category of masculine melancholic genius by representing their depression in terms of the masculine discourse of melancholy rather than the feminized discourse of hysteria."  Kautz sees this fundamental gender distinction and contends that these writers "represented melancholia and therapies for melancholia—spa treatments, salutary landscapes, and botany—in order to claim the illness and its association with literary production for women and members of the working class."  What is more, they collectively offer a "more utilitarian and rationally based relationship with nature than commonly has been attributed to Romantic writers."

Keen, Paul.  The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Kelley, Theresa. "Romantic Interiority and Cultural Objects." In Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age, ed. Karen Weisman. RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/kelley/tk1.html>.

Kelsall, Malcolm.  Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation.  New York, St. Martin's P, 1999.

Khan, Jalal Uddin.  "On the Making of Wordsworth's Political Thought in 'Dion.'"  ELN 37.1 (September 1999): 44-56.

King-Hele, Desmond.  Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets.  London: DLM, 1999.

Kitson, Peter, Debbie Lee, Anne K. Mellor, James Walvin, Alan Bewell, Jeffrey Cox, David Dabydeen, Alan Richardson, Sukhdev Sandhu, and Srinivas Aravamudan, eds.  Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period.  Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 1999.

A massive, eight volume, 3200 page collection of period writing on slavery and the slave trade question.  The first volume consists principally of the autobiographical narratives of slaves and former slaves; volumes 2-4 are taken up with documents from the public debate over abolition and the slave trade as it was carried on in the periodical press, in Parliament, and elsewhere; volumes 5 and 6 cover drama and fiction respectively; volume 7 consists of documents on the medical aspects of the slave trade; and volume 8 presents several essays presenting various Romantic-era theories of racial difference.

Kneale, J. Douglas. Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999.

Koenig-Woodyard, Chris. "sex—text: 'Christabel' and the Christabelliads." RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/parodyxtabel.html>.

Kohler, Michael David.  "Governmental Modernity and Nineteenth-Century Narrative and Dramatic Verse: A Study in the Ideological Inflection of Form (William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Romantic, Poetry)."  Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins U, 1999, DAI, 60-02A (1999): 433, 256 pages.

The dissertation examines the Romantic writers' assumption of a link between imaginative writing and social and political change.  "These essays chart the attempts of three representative poets, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, to shape new forms of social experience by developing new modes of poetic coherence and totality. In readings of Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain poems and The White Doe of Rylstone, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, and Browning's Sordello and The Ring and the Book, I argue that these new poetic modes are established principally by coupling narrative representations with and against alternative regimes of formal completion.  These alternative regimes are aligned in the poems with particular representations of the relation of person and social whole, such that the overcoming or transformation of narrative coincides with the triumph of a certain literary-aesthetic, hence ideological, regime."

Kooy, Michael John.  "Coleridge, Malta and the 'Life of Ball': How Public Service Shaped The Friend."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 102-08.

Kooy, Michael John.  "Romanticism and Coleridge's Idea of History."  Journal of the History of Ideas 60.4 (1999): 717-35.

Kroeber, Karl.  "Proto-Evolutionary Bards and Post-Ecological Critics."  KSJ 48 (1999): 157-72.

In a spirited and at times highly polemical review essay focusing on two recent special journal issues devoted to "Ecological Criticism" (Studies in Romanticism, 35.3, Fall 1996 and The Wordsworth Circle, 28.3, Fall 1997), Kroeber clarifies his own contributions to the field, suggests that ecological criticism "offers the best means for evaluating how—and why—our culture conceives the operation of natural processes as we do" (171),  and offers a monitory note about criticism gone wrong.

Kroeber, Karl.  "The Blake Archive and the Future of Literary Studies."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 123-25.

Kuduk, Stephanie Ann.  "Republican Aesthetics: Poetry and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Nineteenth Century, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Cooper, Algernon Charles Swinburne)."  Ph.D. diss., Stanford U, 1999, DAI, 60-08A (1999): 2940, 284 pages.

Kuduk examines a genre she calls "republican aesthetics"—the works of "radical poets [who] attempted to translate republican ideals such as liberty, equality, and community into poetic form and . . . to envision poetry as an agent of social and political change."  In this view, poetry had the power to pierce people's tendency to acquiesce in the ideological, typically monarchical repressions that had heretofore held them to a rather confined space within the public sphere.  The formal innovations of radical poetry could potentially awaken readers to the fact of their own oppression.  Romantic-era works discussed include Blake's Songs of Experience, the "New Songs" of the radical press, the practice of tavern singing, and Shelley's Queen Mab. 

Kustec, Aleksander.  "The Poetry of a Nation: France Prešeren, Slovene Literature's Pater Patriae."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 64-70.

Labbe, Jacqueline M.  “Deflected Violence and Dream-Visions in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 163-74.

Landrum, Crystal Michelle.  "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: Male Mothering in Nineteenth-Century Literature (William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, Men)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Georgia, 1998, DAI, 60-02A (1998): 433, 203 pages.

The dissertation considers instances where men are cast in the role of mothers and finds that a traditionally partriarchal system is inevitably disturbed by such crossings.  "[M]ale mothers reveal resistant and unconscious subtexts, challenging hegemonic constructions of gender and the cultural constructs of the mother and striking at the patriarchal conceptions of motherhood as mater minus materiality.  In doing so, male mothers deconstruct the ideology of motherhood that they are supposed to embody; uncover flaws and repressed anxieties in the system as well as ideological inaccuracies; and inadvertently invert and pervert the 'traditional' constructs of motherhood and femininity, notions of home and family considered constant in a patriarchal society."  Landrum offers readings of, among other texts, Wordsworth's Michael and Shelley's Frankenstein.

Larrissy, Edward. "The Celtic Bard of Romanticism: Blindness and Second Sight." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 43-57.

Larrissy focuses on blindness and "second sight," seeing parallels and possible influences between the bardic tradition of Celtic cultures and the bard figures of romantic literature. The essay concentrates on Macpherson, but also discusses Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats.

Larrissy, Edward, ed.  Romanticism and Postmodernism.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

"The persistence of Romantic thought and literary practice into the late twentieth century is evident in many contexts. Though the precise meaning of the Romantic legacy is contested, it remains stubbornly difficult to move beyond. This collection of essays by prominent critics and literary theorists explores the continuing impact of romanticism on a variety of authors and genres"—from the dustjacket description.  Among the essays included here are Paul Hamilton's "From Sublimity to Indeterminacy: New World Order or Aftermath of Romantic Ideology,"  Emma Francis's "'Conquered good and conquering ill': Femininity, Power and Romanticism in Emily Brontë's Poetry," J. Drummond Bone's "A Sense of Endings: Some Romantic and Postmodern Comparisons," Geoff Ward's "A Being All Alike? Teleotropic Syntax in Ashbery and Wordsworth," Fred Botting's "Virtual Romanticism," John Fletcher's "The Sins of the Fathers: The Persistence of Gothic," Andrew Michael Roberts's "Romantic Irony and the Postmodern Sublime: Geoffrey Hill and 'Sebastian Arruruz,'" Stephen Clark's "'Uprooting the Rancid Stalk': Transformations of Romanticism in Ashbery and Ash," and finally Marjorie Perloff's "Postmodernism/Fin de Siecle."

Lessenich, Rolf.  "Literary Views of English Rhine Romanticism 1760-1860."  ERR 10.4 (Fall 1999): 480-514.

Lessenich examines the rise and fall of the Rhine as a preferred destination for English tourists.  The fascination with the Rhine was coincident with and dependent upon the "aesthetics and alienating perspective of Romanticism" (500).

Lincoln, Andrew.  “What Was Published in 1798?”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 137-51.

Lindenberger, Herbert.  Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage.  Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.

Lindop, Grevel.  "Line-end Hyphenation as a Problem for Editors, with Case-Studies from De Quincey."  YES 29 (1999): 191-201.

Liu, Yu.  Poetry and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth.   New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 

Lodge, Sara.  "Sally Brown (1822) and Bridget Jones (1825): Where They Came From and What They Say about Thomas Hood."  CLB 107 (July 1999): 98-110.

Loeffelholz, Mary.  "Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell's 'Africa.'"  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 171-202.

Logan, William.  "Four or Five Motions Toward a Poetics."  Sewanee Review 107.2 (Spring 1999): 244-59.

An essay primarily on reader-response stylistics focuses in part on Wordsworth (a London sonnet) and Byron (Don Juan).

Lowe, Walter.  "The Bitterness of Cain: (Post)Modern Flight from Determinacy."  Literature and Theology 12.4 (December 1998): 379-89.

Lussier,  Mark S.  Romantic Dynamics: A Poetics of Physicality.   New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Romantic Dynamics is a radically interdisciplinary work.  Lussier identifies parallels between, on the one hand, the concepts and metaphors of twentieth-century physics and cosmology and, on the other, the concerns of Romantic-era poetry with physical reality and its apperception by the psyche.  Both areas—recent physics and Romantic poetry—are struck by questions of indeterminacy, relativity, and complexity.  Lussier describes the resulting dynamic models of reality and consciousness in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. 

Mack, Douglas S.  "Editing Different Versions of Romantic Texts."  YES 29 (1999): 176-90.

A discussion of textual editing focusing especially on the McGann/Bowers controversy.  Mack's chief examples are drawn from his experience in editing the works of James Hogg and Walter Scott.

Macovski, Michael, ed.  Romanticism and the Law.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/index.html>.

Macovski, Michael.  "Introduction: Juridical Texts and Transgressive Containment." In  Romanticism and the Law.  Ed. Michael Macovski.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/macovski/mmintro.html>. 

Before offering brief overviews of the articles collected together for this edition of the Romantic Circles Praxis series, Macovski identifies the key legal-historical movements which are the armature for the entire volume:  "As legal strictures blur, collapse, and metamorphose, we come to realize that what marks the juridical terrain of the Romantic era is the shifting sand of defined criminalization: the radical redefinition of legal dissent, legal ownership, and legal publication during this period. Such slippages in legal language and meanings define not only the unstable ground of Romantic legal praxis but also the evolving concepts of intellectual property, blasphemy, sedition, and treason during this period" (par 1).

Mahoney, Charles.  "The Multeity of Coleridgean Apostasy." In Irony and Clerisy,  Ed. Deborah Elise White.  RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/mahoney/stasis.html>

Manning, Peter J.  "Troubling the Borders: Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1998."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 22-28.

Marso, Lori Jo.  (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Stael's Subversive Women.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Mayer, Robert.  "The Illogical Status of Novelistic Discourse: Scott's Footnotes for the Waverly Novels." ELH 66.4 (Winter 1999): 911-38.

McCalman, Iain, Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, Clara Tuite, Kate Fullagar, and Patsy Hardy, eds.  An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

A useful reference guide to the Romantic period.  The book is divided into two large sections: The first is comprised of dozens of brief essays surveying specific cultural or historical topics.  There is a wealth of useful material here—including Roy Porter on "Consumerism" (181-86), John Brewer and Iain McCalman on "Publishing" (197-206), Gillian Russell on "Theatre" (223-31), Jerome McGann on "Poetry" (270-78), Jon Klancher on "Prose" (279-85), Fiona Robertson on "Novels" (286-96), Marilyn Butler on "Popular Antiquarianism" (328-37), James Chandler on "History" (354-60), Jon Mee on "Language" (369-77), and Peter Otto on "Literary Theory" (378-86).  Other essays—too numerous to be listed completely here—cover such topics as "Painting," "Architecture," "Music," "Revolution," Empire," "Women," "Education," "Land," etc.  The second section of the book contains an alphabetical encyclopedia of persons, places, events, and other culturally significant items from the period.  These brief notices, when taken together with the essays of the opening section, should offer students of Romantic culture a reliable foundation in the central issues, movements, and events of the period, and the volume as a whole will make a useful reference book for anyone who reads and writes about Romantic-period culture.

McEathron, Scott.  "Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry."  NCL 54.1 (June 1999): 1-26.

McEathron notes that, while Wordsworth claims in the Lyrical Ballads to be giving voice to a heretofore silent peasantry, in fact peasant and other kinds of "rustic" writing were already fashionable in 1798—thus complicating Wordsworth's self-definition.  The resulting poems are "experiments in narratorial perspective, class identification, and social sympathy" through which the poet establishes his own distinctive voice.

McGavran, James Holt, ed.  Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations.  Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999.

A set of essays on the general theme of childhood and Romanticism.  Contributors include (among others) McGavran, Alan Richardson, and Mitzi Myers.

McGlone, Matthew S. and Jessica Tofighbakhsh.  "The Keats Heuristic: Rhyme as Reason in Aphorism Interpretation."  Poetics 26.4 (May 1999): 235-44.

This article presents the results of an experiment in which subjects were asked to weigh the accuracy of given aphorisms, some of which rhymed.  The experiment suggests that people's sense of the "truth" of a claim is linked to aesthetic design of the language.

McKusick, James C.  "John Clare's Version of Pastoral."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 80-84.

McNeil, Kenneth.  "Inside and Outside the Nation: Highland Violence in Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather."  Literature and History 8.2 (1999): 1-17.

Mee, Jon. "The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790s." In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Michael Davis (New York: St. Martin's P, 1999), 41-55.

Menninghaus, Winfried.  “’Disgusting Impotence’ and Romanticism.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 202-13.

Miall, David S. "The Resistance of Reading: Romantic Hypertext and Pedagogy." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/reading.html>.

Middeke, Martin and Werner Huber, eds.  Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama.  Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999.

Miles, Robert. "The Eye of Power: Ideal Presence and Gothic Romance."  Gothic Studies 1.1 (August 1999): 10-30.

Mizukoshi, Ayumi. "The Cockney Politics of Gender — the Cases of Hunt and Keats." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cockneygender.html>.

Situating the Cockney School writers—especially Hunt and Keats—within an emergent middle-class ideology (with all its gendered assumptions), Mizukoshi illustrates how the Cockneys "adopted and appropriated ubiquitous gendered language in order to legitimise their bourgeois poetics and politics."  One particularly cogent observation demonstrates that Keats's reputation as a "strong" poet with distinctly masculine aspirations—in contrast to the effeminate Hunt—is a twentieth-century critical redaction of the emergent gendered politics of the early nineteenth-century.

Momma, Haruko.  "A Man on the Cusp: Sir William Jones's 'Philology' and 'Oriental Studies.'"  TSLL 41.2 (Summer 1999): 160-79.

Relying especially on Foucauldian analyses of late eighteenth-century intellectual developments, Momma considers the scholarship of Sir William Jones in the context of (1) the emergence of philology as an intellectual/historical pursuit, (2) the rise of interest in "Orientalism" and "Oriental Studies" in the nineteenth century, and (3) Jones's own travels.  Thus, "When Jones set foot on Indian soil at the end of a long voyage, he also stood, symbolically, on a cusp created by history, where everything had potential but nothing had been realized; and his role in this crucial time in Western history was to maximize the potential in order for his posterity to determine the actual course of the new era" (176).

Monsman, Gerald.  "Charles Lamb's Elia and the Fallen Angel."  SIR 38.1 (Spring 1999): 51-62.

In an analysis (primarily) of Lamb/Elia's "The Child Angel: A Dream," Monsman traces an essentially ironic relationship to the Miltonic or prophetic stance of the canonical Romantic poets.  "'The Child Angel' is . . . a fantasy resonant with subconscious patterns that recasts the Miltonic myth of the fallen angel in romantic and personal terms" (52).  The central poles of the argument can be seen even in the name "Elia," which conflates the biblical prophet "Elijah" with "a lie"—Lamb's is a consciousness founded on "this green earth" and not on "clouds of glory" originating from some more perfect sphere.

Moore, Fabienne.  “’Revolution’ or ‘Deplorable School’?: Chateaubriand’s Analysis of French and British Romanticism in the Mémoires d’ outre-tombe.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 231-41.

Morrison, Robert.  "'An Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence' in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 47-48.

Morrison, Robert. "De Quincey and the Opium-Eater's Other Selves." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 87-103.

Morrison, Robert.  "John Wilson and the Editorship of Blackwood's Magazine."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 48-50.

Morrison, Robert.  "The 'Scotchman of eminent name' in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 45-47.

Morse, David.  The Age of Virtue: British Culture from the Restoration to Romanticism.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

Mortensen, Peter.  "High Romantics and Horrid Mysteries: British Literature and the Struggle with German Romance (1798-1815) (Great Britain, Romanticism, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)."  Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins U, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1121, 279 pages.

Mulvihill, James.  "Wordsworth, Peacock, and Malthusian Social Statics."  ELN 36.3 (March 1999): 54-61.

Writing against the idea that Peacock's Melincourt was essentially a reaction against Wordsworth's Excursion, Mulvihill argues that at least one episode in the novel "can be read as a sympathetic critical supplement to the final and most problematic books of The Excursion.  Its ironic deployment of Malthusian demographics underscores important issues of narrative economy raised by Wordsworth's poem and its critics, issues that in turn carry important social implications" (54-55).

Nash, David.  Blasphemy in Modern Britain: 1789 to the Present.  Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999.

A theoretically informed historical study of the role of blasphemy in public discourse.  Of particular interest to Romanticists are chapters on the theoretical significance of blasphemy and on the agitations surrounding Thomas Paine, William Hone, and Richard Carlile.

O'Neill, Michael.  "'A Storm of Ghosts': Beddoes, Shelley, Death, and Reputation."  Cambridge Quarterly 28.2 (1999): 102-15.

The prolific O'Neill here discusses the influences of Shelley on Beddoes and describes the anxieties of fame and reputation as they affect the life and writing of the later poet.  "Powerfully influenced by Shelley in particular, Beddoes at the same time makes something memorably his own out of an interiorising and extension of Romantic motifs and a pervasive sense of alienation . . ." (103).

O'Quinn, Daniel.  "Murder, Hospitality, Philosophy: De Quincey and the Complicitous Grounds of National Identity."  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 135-70.

Paley, Morton D.  Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Paley, Morton D.  Portraits of Coleridge.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. 

Parrish, Constance.  "Isabella Lickbarrow: An 'Unlettered' Poetess."  CLB 106 (April 1999): 66-77.

Pearson, Jacqueline.  Women's Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

By some accounts, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England the majority of the reading public was made up of women readers.  Pearson presents a thoroughly researched and carefully written study of the cultural status of this female readership.  The work is not a chronological account; rather, it is organized around a handful of key issues which Pearson names as "the elision of sexuality and textuality, the dangers of novel-reading, reading and its various relationships to domesticity, family, and community, the temptations of resisting reading" (ix-x).  A theoretical/methodological Introduction is followed by half a dozen chapters that deal with these issues and that touch on such writers as Byron, Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, and others.  The volume ends with an impressive "Select Bibliography" (pp. 260-84) of both primary and secondary texts.

Perkins, David.  "Sweet Helpston! John Clare on Badger Baiting."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 387-407.

Perkins offers a historical account of the practice of badger baiting and the debate over its inevitable cruelty.  In an appendix, the essay includes the full text of Clare's poem on badger baiting.

Perry, Seamus.  Coleridge and the Uses of Division.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Persyn, Mary Kelly.  “’No Human form but Sexual’: Sensibility, Chastity, and Sacrifice in Blake’s Jerusalem.”  ERR 10.1 (Winter 1999): 53-83.

Petroski, Karen Beth.  "Making Sense of Nationality: The Politics of Irrationality in British and American Prose, 1776-1850 (Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, John Wilson, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Great Britain)."  Ph.D. diss., Columbia U, 1999, DAI, 60-01A (1999): 119, 369 pages.

Pfau, Thomas. "The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition after Kant." In Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age, ed. Karen Weisman. RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/pfau1/tp1.html>.

Pitha, J. Jakub.  "Narrative Theory and Romantic Poetry (Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron)."  Ph.D. diss., U of South Carolina, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1146, 183 pages.

Pitha sees lyric poetry and narrative poetry as "points on a continuum of narrative" rather than as distinct modes of literary production.  Having thus formulated these generic categories, the dissertation offers readings of Romantic-era poems using the techniques of narrative theory.  With respect to the later Romantics, Pitha focuses most closely on Keats ("Grecian Urn," Eve of St. Agnes) and Byron (Don Juan).

Pratt, Lynda.  "The Pantisocratic Origins of Robert Southey's Madoc: An Unpublished Letter." N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 34-39.

Priestman, Martin.  Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

A historical account of the association between atheism—the expression of which, according to Priestman, became possible only in the late eighteenth century—and the emergent writing of the major Romantics.  As Priestman claims in his conclusion, "With some [writers] it was the very 'possibility' [of expressing a heretofore unthinkable atheism] that was most important, either as a reference-point by which to re-evaluate their own positions, or as an ever-present danger to be skirted at all costs.  With others the possibility of atheism was an opportunity to make sense of the world in purely human terms, in ways hitherto thought unimaginable" (257).  The book is especially useful in focusing on and distinguishing the numerous modes of English religious experience characteristic of the period (Priestman includes, for instance, a glossary wherein one can find quick definitions of such terms as "antinomianism," " pantheism," "deism," and "enthusiasm") rather than concentrating on the continental influences of German Romanticism or the philosophes.  After two introductory historical sections, the book follows with chapters on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, the "Atheist Strategies, 1800-1830," and "The Shelley Generation in the 1810s."

Punter, David, ed.  A Companion to the Gothic.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.

An extensive reference source on the rise and continuing prominence of the gothic.  Among the twenty five or so essays collected here are Robert Miles on Ann Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Nora Crook on Mary Shelley, Ian Duncan on Scottish Gothic, and David Worrall on "The Political Culture of Gothic Drama." 

Punter, David.  “Revising the Uncanny, or, Coleridge Forgets Freud.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 254-64.

Quinney, Laura.  The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery.  Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1999.

From the opening paragraph of Quinney's Preface: "I advance an account of romanticism without consolations.  In the conventional version of romanticism and its legacy, the loss of vitality and self-esteem bewailed in major first-person poems is surreptitiously compensated by a gain in intellectual or artistic entitlement; in the account given here, the losses are subtly compounded, moving up the levels into reaches of ontological catastrophe where restitution is no longer possible.  The pleasures of the self are obliterated rather than solemnized, and the self disappointed with its portion is simultaneously stripped of the comfort of art" (ix).  Thus Quinney introduces the bleak theme of disappointment, dejection, and even desolation which she then follows through chapters on Wordsworth, Shelley, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.  The Shelley chapter focuses specifically on Shelley's repeated concern with the collapse of hopes and the subsequent psychology of disappointment.  Quinney contends that Shelley borrowed the theme of melancholy disappointment from the sensibility poets and the earlier Romantics (especially Wordsworth), but that Shelley "played upon, explored, and expanded the fascinations of this theme with a greater range, and perhaps, a greater dexterity than any of his forbears" (67).

Rajan, Balachandra.  Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999.

In the Introduction, Rajan notes that "This book can be characterized as a historical study with its center of gravity in the romantic era, carried out from a postcolonial vantage point" (10).  The study concentrates, of course, on the place of India in the discourse and consciousness of British public culture during a period of colonial and commercial expansion.  Especially useful in the present connection are chapters on women writers on India, on Southey and The Curse of Kehama, and on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.  In the latter, Rajan develops a reading based on the force of discourse as it relates to the setting in the Indian Caucasus and to the character Asia.  The work when examined in such terms forwards Shelley's transformative critique of British imperialism and the discourses of domination.

Rambow, Amy K.  "'Come Kick Me': Godwin's Memoirs and the Posthumous Infamy of Mary Wollstonecraft."  KSR 13 (1999): 24-57.

Rambow examines the effects on Wollstonecraft's reputation generated by Godwin's publication of the Memoirs.  Rambow contends that "the shock and horror the Memoirs held for its original audience are attributable in part to the innovative style of the work, but derive primarily from its unintentional evocation of sexuality through suicide, religion, and nationalism" (26).

Ranger, C. M.  "'Finely fashioned nerves' in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 27-28.

Reid, Nicholas.  "'Kubla Khan' and Harington's 'The Witch of Wokey.'"  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 112-14.

Reilly, Susan P. "Blake's Poetics of Sound in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/blakepoetics.html>.

Richardson, Alan. "Coleridge and the Dream of an Embodied Mind." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 1-25.

Richardson, Alan.  "Romanticism and the End of Childhood."  Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 169-90.

Riehl, Joe.  "Lamb's Drama Criticism of July 1823: A New Letter and a New Essay."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 59-64.

Riehl, Joe.  "'The Mermaid': A Newly Identified Lamb Essay."  CLB 105 (January 1999):  28-32.

For a counter attribution of "The Mermaid" to Thomas Hood, see John Strachan's essay, CLB 106 (April 1999): 78-82, below.

Riehl, Joe.  "The St. James's Street Mermaid and the Case for Thomas Hood's Authorship of 'The Mermaid': A Postscript."  CLB 106 (April 1999): 83.

Roberts, Adam.  Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: A Guide.  Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999.

A survey of the nineteenth-century long poem including, for instance, The Prelude and Erasmus Darwin's The Lovers of the Plants, the book offers summaries along with historical and biographical contexts.

Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv.  "Coleridge's Liverpool Connection: An Unpublished Letter from William Roscoe to John Edwards."  N&Q  46.4 (1999): 455-57.

Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv.  Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument.  Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1999.

Roman, Laura E.  "Addison, Quintilian, and Wordsworth's 'Lucy.'"  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 41-44.

Rubinstein, Christopher.  "Along the Road to Xanadu."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 108-12.

Rule, Philip C.  "The Gendered Imagination in Religion and Literature."  In Seeing into the Life of Things: Essays on Literature and Religious Experience, ed. John L. Mahoney (New York: Fordham UP, 1998), 59-72.

Russett, Margaret.  "Like 'Wedding Gowns or Money from the Mint': Clare's Borrowed Inheritance." In Romanticism and the Law, ed. Michael Macovski.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/russett/mruss.html>.

Ruston, Sharon, comp., with Lidia Garbin.  The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1999.

This collection of essays—originally papers delivered at the 1998 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in Liverpool—considers the preoccupation of Romantic writers with ghosts.  The term "ghosts" is very broadly construed, referring to such diverse textual elements as the hauntings of intertextuality, authorial presence, and the "spectres" of a writer's influential precursors.  Following a preface by John Whale and an Introduction by Ruston, the collection offers essays on Charlotte Dacre, Blake, Wordsworth, Peacock, Percy Shelley, Keats, Beddoes, and Henry James.

Saglia, Diego.  "Nationalist Texts and Counter-Texts: Southey's Roderick and the Dissensions of the Annotated Romance."  NCL 53.4 (March 1999): 421-51.

Examines the interplay between the poetry and notes in Southey's 1814 work, finding that the notes offer a kind of counter-text—a supplement in the Derridean sense of the term.

Samara, Donya Anne.  "Questionable Ends: Reflections on the Sublime in Contemporary Culture (Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley)."  Ph.D. diss., Indiana U, 1998, DAI, 60-02A (1998): 435, 250 pages.

A series of theoretically informed meditations on how the sublime can function as a critique of "a political belief in ends."  One of the novels discussed is The Last Man.

Saunders, Julia. "Putting the Reader Right: Reassessing Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts." RoN 16 (November 1999):  <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/more.html>.

Scrivener, Michael.  "John Thelwall's Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution." In Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis, ed. Michael Davis (New York: St. Martin's P, 1999), 69-83.

Scrivener, Michael.  "The Discourse of Treason, Sedition, and Blasphemy in British Political Trials, 1794-1820." In Romanticism and the Law.  Ed. Michael Macovski.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/scrivener/mscrv.html>.

This is a historical essay that considers how the contexts rather than the explicit content of some "questionable" political discourse help to determine the effects—and hence the legality—of that discourse.  The results, too, are various inversions of intentions, coopting of forms, and so forth.  Scrivener's principal examples are Godwin, Thelwall, and Robert Wedderburn.

Shaffer, Julie.  "Familial Love, Incest, and Female Desire in Late Eighteeth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Women's Novels."  Criticism 41.1 (Winter 1999): 67-99.

Though the essay focuses primarily on the gothic fiction of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, Shaffer's study also offers germane backgrounds for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mathilda.

Shelston, Alan.  "Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Wordsworth."  N&Q  46.4 (1999):  470-73.

Simpson, Michael.  "Re-Opening after the Old Price Riots: War and Peace at Drury Lane."  TSLL  41.4 (Winter 1999): 378-402.

In a complex, theoretically and historically astute analysis, Simpson traces distinct genres of cultural behavior, especially as a kind of burgeoning nationalism is translated in and through the actions of theater-goers during the reopening of Drury Lane in 1812.  The essay is included in a special issue of Texas Studies devoted to Romantic drama.

Smith, Christopher J. P.  "Lamb and Southey: Painterly Allusion in the 1798 Review of Lyrical Ballads."  CLB 107 (July 1999): 110-14.

Snodgrass, John Charles Joseph.  "Narrating Nations, Negotiating Borders: The Scottish Romantic Novel in 'Blackwood's' Circle (Sir Walter Scott, John Galt, Susan Ferrier, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine)."  Ph.D. diss., Texas A&M U, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2042, 307 pages.

Sorensen, Peter J.  "Blake as Byron's Biographer: An Anthroposophic Reading of The Ghost of Abel."  WC 30.3 (Summer 1999): 161-65.

Spector, Sheila A.  “The Other’s Other: The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction.”  ERR 10.3 (Summer 1999): 307-40.

Starr, Gina Gabrielle.  "The Frame of Sense: The Epistolary Novel and the Lyric Mode in Eighteenth-Century England (Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)."  Ph.D. diss., Harvard U, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2043, 299 pages.

Stevenson, W. H.  "Blake's Progress."  EIC 49.3 (July 1999): 195-218.

Strachan, John.  "The St. James's Street Mermaid and the Case for Thomas Hood's Authorship of 'The Mermaid.'"  CLB 106 (April 1999): 78-82.

Strachan's attribution to Thomas Hood is intended to counter Joseph Riehl's article [CLB 105 (January 1999): 28-32,above] which identifies Charles Lamb as the author of "The Mermaid."

Strachan, John. "'The Praise of Blacking': William Frederick Deacon's Warreniana and Early Nineteenth-century Advertising-related Parody." RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/warren.html>.

In a volume of Romanticism on the Net devoted to Romantic-era parody, Strachan offers this historical recuperation of a little known but "enormously engaging and enjoyable" volume called Warreniana, a collection of parodies of prominent writers all of whom sing the praises of Warren's boot polish.  Strachan describes his purposes: "This essay offers an account of the work and sets it in its contexts of early nineteenth-century advertising and post-Napoleonic advertising- and advertising-related parody and satire. It concludes with a consideration of the importance of Warreniana and a discussion of the book's parodic methodology and social resonance."

Sullivan, Heather I.  “Collecting the Rocks of Time: Goethe, the Romantics and Early Geology.”  ERR 10.3 (Summer 1999): 341-70.

Tayebi, Kandi Ann.  "Dynamic Opposition: Charlotte Smith's Revolutionary Poetics (Charlotte Turner Smith, Women Writers, Romanticism, Nature, Elegy)."  Ph.D diss., U of Denver, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2043, 271 pages.

Temple, Kathryn.  "The Angry Owner: Samuel Richardson, Modern Authorship, and the Ancient Romance." In Romanticism and the Law.  Ed. Michael Macovski.  RC-Praxis (April 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/law/temple/ktempl.html>.

Treadwell, James.  "Impersonation and Autobiography in Lamb's Christ's Hospital Essays."  SIR 37.4 (Winter 1998): 499-521.

Treadwell sees an opposition between autobiography and historicity which he then calls into question in an essay examining the representation(s) of self in Lamb's "On Christ's Hospital" and "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago."    The conclusion, in essence, is that "the essays actually represent a highly complex interrogation of the (verifiable) relation of the textual 'I' to its contexts" (521), or, later, "autobiography is an ambiguous, contestable, self-interrogating proposition which calls into play the historical moment of the two texts" (521).

Vallins, David.  Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Waddington, Keith.  "Pictures and Poetry.  Debunking the Bunk: An Examination of Picturesque Influence (William Wordsworth, John Keats)."  M.A. thesis, Concordia U (Canada), 1998, MAI, 37-06 (1999): 1618, 144 pages.

Ward, Aileen.  "Romantic Castles and Real Prisons: Wordsworth, Blake, and Revolution."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 3-15.

Watson, J. R.  "'My benevolent Friend': George Dyer and his 1800 Preface."  CLB 108 (October 1999): 170-78.

Watt, James.  Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 

Wedd, Mary.  "The Essays of Elia Revisited."  CLB 108 (October 1999): 161-69.

Weisman, Karen, ed. Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age. RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/index.html>.

Weisman, Karen.  "Introduction: The Uses of Interiority in the Domain of Pleasure."  In Romanticism and Philosophy in an Historical Age, ed. Karen Weisman. RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/philosophy/weisman/kwintro.html>.

In this brief introduction to her Romantic Praxis series, Weisman poses the fundamental question of whether there is genuine meaning in aesthetic experience that goes beyond either a mere formalist demonstration on the one hand or a stylized historical commentary on the other.

Weitzel, William Conrad, III.  "The Space of Memory: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Temporal Imagination (Time, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Great Britain, William Butler Yeats, Ireland, Marcel Proust, France)."  Ph.D. diss., Harvard U, 1999, DAI, 60-06A (1999): 2020, 278 pages.

Welch, Dennis M.  "Blake's Book of Los and Visionary Economics."  ANQ 12.4 (Fall 1999): 6-12.

Wendling, Ronald C.  "Pater, Coleridge, and the Return of the Platonic."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 94-100.

Westbrook, Donna.  "Wordsworth's Song of Songs: 'Nutting' as Mystical Allegory."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 36-47.

Wheeler, Kathleen.  "Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 89-94.

White, Deborah Elise, ed.  Irony and Clerisy.  RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/ironycov.html>

White, Deborah Elise.  "Introduction: Irony and Clerisy." In Irony and Clerisy,  Ed. Deborah Elise White. RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/white/ironyintro.html>.

White's introductory essay to her Romantic Circles Praxis series identifies the central problematic.  "Clerisy"—the term comes from Coleridge—refers to the effort at a kind of institutional unity, a stable synthesis of diverse and divergent elements, a coherent and comprehendable history.  "Irony" is a kind of short-hand of that counter-movement of Romanticism that deals with self-division, fragmentation, dissolution.  Both the introductory essay and the series as a whole examine this opposition from diverse points of view.

White, Mary Gassaway.  "Writers Among Friends: A Historical Study of Writing Groups."  Ph.D. diss., U of Southwestern Louisiana, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1117, 360 pages.

This dissertation examines the form and function of various "writing groups" including, among others, Coleridge and the Wordsworths, and Byron and the Shelleys.  The emphasis is on rhetoric and composition theory.

Whittaker, Jason.  William Blake and the Myths of Britain.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999. 

Wickham, D. E.  "Three Unpublished Notes of Charles Lamb and a Reply from Moxon."  CLB 105 (January 1999): 32-37.

Wiebe, Paul M.  Myth as Genre in British Romantic Poetry.  New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

"The notion that Romantic poetry is mythopoeic has become one of our assumptions about the Romantic period. This study re-evaluates that assumption from a new perspective, that of genre criticism, and argues that myth functions as an effective critical term only when it is defined pragmatically as a genre. In this study, myth is defined as a text that projects a world structured around three components: supernatural beings, humans, and nature. Using this model, Myth as Genre in British Romantic Poetry provides new analyses of selected Romantic works and concludes that the Romantics' sporadic return to the three-term discourse of myth represents a reaction against the dominant Romantic discourse of subject and object. The study also addresses related theoretical issues such as the validity of pragmatic genres and the relationship between genre analysis and literary history."

Wiley, Mike.  "Wordsworthian Dystopia: The Spatial Play of Salisbury Plain."  Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 89-114.

Williams, Nicholas M.  “’Bewildering Dreams and Extravagant Fancies’: The Sublime of Population in Thomas Malthus.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 193-201.

Wilson, Eric.  Emerson's Sublime Science.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999. 

Wilson, Lisa Marie.  "Pen Names: Marketing Authorship in a Romantic 'Age of Personality,' 1780-1830 (Matthew G. Lewis, Charlotte King, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Robinson)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1999, DAI, 60-02A (1999): 437, 209 pages.

The dissertation examines the delicate balancing act that writers and publishers played during the Romantic period, a balance between, on the one hand, establishing literary celebrity and authority and, on the other, avoiding "charges of unseemly self-promotion."  This process was itself engaged in the broader cultural movement of the commercialization of literature and of authorship itself.  The fundamental terms of the study enable fresh analyses of such problematic issues as the status of biographical criticism and the strategies of anonymity and pseudonymity.  The key texts are by Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Charlotte King (a.k.a. "Rosa Matilda" and "Charlotte Dacre"), Mary "Perdita" Robinson, Walter Scott, and Byron.  These writers' careers "reveal the contradictions inherent in the discourse of Romantic authorship, which demanded that authors market themselves successfully—without appearing to do so."

Wohlgemut, Esther.  "Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity."  SEL 39.4 (1999): 645-58.

Wohlgemut examines Edgeworth's writing in the context of an emergent nationalist discourse: "Having herself been both immersed in Continental Enlightenment thought and personally affected by the nationalist upsurge of the 1798 Rebellion, she used her writing to reconsider the meaning of the denomination 'Anglo-Irish.' And through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute 'Anglo-Irish' less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders" (645).

Wolfreys, Julian.  Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

An extended discussion of literary representations of the city with particular attention to the relationship between individual self and urban space.  The book covers writers from Blake through Dickens and Engels; chapter two focuses on Byron, Shelley, and Barbauld.

Wolfson, Susan and Peter J. Manning, eds.  The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries.  New York: Longman, 1999.

Wolfson, Susan.  "Shakespeare and the Romantic Girl Reader."  Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 191-234.

Wood, Marcus. "William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics." RoN 15 (August 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/thelwall.html>.

Wood points to parallels and parodies between the public discourse over slavery and the public discourse over the ill-treatment of laborers in England.  As the essay puts it, "The fifty years from 1780 to 1830 saw the generation of a fantastically varied set of literatures concerning slavery written by men and women and directed at every available area of the publishing market. . . . Radicals could not avoid exposure to, and the influence of, the slavery debates, and their writings on race were parodically moulded around the dominant forms of these polemics."

Woodbery, Bonnie.  "The Mad Body as the Text of Culture in the Writings of Mary Lamb."  SEL 39.4 (1999): 659-74.

A consideration of the culturally "silenced" aspect of Mary Lamb—the Mary Lamb who stabbed her mother to death in 1796.  The reading is grounded in the thinking of Foucault: "This analysis of Lamb's stories and poems shows something of Lamb's struggle to maintain her fragile identity in the face of extreme forms of mental and physical containment as advocated by medical and social discourses at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Lamb's writing, as painful and destructive for her as it was, offered her a chance to confront and resist her society's constructions of madness and the feminine" (671).  Woodbery offers several provocative readings of Lamb's poems and stories.

Woof, Pamela.  "The 'Lucy' Poems: Poetry of Mourning."  WC 30.1 (Winter 1999): 28-36.

Woof, Robert.  Romantic Icons: The National Portrait Gallery at Dove Cottage, Grasmere.  [Grasmere]: Wordsworth Trust, 1999.

Worrall, David and Steve Clark, eds.  Blake in the Nineties.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Wright, Julia M.  "'The Nation Begins to Form': Competing Nationalisms in Morgan's The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys."  ELH 66.4 (Winter 1999): 939-963.

Wyatt, John.  Wordsworth's Poems of Travel 1819-42: Such Sweet Wayfaring.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999. 

Youngquist, Paul.  "De Quincey's Crazy Body."  PMLA 114.3 (May 1999): 346-58.

From Youngquist's abstract: "De Quincey's Confessions … evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition.  The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. . . .  Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality."  See also Charles Rzepka's letter about the essay and Youngquist's response, PMLA 115.1 (January 2000): 93-94.

Youngquist, Paul.  "Rehabilitating Coleridge: Poetry, Philosophy, Excess."  ELH 66.4 (Winter 1999): 885-909.

Youngquist, Paul.  “Lyrical Bodies: Wordsworth’s Physiological Aesthetics.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 152-62.

Ziegenhagen, Timothy Eugene.  "Reading the Book of Nature: Romantic Literature and Romantic Science from William Wordsworth to Thomas De Quincey (John Keats, Humphry Davy, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)."  Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois U at Carbondale, 1999, DAI, 60-08A, (1999): 2945, 238 pages.

"By using rhetorical figures and even the experimental strategies of scientific writers like Buffon, Priestley, Beddoes, and Davy, Romantic literary authors were able to critique the underlying assumptions about the 'natural' origins of political power and to overturn a static view of nature in favor of a more progressive, transformative one. Rigid systems—political and literary—are oftentimes figured in period works of literature as unhealthy and diseased. Closed off from the renewing cycles of an everchanging and vital nature, these systems are prone to pathological manifestations. Disease, in this paradigm, enables change in stagnant social structures and signifies an inevitable return to health—for the state of literature and also society in general."  The dissertation proceeds through discussions of Coleridge, Keats ("The Fall of Hyperion"), Humphry Davy, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and De Quincey ("The English Mail-Coach").

Zimmerman, Sarah M.  Romanticism, Lyricism, and History.  Albany: State University of New York P, 1999.

In contrast to the more conventional view that Romantic-era lyric poetry was chiefly introspective and thus tended to isolate its speakers from engagement with history, Zimmerman contends that the lyrics have a great capacity for commentary on social and historical circumstances.  The result is a fresh and compelling reading of (especially) Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and John Clare.

Zuccato, Edoardo.  "Italy's Invisibility: 'Mediterranean' Culture and Recent Romantic Culture."  WC 30.2 (Spring 1999): 100-02.

II. BYRON

Note: This is the Byron section from the letterpress version of the Current Bibliography (without reviews). A more complete and detailed Byron bibliography is available here.

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE, TRANSLATED

Chu Chi, Yu.  "Lord Byron's 'The Isles of Greece': First Translations."  In Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918, ed. D. E. Pollard (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998), 79-104.

Muldoon, Paul, ed.  The Essential Byron, by Lord Byron.  London: HarperCollins, 1999.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO BYRON

Accardo, Peter X.  "American Editions of Byron, 1811 to 1830."  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 93.4 (December 1999): 484-93.

Accardo presents the findings of a study of some 99 American editions of Byron's works published between 1811 and 1830. The study "will be of crucial interest to students of Byron's reputation and reception, to collectors of Byron, and to historians of the American reprint trade" (485). Accardo offers a summary of the "Key Findings" of his research and concludes with case studies of two works: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and The Giaour.

Accardo, Peter X.  "Byron in America to 1830."  Harvard Library Bulletin 9.2 (1998): n.p.

Bainbridge, Simon.  "From Nelson to Childe Harold: The Transformations of the Byronic Image."  BJ 27 (1999): 13-25.

Focusing principally on George Sanders's 1809 portrait of Byron, Bainbridge contends that most accounts of the Byron iconography have missed the fact that "Byron has himself represented in terms of the pre-eminent and already mythical hero of the hour, Horatio Nelson, an astonishing act of heroic self-conception and self-presentation that anticipates his more famous and ambiguous identification with the major world historic figure of the age, Napoleon Bonaparte" (13).  This initial heroic and very public image, Bainbridge argues, was transformed in later portraits into the figure of an "isolated and a-historical romantic wanderer."  Four plates.

Bradbury, Oliver C.  "Lord Byron's 1812 Visit to Cheltenham."  BJ 27 (1999): 97-101.

Cheeke, Stephen.  "Byron, History and the Genius Loci."  BJ 27 (1999): 38-50.

Cheeke concentrates on Byron's fascination with particular locations, or "spots": "These spots, particularly those associated with the famous dead, offer Byron sites of what I shall call in-placement, homes in eternity which are testimony to historical vindication and against which Byron measures himself" (38).  This emphasis on place presents Cheeke with an entry into the vexed issue of Byron—the wandering, out-of-place poet—and his relationship to a very tangible, material history associated with a distinct geographical site.  To use Cheeke's language: "the notion of a concentrated accretion of meaning and experience (being there on the spot) can offer a way of thinking more broadly about Byron and history, and the place of his work in the context of early nineteenth-century 'historical mindedness'" (38).

Cochran, Peter.  "Byron's Manfred and Pellico's Francesca da Rimini."  Review of National Literatures and World Report 1 (1998): 73-86.

Cochran, Peter.  "International Byron Societies, 1998-1999."  BJ 27 (1999): 132-39.

Cochran, Peter.  "The Life of Bryon, or Southey Was Right."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 63-76.

Cochran surveys and reviews films in which Byron figures as a character.  These include James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), David Macdonald's The Bad Lord Byron (1948), Robert Bolt's Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer (1988), and Gonzalo Suarez's Rowing with the Wind (1988).

Crane, David.  Lord Byron's Jackal: The Life of Edward John Trelawny.  New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.

Donelan, Charles.  Romanticism and Male Fantasy in Byron's Don Juan: A Marketable Vice.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

The book offers a wide-ranging and complex argument regarding the poetics of Don Juan.  Donelan places the poem in the repressive cultural context dominated by the overt moral strictures of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the overt political censorship of revolutionary ideological claims.  The genius of the poem, as Donelan has it, lies in its liberatory poetics, its Protean capacity to find freedom in the very air of repression: "Don Juan is the Romantic period's most comprehensive defence of freedom of expression and liberty of the imagination" (1).  One way the poem manages to both sidestep and satirize the evangelical censorship of the day lay in its capacity to foster male fantasy, and this capacity in turn rests on Byron's representations of women.  The portrayal of women, after all, becomes the foundation upon which Byron builds his version of Romantic masculinity: "the narrative persistently explores the role women play in the establishment and maintenance of masculine identity" (8).  In effect, the overarching argument—incorporating issues of gender, publishing history, cultural psychoanalytics, reader response, etc.—finds that Don Juan elicits the "marketable vice" of male fantasy at precisely the moment when a more direct, less merely suggestive discourse was considerably less marketable (in every sense of the term).

Eisler, Benita.  Byron—Child of Passion, Fool of Fame.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

This full-length biography is not directed primarily toward a scholarly audience, and the analytical or interpretive coverage of Byron's literary work is sparse. Nonetheless, the narrative of the impetuous aristocrat—the figure that inspired a century of "Byronism" and "Byromania"—is quite compelling, particularly in its coverage of the more scandalous moments of Byron's career.

Elfenbein, Andrew.  "Silver-Fork Byron and the Image of Regency England." In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  77-92.

Elfenbein begins by describing the dual images of Regency England—on the one hand, it is a time marked by lavish displays of gaudy wealth that mask a morally empty core, and, on the other hand, it is a period when the aristocratic classes took more than usual care to demonstrate a moral righteousness and disciplined personal behavior.  Having established these contradictory views, Elfenbein examines "why one image is so much more familiar than the other by looking at Byron's reception in early Victorian culture."  The analysis focuses on the portrayals of Byron in Disraeli's Venetia (1837) and Catherine Gore's Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841).  These "silver-fork" novels, particularly in their treatments of Byron's relations with women, "suggest the inadequacy of Regency values and the need for their ultimate supersession by the supposedly better world of Victorian England" (78).

Goldberg, Leonard S.  "'This gloom . . . which can avail thee nothing': Cain and Skepticism."  Criticism 41.2 (Spring 1999): 207-32.

An examination of Byron's Cain in light of a radical and extreme skepticism: "Cain, whose acts effectively deny that mind can, should, or need have anything to do with its objects, catastrophically deifies rationality as the way towards autonomous life" (207-08). 

Goulding, Christopher.  "From Byron to Babbage: Ada Lovelace's Adventures in Mathematics."  TLS 5036 (October 8, 1999): 16.

Graham, Peter W.  "His Grand Show: Byron and the Myth of Mythmaking."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  24-42.

Offering a kind of meditation on and historical survey of the distinctively Byronic mode of self-dramatization through an interplay of confession and concealment, Graham identifies the poet more with the ironies and feints of his narrators than with any of his characters, Byronic-heroic or otherwise. The essay concentrates primarily on Childe Harold and Don Juan, with passing reference to the "Detached Thoughts" journals and "On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year."

Holland, Tom.  "Undead Byron."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  154-65.

Holland presents a survey of vampire references in Byron's writing and comments on Byron's place in the popular history of vampires and vampirism.  Vampirism, in fact, fits well—both thematically and formally—into the poetry: "it is clear that Byron wrote as he gambled, or travelled, or had sex, with the restless agitation that enabled him to know that he existed, and was keeping satiation at bay: his great enemy in life was boredom; and his great object the discovery and experience of excitements.  His poetry can therefore fittingly be interpreted as both the record and the expression of a craving for fresh sensations—a true inspiration for the figure of the vampire, that bastard offspring of his genius and fame" (154).

Housley, Paul Simpson and Priya N. Kissoon.  "The Evaluative and Spiritual Dimensions of Mountains in 'Manfred.'"  BJ 27 (1999): 90-96.

Huber, Werner.  "Byronic Bioplays."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  93-108.

Huber considers three bioplays—Liz Lochhead's Blood and Ice, Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry, and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia—examining how these dramatic representations inevitably engage in a process of the deconstruction and fragmentation of the Byronic image.  Because of the formal conventions of dramatic (as opposed to, say, prose narrative) writing, "the biographical facts and motifs acquire additional significance, they begin to appear as signs, symbols, and metonymies pointing to, and representing, a sphere of reference beyond themselves (beyond the 'historical facts' of Byron's life)" (96).

Janssen, David Alan.  "Byromania: The Romantic Malady (Lord Byron, Poetry, Mania, Melancholy, Reception)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Georgia, 1999, DAI, 60-05A (1999): 1574, 212 pages.

With its theoretical foundations set most firmly in the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan, this dissertation examines the phenomenon of "Byromania."  Janssen contends that "there exists in Byron's poetry a manic strain powerful enough to be contagious," and then argues that "the phenomenon of Byromania can be best understood as a mutual construction by Byron and his audience, which continues to inform critical readings of Byron well into the twentieth century." 

Jones, Christine Kenyon.  "Fantasy and Transfiguration: Byron and His Portraits."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999),  109-36.

Jones focuses on the distinctly visual aspect of Byron's obsessive concern with self presentation, examining such matters as fashion, weight control, and (especially) the poet's concern for and use of his many portraits.  Jones concludes: "In the same way that his poetry provided the 'word' for his readers, the visual images which he authorised in turn created the 'outline' upon which his public—both female and male 'Byromaniacs'—have fantasised the poet, building visions which have transfigured him and effectively rendered him immortal" (132).  Four plates.

Jones, Christine Kenyon.  "'Man Is a Carnivorous Production': Byron and the Anthropology of Food."  Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6 (1998): 41-58.

Kelsall, Malcolm.  "Reading Orientalism: Woman or Ida of Athens."  Review of National Literatures and World Report 1 (1998): 11-20.

Kim, Eugene Eric and Betty Alexandra Toole.  "Ada and the First Computer."  Scientific American  May 1999: 76-81.

This historical/biographical article discusses Byron's daughter's collaboration with the mathematician and innovator Charles Babbage.  One product of this collaboration was a set of notes by Ada Lovelace containing insights that prefigure the work of twentieth-century computer scientists.

Loo, Tessa de.  Een varken in het paleis.  Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1998.

The book discusses primarily Byron's experience in Albania, particularly his meeting with the Ali Pasha.  In Dutch. 

Lupak, Mario J.  Byron as a Poet of Nature: The Search for Paradise.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1999.

McDayter, Ghislaine.  "Conjuring Byron: Byromania, Literary Commodification and the Birth of Celebrity."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 43-62.

Focusing on the commodification of literature—especially Byron's literature—during the Romantic period, McDayter suggests that "this well-known imagery of metaphysical angst [about having one's sublime visions sullied by an uncomprehending and vulgar public] simultaneously veils, even as it reveals, an underlying material concern for writers in the literary market of the time" (44).  The processes of commodification are likened to a relationship of vampirism and victimization which McDayter sees as prefiguring the alienation of labor that later became so central to analyses of Victorian economics: "What this essay will explore is the manner in which this gothic language of monstrosity and consumption . . . in some respects does the cultural work of actually writing the emergent discourse of production and commodification that intellectuals such as Marx would ultimately develop and amplify in their own work" (44).  The process of commodification—both of poetry and of poets—signifies, in McDayter's phrase, the "industrialisation of Romanticism" (44).

Nicholson, Andrew.  "Byron and Ovid."  BJ 27 (1999): 76-81.

O'Connor, Ralph. "Mammoths and Maggots: Byron and the Geology of Cuvier." Romanticism 5.1 (1999): 26-42.

Focusing primarily on the late play "Cain," O'Connor suggests that Byron was influenced by Cuvier's geological research, especially insofar as that research began to raise doubts about the truth of Genesis.

Oueijan, Naji B.  "Western Exoticism and Byron's Orientalism."  Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6 (1998): 27-39.

Oueijan, Naji B.  A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron's Oriental Tales.  New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Part historical and cultural study and part reference work, Oueijan's book opens with chapters describing Byron's experience as traveller and student of Eastern cultures and sketching the compositional backgrounds of the oriental tales.  The long central chapter consists of an extensive, alphabetically organized encyclopedia of oriental elements in Byron's poetry wherein one can look up individual terms and place names (e.g. "Giaour" and "Abydos"), character names (e.g. "Gulnare" and "Leila"), and broader categories of Eastern culture (e.g. "Adultery" and "Marriage").  The book concludes with several brief appendices that list Byron's reading in orientalism, language and literature, and travel writing; there is also a useful bibliography of secondary materials for students of orientalism in Byron.

Pont, Graham.  "Byron and Nathan: A Musical Collaboration."  BJ 27 (1999): 51-65.

A detailed historical account of of the Nathan/Byron collaboration that produced the Hebrew Melodies. Pont concentrates especially on the musical settings of the poems. As Pont puts it, "The musical side of Byron's life has been very inadequately covered by his biographers" (53), and the article helps to make up for this deficit.

Ragaz, Sharon.  "'The Truth in Masquerade': Byron's Don Juan and Walter Scott's The Antiquary."  KSJ 48 (1999): 30-34.

Identifies the source of Byron's line "The truth in masquerade" (Don Juan, IX) in Walter Scott's The Antiquary (1816).  The borrowing, which Ragaz suggests is likely unconscious, is important because "the Byron text refers explicitly to the difficulties of writing true history, [thus] it is not improbable that Byron had in mind Scott's historical novel and his extended series of meditations on fiction-making and history" (33-4).

Raizis, M. Byron.  "Childe Harold's Offspring, English and American."  BJ 27 (1999): 26-37.

Raizis surveys several Childe Harold imitations and continuations.  The account of the various poems, though chiefly introductory and evaluative, offers much material relevant both to the reception (often critical) of Byron's poem and to the emergence on an international scale of "Byronism" itself.  Works discussed include Clare's Child Harold, William Lisle Bowles's "Childe Harold's Last Pilgrimage," Hemans's Modern Greece: A Poem; the American works include John Parker's The Pilgrimage of Ormond, or Childe Harold in the New World (1831), John Augustus Shea's Adolph (also 1831), and Frederick William Thomas's The Emigrant, or Reflections While Descending the Ohio (1833).

Ralston, Ramona M. and Sidney L. Sondergard.  "Screening Byron: The Idiosyncrasies of the Film Myth."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 137-53.

Ralston and Sondergard consider seven different film representations of Byron: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Bad Lord Byron (1948), Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), Gothic (1986), Remando al viento [Rowing with the Wind] (1988), Haunted Summer (1988), and Frankenstein Unbound (1990).  The authors conclude with a listing of several general characteristics of the Byron myth.  As represented in film, Byron is marked by "an attitude of determined and notorious unconventionality," by being "sexually attractive and profligate," and by being a "generally corruptive influence [with] a propensity for cruel insensitivity" (149).  In addition, the portrayals of Byron are typically modeled on Byron's portraits; they see him as charming, witty, handsome, and troubled by the unspoken hardships of his past (sometimes signified by his limp); they emphasize his aristocratic roots; and they assume his genius as a poet, though this genius is never demonstrated.

Rawes, Alan.  "'Tears, and Tortures, and the Touch of Joy' in 'The Dream.'"  BJ 27 (1999): 82-89.

Rawes, Alan.  "Visionary Moments and the March of Time: The Influence of Wordsworth in Childe Harold I and II."  KSJ 48 (1999): 129-37.

Rawes identifies structural parallels between the lyrical segments of the opening cantos of Childe Harold and the "Greater Romantic Lyrics" (Abrams' term) of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Focusing more specifically on Wordsworth, Rawes contends that "the form and thematic development of Childe Harold I and II are the direct result not only of Byron's adoption of various features drawn from Wordsworth's lyric verse, but also of a profound opposition to Wordworth's characteristic idealization of consciousness and memory" (129).

Rishmawi, G. K.  "The Muslim East in Byron's Don Juan."  PLL 35.3 (Summer 1999): 227-43.

Rishmawi suggests that comparing Byron's portrayals of the East in the early tales to his portrayals of the East in Don Juan reveals a development in the poet's attitudes—essentially a movement from passionate commitment to a more disengaged, literary, and cosmopolitan wit.

"Risk of Collapse of Newstead Abbey, Ancestral Home of Lord Byron."  Official Journal of the European Communities: Information and Notices.  41.134 (1998): 100.

Sales, Roger.  "The Loathsome Lord and the Disdainful Dame: Byron, Cartland and the Regency Romance."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 166-83.

The essay offers a detailed examination of the "wicked" and "rakish" characters in the Regency novels of the puritanical but prolific Barbara Cartland.  Sales finds that these characters often seem to be modeled on Byron—or at least on the Byron myth—but that the "real" Byron is rather different from his romance-novel representations.  "Cartland's debauched and yet also rather suburban aristocrats are permitted to lead a Byronic lifestyle, but only on condition that they reject it dramatically and emphatically when at last true love crosses their paths.  Somebody should have mentioned this to loathsome Lord Byron.  Perhaps, poor dear, he just never met the right girl or boy" (181).

Simpkins, Scott.  "'Crises of Address': Speech-Shifting and Negative Solidarity in Byron's Lara."  Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 4.1 (Spring 1999): 19-35.

Simpkins' abstract: "Theorists of masculinity argue that men face 'role stress' due to the conflicting codes that are employed to construct a performance of manhood. Lord Byron's verse tales provide particularly good illustrations of this as his antiheroic men constantly battle each other partly because of the incompatibility they create for themselves through their conception of masculine behavior. Byron's Lara demonstrates this when two males confront each other in a public standpoint that places their masculine status at risk. The semiotic clash that occurs reveals the extent to which 'masculinity' is extremely vulnerable as a signified entity." The subsequent semiotic/rhetorical analysis concludes with the observation that "characters like Lara seem to bring about their own misfortune by virtue of their retarded conception of what it means to act like a man" (33).

Soderholm, James.  "Byronic Confession."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 184-94.

The "Byronic Confession" of the title, Soderholm explains, is "a mode of presentation in which disguise and disclosure intermix and where the aim is not forgiveness of self-expiation, but rather rhetorically evoking various responses in one's audience in order to manipulate one's own image" (184).  This is a line of autobiographical writing that stems most directly from Rousseau and thus contrasts with the Augustinian theodicial autobiographical writing that one sees in, for example, Wordsworth's Prelude. 

Spence, Gordon.  "Byron, Enoch, Calvin and the Deluge."  BJ 27 (1999): 66-75.

Stabler, Jane, ed.  Byron.  London and New York: Longman, 1998.

A collection of essays and excerpts aimed principally at a student readership and designed to consider Byron from a diverse range of critical vantage points.

Stabler, Jane.  "Women and Children First: Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and the Nineteenth-Century Readership."  CLB 105 (January 1999): 2-15.

Stabler identifies some surprising parallels and points of contact between Lamb and Byron, perhaps the most important of which is that both writers "sustain a playful and ironic dialogue with their readers, questioning the 'correct' taste of the time" (14). This leads to the conclusion that the work of the two writers shows evidence of "a campaign to reform the English stage and English culture more widely. In this, they had more in common with each other than is usually acknowledged, and at the heart of their reforming beliefs was the knowledge that if literary taste in England was to be changed, it would have to begin with comedy in its broadest sense, and with attitudes to women and children first" (15).

Stauffer, Andrew M.  "The Pleasures (and Pains) of Memory: Byron, Rogers, and Henry F. R. Soame."  N&Q  46.4 (1999): 459-61.

Stauffer identifies Henry Francis Robert Soame as the author of a poem beginning "Pleasures of memory! Oh supremely blest" that was for a time attributed to Byron and that was published by Samuel Rogers.

Stauffer, Andrew M.  “The Hero in the Harem: Byron’s Debt to Medieval Romance in Don Juan VI.”  ERR 10.1 (Winter 1999): 84-97.

Relying on both structural and historical evidence, Stauffer contends that Byron used some version of the Floire and Blancheflor romance as the basis for the Dudú episode of Don Juan VI.  This identification of the source is significant, Stauffer argues, because it shows that Byron (like Keats) saw in the romance "a naïve poetry which could be redeployed to create frankly erotic scenes undisturbed by characters' self-consciousness or guilt" (92).

Tambling, Jeremy.  "Henry James's American Byron."  The Henry James Review 20.1 (Winter 1999): 43-50.

Tambling contends that the character of Jeffrey Aspern (The Aspern Papers) is modeled on Byron's writings about being an expatriate in Italy.

Taylor, Brian W.  "Annabella, Lady Noel-Byron: A Study of Lady Byron on Education."  History of Education Quarterly 38.4 (Winter 1998): 430-55.

Biographical study highlights Lady Byron's efforts as a theorist and practitioner in education.  The essay applauds her philanthropic work and strives to see Lady Byron in her own right, not merely as a footnote to her famously estranged husband.

Whissel, Cynthia.  “’Tis more than what is called mobility’: Structure and a Development towards Understanding in Byron’s Don Juan.”  RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/donjuan.html>.

Whissel addresses the issue of structure (or lack thereof) in Don Juan, finding a kind of emotional continuity or pattern in the three major divisions of the text (cantos 1-5, 6-10, 11-end).  The analyses of these emotional patterns "led to the conclusion that far from being planless and unstructured, the poem was a model of logical development or intellectual growth as defined by Hegel’s dialectic."  The analyses are quantitative, carried out by computer and a "Dictionary of Affect."

Whitaker, Thomas R.  Mirrors of Our Playing.  Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.

In a book chiefly about twentieth-century drama, Whitaker contends—interestingly—that many of the standard works of the contemporary theater have been heavily influenced by Byron.  Most writers on the theater point to Shakespeare as the abiding ancestral presence.  "But the distinctive accents of our theater—from Wilde and Shaw to Williams, Brenton, and Stoppard—owe as much to the more elusive presence of another poet and dramatist, Lord Byron" (139).

Whittier, Ellen Dorothy.  "Concentrated Ground: The Body as Poetic Play Space in Shakespeare, Byron, Chaplin and Hugo (William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Hugo, France)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1999, DAI, 60-05A (1999): 1546, 203 pages.

The dissertation examines the representations of bodies within texts, considering them "as potential spaces for exploring, questioning, and reconceiving various aspects of artistic composition and audience response."  The section on Byron focuses on disability: "the blending of body and text helps [Byron] create one of the first innovative works about disability as complex, even paradoxical identity[.]"

Wilkes, Joanne.  Lord Byron and Madame de Staël:  Born for Opposition.  Aldershot, Brookfield VT:  Ashgate, 1999.

A detailed and well-researched account of the relations—both literary and personal—between Byron and de Staël. 

Wilson, Frances, ed.  Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture.  Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999.

An interesting and useful collection of essays focusing on the extraordinary reputation of Byron in Victorian England and after.  Wilson's introduction (pp. 1-23) presents the immediate historical and biographical contexts and then surveys the rise and promulgation of "Byronism."  The central issue throughout is as much about fame, stardom, and the cult of personality as it is about Byron himself.  As Wilson puts it, "These essays explore something of the strange relation between Byron's identity—on and off the page—and the fantasies of readers, and the identity of readers—on and off the page—and the fantasies of Byron.  They tell the tale of how it is that Byron, anticipated by his hero, 'left a Corsair's name to other times, / Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes'" (21).

Wilson, Frances.  "'An Exaggerated Woman': The Melodramas of Lady Caroline Lamb."  In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's P, 1999), 195-220.

"This essay will ask why the appearance of Caroline Lamb always turns a drama into a melodrama; why it is only melodrama which can contain the complex and intricate tales of Byron's most unhappy, gifted, and artful lover" (196).  Wilson pursues the question through several representations of the Lamb/Byron affair in three biographies (Cecil's Lord Melbourne, Blyth's Caro: The Fatal Passion, and Leslie's This For Caroline), three novels (Disraeli's Venetia, Moore's He Loved But One, and Ward's The Marriage of William Ashe), and finally in Lamb's own fictional account in Glenarvon.  The essay concludes with an evocative comparison of Lady Caroline Lamb to Diana, Princess of Wales—both figures whose public images came to overburden the historical self.

Wise, Derek.  "Byroniana: Report from the Sale Rooms and Booksellers."  BJ 27 (1999): 127-31.

Woodward, Christopher.  "Newstead Exhibition, Nottinghamshire."  Country Life, 27 May 1999: 142.

Zani, Steven J.  "B is for Byron: Constructing Romanticism(s).  The Creation of the Byron Figure (Lord Byron, Romanticism, Identity)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Binghamton, 1999, DAI, 60-04A (1999): 1149, 204 pages.

From Zani's abstract: "The dissertation focuses on the dynamics of both identity production in the biographies of Byron, and the production of 'Romanticism' itself in the texts that surround and define his life.  It depends upon the critical insights of Lacan, Benjamin, Foucault and De Man, among others.  From this perspective, I explore the degree to which Byron's supposed narcissism, education, and genius, while always components of Western identity as such, became exaggerated as the truth of identity in the Romantic period, and have encoded our traditional understanding of 'Romanticism' as a literary period."

III. HAZLITT AND HUNT

Note: This is the Hazlitt/Hunt section from the letterpress version of the Current Bibliography (without reviews). More complete and detailed bibliographies are available for both Hazlitt and Hunt.

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Cook, John, ed.  Selected Writings, by William Hazlitt.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Gates, Eleanor, ed.  Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters.  Essex, CT: Falls River Publications, 1998.

A rather idiosyncratic selection of some 442 letters from Hunt's voluminous correspondence, covering dates ranging from 1802 to 1859.  Many of the Hunt letters have not previously been published.  Gates also includes 14 Hazlitt letters. 

Wu, Duncan, ed.  The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays, by William Hazlitt.  Introduction by Tom Paulin.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999.

A selection from Hazlitt's last major work.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO HAZLITT AND HUNT

Bromwich, David.  Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic.  New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Reissue of the 1983 volume, this version has a new preface and a fresh bibliography.

Cox, Jeffrey N. "Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' 'Other'." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/huntlakers.html>.

Cox identifies a number of parallels between the critical treatment of the "Lakers" and the critical treatment of the Cockney School; as a consequence of the comparative analysis, Cox finds that the latter school—though frequently ideologically derided—offers a useful cultural model: "The real Cockney School, the circle gathered around Hunt, offered itself through its collective, collaborative work as a kind of prefigurative community; they sought an image in their circle of the reformed world they imagined. Against the violence of a society long devoted to war and the cultural despondency they saw embodied in the Lakers, the Cockneys pitted sociability: the bonds between them offered the hope for a society unbound."

Davies, Damian Walford and Laurent Châtel.  "'A Mad Hornet': Beckford's Riposte to Hazlitt."  ERR 10.4 (Fall 1999): 452-79.

The authors point out that Hazlitt's negative commentaries on Beckford's Fonthill collection have been quite well documented, but that Beckford's response to this criticism has been unknown.  Relying on references in the correspondence of the painter Ange Denis Macquin and on Beckford's annotations to Hazlitt's Table Talk, Davies and Châtel contend that not only did Beckford see Hazlitt's original 1822 articles but that the marginalia in Beckford's copy of Table Talk "must now be seen to stand as a fascinating, and surprisingly restrained, riposte manquée" (455).  The article presents numerous transcriptions from the primary sources. N. B.: Four illustrations that were to be published with this article were mistakenly omitted from the journal. The illustrations appear in ERR 11.1 (Winter 2000), pp. 97-99.

Koenigsberger, Kurt M.  "Liberty, Libel, and Liber Amoris: Hazlitt on Sovereignty and Death."  SIR 38.2 (Summer 1999): 281-310.

This theoretically nimble essay focuses on the slippery representations of self and identity in Hazlitt's Liber Amoris.  Hazlitt's text plays with this instability of representation, teasing it into an ironic and unstable foundation for genre itself: "the characteristic that would distinguish confessional from fiction and demarcate genre depends upon a fixed relation between Hazlitt and the subject of his narrative, a relationship which is never firmly established" (283).

Kucich, Greg.  “’The Wit in the Dungeon’: Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries.”  ERR 10.2 (Spring 1999): 242-53.

Kucich suggests that Leigh Hunt's prison cell—occupied for two years after Hunt was found guilty of libel in 1813—formed the initial site wherein the Cockney School was formed.  This School (increasingly viewed as cultural counter to the Lake Poets) and the activities in Hunt's prison cell "helped foster a group identity and a cultural project that strongly affected the course of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century while establishing an important model of progressive gender relations among the period's second generation of writers."  Appears also in RoN, see below.

Kucich, Greg. "'The Wit in the Dungeon': Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cockneycoteries.html>.

Appears also in ERR, see above.

Lapp, Robert Keith.  Contest for Cultural Authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Distresses of the Regency.  Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999.

Lapp focuses on Hazlitt's satirical reviews of Coleridge published between 1816 and 1818.  In so doing, Contest for Cultural Authority asserts that Hazlitt's reviews were part of the broader post-Waterloo political debate and that they constitute Hazlitt's criticism of what he took to be Coleridge's conservatism.  The Hazlitt-Coleridge debate thus becomes the opening into a discussion of the complex dynamic of literature, politics, and culture.

Mahoney, Charles.  "Upstaging the Fall: Coriolanus and the Spectacle of Romantic Apostasy."  SIR 38.1 (Spring 1999): 29-50.

The essay focuses on Hazlitt's writing on the figure of Coriolanus, a figure remarkable for its inherent political instability.  The drama explores the question of the relationship between poetry and politics, and, as Mahoney writes, "no reader is more preoccupied with this question than Hazlitt, whose writing during this period is riddled with his attempts to formulate its implications for contemporary poetry[.]" 

Mahoney, Charles.  “Liber Amoris: Figuring Out the Coquette.”  ERR 10.1 (Winter 1999): 23-52.

Mahoney presents a close analysis of Hazlitt’s biographically-inspired preoccupation with “coquettes.”  For Mahoney, Hazlitt’s experience in striving to know some coquette becomes itself the figure of a kind of Romantic striving, inevitably futile, to identify with some Other—a figure of failing desire.  The epistemological attempt to fully grasp the figurative is doomed from the outset, and thus “we run the risk of wearing ourselves out, like Hazlitt, in the name of a futile attempt to arrest an always absent other, to unriddle that which we already understand to be irrecuperably riddled with the errors attendant upon la folie d’amour” (27).

Purkayastha, Mali.  "Hazlitt on Hogarth: A Problem of Perspective."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 31-33.

Stam, David H.  "'A Glutton for Books': Leigh Hunt and the London Library, 1844-46."  Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 6.2 (Spring 1998): 149-89.

IV. KEATS

Note: This is the Keats section from the letterpress version of the Current Bibliography (without reviews). A more complete and detailed Keats bibliography is available here.

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Cook, Elizabeth, ed.  Selected Poetry, by John Keats.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Keenlyside, Perry, comp.  Realms of Gold: Letters and Poems of John Keats.  [2 audio compact discs.]  Read by Samuel West and Matthew Marsh.  [Germany]: Naxos Audiobooks, 1999.

McMahon, Lynn.  "Anniversary."  Washington Post Book World (31 October 1999): 12.

A poem acknowledging Keats's birthday and printed along with Keats's "This Living Hand." 

Weil, James L.  "From the Life: A Letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor."  KSJ 48 (1999): 20-21.

Brief commentary and complete transcription of a letter from Severn to Taylor, 21 January, 1825.  The letter, now in the Morgan Library, originally accompanied a sketch of Keats.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO KEATS

Abrams, M. H.  "Keats's Poems: The Material Dimensions." In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp  (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 36-53.

Abrams brackets the various approaches to Keats's poems that concentrate on "content" or "ideas" and looks instead at Keats's style.  The aim is to explore and clarify what is meant by the term "Keatsian," and Abrams identifies a distinctive materiality at the core, a materiality both in the form of a richness and complexity of sound and in a referential concreteness of image and expression.  As Abrams expresses it, "To read him rightly, we need to recognize that he is preeminently a poet of one world, however painful his awareness of the shortcomings of that world when measured against the reach of human desire.  And Keats's one world is the material world of this earth, this life, and this body—this sexual body with all its avidities and its full complement of the sense, internal as well as external, and what traditionally are called the 'lower' no less than the 'higher' senses" (44).

Bate, Walter Jackson.  "The Endurance of Keats."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp  (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 54-56.

Brief, anecdotal piece identifying some reasons why Keats's poetry has endured in the canon of English literature.

Boland, Eavan.  "The Limits of the Imagination." In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998) 82-87.

Boland celebrates the unusual gifts of a fellow poet: "No poet I can think of encountered that art [poetry] more humanely than John Keats.  No poet left it more ready for the testing times which are ahead of it" (87).

Bornstein, George.  "How to Read a Page: Modernism and Material Textuality."  Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (Spring 1999): 29-60.

In a discussion of the material presentation of words on the page, one of Bornstein's key examples involves the various manuscript and print embodiments of Keats's "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer."

Bromwich, David.  "Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998) 183-88.

This brief essay identifies Keats as the supreme theorist and exemplar of "the aesthetic sense of poetry."  Bromwich contends that Keats's letters and poems focus on the sheer discipline of poetry, on the sacrifice made in the name of art.  The essay concludes with a list of six aesthetic principles—distilled from Keats's writing—that define the modern work of art.

Burton, James.  "Keats and Coldness."  KSR 13 (1999): 15-23.

The essay concentrates on the representation of "coldness" in Keats's poems, arguing that the sense can elicit a kind of existential intersubjectivity between poem and readers.  Burton discusses especially "La Belle Dame sans Merci," The Eve of St. Agnes, and "This Living Hand."

de Almeida, Hermione.  "Prophetic Extinction and the Misbegotten Dream in Keats."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 165-82.

Hermione de Almeida writes primarily about the Hyperion poems, concentrating on the peculiarity of extinction in a pre-Darwinian world: "I focus in particular on the novelty of the concept of extinction during the period and its connection to contemporary Romantic notions about the misconceived or misbegotten creations of the mind" (165).  What emerges is an argument that has much to say about extinction, evolution, and the conception of history.  Indeed, de Almeida finds that history itself is represented in the poems as "neither grand and Hegelian nor giant and Titanic.  It is natural, interrupted and brief, and, like a dream, seen only in its moments of ending" (179).

Deane, Nichola.  "Keats's Lover's Discourse and the Letters to Fanny Brawne."  KSR 13 (1999): 105-14.

Deane reads the self representations in Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne using the model developed by Roland Barthes in his A Lover's Discourse (1977): "In examining the sexual and sentimental excesses of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne, I hope to defamiliarise this both over-familiar, and, paradoxically, neglected correspondence, highlighting its importance both as a factor in determining Keats's posthumous reputation, and its centrality to the broader 'lover's discourse' which pervades Keats's work" (106).

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning.  "Keats's Sonnet 'To Sleep,' Sidney, Drummond, Daniel and Beaumont and Fletcher."  ELN 36.3 (March 1999): 61-67.

Edgecombe identifies several sources and even "borrowings" in Keats's sonnet, eventually placing the Keats poem in the context of Romantic era plagiarism, or, more accurately, a kind of literary appropriation and transformation.

Endo, Paul.  "Seeing Romanticism in 'Lamia.'"  ELH 66.1 (Spring 1999): 111-28.

Endo considers Keats's later romances—especially Lamia—and points to a shortcoming not of the title character's ability to sustain illusion but rather of the inadequacy of rationality to fully grasp the multifarious condition of reality.

Epstein, Joseph.  "The Medical Keats."  Hudson Review 52.1 (Spring 1999): 44-64.

The essay recounts the familiar circumstances of Keats's biography with particular emphasis on his early medical training.  Epstein wonders what might have happened had Keats been able to live through a normal life span.

Franta, Andrew.  "Keats and the Review Aesthetic."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 343-64.

The essay examines Keats's conflicted relationship with a reading public—on the one hand courting favor with a readership and on the other rejecting the idea that he might be writing to satisfy an audience rather than the pure dictates of a love of poetry.  Keats's early poems especially represent "not an escape from the kind of disputes that characterize the literary market and the reading audience but a site that reflects and reviews the conflicts of the market and the public" (344).  The examination of Keats's relations with a reading public and with the reviews enables Franta to speculate about the more general issue of the rise of a mass readership and to consider the complex and historically specific relationships between aesthetic experience and critical judgment.

Henderson, Andrea.  “Keats, Tighe, and the Chastity of Allegory.”  ERR 10.3 (Summer 1999): 279-306.

Focusing on conceptions of identity, subjectivity, and "soul-making," Henderson finds Keats to be split between "an effort to adhere to masculine ideals of soul-making" but at the same time "enjoying some of the specifically literary benefits of the feminine image of the soul" (280).  Loosely speaking, this generates an inner tension between the aspiring poet who seeks to forge a distinct identity and the poet of "negative capability" who "has no self."  Henderson pursues the argument by way of a detailed comparitive analysis of Tighe's Psyche and Keats's "Ode to Psyche."

Hoagwood, Terence Allan.  "Keats and the Critical Tradition: The Topic of History."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 153-64.

Hoagwood distinguishes between two ways of relating Keats to history: an "inside story" which is essentially the development of Keats as a kind of professional subject or "segment on a syllabus produced for occupational reasons," and an "outside story" which considers how Keats has fit into the larger social world.  The former approach relies on close reading and subtle interpretation.  But, Hoagwood concludes, "It is probably outside the poems' strictly verbal formations—outside their textual nuance—that their real-life meanings are found and made" (161).

Jones, Elizabeth.  "The Cockney School of Poetry: Keats in the Suburbs."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 120-31.

Jones focuses on the class and cultural significance of the fact that Keats lived in the trendy suberb of Hampstead: "Keats's early poetry offers a literary parallel to a rapidly changing British urban landscape and allows us to see his being criticized for 'vulgarity' in the light of a changing cultural consciousness that threatened some of the cherished values of Britain's established classes" (120).  A longer version of the essay appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal 45 (1996): 23-43.

Ketchian, Sonia A.  "In the Forest with Anna Akhmatova and John Keats."  KSJ 48 (1999): 138-56.

Keats's poetry was relatively little-known in nineteenth-century Russia, but Ketchian discovers an early (1911) influence in the work of Akhmatova.  The Russian poet "was so fully aware of Keats that in her early poem 'In the Forest' she reconceptualizes a concentrated moment of high tragedy from his 'Isabella, Or the Pot of Basil,' with her very title reverberating with allusion" (156).

Lawrence, Elizabeth A.  "Melodious Truth: Keats, a Nightingale, and the Human/Nature Boundary."  Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment  [Reno] 6.2 (1999): 21-30.

Lee, Debbie.  "Poetic Voodoo in Lamia: Keats in the Possession of African Magic."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 132-52.

Seeing Lamia's palace as an allegorical representation of Africa and Lamia's ability to cast spells as a representation of African magic, Lee reads Keats's late narrative in terms of colonial explorations.  The result is both revivifying and dangerous: "Keats takes hold of or possesses Lamia's African mysteries and so re-enlivens his poetic imagination.  At the same time, the poem sounds a cautionary note: British possession of African magic could be brutally destructive to both cultures" (133).  The danger implicit in casting spells is likened on the one hand to a kind of voodoo and on the other to Keats's own practice of writing poetry.

Levine, Philip.  "On First Looking into John Keats's Letters."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 201-11.

An autobiographical account of Levine's initial encounters with Keats's poems and letters: Keats, for Levine, is "an extraordinary human soul animating us still" (211).

Lopez, Debbie.  "Liberties with Lamia: The 'Gordian Knot' of Relations between Keats and Hawthorne."  Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations  2.2 (October 1998): 141-60.

McFarland, Thomas.  The Mask of Keats: The Endeavour of a Poet.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Reiman, Donald H. "Keats and the Third Generation."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 109-19.

Reiman contends that Keats was not so much one of the three canonical second-generation Romantic poets as the best of the third generation of Romantics.  Looked at in this way, the mismatch between Keats and the other Romantics becomes an issue more of generational difference than of social class.  This third generation was made up of writers who emerged from the middle classes rather than the aristocracy and who were motivated into literature by a drive toward self-expression rather than classical training.  The consequences of this approach are rather far-reaching: "John Keats's fame and influence have grown in our day because he was the nineteenth century's best twentieth-century poet" (117).

Robinson, Jeffrey C.  Reception and Poetics in Keats: "My Ended Poet."  New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

A study of the numerous poems of praise for and commemoration of Keats.  Robinson divides the study into two large sections: first, a reception history that focuses on commemorative poems of various sorts (including Adonais), and second, "a sketch of what [Robinson] believe[s] to be a more vital Keatsian poetics both in terms of familiar poems and of those that tend to be neglected or relegated to a minor place in his ouvre" (7).  The book has a useful Appendix which reproduces many of the poems mentioned in the text.

Ryan, Robert and Ronald A. Sharp, eds. The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998.

A collection of essays—many by very prominent Keatsians, Romanticists, and poets—commemorating the bicentennial of Keats's birth.

Sharp, Ronald A.  "Keats and Friendship."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 66-81.

Sharp discusses the importance of—and Keats's dedication to—a close circle of friends including Cowden Clarke, Joseph Severn, Benjamin Bailey, John Hamilton Reynolds, Charles Brown, Leigh Hunt, and others: "from beginning to end, Keats's was a life densely crowded and textured with friendships and resonant with friends' voices.  He was aware of the importance of friendship and profoundly reflective about its nature" (66).  In Sharp's view, Keats's poems are thus imbued with a kind of open-hearted friendliness that could acknowledge both the joys and the sorrows of personal relationships: "What I want to emphasize here is that Keats's ability to accept the sorrow inherent in friendship without reducing friendship to therapy accounts in large measure for the authenticity—the lack of meretriciousness—of both his empathy and his delight" (80).  The essay also appears in the Kenyon Review, 21.1 (1999): 124-37.

Sharp, Ronald A.  "Keats and Friendship."  Kenyon Review 21.1 (1999): 124-37.

See above.

Siegel, Jonah.  "Among the English Poets: Keats, Arnold, and the Placement of Fragments."  VP 37.2 (Summer 1999): 215-31.

Siegel uses Keats's poetry as a prime example of the effects of anthologizing an English literary tradition in the nineteenth century.  The argument "presents the reception of Keats in mid- and late-Victorian England as characteristic of a certain anxious relation to the accumulation of cultural knowledge directly related to that motivating the later nineteenth-century anthology."  As Siegel expresses it, Keats "came to have the effect he did in Victorian culture in part because he so well represented emergent notions of accumulation and organization" (215).

Steiner, George.  "The Dog Did Not Bark: A Note on Keats in Translation."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 189-200.

Brief discourse on the odd fact that Keats seems very much "English-centered."  Poetic translations make up very little of Keats's writing (in contrast to, say, Shelley or Byron), and Keats's poems are far less available and influential in translation than other poets' works. 

Stillinger, Jack.  "Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 10-35.

"I am interested in what happens when each of the principal elements of the literary transaction—author, text, and reader—is viewed as a complex of multiples.  My aim is to explain, first, why there are so many different ideas of what a Keats poem means and, second, why we think Keats was a great poet" (14).  Finally, Stillinger comes to a conclusion involving a version of authorial intent: "Who is ultimately responsible for this grand complexity of author, text, and reader?  I believe the one indispensable element is the author." (30).  The essay concludes with an appendix listing 59 very different critical approaches to Keats's Eve of St. Agnes.

Stillinger, Jack.  Reading the Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

This study considers Keats's Eve of St. Agnes not so much to forward any one "right" reading but rather to focus attention on the multiple complexities of writing, reading and interpretation.  Stillinger sets forth his own position in the Preface: his aim is to show that the apparently conservative notion that there are "major authors" who wrote "major works" and the apparently radical notion that there is no one right interpretation to any literary work are not necessarily incompatible beliefs.  As Stillinger explains it, "My ideal is, in effect, interpretive democracy, and, like political democracy, it negotiates between individual freedom . . . and some familiar restraints (in the form of factuality, comprehensiveness, and consensus)" (ix).  The book includes chapters on theory and methodology, on the complexities of both authorship and readerships, and, perhaps most interestingly, on a listing of 59 different interpretations of the poem, each with some supporting commentary.  An Appendix presents a complete reading text of St. Agnes, with apparatus.  [See also Stillinger's essay in the Ryan-Sharp collection, # 602 above.]

Turley, Richard Marggraf.  "Indolent Minds, Indolent Men, and 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.'"  RES 50.198 (May 1999): 204-07.

Points to a more prominent influence of Charles Cowden Clarke on Keats than has heretofore been acknowledged.

Walsh, John Evangelist.  Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats.  New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

An elegiac, biographical account of Keats's last days in Italy.  Walsh includes a good deal of information about Fanny Brawne.

Ward, Aileen.  "Keats and Endurance."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 57-65.

The essay—part of a celebration of Keats's 200^th birthday—offers a kind of meditation on the endurance of Keats's writing and a poignant commentary on the relationship between the quality of the late works and the poet's knowledge of his own impending death.

White, R. S.  "Keats and the Crisis of Medicine."  KSR 13 (1999): 58-75.

Biographical and historical account of Keats's experience in medicine, especially the years at Guys Hospital and the difficult decision to leave medicine for poetry.  White finds that one motivation for Keats's move was that "his own teachers were in the forefront of the radical revolution [in medical science] with which he found himself out of sympathy" (75).

Wolfson, Susan J.  "Keats and Gender Criticism."  In The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998), 88-108.

Wolfson sees Keats (both writer and biographical subject) as contradictory and multifarious: "His overall syntax of gender is more zigzag than linear, and the total story more indeterminate than definitive" (90).  The discussion describes a kind of perplexity and "indolence"—borrowing a key Keatsian term and adapting it to the intricately gendered terms in which Keats pursued a (masculine) ambition for Fame while recognizing this drive as itself a "rival to the heart in love" (103).

Woolford, John.  "Keats Among the Mountains."  EIC 49.1 (January 1999): 22-43.

Focusing on Keats's encounters with a supposedly sublime and mountainous landscape (e.g. the 1818 walking tour), Woolford discovers an increasingly precise sense of disillusionment and disappointment.  This sense, worked through in both the letters and the poems, shows Keats to be dedicating himself to the art of the beautiful and rejecting "the austerity of the mountainous sublime to which Wordsworth (and Milton) had been committed" (40).

V. THE SHELLEYS

Note: This is the Shelley section from the letterpress version of the Current Bibliography (without reviews). More complete and detailed bibliographies are available for both Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

MacDonald, David Lorne and Kathleen Scherf, eds.  Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  2^nd ed.  Broadview, 1999.

Paley, Morton D., ed.  The Last Man, by Mary Shelley.  New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

This volume, from Oxford's "World Classics" series, has notes and an Introduction by Paley.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft.  Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.  New York: Modern Library, 1999.

This Modern Library edition has an Introduction by Wendy Steiner.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft.  Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.  New York: Doubleday, 1999.

From the New York Public Library Collector's Edition series.

Smith, Johanna M., ed.  Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.  2nd ed.  New York: St. Martin's P, 2000.

Revised and extended version of the teaching edition; includes new critical essays and an additional essay demonstrating how different critical approaches can be combined. 

Tomalin, Claire, ed.  Maurice, or, The Fisher's Cot: A Tale, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  New York: Knopf, 1998.

Tomalin's edition of the recently discovered children's tale includes an extensive introduction explaining the circumstances of the tale's discovery.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO THE SHELLEYS

Albright, Richard S. "'In the mean time, what did Perdita?': Rhythms and Reversals in Mary Shelley's The Last Man." RoN 13 (February 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/perdita.html>.

"In The Last Man we see multiple levels of primary and secondary imagination at work: Verney's act of perception and then recreation is enclosed within the Sibyl's perception and recreation, which in turn is enclosed within the Author's perception of the tale written on the Sibylline leaves and his or her efforts to 'model the work into a consistent form' (4); the modeling efforts are equivalent to Coleridge's 'struggles to idealize and to unify.'" 

Arditi, Neil Lucien.  "The Uses of Shelley: 'Alastor' to 'The Triumph of Life' (Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude)."  Ph.D. diss., U of Virginia, 1998, DAI, 60-01A (1999): 138, 213 pages.

Arditi presents a reading of Shelley's later works with particular attention to Shelley's revisionary confrontation with Wordsworth.  The aim of the study is "to re-establish Shelley's credentials as our contemporary" and even "to suggest ways in which Shelley is still out in front of us."

Bennett, Betty T., ed.  Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley by their Contemporaries.  Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto, 1999.

Brennan, Matthew C.  "Mary Shelley's Cautionary Narrative: Frankenstein as Therapy."  Lamar Journal of the Humanities 24.2 (Fall 1999): 5-11.

Brewer, William D.  "William Godwin, Chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck."   PLL 35.2 (Spring 1999): 187-205.

The essay considers the influence of Godwin's notion of chivalry on Mary Shelley's novel.  Especially useful here is the conception of chivalry not as the remnant of some more autocratic and rigorously gendered past but as an imaginative alternative to the shortcomings and inequities of current social relations.

Brigham, Linda C.  "Disciplinary Hybridity in Shelley's 'Adonais.'"  Mosaic 32.3 (September 1999): 21-39.

Rather than seeing Shelley's elegy for Keats in terms of the poetic and philosophical ideas it embodies, Brigham examines relationships between Shelley's imagery and contemporary scientific understanding.  Ultimately, Brigham sees the poem as "anti-modern."

Brigham, Linda C.  "Alastor, Apostasy, and the Ecology of Criticism." In Irony and Clerisy,  Ed. Deborah Elise White.  RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/brigham/alastor.html>.

Brigham describes a conflict in Alastor between an escapist equivocation on the one hand and political commitment on the other.  Then, Brigham argues, "Rather than searching for a resolution to this long-familiar inconsistency, in this essay I suggest these contradictions as by products of agonistic pressures themselves. 'Alastor's' peculiar, sporadic attachment to polemic is the result of a form of argument gone haywire, like the logic of 'Live free or die' in a global context of nuclear deterrence" (par 3).  In effect, Brigham contends that the poem—theoretically considered—is radically reflexive, that its pursuit of pleasure destabilizes any expression of a totalizing "strong theory" (and vice versa), but that this interchange between pleasure and theory constitutes the ideological stance of the poem.  In her title Brigham calls this interdependence the "ecology of criticism."

Bush, Ronald.  "Rereading the Exodus: Frankenstein, Ulysses, The Satanic Verses, and Other Postcolonial Texts."  In Transcultural Joyce, ed. Karen R. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 129-47.

Caldwell, Janis McLarren.  "Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein." In The Ethics in Literature, eds. Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods.  (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998), 262-74.

Carlson, Julie.  "Coming After: Shelley's Proserpine."  TSLL 41.4 (Winter 1999): 351-77.

"This essay analyzes a few of Mary Shelley's points of entry into the [Proserpine] legend that she recomposes in the early months of 1820 as the mythological drama Proserpine to examine how Proserpine joins the novella Mathilda (1819-20) in rescuing this mother-daughter from the hell in which she is wandering in that 'tragic year' of 1819." 

Chantler, Ashley.  "Echoes of Cowper in Frankenstein."  N&Q 46.1 (March 1999): 33-34.

Chantler, Ashley.  "The Waltons: Frankenstein's Literary Family?"  BJ 27 (1999): 102-104.

Clampitt, Heather Lynn.  "Cartesian Creations: Frankenstein's Battle against the Body (Mary Shelley)."  M.A. thesis, U of Texas at Arlington, 1999, MAI, 38-01 (1999): 48, 53 pages.

Colbert, Benjamin.  "Contemporary Notice of the Shelleys' History of a Six Weeks' Tour: Two New Early Reviews."  KSJ 48 (1999): 22-29.

Considering two early reviews (Eclectic Review and Monthly Review) of the Shelleys' late 1817 production, Colbert argues for a reading of the work in context of travel writing rather than the more familiar teleological reading of the History leading up to Mont Blanc.

Daffron, Eric.  "Male Bonding: Sympathy and Shelley's Frankenstein."  Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21 (1999): 415-36.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning.  "Lucretius, Shelley and 'Ode to the West Wind.'"  KSR 13 (1999): 134.

In this brief note, Edgecombe identifies imagistic parallels between Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, book 6, and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind."

Epstein, Andrew.  "'Flowers that Mock the Corse Beneath': Shelley's Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Influence."  KSJ 48 (1999): 90-128.

Epstein sees Adonais as Shelley's deliberate response to Keats's famous admonition to "load every rift with ore."  The resulting poem is fraught with ambivalence and contradiction—the consequence of Shelley's complex relationship with Keats as both brother and rival:  "The pervasive undecidability that colors Adonais's content, structure, and imagery stems as much from Shelley's relationship with Keats's poems and his ambivalent feelings about Keats and poetic independence, as from Shelley's characteristic penchant for unstable and self-contentious rhetorical figures" (94).

Finch, Peter.  "Monstrous Inheritance: The Sexual Politics of Genre in Shelley's St. Irvyne."  KSJ 48 (1999): 35-68.

Finch sees a kind of nascent narrative strategy in the two, seemingly unrelated plots of St. Irvyne.  Formally, the two plots dramatize "dual and often conflicting generic conventions, the gothic and the sentimentalist."  The result of the analysis finds that the novel is indeed "immature" in that it shows a young writer experimenting with potential narrative modes, "yet it also reveals [Shelley] . . . as an accomplished interrogator and subtle unbinder of existing regimes of literary discourse, in a manner that deserves to be given much more scholarly attention" (37).

Fischer, Doucet Devin and Stephen Wagner.  "Visionary Daughters of Albion: A Bicentenary Exhibition Celebrating Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley."  Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 6.2 (Spring 1998): 3-148.

Foss, Chris.  "Shelley's Revolution in Poetic Language: A Kristevan Reading of Act IV to Prometheus Unbound."  ERR 9.4 (Fall 1998): 501-18.

Frosch, Thomas.  "Passive Resistance in Shelley: A Psychological View."  JEGP 98.3 (July 1999):  373-95.

Focusing on the apparent contradiction between Shelley's avowed stance of passive resistance and the numerous moments—in both the literature and the letters—of violent and aggressive anger, Frosch contends that Shelley was psychologically conflicted.  For example: "The urge to demolish the father is restrained by the masochistic urge to submit to him, and, conversely, the urge to submit is restrained by the urge to demolish" (395).  Passive resistance in this context emerges as a kind of psychic stalemate, essential both as a psychological defense and as a political tactic.

Goodall, Jane.  "Frankenstein and the Reprobate's Conscience."  Studies in the Novel 31.1 (Spring 1999): 19-43.

Goodall presents a historically informed argument focusing on the notion and function of conscience in Frankenstein—an area which has been misunderstood due, in part, to a twentieth-century emphasis on the novel as a critique of science: "Frankenstein's conscience is foreign to us and needs to be approached across a cultural divide that is elided when we concentrate our attentions on Frankenstein's science.  Yet if the effort is made to cross this divide, there emerges a radically altered perspective on the novel, with the prospect of an interpretation that focuses not on the horrors of science, but on the phantasmic horrors turned into realities by the monstrous conscience" (21).

Goulding, Christopher.  "Shelley from Pisa."  TLS 5023 (July 9, 1999): 14-15.

Goulding includes the full transcription of a Shelley letter of 27 August 1820; the letter—from Brooks Collection in the Northumberland County RO, Newcastle—mentions Southey and Keats and sheds some light on A Philosophical View of Reform.

Graziano, Anne Leigh.  "Extreme Measures: Individuation in Crisis in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot)."  Ph.D. diss., SUNY Buffalo, 1999, DAI, 60-02A (1999): 432, 394 pages.

"I specifically contend that protagonists of nineteenth-century novels are tenuous figures positioned between two threatening, but constitutive possibilities: complete incorporation by others, on one hand, and utter singularity, on the other."  The Last Man is among the works discussed.

Harrington-Austin, Eleanor J.  Shelley and the Development of English Imperialism: British India and England.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1999.

Heohne, Horst.  Percy Bysshe Shelley: Leben und Werk.  Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Jones, Raymond E.  "Re-Visioning Frankenstein: The Keeper of the Isis Light as Theodicy."  Canadian Children's Literature/Litterature Canadienne pour la Jeunesse 93 (1999): 6-19.

Koelbleitner, Chris.  "Frankenstein and Great Expectations: The Romantic Child and the Victorian Adult (Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens)."  M.A. thesis, Concordia U (Canada), 1999, MAI, 37-06 (1999): 1630, 157 pages.

Kohler, Michael.  "Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the Paternalist State in The Cenci."  SIR 37.4 (Winter 1998): 545-89.

"This essay will explore the way in which Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci takes up a burden more often laid at the feet of political or moral philosophy: the discovery of proper comportment, or ethical stance, towards the claims of law" (545).  Thus begins a complex analysis both of Shelley's early conception of state power as founded on the consent of the governed and of The Cenci's refashioning of this relationship of power.  The later drama, Kohler argues, "provides an account of legal obligation and political authority at odds both with his earlier beliefs and with a strong scholarly tendency to treat The Cenci as an essentially anti-authoritarian representation" (546).

Komisaruk, Adam.  "'So Guided by a Silken Cord': Frankenstein's Family Values."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 409-41.

Komisaruk challenges the common notion that some private sphere—the bourgeois family—could serve as a sound basis for an enlightened and egalitarian society.  Instead, the essay contends that "Shelley draws a precise analogy between the ethos of personal (e.g. domestic) privacy and economic privatization, which flourished in tandem during the age of revolution" (411).   This analogy enables Komisaruk to expand on a reading of the novel as embodying a broad economic and ideological critique: "The family is a rehearsal space for the exclusionary attitudes of the privatized public sphere; the self nurtured in the home is a self who will go out and pursue its own interests, not the community's" (441).

Laplace-Sinatra, Michael.  "'I will live beyond this life': Shelley, Prefaces and Reviewers."  KSR 13 (1999): 88-104.

Laplace-Sinatra examines the Prefaces to Shelley's published works, considering especially "how Shelley used his prefatory writings to respond to and, in some occasions, to try to pre-empt the reviewers' attacks on his poetry" (89).

Lee, Monika.  Rousseau's Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 1999.

Lee examines the relationship between Rousseau and Shelley, considering especially how Rousseau's work influenced Shelley and how Rousseau himself is represented in Shelley's poetry.  The analysis—detailed and persuasive—offers illuminating chapters on Queen Mab, Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, The Sensitive Plant, and, of course, The Triumph of Life.  The book is theoretically astute with an eye always on issues of Romantic subjectivity, language, and the complexities of literary representation.

Lussier, Mark. "Wave Dynamics as Primary Ecology in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound." RoN 16 (November 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/physics.html>.

"Shelley’s use of the tension between differing constructions of the fundamental nature of light arises from a historical context of heated exchanges between proponents arguing over the nature of light itself, following observations that light tends to act as both wave and particle. This essay, then, seeks to bridge the somewhat conflicting modes of reading 'light' by a two part procedure: initially, I examine the historical context of Shelley’s understanding of the dynamics of light, and subsequently I strive to articulate a theoretical framework within which to connect Shelley’s thought to physical models expressed within the new physics of relativity and quantum as these relate to matters of Shelley’s deep ecology. Phrased differently, the essay seeks to find a common ground or middle path between conflicting descriptions of the play of light offered by de Man, Reiman, and Plotnitsky, for all such descriptions are required to investigate fully the role that light plays in Shelley’s argument for the complementarity of consciousness and cosmos as boundary condition for the deepest of ecologies."

Markley, A. A.  "Tainted Wethers of the Flock: Homosexuality and Homosocial Desire in Mary Shelley's Novels."  KSR 13 (1999): 115-33.

In this study of gender and sexuality in Mary Shelley's later novels, Markley claims that Shelley "uses intimations of homosexuality and homosocial desire to amplify the competitive nature of relationships between men and to illustrate the social danger implicit in a male-male desire that excludes women."  Female characters, by contrast, "persistently work to dismantle traditional systems of power in the relationships with men and with other women" (116).  The argument has obvious biographical ramifications; the novels that come in for most detailed treatment are The Last Man, Valperga, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.

Marks, Clifford J.  "Fragments and Fragility: Permeable Foundations in 'The Triumph of Life.'"  ERR 10.4 (Fall 1999): 515-41.

The essay focuses on the ethical dimensions of Shelley's last poem, drawing particular attention to the "the poem's and life's fragile foundations"—a fragility that Marks interprets as potentially advantageous since it "entreats individuals into ethical relationships and community" (516).  This ethical position is mirrored in the form of the poem: the unfinished, fragmentary status of the work drives readers to consider alternative potential endings, and "As long as the critical community struggles for answers, we will replicate an ethical striving that the narrator, Rousseau, and Shelley sought in their investigations into foundational humanity" (535).

McKeeverr, Kerry Ellen. "Writing and Melancholia: Saving the Self in Mary Shelley's 'The Mourner'." RoN 14 (May 1999): <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/mourner.html>.

McKeeverr sees in Shelley's neglected short story "The Mourner" (1829) several significant psychological and structural developments.  The story inverts and complicates some of the same concerns as expressed in Mathilda, thus revealing new dimensions of Shelley's treatment of such elements as loss, grief, and melancholy.  The argument is founded on psychological and linguistic theory, especially Kristeva.

Mekler, Lamar Adam.  "Solitude, Alienation and Exile: Mary Shelley in Context (Romanticism)."  Ph.D. diss., Drew U, 1998, DAI, 60-03A (1999): 753, 388 pages.

In this rather disjointed work, Mekler considers the notion of solitude—a positive condition in the writing of canonical Romantic writers, but often the undesired consequence of others' power in Mary Shelley's (and other women writers') work.  The dissertation follows Shelley's development away from the Romantic-era contexts of her youth toward the more "proper" Victorian contexts of her late novels.

O'Rourke, James.  "The 1831 Introduction and Revisions to Frankenstein: Mary Shelley Dictates Her Legacy."  SIR 38.3 (Fall 1999): 365-85.

O'Rourke reads the 1831 version of Frankenstein not as a capitulation to the expectations of a "proper lady" but as an "oblique but systematic interpretation of her own most famous novel and of her place in the literary history of her period" (366).  Indeed, the 1831 Introduction and revisions "highlight Mary Shelley's ironic critique of our willingness to accept the fictional cover that novels provide in order to indulge our identifications with figures of privilege, especially if those figures are clothed in romance, to overlook the dispossessions that their privileges entail, and to do so even as we read a novel whose central figure is a victim of those conventional preferences" (385).

Pifer, Ellen.  "Her Monster, His Nymphet: Nabokov and Mary Shelley."  In Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Julian Connolly.  (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 158-76.

Pifer sees aesthetic parallels between Nabokov's Lolita and Shelley's Frankenstein, most especially the separate narrators' parallel recognition of the "hideousness" of the tales they are compelled to tell.  But the parallels have to do as well with artistic creation: both narratives are readable as metaphors for the book that achieves a kind of dangerous independence from the aims and intentions of its author.

Plotkin, David Charles.  "Growing Native: Rhetoric, Education and Community in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Nineteenth Century, Cultural Studies, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold)."  Ph.D. diss., U of California, Irvine, 1999, DAI, 60-08A (1999): 2942, 354 pages.

"Debates over popular education in nineteenth-century Britain reflected anxieties about cultural heterogeneity, particularly through portrayals of the lower classes as savages, heathens, or outsiders inside the nation. Literary representations of literacy and education reflected and transformed these debates. The dissertation examines the rhetorical strategies embedded in literary texts and the reception histories of those texts to explore how the cultural rhetoric of popular education circulates through literary, cultural, and historical documents."  The second chapter focuses on Frankenstein with particular emphasis on issues of education and literacy.

Pyle, Forest.  "'Frail Spells': Shelley and the Ironies of Exile." In Irony and Clerisy,  Ed. Deborah Elise White.  RC-Praxis (August 1999): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/irony/pyle/frail.html>.

Pyle begins with a detailed reading of Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," stressing the numerous ironies of the "frail spells" of poetry, philosophy, and even theology which are dispelled in acts of critical demystification.  The complex and historically grounded argument concludes with Pyle's claim that "sustained attention to the workings of Shelley's texts disclose something more than the representations of their age or the literary displacements of the empirical condition of exile; Shelley's texts are limit cases of poetic thought and practice in a Romanticism which may well be far from exhausted conceptually. The continuing power of Shelley's most demanding work resides in its ability to reckon with the political as well as poetic implications of an epistemological irony so extensive that it disqualifies the claims of any clerisy to escape it, including the clerisies of contemporary criticism" (par 24).

Ramadier, Bernard.  "Shelley et l'encombrante enveloppe: Le Passage de l'etre a l'ombre dans Alastor." In Images fantastiques du corps, ed. Jean Marigny (Grenoble: Universite Stendhal-Grenoble, 1998), 31-42.

Roussetzki, Remy Joseph.  "A Theater of Anxiety: The Irrepresentable in Shelley's 'The Cenci' and in Musset's 'Lorenzaccio' (Alfred de Musset, France, Percy Bysshe Shelley)."  Ph.D. diss., 1999, CUNY, DAI, 60-01A (1999): 120, 301 pages.

Roussetzki contends that Shelley and Musset "aggravated" the traditions of tragic drama in such a way as to generate shock and anxiety: "the dramatic action and the rhetoric of both plays ceaselessly address the radical fact that language has limits and that 'beyond' there lurks an irrepresentable, unimaginable and undefinable 'real.' Both works center around a cause for anxiety in the central characters which language, i.e. the written text, can only approach indirectly, through elaborate linguistic constructions or sublime metaphors."

Schwarz, Jeffrey A.  "Shelley's Eternal Time: Harmonizing Form and Content in Prometheus Unbound."  KSR 13 (1999): 76-87.

"Shelley's theme of love and forgiveness in Prometheus Unbound elucidates how the causality of tyranny can be broken, while, at the same time, his literary form attempts to shatter the conceptions that poetry and drama are limited to the past, and prove that they are, in actuality, eternal and timeless" (76).

Takubo, Hiroshi.  "The Power and the Poet: Shelley's Ideas of Poetry."  Annual Bulletin of Japan Shelley Studies Center 7 (1999): 11-41.

The essay—a chapter from Takubo's 1997 dissertation on Shelley and Wordsworth—identifies a Power that is the source and inspiration of poetic creativity.  Poets are those who are sensitive to the influences of this Power, and poets are thus moved "to produce poetry that inspires in people higher sentiments that direct society to a happier state. . . .  The later Wordsworth is no longer inspired by the Power, therefore his poetry no longer inspires people to imaginative visions" (12).  Takubo pursues this comparative theme through several lyrics, including especially Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Ode to the West Wind" and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode.

Tocchini, Delia.  "'L'esprit ne souffle qu'a son heure': Lamartine, Shelley e il mito romantico dell'ispirazione poetica."  Lettore di Provincia [Ravenna] 29.101 (April 1998): 77-85.

Vatalaro, Paul.  "The Semiotic Echoes in Percy Shelley's Poems to Jane Williams."  KSJ 48 (1999): 69-89.

In a provocative psychological-semiotic analysis of Shelley's late lyrics to Jane Williams, Vatalaro argues that the poems reveal a fundamental tension that runs throughout Shelley's poetry.  On the one hand, the poet is attracted to the "feminine-maternal" (represented by Jane Williams), and he longs to be involved in a relationship of intersubjective intimacy which has its correlative in a mother-infant bond.  On the other hand, Shelley resists the challenge to individual subjectivity and individual autonomy that would be the inevitable consequence of such intimacy, and seeks instead a mature adult relationship mediated by "obligation, legality, and language" (69).  The lyrics turn on this psychological ambivalence.

Webb, Samantha Christine.  "Literary Mediators: Figures of Authority and Authorship in English Romantic Prose (Hannah More, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Mary Shelley, Nineteenth Century)."  Ph.D. diss., Temple U, 1999, DAI, 60-03A (1999): 756, 161 pages.

This study examines the common "found manuscript" frame, considering its relationship to issues of authorship and the commercialization of literature.  Webb focuses on The Last Man and other prominent Romantic period works.

Weineck, Silke-Maria.  "'They Met—They Parted': On the Relationship Between Poetry and Madness in Julian and Maddalo."  SIR 38.1 (Spring 1999): 89-102.

"In analyzing the relationship between narrative, fragmentation, and madness, I will argue that Julian and Maddalo radicalizes the notion of poetry that Shelley develops in the Defence of Poetry.  What emerges is a concept of pure poetry characterized by the absolute absence of narrative; however, a purely poetic, i.e. purely non-narrative poetry would render poetic speech indistinguishable from mad speech.  Ultimately, then, Julian's abandonment of the maniac stages the abandonment of a notion of radical poeticity." (89).

Wheatley, Kim.  Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics.  Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1999.

Wheatley borrows the "Paranoid Politics" of her title from Richard Hofstadter's 1965 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.  In essence, the term refers to a mode of public discourse which tends to see oppositional ideological claims through a lens of suspicion and a fear of conspiracy.  This was the dominant rhetorical mode of the major reviews during those years when Shelley tried to forward his idealistic poetic works (and political ideologies).  Critical hostility was inevitable, and such becomes the subject matter for Wheatley's discussion: "This book explores the dialogue between the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and its immediate public reception" (1).

The book begins with a chapter analyzing the discursive style of three of the most influential reviews: the Quarterly, the Edinburgh (both offer numerous instances of the paranoid style), and Blackwood's Magazine (which strives for a less partisan appreciation of its subjects).  Having established this context, there are three main chapters dealing respectively with Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and Adonais.  The argument connecting these works is subtle and detailed, but a brief synopsis finds a movement from a kind of pure and self-righteous opposition in Queen Mab, through a more collective, participatory strategy fostered by aesthetic beauty in Prometheus Unbound, to Adonais whose reception effectively realizes "a historically and generically determined manifestation of the elegy's own complex revision of Shelley's aesthetic idealism" (12).  Perhaps most significant here is Wheatley's view of the poems not as some purely aesthetic objects for contemplation and study but rather as the focal points—more or less effective—of collective response.  The work of the poem is accomplished in this collective aesthetic-ideological dialogue, and Shelley's singular challenge was one of establishing a place for such dialogue amidst the clamorous paranoid politics so evident in the periodical press.

Wu, Ya Feng.  "The Spectre of Rousseau in Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life.'"  Studies in Language and Literature [Taiwan] 106 (December 1998): 119-45.

Yeasting, Jeanne Ellen.  "Double Trouble: Romantic Idealism in the Novels of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Angela Carter (Narcissism, Family Dysfunction)." Ph.D. diss., U of Washington, 1999, DAI, 60-08A, (1999): 2945, 310 pages.

This study considers works by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Angela Carter, focusing particularly on dysfunctional families, narcissism, and Romantic idealism.  More specifically, the dissertation "explores these authors' use of the double as a critique of Romantic ideals."  An opening chapter on Mary Shelley's fiction adapts Carter's idea of "consolatory myth" to a study of the "connections between Romantic idealism and the quest for an idealized other.  It investigates the relationship between Percy Shelley's 'epipsyche,' the Romantic quest, depression, and pathological mourning."  A subsequent chapter examines these issues in a familial context, arguing that "Shelley shows the devastating effects of idealization, not only on the idealized Other, but also on his or her children."

Zimmerman, Phyllis.  Shelley's Fiction.  Los Angeles: Darami Press, 1998.

Zimmerman contends—on rather slender stylistic evidence—that Percy Shelley was a more prolific novelist than has been heretofore acknowledged.  In effect, she claims that Shelley wrote novels (including Frankenstein) and then gave them to his friends to help them become established as writers.