Preview the new issue of Romantic Textualities

After a lengthy and unplanned delay, the new issue of Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is to be published in its HTML incarnation next month. In the meanwhile, you can preview the print-optimized version of the journal as a PDF, which contains all of the items that will feature in the HTML version in one convenient publication.

Issue 20 contains the following material:

• ‘ “We’ll Wear Out Great Ones”: Maria Pickersgill, Letitia Landon and the Power of the “Improvisatrice” ’ (David Moberly): an article which provides an engaged and persuasive analysis of Pickersgill’s poetry, and its reflections on performativity and gender, through her use of orientalist framing devices, which can be contrasted with those of contemporaries such as Moore and Byron.
•  ‘Hazlitt’s Prizefight Revisited: Pierce Egan and Jon Bee’s Boxiana-Style Perspective’ (David Snowdon): an article that examines the masculine sporting culture that flourished in the 1820s, revolving in particular around the boxing world dubbed ‘The Fancy’.
• ‘Merely an Imitator? The Preponderance of ‘Radcliffe’ in Lusignan or the Abbaye of La Trappe and The Orphans of Llangloed’ (Jacqueline Howard): a lengthy report that puts forward the tantalising—and, no doubt, controversial—view that Ann Radcliffe’s career as a novelist did not stop with the publication of The Italian (1797), based on close textual and contextual analysis.
• Reviews of recent publications by Alex Benchimol, Clare Broome Saunders, Richard Hill, James Hogg, Sarah Houghton-Walker, Maria Purves and Nicola Watson.
• Books Received: a list of books relating to Romantic print culture and intertextuality available for review.

You can download the new issue, by clicking on this link.

You can visit Romantic Textualities @ www.romtext.org.uk.

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is a peer-reviewed online journal that focuses on the interface between literature, book history and material cultures during the Romantic era. Romantic Textualities disseminates scholarship in a variety of forms: peer-reviewed essays, reports and bibliographical checklists, and review articles. Essays have included studies as diverse as Wordsworth and the rise of copyright, metropolitan art criticism, travel writing, pugilism, sentimental fiction and morality, Gothic bluebooks and discourses of gardening.

Romantic fiction and print culture: paper available for download

On 23 June, Anthony Mandal presented a talk on Romantic fiction and print culture at The Romantic Book: A Day Symposium, hosted by the Open University. The talk, entitled ‘A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace’, provided an overview of various economic, legal and technological factors that impacted on the production of fiction during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as analysing the output of new fiction and what it meant to be a novelist in the Romantic era. The talk and accompanying slides are available for download through the Cardiff Book History blog.

Download Anthony’s paper, ‘A World of Words: Romantic Fiction and the Literary Marketplace’ (PDF).

Download the PowerPoint slides that accompanied the talk (PPTX).

Visiting speaker, 17 Nov 2010: Deborah Wynne on Victorian clothing

Deborah Wynne will be presenting her talk, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Frocks and Shirley‘s Queer Textiles’, at 2pm on Wednesday, 17 November 2010. The talk will take place in the Cardiff University Humanities Building, Room 2.48.

Abstract
Charlotte Brontë’s ‘condition-of-England’ novel Shirley (1849) engages with the issue of textile manufacture and use in the age of mass production. It offers insights into the ways in which cloth functions as a language through which identities can be forged. This talk examines why textiles, particularly women’s clothes and needlework activities, are important in Shirley. It focuses on Brontë’s anxieties about her own metaphorical cross dressing as the ‘male’ author Currer Bell and her complex representations of dress, particularly the homosocial potential of clothing rituals, as she depicts her female characters dressing and undressing their friends. The paper also considers the importance of Brontë’s unpublished Preface to Shirley, entitled ‘A Word to the Quarterly’, an attack upon Elizabeth Rigby, a hostile reviewer of Jane Eyre. Brontë’s satirical essay helps to explain why Shirley offers an extended engagement with the topic of women’s dress.