Abstract: This article examines the formal and theoretical stakes of literary instruction by reading for utility in the didactic poems and allegories of Thomas Spence's Pigs' Meat . These texts have obvious political and pedagogical agendas, yet they work overtime aesthetically, warping didacticism's clear-cut utility into an excessive formal experiment that resists the extraction of enclosure and colonialism without leaning on lyric sentimentalism. I argue that in Spence's work, systems of instruction derive from relations to land, and Spence seeks to imagine better versions of both.
Abstract: Inspired by the Anglo-Mysore Wars, the Tippoo productions at Astley's Amphitheatre combine circus acts, military pageantry, and pantomime to display extravagant Oriental spectacles. This essay explores how movement, orientation, and shifting perspectives generated unstable affective atmospheres that both reinforced and unsettled colonial binaries. Ultimately, the essay advocates for a creative-critical mode of historical recovery that treats criticism itself as a performative engagement with the ephemeral traces of past performances, expanding the archive of Romantic-era theater beyond static textual and visual records to include the range of possibilities of affective experiences available to spectators in positioning themselves vis-à-vis the empire.
Abstract: This article explores the interconnections between the work of Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. I argue that despite apparent differences between the gender politics and religious practice of the two, Wollstonecraft was strongly indebted to Barbauld, in particular to Barbauld's account of religious devotion. I focus on their reading anthologies for young women, Wollstonecraft's Female Reader (1789) and Barbauld's Female Speaker (1811), to show that Barbauld's work was a model for Wollstonecraft's account of devotional feeling, divine Providence, and the use of the voice in prayer, and that Barbauld celebrated Wollstonecraft's embodied devotional practice in her own later writings.
Abstract: This paper reassesses the emancipatory potential of Jewish salons in Romantic-era Berlin through the case of Henriette Herz. Challenging idealized accounts of these gatherings as spaces of female empowerment and civic inclusion, it argues that they also imposed significant burdens on their hostesses. First, it examines the structural constraints that limited the salons' gender-transformative potential. Second, it shows how Schleiermacher's interpretation of salon sociability obscured the tensions between women's prescribed domestic roles and their civic aspirations. By highlighting the structural vulnerability of Jewish salonnières , the paper calls for a reevaluation of their place in European intellectual and social history.
Abstract: In 1796 the venerable English mythographer Jacob Bryant declared that Troy and the Trojan War as related by Homer had no direct historical basis. Bryant, hitherto considered an (albeit idiosyncratic) defender of orthodoxy, was accused of a skeptical Jacobinism that threatened to undermine the established religious and intellectual order. This essay explores Bryant's religious and political apostasy in the eyes of fellow Loyalists to establish the relationship between religious apologetics, antiquarian philology, political ideology and Romantic poetics during the French revolutionary era; and to identify ways in which those relationships continue to shape critical responses to the period's mythographical debates.
