14 July 2004 at 2:40 PM, post #52

Forcey, Blythe. "Charlotte Temple and the End of Epistolarity." American Literature. 63:2, 1991 (225-241).

This article examines why the epistolary form, though universally considered the root of the British and the American novel, actually enjoyed only a very brief life of influence. Drawing parallels between epistolarity and the "typically benighted heroines" of novels, Forcey hypothesizes that the "polygot [speaking,writing, written in, or composed of several languages] world of eighteent-century Anglo-America" silenced the form. Secifically, Forcey uses Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple as the paradigm of what was silenced, as a work with the once "traditional Richardsonian plot and ... an authoritive, unifying narrative voice" (225).

Forcey first examines the social and ethnic changes that brought a flux of new languages and new groups of people to America during the first five years of the last eighteenth-century decade. She narrates the social mood, one of "anonymity and volatility." She notes that "most potential readers [of Charlotte Temple], even those seemingly least likely to identify with Charlotte Temple--battle-scarred old soldiers, jaded prostitutes, sophisticated society matrons, successful merchants, or ambitious young entrepreneurs--would still have been affected by the pervasive sense of 'homelessness'" (226). Forcey also discusses how Charlotte Temple allowed readers to experience their worst fears and yet emerge unscathed, noting the motherly tone of the narrator and how this motherly role filled a void in a lonely, individualistic society. And, Forcey concludes, "lacking the support of such narrative guidance, the epistolary novel could not make the successful crossing to the New World" (228).

Forcey then examines the lack of boundaries in epistolary novels and the break in reader-author trust that led to the fall of the form: "knowing that they [authors] were writing in a time of rapid transition and for many possible audiences (rural/urban, British/American, naive/wordly, male/female, moral/amoral), they could no longer trust readers to interpret on their own" (229). Rowson, Forcey argues, must narratively intervene in order for Charlotte's story to be understood: a warm, motherly presence, this narrator acts as an editor, moralizer, translator, and guide for her young readers. Rowson eschewed the role of mere passive compiler of letters and, in the process, ensured that Charlotte Temple's voice was not misconstrued or erased" (230).

Next Forcey examines the presence of letters and letter-writing within the novel itself and the 'motherly' way in which Rowson guides the reader to avoid epistolary influence. Specifically, Forcey notes several key instances in which Rowson replaces the text of letters "with an interpretive passage that neutralizes [their] potentially negative effect" (231). The methods by which Rowson shifts narrative attention are highlighted, and Foley examines every in-text letter.

Forcey concludes that "taken together, Rowson's narrative incursions provide an authoritative unifying voice which gives structure and guidance to the reader. An epistolary novel can have no such unifying voice; inherently multi-vocal, its linguistic duplicity resists the explicit direction and control possible in the narrated form" (236). She then adds a discussion of Francophobia in the time period's English and American literature, explaining that this strain "rested not only on the horror of the French Revolution but also on the idea that the French, through their vaunted verbal arts, could seduce even the sane into hysterical behavior" (237).

08 July 2004 at 1:45 PM, post #48

Christophersen, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993.

In this book, Christophersen analyzes and contextualizes Brown's four Gothic novels in order to proove that Brown's title 'father of the American novel' is neither perfunctory nor questionable (x). By taking into account Brown's self-conscious nationalism along with his philosophical, moral, literary and psychological conerns, Christophersen uses a cultural-historical lens to examine the American character of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

The first of seven chapters highlights "key issues and events of the 1790s and [is] tailored to concerns Brown himself voiced about the Republic" (x). Chapter two delineates Brown's method and style. Each of the subsequent four address one novel in full. The last chapter examines why it would be so easy for Brown to "imagine the legacy of the Enlightenment and of America in such pessimistic terms" (166) as his books convey, why Brown would spearhand a Gothic counterpart that, "oblivious to morality, reason, laws, and social compacts, mocks the young citizen's modish pretensions even as it strikes him down" (178).

06 July 2004 at 4:53 PM, post #38

Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. This book aims to “explain how a particularly articulate and sensitive individual [Brockden Brown] confronted, wrestled with, and ultimately helped articulate the emergence of a liberal culture in early modern America” (xvii). Watts addresses Brown’s significance in hitherto unexplored areas, working to revise a “stereotyped image” (xiv). His discussion draws structure from three main emphases: the extreme transformations of American society and culture during Brown’s career; the interpretation of writing as a kind of cultural conversation, a “process of give and take between writer and audience where meanings are never inherent but shaped by participants according to their values and experiences”; and cultural hegemony, as seen through “links between ‘imaginative’ expression and market change” (xvii).

Seven chapters structure the book. Watts first establishes the characteristics of Brown’s contemporary literary scene and market society, and then examines the earliest fiction. The shift from these “self-absorbed…crude social criticism” to his 1790s work with a “rich interplay of literary and ideological themes” (xviii) is next delineated. The book ends discussing works from the early nineteenth century, specifically nonfiction writing and social criticism. Ultimately, Watts portrays Brockden Brown’s life as one “illuminating the origins of America’s bourgeois civilization,” one which “discloses as well some of its dirty little secrets” (xviii). Watts repeatedly states his bibliography philosophy that an “individual must be seen not so much as a determining free agent, but rather as a kind of contested emotional and intellectual battleground for a wide variety of cultural discourses” (xvi).

05 July 2004 at 1:22 PM, post #35

These are my edited versions.

Cooper, Andrew M. "Blake and Madness: The World Turned Inside Out." ELH 57.3 (1990): 585-642.

This article endeavors to use an examination of William Blake's mental state as means toward encouraging the reintroduction of subjectivity into historical analysis. Via systematical contextualization, Cooper presents his work as a concerted effort toward finding and animating the individual and social overlap between Blake's "paranoid tendencies to experience the social-political upheavals of his time as personal crises" and his tendencies "to project his personal crises outward as grandiose cosmic ones" (586). Cooper also engages Blake's illustrations and those by other artisans in his discussion of eighteenth-century madness portrayals.

In the first section, Cooper examines the different cultural and ideological spheres of Blake's lifetime to "clarify the basic intersubjectivity of Blake's mythology" (587). He incorporates numerous philosophers and psychoanalytic thinkers, including Adam Smith, Thomas Locke, Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg. Blake, Cooper says, did not see opposites--including notions of 'self' and 'other'--as absolute divisions but rather as interdependents. Cooper also discusses how the French Revolution confounded popular beliefs concerning perception, apperception, and representation, e.g. how propogandic figures and political cartoons like John Bull, a patriotic stereotype, also led to new aspects of the British 'self.' Cooper then examines other contemporary authors and non-fiction works about mental illness. He places special emphasis upon portraits and engravings concerning James Matthews, a documented hospital patient, and notes that politics often infused the diagnosis of paranoia in patients. He concludes that "the madman, not unlike the Painite of the early 1790s, could secure a social role only by collaborating with the very stereotypes that served to justify his confinement" (600).

The second section traces the trajectory of Blake's involvement with cultural stereotyping trends. Introduced to the time period by Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, science of the face strongly influenced Blake’s work and throughout this section Cooper pays particular attention to Blake's problems with visual rendering. In the third section, Cooper examines the debate concerning the supposed mutual exclusivity of reason and madness. Theories from Locke, Hume, and Spurzheim frame the continued contextualizations, as we learn that "late eighteenth-century medical books ... begin to distinguish a peculiarly subtle patient whose illness lies in a faulty assumption about reality--a delusion--but whose reasoning powers remain intact or even heightened, inasmuch as they are enlisted to invent ingenious rationalizations of whatever might expose the delusion" (610). Blake, writes Cooper, complicates such standard iconographic depictions. Cooper continues to delineate the various veers and turns of popular and medical opinion concerning mental illness. Exploring further Blake's religious surroundings and examining various Blakean texts, Cooper finally argues that Blake recognized the contradiction between his self-annihilation and transcendental idealism: this realization, Cooper argues, is what allowed the author to "open ... himself to a new identity" (634) beyond self-representation.

Cox, Jeffrey. "Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s." ELH. 58. 3 (1991): 579-610.

Cox wishes to highlight groups of writers and other patterns of reaction that have been excluded by what Jerome McGann calls the 'romantic ideology.' Cox writes that “these plays are part of a broader reactionary literature and culture as relevant to the literary and political situation of England in the 1790s as the work of [William] Wordsworth, [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge or [William] Blake. Considering the particular contexts that shaped these texts, we will find that these dramas have an important place in the ideological struggles of the day" (579). In three sections, the article enumerates the goals of the antirevolutionary drama and explicates numerous scripts and plots. After delineating the two forms of antirevolutionary drama, domestic melodrama and neoclassical tragedy, Cox addresses the philosophical and aesthetic theories of theater, of performer and viewer.

Cox first establishes that the number of antirevolutionary dramas of the 1790s is quite large. In broad terms, the moniker ‘antirevolutionary drama’ refers to direct attacks against the French Revolution or Jacobin principles--in France, the Jacobin society was one of violent agitators during the revolution of 1789 who met secretly in a convent and who conspired to control the National Assembly. The specific types of drama include histories or historical tragedies, Jacobin travesties or celebrations of British virtue, plays paralleling the French Revolution with biblical history, and various plays with negative allusions to the revolution. Cox then makes a further distinction, noting that antirevolutionary drama, arising after 1792, is in fact a direct response to the prorevolutionary images that began to appear on the London stage in 1789, is a revisionist attempt. Cox briefly describes these prorevolutionary dramas, and then moves forward to show how the antirevolutionary drama developed into two specific forms--the spectacular play on contemporary history and the Gothic drama.

The greatest antirevolutionary art tends to parody or satirize Jacobins, and Cox examines what he deems the most potent examples of such. He also highlights the drama's link between political resistance to authority and the welcoming of sexual freedom. Anti-Revolution attacks were often based upon the depiction of revolutionaries as immoral revelers in sexual excess, established early in Burke's Reflections on The Revolution in France. Cox outlines the plot of numerous plays which "insist upon the continuity of patriarchal order from father to king, thereby grounding their conservative ideology in "nature" and rendering revolt into an "unnatural" assault upon parental power (593). Cox presents further methodologies behind counterrevolutionary tracts, including the common emphasis upon an abundance of entities supposedly responsible for 'manipulating' the public.

Cox then examines the weighty and possibly detrimental charge with which conservative ideology, via traditional and dominant theatrical forms, could infuse antirevolutionary intentions, citing the career and work of Matthew Lewis as a "crucial example of the impact of generic choice upon intention" (598). Still, Cox does not conclude that a hegemonic conservatism subverted the drama of the day but rather draws attention to the fact that the government unilaterally and actively discouraged antirevolutionary plays. He announces that "if we, as scholars, tend to see works as aesthetic and ideological wholes .... audiences and readers often react not to the whole but to a part; a particular scene or speech might move the audience more than its aesthetic architectonics or its ultimate ideological vision" (602). That is, despite the author's intentions or the government's mandate, a play performed is a play open to radical interpretation by viewers, and it was for this reason, Cox intimates in conclusion, that after the 1790s the government essentially eliminated history from the stage.

Goslee, Nancy Moore. "Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion." ELH 57.3 (1990): 585-642.

Hypothetical questions and interrogations with previous works of criticism dominate this article. Goslee deconstructs both the master trope and critical frameworks which disregard the poem’s racial framework, as well as criticism refusing to address the 'sexual character' of consciousness. Writes Goslee, "both the date engraved on the title page of Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion--1793, that tumultuous year for the French Revolution--and the first word of its narrative two pages later--"Enslaved"--urge us to consider political contexts for its mythic narrative" (101). Proceeding further to take feminist, Freudian, metaphysical, and sociopolitical critiques into consideration, Goslee ultimately endeavors to affirm "the heuristic possibility of an individual consciousness at a given moment" (104).

Goslee systematically moves through the sections of the poem to observe how the work "defines its own characters through its illuminations, through its narrative, and through a series of dramatic yet static speeches" (105). By showing, for instance, how Oothoon's speech endorsing the universality of desire clashes with Milton's, Jean Jacques Rousseau's, and Mary Wollstonecraft's depiction of female sentimental emotion, Goslee underscores how striking it is that Blake does not associate racial liberation with his characters' claims to male and female sexual freedom. Goslee argues that Blake introduces racial victimization at the onset of his work and allows it to remain throughout.

At the beginning of this article, Goslee states explicitly that the questions inspired by the Daughters of Albion must be answered in order to answer not only historical and literary inquiries, but also to mend modern day cultural troubles. In this vein, the article frequently address the role of individual consciousness in social change: the poem's pattern not only "suggests a romantic descent into the self in order to find a revolutionary or at least reforming vision for society, it also suggests that private, metaphysical vision brings about social change" (104). Ultimately, Goslee paints a portrait of the poem in which "the rhetoric of race is employed but then included in an enlarged definition of slavery that includes not only all women but all humans whose liberty of desire and of imaginative vision is subordinated to a repressive religious and economic system" (124).

Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

This book examines William Blake’s most explicitly radical period so as not only to provide the basis for better judgments of work post-1800 but also to specifically emphasize that "if the modern reader finds little like Blake's illuminated books in the other literature of the time, it is because our knowledge is filtered through the canonical construction of Romanticism" (18-19). Mee underscores Blake's work to be flooded in political significance, positing throughout that radical discourse affects Blake's entire lexicon and claiming Blake as an integral part of a complex political atmosphere surrounding the French Revolution controversy.

The book's structure manifests Mee's version of the 'bricolage,’ an approach he defines as "unapologetically recombin[ing] elements from across discourse boundaries such that the antecedent discourses are fundamentally altered in the resultant structures" (3). Mee examines how Blake's own work from the 1790s drew upon very different discourses, and his book chapters each gain organization from these discourses. These discourses include: popular traditions of millenarianism, the belief in an imminent return of Christ to reign in a millennium, a Christian doctrine mentioned in the Book of Revelations; antinomianism, the belief that the Gospel frees Christians from required obedience to any law and that salvation is attained solely through faith and the gift of divine grace; literary primitivism, the belief that primitive peoples were more noble and less flawed because they had not been subjected to the tainting influence of civilized society; mythography; and scriptural criticism. Mee highlights writers he says are often erroneously ignored as relevant influences, including John Toland, Joseph Priestly, Thomas Spence, and Thomas Paine. Giving particular attention to how Blake's forms, plots, and figures frequently assemble at a single conjecture of different discourses, particularly those of a religious nature, Mee attempts to delineate complex patterns of connections between works such as America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, and The Book of Ahania.

Gould, Eliga H. "A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution." AHR Forum, April 1999. *I failed to record page numbers and will need to do so in Iowa City*

This article offers a broad view of the historical and political interpretations concerning Britain's relations with other countries and with itself. Gould mentions numerous critical predecessors, thusly examining the conflicts of unity and individuality across ethnic, geographical, historical, and ideological lines. Specifically, Gould addresses whether the American revolution was "a momentary setback from which the British soon recovered" (477) or an event which irrevocably shook Britain's core confidence.

First, Gould discusses various academic and historic interpretations of how Britain reinvented itself as an all-encompassing entity, regardless of class or other social rank, and how the populous fervently embraced patriotic paraphernalia. Gould asserts that other countries' desire to imitate the newly emerged 'Britishness' spurred Britain's eighteenth-century rulers toward expanding authority and conquests despite previous surrounding rebellion. These 'metrocentric tendencies' were strongest in English-speaking North American colonies: "early Americanists generally concede that on the revolution's eve Anglomania was a far more conspicuous feature of colonial society than the separatist sentiments that appeared so suddenly during the controversy over parliamentary taxation" (480). This copy-cat patriotism, even after the political relationship break-up, kept Americans eager to consume British goods and supported predictions that Britain will still maintain some sort of empire. Literature of the American Revolution, Gould goes on to attest, "largely confirm[s] the Anglicization thesis" (481). Citing how "the disintegration of the 'First British Empire' highlighted the limits of metropolitan authority in provinces as scattered as Nova Scotia, Jamaica, Bengal, and Ireland" (478), Gould links the important moments of heightened awareness to Britain's modern day internal boundaries and 'virtual' existence.

Then, changing gears, Gould discusses Britain's palpable lack of homogeny. The local authority maintained by the system of realms and provinces produced racial and ethnic diversity. Referencing individuals like Olaudah Equiano, Gould claims that "the rites of British patriotism may have been a transformative experience, but it clearly did not mean abandoning alternative, even apparently opposed, identities" (482). The autonomy of diverse populations extended to white inhabitants also, including the Irish and the Scots. From here, Gould moves to discussing the Britons' strong reluctance toward increased sacrifice to end the war in America: "[the British's] sense of the boundaries between realm and province remained sufficiently clear for them to sacrifice their own peace and prosperity indefinitely to the greater cause of imperial unity" (485). Gould then examines the Britain-America relationship post American independence, discussing how the perceived overabundance of colonial freedoms led imperial officials to pursue severely conservative policies after 1783. The popular belief about Britain's stability was also shaken as citizens expected the new empire to follow a similar path. Gould closes by acknowledging more recent governmental actions, stating that though Britain may have been of nebulous size and ever-fluctuating influence for the past two centuries, it "remained capable of vigorous, unilateral action" (487).

Finn, Margot. "Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760-1860." The Historical Journal 39.3 (1996): 703-722.

This article examines the methods by which married women of the time period enacted a system of evasion that led to contradictions between the political mandates of coverture--laws depriving wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own name--and the actual cultural developments. That is not to say, however, that Finn claims the laws were entirely innocuous and entirely subverted: rather, she paints a portrait of 'suspended animation,' showing that though "wives' legal inability to contract and litigate debts was often ignored or attenuated in practice, the norms of coverture shaped or animated women's experience of debt even in their suspensions" (707). This acknowledgment broadens our understanding of contemporary literary works, the "efflorescence of didactic literature condemning married women's increasingly uncontrolled consumption during a period in which wives' formal economic rights appear to have been diminishing" (707). Concurrently, the article shows how the English economy functioned and expanded despite Britain's refusal to allow legal female involvement.

Three sections enumerate the complex relationship between legal theory and economic practice. Wives were able and willing to purchase 'necessary' goods with their husbands' credit; they used this ability to establish a kind of independence from unfortunate marriages; and they had an accepted legal voice in the large system of local small claims courts. The history of debt litigation, marital breakdown, court transcripts, legal documents, archival evidence, newspaper accounts, and personal narratives provide the evidence for Finn's argument. Ultimately, Finn argues against criticism that elides women's importance in establishing middle-class morality and discounts courts' successful economic authority. To study just the private or just the public side of a wife's life, Finn says, "is to ignore the strategies and devices that allowed both men and women to experience, promote and even enjoy the commercialization of English society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (722).

Manning, Susan. Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

"What is implied in bringing fusion together with fragmentation?" Susan Manning asks in her book’s introduction. She explores answers to this question within the context of two enmeshed cultural mindsets and literary communities--those of Scotland during its Enlightenment, and those of America on the cusp of its revolution and newfound independence. Manning posits that modern types of thought in Britain and America stem from Scottish Enlightenment writings on fragmentation, and explores, through close examination of texts, how the American ideal of a conjunction between 'one' and the 'many' joined Scottish ideology. The work establishes systems of connections and analogies based on three notions of conjunction--resemblance, contiguity, and causation. This phrase Manning borrows from David Hume, the political and philosophical writer around which the majority of the book revolves. New readings of works by well-known and lesser known individuals flood the text, culminating in an interdisciplinary revision of Scotland and England’s literary topography during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods.

In the first chapter, Manning mobilizes previous documentation of the Scottish Enlightenment's influence on American colonists' towards what she deems a more informed and more 'imaginative' end--i.e., exploring "the literary consequences of powerfully ingrained ways of thinking, and their relationship to verbal expression. The evidence and the justification for the argument are derived at every stage from the use of language: what words are used, how they combine and connect, the interaction of the articulated with the unwritten or unspoken" (4). In its entirety, using political, philosophical, psychological, cultural, and grammatical contexts, Fragments of Union particularly focuses on Hume's and his successors' articulations of consciousness and the development of Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory.

The second chapter, "The Grammar of the Imagination," enumerates how Anglo-Scottish and American fiction documented a coming-to-consciousness, a realization of membership in a nationhood. "Finding the Boundaries" examines how various authors interpreted and composed topography as direct means to forming their identity. The various methods of autobiographical disclosure and disguise base "Composing a Self." "Savaged Texts and Harmonising Sentiments" addresses Scottish and American writing "which attempted to compose (and re-compose) a current national identity from the fragmentary survivals of the past" (148). "Gathering the Nation" further discusses the linked personal and political identities, the way unity comes from physical land. Finally, "Mapping the Language: A Scottish-American Stylistics of Consciousness" charts the risks and contingencies of valuing 'otherness-in-relationship' as protection against fragmentation.

Armitage, David and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

This book aims to guide and advance the scholarship of historians "interested in the common, comparative, and interactive aspects of the history of the peoples of the Atlantic world" (xiv). Thirteen historians from Britain and the United States contribute to a volume dedicated to widening what has previously been narrow specialization in British history. The consequent collective subject, editors Armitage and Braddick claim, is a "social system, with permeable boundaries, created by the interactions of migrants, settlers, traders, and a great variety of political systems" (3). A break from egocentric historiographies propels the work.

Armitage and Braddick select contributing essays in order to represent as many different approaches to Atlantic history as possible. This complex conglomeration fits what is here unanimously considered an extremely complex historical phenomenon--the broad scope and copious connections exist to mimic history's real networks and looming context. The book opens with a chapter establishing the three specific concepts of Atlantic history-circum-Atlantic (history of the Atlantic as a particular zone), trans-Atlantic (history through comparisons), and cis-Atlantic (history of one particular place). Part II examines the characteristics and affects of the movement of goods and people, how ideas and trends in economy and religion were influenced by Atlantic migration. Part III discusses collective identities--relationship between political authority and the system of chivalry, for example, or problems of deviance and political conflicts (again positing these discussions under the phenomenon of large population, idea, and commodity exchange). The three essays in Part IV address politics in full, discussing early British empire-building and its surrounding international context, crises amidst the English revolution and civil wars, and the slavery that saw its origin in the Atlantic world.

23 June 2004 at 8:17 AM, post #24

Gould, Eliga H. “A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution.” AHR Forum, April 1999.

This article offers a broad view of the historical and political interpretations concerning Britain’s relations with other countries and with itself. Gould mentions numerous critical predecessors, thusly examining the conflicts of unity and individuality across ethnic, geographical, historical, and ideological lines. Specifically, Gould addresses whether the American revolution was “a momentary setback from which the British soon recovered” (477) or that the revolution was an event which irrevocably shook Britain’s core confidence.

First, Gould discusses various academic and historic interpretations of how Britain reinvented itself as an all-encompassing entity, regardless of class or other social rank, and how the populous fervently embraced patriotic paraphernalia. Gould asserts that other countries’ desire to imitate the newly emerged ‘Britishness’ was the phenomenon spurring Britain’s eighteenth-century rulers to expanding conquests and authority despite previous surrounding rebellion. These ‘metrocentric tendencies’ were strongest in English-speaking North American colonies: “early Americanists generally concede that on the revolution’s even Anglomania was a far more conspicuous feature of colonial society than the separatist sentiments that appeared so suddenly during the controversy over parliamentary taxation” (480). This copy-cat patriotism, even after the political relationship break-up, kept Americans eager to consume British goods and supported predictions that Britain will still maintain some sort of empire. Literature of the American Revolution, Gould goes on to attest, “largely confirm[s] the Anglicization thesis” (481). Citing how colonists used English terms to justify their resistance, Gould also states that such imitation, ironically, led to George III losing most of the empire, as the Americans refused to be treated without the self-governance allowed to Britons. Similarly, “the disintegration of the ‘First British Empire’ highlighted the limits of metropolitan authority in provinces as scattered as Nova Scotia, Jamaica, Bengal, and Ireland” (478): Gould links this important moment of heightened awareness to Britain’s modern day internal boundaries and ‘virtual’ existence.

Then, changing gears, Gould discusses Britain’s palpable lack of homogeny. The local authority maintained by the system of realms and provinces produced racial and ethnic diversity. Referencing individuals like Olaudah Equiano, Gould claims that “the rites of British patriotism may have been a transformative experience, but it clearly did not mean abandoning alternative, even apparently opposed, identities” (482). The autonomy of diverse populations extended to white inhabitants also, including the Irish and the Scots. From here, Gould moves to discussing the Briton’s strong reluctance toward increased sacrifice to end the war in America: “[the British’s] sense of the boundaries between realm and province remained sufficiently clear for them to sacrifice their own peace and prosperity indefinitely to the greater cause of imperial unity” (485). Gould then examines the Britain-America relationship post American independence, discussing how the perceived overabundance of freedoms allowed to the colonists led imperial officials to pursue severely conservative policies after 1783. The popular belief about Britain’s stability was also shaken, as citizens expected the new empire to follow a similar path. Gould closes by acknowledging more recent governmental actions, stating that though Britain may have been of nebulous size and ever-fluctuating influence for the past two centuries, it “remained capable of vigorous, unilateral action” (487).

22 June 2004 at 4:28 PM, post #17

This article examines the methods by which married women of the time period enacted a system of evasion that led to contradictions between the political mandates of coverture--laws depriving wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own name--and the actual cultural developments. Not, however, that Finn claims the laws were entirely innocuous and entirely subverted: rather, she paints a portrait of ‘suspended animation,’ showing that though “wives’ legal inability to contract and litigate debts was often ignored or attenuated in practice, … the norms of coverture shaped or animated women’s experience of debt even in their suspensions” (707). This acknowledgment broadens our understanding of contemporary literary works, the “efflorescence of didactic literature condemning married women’s increasingly uncontrolled consumption during a period in which wives’ formal economic rights appear to have been diminishing” (707). Concurrently, the article shows how the English economy functioned and expanded despite Britain’s refusal to allow legal female involvement.

Three sections enumerate the complex relationship between legal theory and economic practice. Wives were able and willing to purchase ‘necessary’ goods with their husbands’ credit; they used this ability to establish a kind of independence from unfortunate marriages; and they had an accepted legal voice in the large system of local small claims courts. The history of debt litigation, marital breakdown, court transcripts, legal documents, archival evidence, newspaper accounts, and personal narratives provide the evidence for Finn’s argument. Ultimately, Finn argues against criticism that elides women’s importance in establishing middle-class morality and count courts’ successful economic authority. To study just the private or just the public side of a wife’s life, Finn says, “is to ignore the strategies and devices that allowed both men and women to experience, promote and even enjoy the commercialization of English society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (722).

22 June 2004 at 3:03 PM, post #14

Manning, Susan. Fragments of union: making connections in Scottish and American writing. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

“What is implied in bringing fusion together with fragmentation?” Susan Manning asks in the introduction to Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing. She explores answers to this question within the context of two enmeshed cultural mindsets and literary communities—those of Scotland during its Enlightenment, and America on the cusp of its revolution and newfound independence. Manning posits that modern types of thought in Britain and America stem from Scottish Enlightenment writings on fragmentation, and explores, through close examination of texts, how the American ideal of a conjunction between ‘one’ and the ‘many’ joined Scottish ideology. The work establishes systems of connections and analogies based on three notions of conjunction--resemblance, contiguity, and causation. This phrase Manning borrows from David Hume, the political and philosophical writer around which the majority of the book revolves. New readings of works by well-known and lesser known individuals flood the text, the end result's interdisciplinary nature producing a revised literary topography for Scotland and England, for the Enlightenment and Romantic periods.

In the first chapter, Manning mobilizes previous documentation of the Scottish Enlightenment’s influence on American colonists’ towards what she deems a more informed and more ‘imaginative’ end--i.e., exploring “the literary consequences of powerfully ingrained ways of thinking, and their relationship to verbal expression. The evidence and the justification for the argument are derived at every stage from the use of language: what words are used, how they combine and connect, the interaction of the articulated with the unwritten or unspoken” (4). In its entirety, using political, philosophical, psychological, cultural, and grammatical contexts, Fragments of Union particularly focuses on Hume’s and his successors’ articulations of consciousness and the development of Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory.

The second chapter, “The Grammar of the Imagination,” enumerates how Anglo-Scottish and American fiction documented a coming-to-consciousness, a realization of membership in a nationhood. “Finding the Boundaries” examines how various authors interpreted and composed topography as direct means to forming their identity. The various methods of autobiographical disclosure and disguise base “Composing a Self”; “Savaged Texts and Harmonising Sentiments” addresses Scottish and American writing “which attempted to compose (and re-compose) a current national identity from the fragmentary survivals of the past” (148). “Gathering the Nation” further discusses the linked personal and political identities, the way unity comes from physical land. Finally, “Mapping the Language: A Scottish-American Stylistics of Consciousness” charts the risks and contingencies of valuing ‘otherness-in-relationship’ as protection against fragmentation.

The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800.David Armitage and Michale J. Braddick, ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

This book aims to guide and advance the scholarship of historians “interested in the common, comparative, and interactive aspects of the history of the peoples of the Atlantic world” (preface). Thirteen historians from Britain and the United States contribute to a volume dedicated the widening the what has previously been narrow specialization in British history. The consequent collective subject, editors Armitage and Braddick claim, is a “social system, with permeable boundaries, created by the interactions of migrants, settlers, traders, and a great variety of political systems” (3). A break from egocentric historiographies propels the work.

Armitage and Braddick select contributing essays in order to represent as many different approaches to Atlantic history as possible. This complex conglomeration fits what is here unanimously considered an extremely complex historical phenomenon—the broad scope and copious connections exist to mimic history’s real networks and looming context. The book opens with a chapter establishing the three specific concepts of Atlantic history—circum-Atlantic (history of the Atlantic as a particular zone), trans-atlantic (history through comparisons), and cis-atlantic (history of one particular place). Established terms for discussion are enumerated.

Part II examines the characteristics and affects of the movement of goods and people, how ideas and trends in economy and religion were influenced by Atlantic migration. Part III discusses collective identities--relationship between political authority and the system of chivalry, for example, or problems of deviance and political conflicts (again positing these discussions under the phenomenon of large population, idea, and commodity exchange). The three essays in Part IV address politics in full, discussing early British empire-building and its surrounding international context, crises amidst the English revolution and civil wars, and the slavery that saw its origin in the Atlantic world.

22 June 2004 at 11:06 AM, post #7

Manning, Susan. Fragments of union: making connections in Scottish and American writing. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

“What is implied in bringing fusion together with fragmentation?” Susan Manning asks in the introduction to Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing. She explores answers to this question within the context of two enmeshed cultural mindsets and literary communities—those of Scotland during its Enlightenment, and America on the cusp of its revolution and newfound independence. Manning posits that modern types of thought in Britain and America stem from Scottish Enlightenment writings on fragmentation, and explores, through close examination of texts, how the American ideal of a conjunction between ‘one’ and the ‘many’ joined Scottish ideology. The work establishes systems of connections and analogies based on three notions of conjunction--resemblance, contiguity, and causation. This phrase Manning borrows from David Hume, the political and philosophical writer around which the majority of the book revolves. New readings of works by well-known and lesser known individuals flood the text, the end result's interdisciplinary nature producing a revised literary topography for Scotland and England, for the Enlightenment and Romantic periods.

In the first chapter, Manning mobilizes previous documentation of the Scottish Enlightenment’s influence on American colonists’ towards what she deems a more informed and more ‘imaginative’ end--i.e., exploring “the literary consequences of powerfully ingrained ways of thinking, and their relationship to verbal expression. The evidence and the justification for the argument are derived at every stage from the use of language: what words are used, how they combine and connect, the interaction of the articulated with the unwritten or unspoken” (4). In its entirety, using political, philosophical, psychological, cultural, and grammatical contexts, Fragments of Union particularly focuses on Hume’s and his successors’ articulations of consciousness and the development of Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory.

The second chapter, “The Grammar of the Imagination,” enumerates how Anglo-Scottish and American fiction documented a coming-to-consciousness, a realization of membership in a nationhood. “Finding the Boundaries” examines how various authors interpreted and composed topography as direct means to forming their identity. The various methods of autobiographical disclosure and disguise base “Composing a Self”; “Savaged Texts and Harmonising Sentiments” addresses Scottish and American writing “which attempted to compose (and re-compose) a current national identity from the fragmentary survivals of the past” (148). “Gathering the Nation” further discusses the linked personal and political identities, the way unity comes from physical land. Finally, “Mapping the Language: A Scottish-American Stylistics of Consciousness” charts the risks and contingencies of valuing ‘otherness-in-relationship’ as protection against fragmentation.

Updated 22 June 2004, 2:56 PM

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