Dear Joe,

I hope you're doing well! I'm just writing with a quick note to say that I'm about halfway through Red Round Globe Hot Burning, and I'll be so interested to hear your thoughts. My short take is that I wonder if this is an impossible book -- a book defined by failure, by incomplete archives, by irrecoverable experiences … 

Warmly,

Shelby 

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Hey Shelby,

Thanks for touching base -- that's spurred me to start reading in earnest now too! As a career’s culmination (I almost said fulmination--in the best way), Red Round Globe seems to be Linebaugh at his most exuberantly Linebaugh, where both the galvanizing, exhilarating strengths of his work, as well as its limits and occasional missteps, are on full view. But ultimately I’m on his side--or that’s the side I want to be on, in endless search of “the commons” as “the bridge linking romanticism and radicalism, philia...

Marronage and Discomfort with the Black Rebel: a Collaborative Review

Gabriella I. Johnson, New York University 

and

Gregory Pierrot, University of Connecticut—Stamford

Greg: Frances Botkin’s Thieving Three-Fingered Jack is a cultural history that makes the deceptively simple but necessary argument that things are always more complex than they seem. Botkin’s careful exploration of the figure of Three-Finger’d Jack as he came to us in cultural production, but as importantly in the collective memory of Jamaican Maroons themselves, is an injunction to take portrayals (and these sit at the confluence of history and fiction, I suppose) with a grain of salt. As she unpacks how the fictions of Three-Finger’d Jack intersect with what is known of the events from English publications and Maroon accounts and history, we’re reminded that in memory (and forgetting), storytelling is indeed a practice of community-making and...

Deven M. Parker

Queen Mary University of London

Joseph Drury’s Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain breaks new ground in the field of technology and literary studies not just because it offers deep historical dives into several under-researched areas of eighteenth-century technology and science—musical instruments and medicine, carriage and road design, and theatrical engineering, among many others—but even more so because it theorizes a mutually constitutive and constantly evolving relationship between technology and literary form. The argument at the book’s center is that eighteenth-century novelists sought to transform the novel into a machine that could produce knowledge about the world, much like those other Enlightenment machines, such as air pumps and automata, that scientific philosophers believed could recreate natural phenomenon in order to help them better understand it. It follows, then, that if the novel...

Diego Saglia

Università di Parma, Italy

A major product of Britain’s geo-cultural imagination, early nineteenth-century manifestations of Italia romantica were intricate knots of fact and fiction, distant observation and personal involvement, resting on a solid bedrock of age-old myths and stereotypes. Given its extent and complexity, many features of this vision of Italy remain opaque, continuously inviting critical questioning that often results in significant contributions to our understanding of what the Romantic-period imagination ‘did’ with Italy. One such is Keith Crook’s book on Joseph Forsyth and his Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803. Building on Crook’s 2001 critical edition of Forsyth’s Remarks, this is actually two books in one. The first part is an informative, insightful and enjoyable study of Forsyth’s Remarks. It starts from a reconstruction of its...