{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123211752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensitive Plants and Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, and Elizabeth Kent","authors":"Leilani A. Walker","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.3","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000When a team of researchers in 2018 found that plants exposed to anesthesia appeared to lose consciousness, the press reported that plants might have a consciousness to lose. The ensuing debate revealed a gap between scientific and literary approaches to human and nonhuman consciousness that this article traces back to the botanical writing of the Romantic period. These concerns, I argue, are central to Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825), both botanical works that double as literary anthologies in order to expose a productive gap between literary and scientific knowledge. In a time when the distinction between science and poetry could frequently blur, Kent’s works navigate these boundaries with particular attention to the kinds of relationships each entails. In so doing, I argue, she advances an ethics of care attuned to consciousnesses beyond our understanding, rooted in the contested borderland between scientific and poetic knowledge.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132926487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary","authors":"Alice Rhodes","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.2","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130713374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Correspondence in The Woman of Colour","authors":"Deven M. Parker","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay argues that the expansion of the transatlantic packet network in Napoleonic-era Britain informs the form, politics, and racial discourse of the 1808 epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour. My reading of this text demonstrates that it draws upon the political instability of the wartime packet network in order to underscore its heroine’s social and emotional precarity as a woman of color, forced into marriage abroad. Departing from readings that assert Olivia Fairfield’s ability to transcend her precarious situation and achieve autonomy, I demonstrate that the novel’s invocation of the transatlantic packet context in fact casts doubt on her ability to escape from or transcend her predicament. In refusing to provide a hopeful ending, the novel instead offers a powerful, pessimistic condemnation of racism and misogyny in England.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122263138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Battle of the Bards: Canings and Unchivalrous Masculinity","authors":"W. Brewer","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000On 18 August 1800, the satirist John Wolcot (aka Peter Pindar) entered a London bookshop and assaulted a fellow satirist, William Gifford, with a cane. This essay examines their feud within the contexts of Romantic-era notions of chivalric masculinity and the class symbolism of caning. Both middle-class writers felt entitled to deploy chivalric rhetoric and physical violence and insisted that they were honorably defending their reputations. But they grossly miscalculated how their hyperaggressive behavior and emasculatory rhetoric would be received during a time in which the code of gentlemanliness was evolving. Although Gifford’s adherents pronounced him the victor of the battle of the bards, neither satirist performed chivalric masculinity convincingly, and their mutual character assassination campaigns undercut their claims to gentlemanly status. The British print media’s responses to the Wolcot—Gifford caning affair provide insights into the inchoate embourgeoisement and shifting conceptions of chivalric masculinity during the Romantic period.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"263 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114470446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Counting the Bodies: Ferguson and Ferguson1","authors":"Bakary Diaby","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the political and interpretive possibilities of Romantic Idealism for understanding contemporary American race relations. Working with Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime, it puts Romantic aesthetics into a mutually constructive dialogue with afropessimist thought. That is, the underlying logic of Black Lives Matter proves to be one composed of Romantic “counting” as well as an afropessimist stance on Black alterity. Black Lives Matter, in this sense, features an aesthetics of omission and accumulation that reveals how Romantic Idealism intersects with a more expansive notion of materiality. Turning to Ferguson’s reading of William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven,” the article contends that any analysis of Romanticism’s political stakes should make use of the Idealism central to it, and that such a use does not attenuate the urgency or efficacy of Romanticist work.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131508604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“[A] mad excess of love”: Hyper-Sympathy, Fidelity, and Suicidality in Mary Shelley’s Falkner","authors":"Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"88 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120986919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inside Voice: Charlotte Smith, Silence, and the Sonnet of Insensibility","authors":"C. Cognevich","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125475497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“he who made the Lamb”: Catechistic Subversion of Children’s Literature in Blake’s Songs","authors":"D. A. Smith","doi":"10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2020.27.1.5","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience employed catechistic structures frequently found in eighteenth-century children’s literature; however, this appropriation by Blake provokes ques...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116620436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}