Prison Life Writing: Conversion and the Literary Roots of the U.S. Prison System by Simon Rolston (review)

Abstract

preoccupations of letters where neither genre takes precedence” (198). Michael O’Neill contrasts Percy Shelley’s letters from Italy with the letters of contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, suggesting that Shelley’s letters evince the “sensibility, awareness of natural beauty, and questioning intelligence” that mark Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). For O’Neill, Shelley’s “epistolary prose is light on its feet, mercurial, a messenger from the poet’s godlike thought that is also an incarnation of such thought” (217). Anthony Howe identifies some of the drawbacks of relying on standard print editions, where an author’s writings are usually organized by genre, thus concealing the provocative “hybrid character” that may be central to their achievement. After touching on what is missed by printing Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry alongside his early political prose, Howe turns to several poems by Keats to provide readings that would be “impossible for readers of most standard editions of the poetry,” which divorce the poems from their original epistolary context (251). Finally, beginning with a discussion of the epistolary aspects of Mary Shelley’s first novel Frankenstein, Angela Wright explores how her subsequent fiction and her letters after the death of her husband interrelate as she works through her grief. If the letters of Romantic period authors have for the most part been viewed as a supplement to the creative work, valuable for substance to the exclusion of literary qualities, Romanticism and the Letter does much to challenge this misconception while opening the way to further critical work on the epistolary culture and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century.