Reviews & Receptions

Edited by Suzanne L. Barnett, Alex Gatten, Lenora Hanson, and Ross Wilson

Reviews

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Fred Moten, Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being). (Duke UP, 2018). 336 pp.; (Paperback, 27.95; ISBN 978-0-8223-7058-1)

Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770-1830. (Cambridge UP, 2018). 282 pp; (Paperback, 31.99, ISBN: 9781108468756)

Beyond Slavery, Knowledge of Freedom: Bakary Diaby and Deanna Koretsky review Stolen Life and Beyond Slavery and Abolition

Chris Murray, China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome: Classics, Sinology, and Romanticism, 1793–1938. (Oxford University Press, 2020). 265 pp., 8 b&w illus. (Hdbk., $85.00; ISBN 9780198767015).

Emily Sun, On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. (Fordham University Press, 2021). 167 pp. (Hdbk., $105.00; ISBN 9780823294787).
 

Chris Murray's China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome & Emily Sun's On the Horizon of World Literature. Reviewed by Jennifer L. Hargrave

Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Shelley’s Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song (Liverpool University Press, 2021). xxi + 220 pp.; frontispiece + 11 b&w illus. (Hdbk., £90.00; ISBN 9781800855380).

Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Shelley’s Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song. Reviewed by Michael Neth

Diana Pérez Edelman. Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine. Series eds. Sharon Ruston, Alice Jenkins, and Jessica Howell. Cham CH: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2021. Pp. xii + 180. $119.99. ISBN 978-3-030-73647-7.

Diana Pérez Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet

Alexander Freer, Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure (Oxford University Press, 2020), 272 pp.
(Hbk, $70/£55, ISBN: 9780198856986)

Alexander Freer, Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure. Reviewed by Matt ffytche.

Nikki Hessell, Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 269 pp. including apparatus. (Cloth ISBN 9783319709321. eBook 9783319709338 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70933.8. Kim TallBear, “Dear Indigenous Studies, It’s Not Me, It’s You: Why I Left and What Needs to Change.” Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Tucson: U of Arizona Press, 2016. 69-82.

“Romantic Entanglements, Irreconcilable Differences: Indigenous Translations”: a collaborative review of Nikki Hessell's Romantic Literature and the Colonised World and Kim TallBear's “Dear Indigenous Studies" by Matt Hooley & Dawn Morgan

Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019). 252 pp. (Hdbk., $67.00; ISBN 9781487504502).

Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Reviewed by Joel Faflak

Dara Rossman Regaignon, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre (Ohio State UP, 2021). 204 pp., (Hardcover, $69.95; ISBN 978-0-8142-1469-5).

Dara Rossman Regaignon, Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre (Ohio State UP, 2021), Reviewed by Diana Pérez Edelman

Samantha Matthews, Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020). 304pp., 24 illus. (£60, ISBN: 9780198857945)

Samantha Matthews Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020). Reviewed by Kacie L. Wills.

Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (University of California Press, 2019); Matt Sandler, The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery (Verso Books, 2020)

“as at a tavern, a bonfire, a picket line lunch”: a collaborative review of Red Round Globe Hot Burning (Peter Linebaugh) and The Black Romantic Revolution (Matthew Sandler). By Shelby Johnson and Joseph Albernaz

Griffiths, Devin, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 339 pp. (Hdbk., $55.00; ISBN 9781421420769)

Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Reviewed by Kurtis Hessel

Frances Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015 (Rutgers UP, 2017). 240 pp. (Paperback, $31.95 ISBN 9780813587387; Cloth, $120.00, ISBN 9780813587394; Kindle, 28.95, ISBN 9780813595733; EPUB, 31.95, ISBN 9780813587400; PDF, $31.95.ISBN 9780813587417).

 

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (U of NC P, 2000). 480 pp. (paperback, $47.50, ISBN 9780807848296; ebook $29.99, ISBN 9780807876121).

A collaborative review of Frances Botkin’s Thieving Three-Fingered Jack and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. Reviewed by Gabriella I. Johnson & Gregory Pierrot

About Reviews & Receptions

Submitted by rc-admin on

The new Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions section is an innovative venture in contemporary Romantic scholarship, comprising short reviews of recent work, live BookChats, BookLists, a forum for debate, and an evolving compendium of appearances of Romanticism in popular culture.

Romanticism and Popular Culture

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More in this category

Audio

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"The Playlists: Rock and Romanticism" by James Rovira
Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (Lexington Books) and Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan)...
Jon Klancher on Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age
A conversation with Jon Klancher (Carnegie Mellon University) about his text, Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge UP, 2012...

Book Chats

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Roundtable on Romantic Scholarship and Teaching, COVID-19, and Uprising

Romantic Circles: Reviews & Receptions Editors Alex Gatten and Lenora Hanson host a roundtable discussion on uprisings, online teaching, and hopes for the field and for scholarship moving forward. The roundtable took place originally on June 4, 2020, several months into the pandemic and shortly after uprisings began due to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The panelists are Carmen Faye Mathes (University of Regina), Rebecca Schneider (Fort Lewis College), and Anna Shajirat (Quincy University).

 

Romantic Circles BookChat: Michael Gamer's Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry, hosted by Kirstyn Leuner

Kirstyn Leuner (Assistant Professor, Santa Clara University) hosts a chat with Michael Gamer (Professor, University of Pennsylvania) to discuss his new book Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 2017). Their guests are Jeffrey N. Cox (Professor, University of Colorado Boulder), Devin Griffiths (Assistant Professor, University of Southern California), and Devoney Looser (Professor, Arizona State University). Prof. Gamer apologizes for the occasional technical difficulties, since he conducted the chat while staying in a guest house in Dorset with iffy wifi.

Romantic Circles BookChat: The Life and Work of Dr. Diane Hoeveler, hosted by James Rovira

On Friday, 9 December 2016, Dr. James Rovira hosted a Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions book chat in honor of the life and work of Dr. Diane Hoeveler.

Participants and their topics included:

  • Dr. Beth Lau -- Prof. of English, Cal State Long Beach: Romantic Androgyny and the Brontë project
  • Dr. Deborah Morse -- Vera W. Barkley Professor of English, College of William and Mary: her own Brontë projects with Diane.
  • Dr. Angela H Wright -- Professor of English, The University of Sheffield: The Gothic Ideology and other works.

Romantic Circles BookChat: Ossianic Unconformities, by Eric Gidal

Eric Gidal, Tobias Menely, and Theresa Kelley discuss Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (U of Virginia P, 2015); Moderated by Jesse Oak Taylor.

Romantic Circles BookChat: Romantic Globalism by Evan Gottlieb

Siobhan Carroll​, James Mulholland​, Miranda Burgess​, and Evan Gottlieb​ discuss Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830 (Ohio State UP, 2014); Moderated by Roger Whitson.

This marks the first ever Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions BookChat.

BookLists

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Romanticism and Enlightenment by Rowan Rose Boyson

Rowan Rose Boyson collects and discusses seven wide-ranging approaches to the subject of Romanticism and Enlightenment:

  1. Marshall Brown, ‘Romanticism and Enlightenment’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. by Stuart Curran, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  2. Simon Swift, Romanticism, Literature and Philosophy: Expressive Rationality in Rousseau, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Contemporary Theory (Continuum, 2009)
  3. Frances Ferguson, Pornography: The Theory, or what Utilitarianism did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
  4. Nancy Yousef, Isolated Cases: Anxieties of Autonomy in...

Romanticism and the Sciences by Robert Mitchell

Robert Mitchell collects and discusses eight wide-ranging approaches to the subject of Romanticism and the Sciences:

  1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998)
  2. Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989)
  3. Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and its Milieu,” Grey Room 3 (2001): 7-31
  4. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, trans. G. Burchell; ed. M. Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
  5. Denise Gigante, “The Monster in...

Romanticism and Theory: the 1970s by Orrin N.C. Wang

This list will seem noticeably familiar to many.  And that appears to be the point.  If there ever was a primal scene for Romanticism and theory, especially in the way it was staged within North America, the 1970s would be the name for it.  Explicitly confronting or implicitly shadowboxing with that decade’s critical disposition still colors our critical endeavors more than forty years afterward, from New Historicism in the 1980s to contemporary interventions of the New Materialisms and the Affective Turn.

Conference Panel Reviews

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ICR 2016 Panel: Dark Mathematics. Reviewed by Catherine Engh and Jacob Henry Leveton

Panelists and Papers:

  • Joshua Wilner (City College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), “‘I Cannot Further Explain Myself on This Point’: Maimon’s Obscure Differentials”
  • Amy Kahrmann Huseby (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Calculus, the Infinitesimal, and the Non-Narratable in Wordsworth’s Prelude”
  • Rachel Feder (University of Denver), "Dark Horizons"
  • Aaron Ottinger (University of Washington), "Between None and Don Juan," Moderator

ICR 2016 Panel: Jane Austen in the Dark. Reviewed by Talia Vestri Croan

Panelists and Papers:

  • Catherine Engh (Graduate Center, CUNY), “Environmental Aesthetics and Infection in Sense and Sensibility”
  • Daniela Garofalo (University of Oklahoma), “Abandoned by Providence: Loss in Jane Austen’s Persuasion”
  • Christopher Stampone (Southern Methodist University), “‘Obliged to Yield’: The Language of Patriarchy and the System of Slavery in Mansfield Park”
  • Moderator: Talia Vestri Croan (Boston University)

ICR 2016 Panel: These Dark Satanic Mills. Reviewed by Christopher Stampone

Panelists and Papers:

  • Thora Brylowe (University of Colorado, Boulder), “Ode on a Not-So-Grecian Urn: Blake’s Portland Vase and the Work of Engraving”
  • Jennifer Davis Michael (Sewanee, University of the South), “Voices of the Ground: Silence and Articulation in Gray, Wordsworth, and Blake”
  • Jacob Henry Leveton (Northwestern University), “Going Dark: Blake’s Abstract Color Fields and the Pitt Surveillance State”
  • Moderator: Mark Lussier (Arizona State University)

ICR 2019 Keynote: Seasonable Months, Warming Skies. Reviewed by Ross Wilson

Keynote Lecture: ‘“Middle Summer’s Spring”: Seasonable Months, Warming Skies’

Anne-Lise François (University of California, Berkeley)

At the heart of François’s wide-ranging talk was the disturbance that, to borrow Andreas Malm’s term, fossil capital has wrought on the relation of the earth to the sun. Drawing on Malm, but also on Heidegger and the unjustly neglected Marxist historian of agriculture Colin Duncan, François set out how human beings have sought to slip the moors of seasonality in order to foster and indulge a fantasy of the permanent availability of goods – which is a fantasy, not least because one major consequence of the release of the power of the sun stored in fossil fuels is to trap it all over again, only this time with devastating consequences in the atmosphere...

ICR 2019 Panel: Nineteenth-Century Receptions. Reviewed by Lucia Scigliano

Panelists and Papers:

  • Rachel Lewis (University of California, Berkeley), “Seeing Shelley Plain: Mediating the Romantic Past in Browning and James”
  • Matthew Ward (University of Birmingham), “Arnold’s Struggle with Byron”
  • Federica Coluzzi (The University of Manchester), “Beyond Creative Appropriation: The Romantic Critical Discourse on Dante from Coleridge to G. Rossetti”
  • Alessia Benedetti (The University of Manchester), “Between Romanticism and Anti-Romanticism: A Journey Across Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Reception of Dante in Russia”
  • Moderator: Ingrid Hanson (The University of Manchester)

Digital Scholarship Reviews

Jennie Batchelor, et al. - The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre. Reviewed by Laila Ferreira

Laila Ferreira

University of British Columbia

“Should work really be such fun?” asks Jennie Batchelor, lead researcher of The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre project (“The Monster”). In posing this question, Batchelor points to the myth of the isolated struggle and subsequent seriousness of...