Peter Hulme

Emeritus Professor

University of Essex

The literature of Romanticism ran parallel to the British movements for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself.  What Elizabeth Bohls calls “the capacious genre of travel writing” (3) provided several of the key texts that fuelled these debates, most of them centred on the West Indies.  These books, by John Gabriel Stedman, William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Edward Long, Bryan Edwards, Marcus Rainsford, Olaudah Equiano, Janet Schaw, Maria Nugent, and Mary Prince, provide the material for Slavery and the Politics of Place.  The books are well-known, at least to Caribbeanists, but the fine-grained analyses offered here are welcome additions to the scholarship on Romanticism, slavery, and travel writing.

As always in travel writing, description of place plays an important part, so it’s no surprise to see the language of the picturesque featuring so strongly in all the books...

Brian Rejack
Illinois State University

One can’t help but feel slightly immodest when carrying around a book titled Keats, Modesty and Masturbation. While engaged in reading the book in question, this humble reviewer unabashedly displayed it on his coffee table, which resulted in a non-academic friend regarding it—and by extension, its reader—skeptically, perhaps even accusatorily (the response: “yes, of course this is the kind of thing we do in academia!”). But fear not, gentle readers; Rachel Schulkins’s book will not betray your delicate sensibilities. What it will do is educate you on a significant aspect of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period and offer readings of Keats’s romances (and some shorter poems) which challenge and productively expand the scholarship on Keats and gender.

To begin, the term “masturbation” during the Romantic period denotes something not quite as specific as it does today. Instead of referring primarily to “...

Bysshe Inigo Coffey

Adam Roberts’s monograph is the first serious attempt to recuperate Walter Savage Landor’s “vanishing reputation” in around fifty years. This is not an easy task.  T. S. Eliot described Landor as one of the early nineteenth century’s “very finest poets,” but unfortunately, Eliot’s lavish judgement failed to inspire any serious critical revaluation of Landor.  Roberts accepts that Landor is not “a poet of Shelleyan or Keatsian brilliance.”  His “prodigious” and uneven output—some of it, as Roberts admits, is undeniably boring—ranges from lyric, epic, drama, to the Imaginary Conversations. 

Also there’s the Latin to contend with.  For today’s student the centrality of Latin to Landor’s work might seem a rather formidable obstacle, but Roberts’s guidance is light, sound, and inviting.  Furthermore, any would-be reader has to deal with what Donald Davie (in a short essay on the short poems) called the “bewildering insecurity of tone” that...

Jonas Cope
California State University, Sacramento

Jane Austen and Animals is a thoughtful and lucid book. That it never loses sight of its object—tracing connections between the domination of the nonhuman world and the domination of women in the juvenilia, letters and novels of Jane Austen—may be both a merit and a weakness. On the one hand the book is well researched and remarkably consistent. On the other its argument can seem somewhat unadventurous and occasionally formulaic: the “bad” characters in Austen who exploit animals and natural resources usually exploit women; the “good” ones who are sensitive to the environment are also more sexually egalitarian. The point is not that the argument is not convincing—it is—but that even while it makes a solid case the reader longs for a few more intellectual twists and turns along the way.

Seeber’s book marks the “first full-length study of animals in Austen’s writing” (11). Its main goal is to decenter the...