Kathryn Pratt Russell
Clayton State University

Ingrid Horrocks’s rigorous study of “women wanderers” in the late eighteenth century contributes to a critical tradition in British travel studies, recently represented by Elizabeth Bohls, Celeste Langan, Michael Wiley, Robin Jarvis, and others. Horrocks, though, attends to a gap in gender studies and the theory of travel by not merely focusing upon a particular author or genre, but instead enlarging the scope of her analysis in order to argue that at the end of the eighteenth century, British women authors began to write about travel and wandering in ways specific to their gender position, and not limited by genre. As opposed to their male counterparts, who, when depicting women wanderers, portrayed them as objects of loss and abjection, female authors wrote of women wanderers as representative of a “deep homelessness” (7) that reconfigures eighteenth-century theories of sympathy.

Horrocks acknowledges the influence...

Andrew O. Winckles
Adrian College

For those of us brave enough to walk into the minefield that is the study of evangelicalism and Romanticism, Richard E. Brantley has always loomed large. I can remember when, as a graduate student playing with the idea of writing about Methodism during the Romantic era, my dissertation director recommending I read Brantley’s Wordsworth’s Natural Methodism (1975). In typical graduate student fashion, I put it off, somehow convincing myself that the book would be my exact project and I just could not face knowing that someone else had already done what I wanted to do. Of course, it was not, and when I finally did get around to reading both Wordsworth’s Natural Methodism and then Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (1984), they both proved foundational to my own understanding of evangelicalism in the Romantic era and helped contextualize my own project. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say...

David Sigler
University of Calgary

Ashley Cross’s new monograph, Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism, works in two directions at once: it scrutinizes the oeuvre of a single author, but it also presents Romantic-era writing as a network, something thoroughly collaborative, competitive, and communitarian. Cross, in presenting a study of Mary Robinson’s literary writings as she responded to her contemporaries and inspired her successors, gives us a model for understanding “authorial identity grounded in dialogic exchange” (3), and for apprehending Robinson’s writing across genres. Thus it offers a different vision of Robinson than has emerged in previous studies, such as Daniel Robinson’s The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (2011) and Paula Byrne’s more biographical Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (2004), both of which stress the unusualness of Robinson’s celebrity instead of her more typical struggle to be accepted, as a woman...

Diana Edelman
University of North Georgia, Gainesville

What do sleeping babies, dead babies, and lyric poetry have in common? D. B. Ruderman explains in The Idea of Infancy that contemplating sleeping and dead babies literally affects poetic form, which, in turn, creates new conceptions of identity on the part of the reader. Although childhood and the imagination have long been constitutive of Romanticism, Ruderman carves out a new understanding of infancy in the period by reading it through the lens of poststructuralist discourses and psychoanalytic theory.

Ruderman attempts to recover the “more disturbing and philosophically fraught notion of infanthood” that he pits against the “sentimental view of childhood,” which, he rightly argues, tends to be the dominant narrative in the history of Romantic criticism (2). This newer, darker view of infancy challenges linear narratives of development in which infancy is perceived as one stage in a progressive...