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).

Romantic Textualties: Books for review

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. Past essays have included studies as diverse as Wordsworth and the rise of copyright, metropolitan art criticism, travel writing, sentimental fiction and morality, Gothic bluebooks and discourses of gardening.

We have received review copies of the following books. If you are interested in reviewing one of the unassigned books, or if you would like to suggest a different book for review, please contact Nicola Lloyd (LloydN1@cardiff.ac.uk).

The Romantic Book: A Day Symposium

The Open University Romantic Period Research Group and Book History Group will be running a one-day symposium on The Romantic Book, which will take place on 23 June 2011 at Senate House, London.

The event is organized by Dr Nicola Watson and Dr Shaf Towheed, and speakers include Luisa Calé, Stephen Colclough, Katie Halsey, Anthony Mandal, Lynda Pratt and William St Clair. Here’s a summary of the event from the Symposium website:

From plain text pocket editions of Byron’s Don Juan and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, to the richly illustrated volumes of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the book in the Romantic period became a central point of cultural engagement for writers and readers in the British Isles and beyond. But what did the book represent for writers and readers in the Romantic period? How did the material form of the printed book shape readers’ engagement with the literature of the period? How did the established culture of manuscript circulation engage with the rise of mass print culture? How did Romantic period poets and novelists conceive of their writing within the structures of the printed book? What were the opportunities for illustration opened up by innovations in book production? This day symposium brings together speakers from book history, literary studies and visual and material culture to investigate the topic of the ‘Romantic Book’ from a range of perspectives.

More information is available @ http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2011/RomanticBook/index.htm.