Romanticism and Speculative Realism ed. by Anne C. McCarthy and Chris Washington (review)

Abstract

No doubt this book will be browsed by scholars interested in one or another author’s house museum, who will read the book through its index. But the book’s best arguments are the ones it compiles slowly, among aggregates of examples. in visiting, and describing this surprising range of idiosyncratic spaces, Watson has found a convincing way to trace the special cultural function performed by the author after death; she has shown us the material manifestation of author-love as a function distributed across spaces and times, as a phenomenon with a stable set of common features: the author effect which the author’s effects repeatedly conjure.