Hazlitt, 1998

WORKS: COLLECTED, SELECTED, SINGLE , TRANSLATED

Wu, Duncan, ed. The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. 9 vols. London: Ashgate Publishing, 1998.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO HAZLITT

Bromwich, David. "Thinking in Public." American Literary History 10.1 (Spring 1998): 12-14.

Bromwich participates in a symposium on the role of the intellectual in public life. He answers six questions about his audience, the diverse cultures within American intellectual life, the role of contemporary American culture in sustaining intellectual work, whether and how his critical methods changed, how he measures success, and whether he feels contemporary writers have lost their cultural authority. Bromwich discusses the influence of Hazlitt and Adorno and the visibility of black intellectuals in America.

De Montluzin, Emily Lorraine. "Killing the Cockneys: Blackwood's Weapons of Choice against Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats." KSJ 47 (1998): 87-107.

Hofkosh, Sonia. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Includes chapters titled "Introduction: Invisible Girls," "A Woman's Profession: Sexual Difference and the Romance of Authorship," "The Writer's Ravishment: Byron's Body Politics," "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," "Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Gift-Book Stories," "The Author's Progress: William Hazlitt's Keswick Escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal," and "Romanticism in the Drawing Room: Austen's Interiority."

Hofkosh's third chapter, "Classifying Romanticism: The Milliner Girl and the Magazines," briefly considers the periodical press lampoon of Leigh Hunt as "King of the Cockneys" (66). "Invisible girls are scripted into romantic tradition in particularly material configurations--as bodies, among objects, like books, in the marketplace--even as they appear to be overlooked or, what may amount to the same thing, looked over" (3). She discusses Byron's letter to Walter Scott describing the circumstances that attended his dedication to Scott of Cain. Both Keats and Byron owed their literary fame to the very Bluestockings they despised and who read them (54). In her chapter on Mary Shelley, "Disfiguring Economies," Hofkosh turns her attention to Mary Shelley's writings for annual gift books. "Between the death of Percy Bysshe in 1822 and the death of Sir Timothy in 1844, Shelley supplements the subsistence income her father-in-law begrudgingly lends her out of her son's future estate by writing short stories, many for such annual gift books as The Keepsake and Heath's Book of Beauty." Hofkosh argues that "these narratives explicate in their various frames Shelley's negotiations between two economies of value--of authority, authorship, self--in which the body, especially the female body, is inseparably implicated. Shelley's stories respond on the one hand to an aristocratic economy of patrilinear inheritance and, on the other hand, she recognizes an economics of the marketplace, what Percy Bysshe called 'the shop interest'" (86) wherein production disfigures the writer.

In her chapter on William Hazlitt's Keswick escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal, Hofkosh discusses Hazlitt's "unwanted advances to a village girl" (104). In his failed effort to seduce a woman in the Lake District, Hazlitt emerges as the proud author of An Essay on the Principle of Human Action (1805), a book he proudly claimed no woman "would ever comprehend the meaning of" (104). Sarah Hazlitt's Journal of My Trip to Scotland is the subject of Hofkosh's concluding remarks. "In the heterosexual economy within which she must inevitably function--whether single, married, or divorced--the woman may never conclude that she is her own except in contesting the very oppositions which define her" (117). Sarah Hazlitt is forced to lie about having no "collusion in the divorce proceedings" (117). The law conspires to make her a liar by making "perjury, like divorce, a practical necessity of her compromised position" (118).

Jones, Stanley. "Further Quotations and Allusions in Hazlitt: The Bible, Milton, Pascal, Gray, Churchill, Burke, Cowper, "Peter Pindar," and "Tiddy-doll" (Smollett and Gillray)." N&Q 45.2 (June 1998): 208-11.

Jones traces the origin of seven allusions and quotations in the work of William Hazlitt.

Leask, Nigel. "'Wandering through Eblis': Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism." In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 165-68.

Maertz, Gregory. "Reviewing Kant's Early Reception in Britain: The Leading Role of Henry Crabb Robinson." In Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. Gregory Maertz (Albany: State U of New York P, 1998), 209-26. See No. 230.

Maertz' essay examines the critiques of Kant that were published by leading Romantic writers. Includes a discussion of William Taylor, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey, though the essay focuses on Henry Crabb Robinson (8).

Magnuson, Paul. Reading Public Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

The first chapter makes use of Jurgen Habermas' definition of the "public sphere" to define a "public discourse." The second chapter explores the genres and rhetoric of this public discourse with readings of Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," first published in Southey's Annual Anthology, where it was framed as a public letter to Charles Lamb. Chapter 3 explores Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" in Fears in Solitude (1798), defined by reviewers as a German poem. The word German meant "Jacobin" in the 1790s (9). The final two chapters "explore the issue of poetic and political legitimacy" with readings of the dedication to Don Juan and Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "Much of the poetry published between 1789 and 1830 is public poetry, but one cannot discover its public nature by reading individual works of literature apart from the public discourse that literature enters when it is published. Justice cannot be done to a work's literary and cultural significance by disregarding its various locations in collections of the author's own poetry, collaborative publications with several authors, reviews, newspapers, or anthologies" (3). Chapter 5 reads the "paratextual Dedication to Don Juan as an address to Southey composed from many of the reviews and parodies of Southey's laureate verse and the satire on him in the public press. Chapter 6 reads the 'leaf-fringed legend' in 'On a Grecian Urn' in the Annals of the Fine Arts, where it supports the aesthetics of Haydon, Hazlitt, and Richard Payne Knight--an esthetics that opposed not only the ideal art of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the system of patronage that supported the Royal Academy and what Hazlitt called legitimacy" (10). Magnuson focuses on lyric poems considered nonpolitical because their public significance has been lost in the late-twentieth century.

Morrison, Robert. "Essayists of the Romantic Period (De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb)." In Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998), 341-63.

Natarajan, Uttara. Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Natarajan, Uttara. "One Undivided Spirit: Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the Unity of the Imagination." SIR (1998): 235-58.

Distinguishes between Hazlitt's and Coleridge's philosophical positions and principles of criticism. This essay is divided into three parts: "Unitarianism and Coleridge," "Hazlitt and Associationism," and "The Unity of the Imagination." "In Hazlitt's view of the imagination as a single and indivisible presence and in his development from this notion of a theory of association and imaginative unity, we perceive the manner in which he at once incorporates and transcends his Unitarian background and the Coleridgean influence" (257).

O'Neill, Michael, ed. Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998.

"A critical guide to the best and the typical in scholarship and criticism devoted to literature of the Romantic period." This work aims at an undergraduate reader but discusses internecine warfare among Romantic scholars in unattractive detail, especially in O'Neill's introduction. Important gaps are evident in this bibliography, such as historically-informed studies that do not touch upon primary works. The reliability of introductory chapters varies. This volume will not replace Jordan's more descriptive and less evaluative MLA bibliography (1988).

Chapters on "General Studies of the Romantic Period," by Michael O'Neill; "William Blake," by David Fuller; "William Wordsworth," by Nicholas Roe; "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," by Nicola Trott; "Lord Byron," by Andrew Nicholson; "Percy Bysshe Shelley," by Jerrold E. Hogle; and "John Keats," by Greg Kucich. Bibliographies on John Clare; women poets; Burns; Cowper; Crabbe; Southey; Walter Scott; Jane Austen; Thomas Love Peacock; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; fictional writers, including Burney, Inchbald, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Hunt; as well as political prose writers.

Paulin, Tom. The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style. London: Faber, 1998.

Whale, John. "Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism, and the Difference of View." In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 206-20.

Woodbery, Bonnie. "William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age." In A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 283-93.

Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Anthology of Romantic authors. Includes selections from Blake, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, and the Shelleys.