This paper initiates a conversation between two prominent Romantic poets and thinkers who have yet to be connected in scholarship. Throughout the 1790s, Mary Robinson and John Thelwall, each with their own celebrity status, became preoccupied with the role speech and prosody could play in fostering a democratic society. Their poems set against the backdrop of the French Revolution are filled with speech-quoted, heard directly, cut off, or emphasized in typography. However, Robinson's poetry more precisely models the difficulty women experience when vocalizing revolutionary opinions. In fact, the minute attention Robinson gives to the structure of her printed page when female characters speak about war or inequality parallels the speech therapies, including a certain prosody and typography, Thelwall later adopts for his elocution school in London.
Maria Edgeworth's fictional responses to slavery and abolition have been extensively discussed since the publication of Susan C. Greenfield's 1997 essay, "'Abroad and at Home.'" A hitherto unexamined and geographically scattered body of correspondence now reveals Edgeworth's links to the owners of four Jamaican sugar plantations. I establish the familial ties that connected Edgeworth to plantations in America as well as Jamaica, and identify the social contacts that she exploited to advance the case of a family of tenants from her Irish estate who had gone to Jamaica to make their fortunes. The uncovering of the interventions that Edgeworth made on their behalf, at odds with the more critical tendency of her published work on Caribbean slavery and the plantocracy and of other unpublished writing by her on waged and forced labor, throws new light on the relationship between "home" and "abroad" in Edgeworth's thought, and on the power relations and injustices with which she engaged. The article thus illuminates Edgeworth's incompatible stances on the debates surrounding the emancipation of enslaved people and the abolition of slavery.
This essay argues that idolatry is an important and still underappreciated theme in William Hazlitt's philosophical and political writing, as well as his art criticism. It considers examples from across Hazlitt's career, showing that his theory of idolatry-critique was informed both by his early Unitarian education, and by his participation in the intellectual culture of the parliamentary reform movement during and immediately after the wars with France. In making this argument, I provide an updated account of Hazlitt's analysis of the post-Revolutionary interplay between ministerial oppression and popular consent. I will also show that these very same political dynamics drove Hazlitt to embrace an alternative, "virtuous," mode of idolatry, centered on the ambiguous figure of Napoleon Buonaparte. At a broader methodological level, I push back against the view that iconoclasm and idolatry-critique are inherently expressions of reductive dogmatism. The example of Hazlitt suggests that unflinching criticism of idols need not lead to intellectual or political sterility.
Walsingham ushers the late Enlightenment Gothic novel beyond the genre's entrenchment in systemic binaries through paradox. Robinson reaches back to a medieval shrine in the village of Walsingham, whose history began with a woman's vision of Mary, miracles including the appearance of a vial of Mary's breastmilk making it a site of pilgrimage and controversy. Framing the discussion of Robinson's dismantling the heteronormative assumptions behind the Gothic novel through her eponymous protagonist, the essay first explores Robinson's twin subversions of the generic bildungsroman and sentimental novel through the characters of Walsingham and Sidney, both of whom follow trajectories that run counter to tradition. Walsingham's self-pity and rage toward Sidney, whom he believes to be his male rival for his inherited wealth and erotic conquest, are based upon his misprision about Sidney's gender and sexuality that Robinson does not reveal until the novel's end. Through Robinson's authorial voice behind the flawed narration of Walsingham, and through the novel's cross-dressing foils, Sidney evolves as an androgyne too complex for Walsingham to fathom. Belying the reader's demand for a traditional marriage plot, Walsingham insists that Sidney be reeducated as a woman before he will marry her.
Following their publication in Poems by William Wordsworth (1815), three poems by Dorothy Wordsworth appeared in collections by non-family editors including Alexander Dyce, Lucy Aikin, and others. Dorothy's texts found a ready audience in a robust market for children's poetry. While William's attributions of her poems to "a female friend" or "my sister" in his editions have met with disapproval, in others' volumes the texts bore no attributions at all or were credited to William, obscuring not only Dorothy's authorship but also the caregiving for his offspring that the poems depict. Both Dorothy and William examined selective volumes of William's poetry and corresponded with the publishers; they could have requested correct attributions for Dorothy's texts, but none appeared. Recovering the poems' print history, this essay considers Dorothy's apparent resistance to print and to public identification in her poetry by situating it in sociable manuscript culture in which script was her primary mode of literary exchange. I explore the non-mass-market interpersonal nature of Dorothy's poems while demonstrating that the absence of attribution in non-family poetry collections, along with alterations in titles, texts, and implied speakers, could shapeshift the poems and their imports for different readers in different media environments.
Lucy Aikin, the daughter of John Aikin and niece of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, made her literary debut with the anthology, Poetry for Children, in 1801. Since then, its different editions continued to be published until at least 1850. This essay examines the editorial history of Poetry for Children, focusing on the geographical poems it designates as "Original," and which were designed to captivate children's senses with vivid descriptions of foreign lands. The essay identifies the book's pedagogical shift over time from experiments with sensational scenes towards more cautious approaches to such visual temptations. While earlier poems portrayed alluring visions without overt denominational intent or moral lessons, later revisions introduced nuanced nationalistic interpretations into exotic scenes or eliminated awe-inspiring set pieces. This shift reflects the generational and epochal challenges of the early nineteenth century, which necessitated reconciliation between the Dissenting circle's radical educational philosophy, its emphasis on associationist and pleasure-driven pedagogy, and heightened concerns about social stability in the aftermath of the French Revolution. While acknowledging Lucy Aikin's increasing editorial control, this essay suggests that the book's innovations and reactions must be revaluated in this context to reassess its significance, which is not possible when each "Original" poem is examined in isolation.
This special issue showcases new scholarship on Romanticism and translation. It seeks to reframe the period from a comparative vantage point through highlighting moments of cultural exchange across linguistic and national boundaries. Bringing translation theory and translation studies into conversation with recent work on the European dimensions of Romanticism, the articles collected offer a fresh take on the history of Romantic literature and culture as a history of multilingual and transcultural contact. The contributions consider both canonical figures such as Goethe, Scott, Coleridge, or de Sta & euml;l and previously neglected areas such as the translation of radical writing in the wake of the French Revolution or the multilingual production and reception of early Black poetry and prose. This introduction revisits recent research on Romanticism and translation, establishes the wider historical and conceptual framework of the issue, and provides an overview of the individual articles.
What would a translation-centered narrative of British literature and culture in the Romantic period be like? What would it highlight and reveal? To what extent would it transform critical and literary-historical approaches to the period? This essay examines forms of interlinguistic and cultural translation in the Romantic literary-cultural field to assess their presence and impact from a systemic perspective. Through such spatial categories as networks and webs, the assemblage, and the translation zone, this essay outlines a translation-centered narrative of British Romantic-era literature and culture by charting selected translational flows connecting northern and southern traditions-from Henry Mackenzie's pioneering "Account of the German Theatre" (1788) through to the lively translational environment of the 1820s exemplified by Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine's "Horae Germanicae," Walter Scott's novels, or Sarah Austin and Edgar Taylor's Lays of the Minnesingers (1824). Moving translation from a secondary or ancillary function to a focal position, this essay reconsiders how interlinguistic and cultural translations inform literary and cultural production between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and effectively structure the Romantic field, as well as suggesting which kinds of tales can be told about it through a translation-centered approach.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Black writers began to make a mark in the transatlantic public sphere through the printing of their poetry and prose. This article explores the multiple forms of translation that mediated how Black writing reached its European audiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Exploring the multilingual afterlives of Francis Williams and Olaudah Equiano as case studies, the article demonstrates that linguistic transfer (the actual translation of Black writing from one language into another) was a key element of this process. Translation in the broader sense of critical reception and editorial framing was equally crucial, however. Such practices are illustrated through a reading of Henri Gr & eacute;goire's De la litt & eacute;rature des N & egrave;gres (1808), a treatise which featured French renderings of Black prose and verse and was itself soon translated into other European languages. The article concludes with an analysis of abolitionist poetry by Johann Gottfried Herder and Robert Southey, white (proto-)Romantic writers who ventriloquized the language of Black subjecthood. The main argument advanced through these case studies is that translation as linguistic transfer, critical framing, and poetic production determined how Black writing and Black authorship were perceived during the Romantic period.
Through three readings which chronologically and thematically build on each other-taken from Keats's sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," Coleridge's journal The Friend, and Scott's novel The Antiquary, with additional material drawn from Goethe's play Faust-, the present article traces how Romantic writers contended with increasingly international and intermedial contexts, and how they did so in ways that challenged earlier self-perceptions. To reconstruct this alternative orientation for Romanticism and its critical reading, the article examines how practices and theories of translation and mediation interacted and mutually reinforced each other. Writers staged such interactions in scenes of imagined translation in order to trace an aesthetic ideology which reverses the marginalization of mediation and translation by instead centering these concepts. The article theorizes what it means to place British Romanticism in a European context-that is, a transnational and intermedial context. Each of the cases examined allegorizes crucial questions pertaining to the implications of translation and mediation for Romantic textuality by staging numerous transfers among and between numerous languages and media: the resulting excess of movement betokens a sublime insight into the nature of a reconceived Romantic textuality.
Gottfried August B & uuml;rger's Gothic ballad "Lenore" (1774) is one of the most important textual catalysts of international Romanticism. It was written twenty years before the beginning of the German literary movement in Jena and, unlike many Romantic texts, offers a clear Christian moral doctrine. It was only through the translations, which emerged at the beginning (or at the turning points) of many Romantic traditions, that the ballad acquired its Romantic potential. The analysis of the "Lenore Year" in England (1796), Giovanni Berchet's "Lettera Semiseria" in Italy (1816), and selected examples from Slavic Romanticism reveal the essential challenges that "Lenore" poses to European literature: B & uuml;rger's interjections and his use of onomatopoeia, which are perceived as foreign by writers in other cultures, allow these writers to explore forms of foreignness in their own culture. In this way, B & uuml;rger's sometimes coarse language gives rise to moments of folk poetry that oscillate between the individual and the universal. The article concludes by suggesting that this simultaneity of contradictions is an essential structural principle of European Romanticism.
Accounts of the beginning of modern translation theory traditionally start with the German Romantics, who conceived of their models of cultural transfer in the context of the Napoleonic wars and at a time when heightened national sentiments intersected with, and later eclipsed, the universalist spirit of the French Revolution. Yet, the tide of revolution that engulfed Europe from the 1790s gave rise to new practices of translation whose inventive impetus has not been sufficiently recognized. This article presents an alternative canon of discourses on translation, drawn not from theoretical set-pieces but from dispersed fragments recovered from the paratexts of translations published in English, French, and Italian. Radical translators sought to extend ideas of equality, freedom, and rights into new contexts. They saw translation as an act with purpose, strove to intervene in the fast-moving, open-ended temporality of revolution, and reoriented relations between source and target cultures toward an ideal of universal equality. What emerges is a varied picture of translation as a radical intervention and of translators as cultural and political agents who, even when publishing anonymously or protesting humility, actively sought to influence the course of political events, the beliefs of their readers, and the shape of history.
