Category Archives: Review

Retrospective: Pforzheimer Visit

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Members of the RRG viewed the “Shelley’s Ghost” exhibit, followed by a visit to the Pforzheimer Collection, where the curator, Elizabeth Denlinger, showed us several items from the collection that were not included in the exhibit.

Among the highlights of the exhibit was a notebook of Shelley’s containing a revision of Queen Mab. The exhibit itself is wonderfully curated to tell the story not only of Percy Shelley’s life and the afterlife of his poetic reputation, but of the Godwin’ Wollstonecraft-Shelley family more generally. There were a number of letters on display from various members of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley family, including Harriet Shelley’s suicide letter, which I found rather poignant. Along with printed books and manuscripts, the exhibit includes several other artifacts, from hair jewelry and portraits to Shelley’s guitar and fragments of his skull. The ornate rattle with golden bells from Shelley’s childhood helped me grasp just how wealthy his family was.

On our visit to the Pforzheimer we examined several interesting texts, including early editions of Lyrical Ballads, Robinson’s Lyrical Tales, and the manuscript of the sixteenth canto of Byron’s Don Juan. But along with these more canonical texts, Liz Denlinger displayed lesser-known texts and items of Romantic-era ephemera.

Most interesting to me, given my work on education in the period, were the children’s books and educational toys. The collection includes an item described as a “Lilliputian Library,” a wooden box about 6” tall containing two rows of tiny books of children’s stories. A didactic children’s board game entitled “A Game of Genius,” in which children learned about inventions such as the telegraph and gunpowder, featured beautiful color lithography. Most intriguing was a toy Denlinger described as a “peep show” (and no, not that kind). It looked like a small book with an opening cut into the front cover, but it consisted of paper folded accordion-style, the “pages” inside cut and colored so that when you looked through the hole, you saw a detailed diorama with beautiful perspective.

I plan on returning soon to read some educational texts for my dissertation, but suspect I may need to find an appropriate conference to attend just to justify examining more of these fascinating toys and games!

If you are interested in conducting research at the Pforzheimer Collection, please contact Elizabeth Denlinger.

http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/pforzheimer-collection-shelley-and-his-circle

Veronica Goosey

Retrospective: “Modern Nature, or, Imagination Revisited” by Anahid Nersessian

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On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Anahid Nersessian, Assistant Professor at Columbia University, came to give a talk at NYU entitled “Modern Nature, or, Imagination Revisited.”  Her engaging and provocative talk proposed a new formulation of form based on the relationship between ecological disaster and the rise of realism.

While Nersessian provided two intriguing examples in her talk, in her response, Maureen N. McLane, Associate Professor of English at NYU, answered the question of how Nersessian’s formulation might be more widely applied. With examples ranging from the most canonical of Romantic poetry to ancient ballads, McLane illustrated the applicability of Nersessian’s proposed form as an heuristic  of adjustment.

Graduate students from NYU, Stony Brook, and other local NYC universities engaged in a discussion with the professors regarding the theoretical and practical implications of Nersessian’s argument for literary study.

Veronica Goosey

Audience mingles post-discussion. Anahid Nersessian and Maureen McLane center background.

NYURRG Organizer Omar F. Miranda moderated the event.

NYURRG Organizer Randie Sessler engages audience members before the event begins.

Graduate students mingle post-discussion. Cliff Siskin and Anahid Nersessian in left background.

Review: Godwin’s Suspicion of Speech Acts by Angela Esterhammer

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“William Godwin does not trust words to do things” (553). Thus begins Angela Esterhammer’s compelling article on the political philosopher’s relationship to performative speech acts. As the first line makes clear, Esterhammer is not only engaging with speech acts but also participating in and promoting the larger critical discourse regarding the Romantic era’s preoccupation with the relationship between words and things, or, to borrow language from William Keach, the “thinginess of words.” Drawing on J. L Austin’s landmark How to do Things with Words as well as J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin’s work, Esterhammer examines Godwin’s anxiety regarding words doing things and the way that this anxiety manifests itself in his political writing as well as his novels.

According to Esterhammer, Godwin condemns speech acts and dedicates much of his writing to “showing again and again that disastrous situations come about” because those making pledges, oaths, declarations, promises, and indeed any type of performative utterance can not know what pressure the future will place on such binding speech (555). In other words, temporality troubles all performatives. Esterhammer turns to the chapter “Of Promises” in Political Justice and shows how Godwin’s suspicion of speech acts forms the central tension of his novels Caleb Williams, Clouesley, and Deloraine. Indeed Godwin’s fictions turn on the implications of promises and pledges. Here it is interesting to note that Esterhammer argument could, perhaps, be extended to incorporate Godwin’s dramatic writing as well. Godwin’s 1793 play Antonio; or, The Soldier’s Return: A Tragedy in Five Acts is full of competing vows and pledges that are troubled by unpredictable circumstances.

Perhaps the article’s most provocative claim is Godwin’s reluctant admission that despite the fact performative speech acts should not play a role in constituting “sociopolitical experience,” they remain “inescapable” (562). Although Godwin criticizes the French revolutionaries for falling into the very trap they fought to liberate themselves from by “attempting to legislate for all time,” he cannot seem to shake performative speech acts in his own work (560). In fact, Esterhammer claims, the framing of Godwin’s novels speaks to the looming presence of performatives. The novels not only document performative speech acts between characters but are themselves presented as being constituted by speech acts. That is, Caleb Williams speaks his story in the novel that bears his name. Ultimately, Esterhammer concludes that “in paying such obsessive attention to the way speech acts do construct interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical reality – even if, in Godwin’s opinion, they should not – novels like Cloudesley and Deloraine become profound, early analyses of how things are done with words” (555).

The novel becomes one means for Godwin to expose the problems inherent in performative speech acts even further.

Godwin’s Suspicion of Speech Acts
Angela Esterhammer
Studies in Romanticism , Vol. 39, No. 4, William Godwin (Winter, 2000), pp. 553-578.

–R. A. Sessler

Review: Approaches to Religious Poetry

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Tonya Moutray. “Remodeling Catholic Ruins in William Wordsworth’s Poetry.” European Romantic Review 22.6 (2011): 819-831.

Moutray examines some of Wordsworth’s lesser-known religious poetry, including “Tuft of Primroses” (1808), Ecclesiastical Sketches, (1822), “St. Bees, Suggested in a Steam-Boat Off Saint Bee’s Heads” (1835), and “At Furness Abbey” (1845) to argue that Wordsworth’s focus on monastic culture indicates his approval of the institution and its mission of service to local needs. Moutray argues that these poems and the Prelude (1850) indicate the poet’s interest in and support of social practices which “have the potential to revitalize local communities and their natural resources” (819). The article links Wordsworth’s treatment of monastic ruins and religious practices with ecological concerns. Moutray claims, “In placing the monastery within a mutually accommodating natural landscape” in “Tuft of Primroses” Wordsworth argues that “with proper care, nature becomes an ongoing source of spiritual and material replenishment,” a source which, like the institution of the monastery, is endangered in an industrial, secular society (822). The monastery functions as an example of communal practice which integrates social and natural realms; Moutray argues that these poems demonstrate Wordsworth’s support of the development of similar social institutions, such as the Anglican Sisterhoods.

I find this argument fairly compelling, but I’m most interested in the connection between Romantic eco-criticism and religious poetry. Moutray claims that Wordsworth’s depiction of the Catholic monastery functions as a model for ecological preservation. This claim dovetails convincingly with Wordsworth’s position on the role of the Anglican Church in a parish-based approach to social problems in the nineteenth century. Few critics have produced recent work on the religious issues of Romanticism. This article engages the politics of developing religious orders in the Anglican Church, and Michael Tomko explores the ramifications of the movement for Catholic Emancipation in British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: religion, history, and national identity, 1778-1829 (2011). These texts demonstrate some useful approaches to the subject of religion. Religion is as hotly contested and conflicted an issue in the Romantic period as in earlier centuries, though specific issues changed; nevertheless, critics seem content to bypass religious objects of study. Why is that? What might be gained by closer attention to the period’s religious movements and debates? Or to texts like sermons, primers, and hymns, as well as devotional poetry and religious conduct tracts? What might these genres add to our understanding of, for instance, Ecclesiastical Sketches, and thus to our understanding of Wordsworth’s oeuvre and Romantic poetry more generally?

Veronica Goosey

“Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn”: A Visit to the New York Historical Society’s Current Exhibit

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Because we have recently been discussing the role of media and mediation in the Romantic era, I thought it would be provocative to provide some reflections on my recent visit to the New York Historical Society’s current exhibit, “Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn.” Thinking about these varying materials presented in one large display brings other questions and considerations on mediation to the table; it also invites inter-disciplinary approaches to the radical period of great political, historical, and literary consequence (to name but a few) as well as further thought on the significance of Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Thomas Bender, professor of History at NYU, begins the collection of essays dedicated to the elaborate exhibit with his article, “A Season of Revolutions: The United States, France, and Haiti.” In it, he explains: “the three great eighteenth century revolutions were not only close in chronology . . . they were also part of a larger and interconnected history of the Atlantic World” (18). Committed to this idea that these revolutions were interrelated, Bender curiously distinguishes all three cases as a “separate . . . [and yet] collectively single world-shaping event” (15).

First, I am intrigued by what makes a revolution “great,” specifically. Why do the American, French, and Haitian events receive this recognition? Does such a distinction rely on the magnitude of a revolution’s philosophical objectives? Does the number of casualties the event claims matter? Or, does “greatness” refer to the short or long-term effects of a revolution’s overall success as a political change agent? How do these quite dissimilar cases of social transformation from transcontinental and trans-imperial spaces obtain a uniform distinction in Bender’s estimation? In his The Age of Revolution from 1962, Eric Hobsbawm seems to give an answer concerning the French case:

“In 1789 something like one European out of every five was a French man. In the second place it was, alone of all the revolutions which preceded and followed it, a mass social revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable upheaval. It is no accident that the American revolutionaries, and the British ‘Jacobins’ who migrated to France because of their political sympathies, found themselves moderates in France . . . In the third place, alone of all contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so” (75).

Hobsbawn singles out the French circumstance as the paragon for mass social reform because of its numbers, the intensity of its radical beliefs and believers, and the extent to which its ideals inspired other nations. For the Marxist historian, 1789 symbolized the pivotal year that ultimately abolished “agrarian feudal relations” for the first time. Hobsbawm states: “If the economy of the nineteenth century world was formed mainly under the influence of British Industrial Revolution, its politics and ideology were formed mainly by the French” (74). Bender, however, seems to have other criteria in mind for the revolutions on display if he regards these three disparate instances as “great” social transformations. It is well known that the French revolution had made its American predecessor appear less and less like an actual revolution and, compared with the prevalence of and familiarity with the happenings in France, Haiti was hardly considered comparable in magnitude and influence on a transcontinental scale. For these reasons, I believe more nuanced exploration of the case for a “great” revolution is in order especially since Bender does not clarify.

Additionally, I also wished to address Bender’s label of these disparate yet successive revolutions as a “single world shaping event” (15). What is at stake if we meld their particular concerns and outcomes into one progressive occurrence? What are the limits of such a vast “event” that helped shape the Western world—as R.R. Palmer so articulately describes in his 1959 publication, The Age of Democratic Revolution, 1760-1800? Do these three separate instances of political reform in America, France, and Haiti make up a fraction of a larger Zeitgeist that Palmer attributes to a series of upheavals throughout Europe and the Americas? Do they collectively launch an era of contagion for transformation across the Western continents? What does it mean to connect the multiple temporal, spatial, cultural, and political concerns with the domain of “Revolution” as one dominant yet perhaps nebulous totality? Does an attempt at universalizing the experience undermine the particulars of each circumstance?

The New York Historical Society’s exhibit attempts to recreate this “single event” impression in an almost seamless presentation of many specific materials from the latter half of the eighteenth century. Set in one large space that is divided loosely into chronological sections from 1763 to 1804, the exhibit displays the many remnants symbolizing the radical “movement” across these three countries (four countries if we incorporate the many British imperial materials included). After its initial portrayal of the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War that redrew British, French and Spanish control of the Americas and left France in vengeful distress, the exhibit seems to argue that the ensuing events followed each other naturally. The acerbic conclusion of the Seven Years’ War prompted French support of the American revolutionary cause that lead ultimately to France’s financial troubles. These economic tensions led to the storming of the Bastille that subsequently inspired the revolts in Haiti by the end of the century. The exhibit also includes a reflection on the economic usurpation of the colonies, a portrayal of slavery and its economic implications for empire, the brutal conditions of the Slave Trade, and the many efforts in support of abolition.

If we could imagine the exhibit space as a text itself, we could appreciate its sudden twists and turns as well as some of the narrow paths the designers chose to emulate the spirit of the age (to invoke Hazlitt). In addition to encountering fleeting moments with great empire nations (at the exhibit’s start in 1763) that would suddenly change, for instance, visitors experience the unfolding revolutionary narrative through multiple representations from the times. Some of these media include recordings of human voices demanding equal rights (imagine reenacted British, French, and Spanish male and female accents), influential texts such as a copy of Addison’s play, Cato, maps of newly drawn imperial boundaries, images of the brutal conditions of slavery, books and treatises of Enlightenment political theory from Locke, Paine and Rousseau, and first-time constitutional drafts or pamphlets such as The Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, or the Haitian Constitution.

It appeared to me that the series of media did not simply help relate the revolution; it was a part of the struggle. Walking by and absorbing the many representations produced an accumulating effect of that temperament that helped enact the radical transformations. Though the curators tried to emphasize the significant role of speech and orality by using recordings and video, it was evident that the written word, whether in print or manuscript, represented the dominant mode of inspiring change by transmitting the ever-powerful idea of revolution. Copies of Montesquieu, Paine, and Smith (among several others) conveyed the far reaches of this revolutonary mindset—specifically the degree to which social, economic, and political registers were not only deeply interwoven spheres of influence but also significantly altered during this time.

I was pleased by the representation of the Haitian Revolution as it took up at least a third of the exhibit’s space—naturally closer to the end because of its chronological position. This display did a fine job emphasizing the merits of the first successful black slave rebellion. It underscored how strong communal ties enabled the revolt’s effectiveness. A video narrated by a presumed Haitian woman speaking Kreyol described the power of Voudou as a common spiritual practice that connected the many slaves in St. Domingue. She also highlighted her language, Haitian Kreyol, as a unifying element at the time of the revolution. Despite the varying Africans from several nations, the subjugated peoples of Haiti arguably strengthened their cause and ultimately succeeded to gain their independence from France as a united people culturally, spiritually, and linguistically. The exhibit highlighted the power of the community to achieve this unprecedented political reform and social independence. I don’t believe we can justifiably conflate the remarkable occurrences in Haiti as a part of a single “world-shaping” phenomenon when it arguably symbolizes this distinction on its own terms.

As I approached the end of the exhibit, I was quite struck by a short film portraying the contemporary poverty and corruption in Haiti. It displayed numerous poor citizens as well as ruined houses at the mercy and whim of natural and political disaster. One segment even presented a view of a luxury cruise ship docked at Port Au Prince showing the privileged tourists who visit for “their personal gain” alone. The film’s narrator made explicit that the ideals of the French Revolution, liberty and equality in particular, have yet to become a reality in Haiti. If Bender’s claims are true, specifically that the major transformations of the late eighteenth century comprised one “great” event, then the film appears to posit that “revolution” is not only a loaded term but also still taking shape—yet to be truly realized in Haiti.

-Omar F. Miranda

Works Cited:

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New American Library, 1962)

Thomas Bender, “A Season of Revolutions: The United States, France, and Haiti.” In Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn. Ed. by T. Bender, L. Dubois, and R. Rabinowitz (New York Historical Society, 2011), pp. 14-42.

Palmer, R.R. The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton University Press, 1959, 1964 ), vol. 1.

Review: Charm, or de casibus Literary Scholarship?

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Hadley J. Mozer “‘Ozymandias,’ or de Casibus Lord Byron: Literary Celebrity on the Rocks.” European Romantic Review 21.6 (2010):727-749.

Hadley Mozer’s article arguing that Shelley’s sonnet should be read as a lecture to Byron on the vanity of his celebrity won Article of the Year at the 2010 NASSR conference. I attended the conference, and heard several highly complimentary things said of the piece. So when I returned to the article to study its merits more closely, I was somewhat surprised.
The first surprise—a pleasant one—was finding the cleverness of the title recurring throughout the essay. The writing is playful, witty, and a pleasure to read. But despite the charm of Mozer’s wordplay, I found myself not only unconvinced by Mozer’s argument, but convinced that it was a stretch. Mozer’s argument that Shelley experienced a sense of inferiority to Byron in the late 18-teens was well-researched, well-argued, and not, I would think, particularly controversial. Locating in ‘Ozymandias’ an early start to Shelley’s poetic engagements with Byron seemed an intriguing prospect, but the evidence Mozer presents in letters and other poems provide at best circumstantial support. Mozer’s shift to critical interest in identifying the Shelley’s source for the “shattered visage” provides a wealth of historical detail and successfully engages it to disprove earlier claims, and support the interpretation that Shelley’s statuary remains are not based on any actual Egyptian statuary.
Mozer’s archival work is impressive, but the leap from “not based on Egyptian statuary” to “based on Byronic portraits” is questionable. Byron’s poetry, portraits, and bust, along with their reproductions, provide ample evidence that one public version of Byron, the arrogant, brooding Byronic hero, has features which resemble Shelley’s poetic description of the statue of Ozymandias. But Mozer’s claim that this resemblance is the result of Shelley’s attempt to “Byronize” the pharoah in order to critique the poet is problematic. The pharoah’s obessions with monuments to himself could plausibly evoke the image-management in which Byron engaged, but only if we accept Mozer’s claim that Shelley “Byronizes” the statue of Ozymandias, which I found to be the article’s weakest claim, seductive though it was.
Similarly, the genre argument that this ekphrastic sonnet should be read as a de casibus poem held some appeal initially, but the connections between “Ozymandias” and a form of history writing and moral instruction long associated with tragedy are not as strong as one woule hope. Perhaps further research will strengthen what appears in this article as an intriguing possibility. But by Mozer’s own acknowledgement, Shelley departs from de casibus tradition in so many ways, it seems as though any influence the genre might have had on the poem was not enough to merit the claim that the sonnet is a de casibus poem. Mozer’s argument that Byron at least may have read it in this fashion, as supported by the end of canto 1 of Don Juan, is excitingbut under-investigated.
Mozer’s essay demonstrates exemplary writing and research, and the argument itself is provacative, if not entirely persuasive. If “Ózymandias” is indeed “a veiled de casibus meditation on the vanity of Byron’s literary celebrity,” I would argue that the veil is quite thick (743). Yet if, as article of the year, this essay represents the work Romanticists want to see in journal publications, then there are several implications for graduate students. Here are a few: 1) Make a bold claim; 2) Integrate archival research; and, 3) Be playful.
A bold claim should be plausible and provocative, but needn’t necessarily be proven—or even provable. Our job isn’t so much to solve a problem, but to lay out a problem’s parameters and poke around its implications. The more boldly you do that, the more interesting the essay is to read, as long as you have sufficient support.
In answer to that caveat is point two: archival research. We all love it. Finding unusual or neglecting archival materials is a favorite tactic among scholars in the humanties. Applying such texts to a problem and integrating them into an ongoing scholarly debate is highly attractive. Half the seduction of Mozer’s article, for me at least, comes from the manner in which archival research is integrated into the argument.
Charm is also seductive. The more fun it is to read an article, the more seductive the argument appears. An argument may be rich in data supporting a claim which could change the course of literary scholarship, but the accessibility of the argument makes it readable and widens its circulation. In this case, I would argue that the wit and charm of the writing makes it a more appealing read than the argument merits, but this only showcases my own claim—that allowing yourself to be witty and playful in your writing will make your argument more attractive to your readership.

Veronica Goosey

If you have a response to Mozer’s article or our review, please do chime in.

A Brief Summary of Nigel Leask’s “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited”

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Because of our recent interest in exploring the vast connections between Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, I came upon this article by Nigel Leask that I found quite fascinating. Below I summarize the text briefly and offer the hyperlink to Romanticism online where it can be found.

Brief Summary:

In “Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited,” Nigel Leask urges a new reading of Coleridge’s poem free from the 1816 preface that he believes distances the reader from its geo-political significance. To read Kubla Khan free from the modifications (sans preface) invites a view of “literary orientalism,” not focused entirely on the poem’s specific imagery, structural properties, or narrative voices but on its larger geo-political structure. Instead of the opiate-inspired dream vision to which the 1816 version alludes, Leask wishes to “restore” and “recover” the lost cultural narrative of Coleridge’s “geopolitical specificity” and the unexplored travel narratives (Staunton and Bruce’s writings specifically) that inspired him.

Agreeing with Marilyn Butler, Leask links Coleridge’s poem to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer because it celebrates oriental exoticism, the return of an “ideal republican simplicity,” and a parallel transition between Cathay and Abyssinia. He sees a loose connection between the third stanza’s “vision” and Southey’s assassins who “yearn to be readmitted to the paradise of false consciousness.” Leask believes, however, that Coleridge seems to be advancing a more hedonistic participation in the pleasure-dome rather than the poetics that the “brutal revolutionary idol-smasher Thalaba”inspire.

Leask wishes to extend Butler’s fruitful argument by drawing attention to the contemporary writings on Chinese gardens and their introduction to Europe–proposing that “Kubla Khan, despite a vast amount of criticism, is a poem about an emperor’s garden” (jardin anglo-chinois). He discusses the importance of Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), a text describing the garden’s division into three categories or qualities: 1. pleasing (the fragrant shrubs, blossoming trees, winding waterways, etc.), 2. terrible (deep valleys inaccessible to the sun, impetuous cataracts, blasted and shattered trees, deep caverns in the rocks), and 3. surprising (quaking garden tourist in deep gloomy valleys, sepulchral monuments, colossal figures, sudden violent gusts of wind, trembling earth, noises of war). Chambers’ text ultimately connects England to his description of the Chinese garden where George III represents the western version of Emperor Qianlong.

Next, Leask explores Sir George Staunton’s Authentic Account . . . of the Earl of Mccartney as its author describes Emperor Qianlong’s gardens in detail. In his examination, those gardens “betrayed a regularity of design” and, though commanded and created for the pleasure of Qianlong, were made by the labor of thousands–expressing the political and class tensions inherent in oriental despotism. According to Leask, Staunton’s writings are expanded by Sir John Barrow, whose Travels in China reveal that the Earl of Mccartney was a landscape gardener; he recounts how the eastern and western parts of the garden recall the beautiful and sublime elements that Chambers witnessed.

Leask concludes his essay by focusing on Coleridge’s shift from the “Thalaban programme of destruction” in Kubla’s “decree” (the first stanza) to an alternative, positive vision of the Abyssinian maid’s “symphony and song,” a transition from “idolatrous Tartary” or Xanadu to “an ancient Christian culture” or Abyssinia. The religious allusion works as an “antistrophic rebuke” to the Khan’s aesthetic idolatry because of its untainted, “pure” perception in Europe. Despite Purchas’ links to “Mount Amara” as an ancient seat of pagan worship, the poem’s greater significance lies in its conversion to a pure form of Christianity that opposes both pagan and contemporary Christian culture.

-Omar F. Miranda

Source:

Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited

Citation Information. Romanticism. Volume 4, Page 1-21 DOI 10.3366/rom.1998.4.1.1, ISSN 1354-991x, Available Online 1998.

http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/rom.1998.4.1.1