REVIEWS/LES CRITIQUES - MCMASTER ...
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Reviews/Les critiques
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project,
1936 to 1938, digital archive, Library of Congress
https://bit.ly/2P9UTxw
Review by Paul A. Minifee, San Diego State University
To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and
folk-say of slavery.—B.A. Botkin, Chief Editor, Writers’ Unit, Library of
Congress Project (1941)
Since the 1970s, scholars have debated the authenticity and usefulness
of materials housed in this digital archive, which includes over 2,300
narratives and 500 photographs of formerly enslaved people. Released in
2000 by the Library of Congress, it features the collaborative efforts of the
primarily white interviewers, writers, and editors of the Federal Writers’
Project (FWP), a government-funded program tasked with documenting
“America as a more pluralistic, inclusive society” in the 1930s (Shannon
Carter and Deborah Mutnick, “Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal
Writers’ Project for the 21st Century,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no.
1 [2012]: 2). Because the database’s core contents have been scrutinized
for decades, its “About this Collection” and “Articles and Essays” sections
prove more valuable for students and scholars of history, sociology,
cultural anthropology, and social psychology who can determine on their
own how the slaves’ accounts could serve them.
The title of this database might mislead some readers. While these slave
narratives portray scenes of brutal punishments, rape, inhumane slave
auctions, backwoods weddings, and ecstatic religious worship similar
to those found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, William
Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, the differences in their contextual
and compositional constraints should be noted. Both sets of narratives
involved editorial negotiations with socially and politically progressive
white editors and publishers who sought to liberate African Americans
from society’s prejudicial views and discriminatory laws; however, ide
ological conflicts and methodological inconsistencies among the FWP
administrative staff who produced these early twentieth-century accounts
warrant serious considerations that explain ongoing deliberations re
garding their historical significance.
Organized on a state-by-state basis, each slave narrative includes the inter
viewer’s name and a brief introduction with their impression of the subject.
These prefaces expose the interviewers’ biases toward the “informants,”
generally in favourable terms that remind us of the white abolitionists who
endorsed nineteenth-century slave narrators. For example, writer Cecil
Miller describes ex-slave John W. Fields as a “fine, colored man” and a “fine
example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life.” However,
the stylistic variations among entries reveal inconsistencies in the narratives’
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33, no. 2 (Winter 2020–21)
ECF ISSN 0840-6286 | E-ISSN 1911-0243 | doi: 10.3138/ecf.33.2.267
Copyright 2021 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University268 Reviews production—including differences in questions posed, rhetorical framings, and editorial revisions or over-writing. In some cases, the interviewer acts as an amanuensis writing an objective transcription; in others, as an interlocutor who panders to the reader’s sympathies by sensationalizing the slave’s story through flowery, pathos-laden language. The anonymous writer of Sarah Graves’s story, for example, includes an epigraph by Shakespeare, “Sweet are the uses of Adversity / which like a toad, ugly and venomous, / wears yet a jewel in its head,” which clearly frames a compassionate depiction of Graves’s life. This writer, referring to themself as “the interviewer,” opens by describing Graves’s physical appearance (as many writers do of their subjects), including her hair, posture, smile, and clothing, and closes by glorifying the story of African Americans who survived slavery: “These children of a transplanted race, once enslaved, have through years of steadfast courage overcome the handicap of race and poverty.” The most objective entries resemble a transcription and only include a brief biographical abstract with the informant’s name, birth date and place, occupation, and current living situation. Notwithstanding the variations in each narrative’s rhetorical framing, style, and interlocutor influence, these slave narratives reveal at least two significant features about the genre that students of African American history and literature should consider. First, these narratives differ sub stantially from their nineteenth-century predecessors in plot: they depict the experiences of emancipated slaves as opposed to escaped fugitives. Arguably, one of the most compelling elements of antebellum slave nar ratives was the portrayal of how the enslaved escaped—whether they outwitted their masters, physically out-duelled their overseers, craftily used their unlawful literacy, or benefitted from abolitionist rescuers. The FWP narratives, on the other hand, are not plot-driven and, therefore, lack the literary conventions of foreshadowing and climax that engage readers anticipating a dramatic tale. Rather, they feature loosely woven anecdotes (generally based on the interviewers’ questions), dialogues, and descriptions of living conditions. Students and scholars will find en lightening the diversity of experiences, particularly depicting the intimate relationships between enslaved people, their masters, and their masters’ families. For example, Silas Abbott of Arkansas states that he and his master’s children (three girls and two boys) grew up playing together and that they “loved ’em like they was brothers.” Even more surprising, Abbott recalls how his mother disciplined their master’s children: “She whoop them when they needed.” In contrast, other stories illustrate gruesome scenes of beatings numbering five hundred lashes, with buckets of salt- and peppered-water poured on top of the wounds. The absence of novelistic plots in the twentieth-century narratives further underscores how dissimilarly emancipated slaves perceived their pasts when compared to escaped slaves’ accounts. As legally ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University
Critiques 269
free(d) citizens, the FWP narrators watched a generation of time
elapse between the Emancipation Proclamation, the passing of the
Fourteenth Amendment, and the Great Depression, which allowed this
resilient group to view their past experiences from unique perspectives.
A number of the narrators wax nostalgic when recalling their pasts,
and, because they sat in their own homes (captured in hundreds of
archived photographs), they also expressed their current circumstances
in terms of gratitude. At the same time, the fact that the narrators drew
from memories over sixty-five years in the past should not be regarded
lightly, and it poses a second factor that distinguishes the two centuries’
slave narratives: reliability of memory. Most nineteenth-century slave
narratives were published within twenty years of the subject’s escape,
and many of them entailed a strategic production process—drafting,
editing, consulting with abolitionists, reading of contemporaneous nar
ratives, and negotiating with publishers—which, undoubtedly, hard-
wired fairly recent memories. An FWP interviewer, however, arrived
at an informant’s home with a pen and pad, asked a few questions,
and transcribed the responses. This impromptu setting forced the nar
rator to suddenly recall timeworn and long-forgotten memories and
would not have allowed them enough time to compose a story. Rachel
Adams, 78 at the time of her interview, addresses this point at the
start: “Miss, dats been sich a long time back I has most forgot how
things went.” Another informant, reflecting on how the abruptness of
the interview affected his recollection of events, “expressed a desire to
amend his previous interview to incorporate the following facts.” This
second interview allotted Rev. W.B. Allen space for a more detailed and
passionate testimony, which highlighted his spiritual conversion and
calling to the ministry. Thus, scholars studying the effects of historical
trauma on memory distortion, suppression, or supplementation would
find these narratives useful.
While the authenticity and usefulness of the narratives have long been
contested, this archive of personal accounts, historical documents, and
photographs nonetheless serve as empirical evidences of slavery’s multi
farious realities. Ultimately, the images of receipts for payment of slaves,
makeshift slave graves, freed slaves living in “corn cribs” (a storehouse
used to dry and store corn), and “bell racks” (contraptions used by slavers
to prevent enslaved people from running away, consisting of a metal
collar that fit around the neck and strapped onto the belt loop of the
pants) stand out, as they depict the undeniably raw truth of the barbaric
treatment endured by these surviving storytellers.
Paul A. Minifee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and
Writing Studies at San Diego State University and Vice President of Curriculum
Design at ion Learning.
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University270 Reviews
Jane Austen in Context
Broadview Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1554814398.
https://broadviewpress.com/product/broadview-online-jane-austen-in-context
Review by Nicole Mansfield Wright, University of Colorado at Boulder
With thanks to Mariah Chao, Min Ling Chua, Ector Diego, Alison
Durfee, Eva Kareus, Bruce Kaufman, Noah Mahoney, and Darya Navid
With remote learning on the rise, the coronavirus pandemic may
accelerate a longstanding trend of reallocating library funds to digital
subscriptions. Such developments bode well for the success of Broadview
Press’s recently launched, author-focused “companion websites,” includ
ing Jane Austen in Context. The Austen site caters to “students ... who
would like help with term paper research.” Given the target audience, this
review includes feedback from undergraduates enrolled in an honours
seminar on British literary history. A number of students were enthusi
astic about the site’s prospects. Indeed, the site has the makings of a
valuable course supplement. Yet its current iteration seems to be more of
a prototype; substantial development is necessary to unlock its potential.
The site’s home page links to four primary areas: a selection of
scholarship on Austen’s fiction (primarily her six completed novels);
interactive maps of settings featured in the novels; click-to-expand time
lines of relevant biographical and historical developments; and a search
able collection of contextual materials, including images, pertaining to
Regency culture and politics, with topics ranging from “Domestic Life” to
“Wills and Primogeniture.” Undergirding the presentation is an anti-New
Critical premise: the site implicitly contends that readers must familiarize
themselves with Austen’s world in order to understand her work.
In written comments, students lauded the site’s convenience and cura
tion. Several recalled struggling on their own to distinguish worthy research
from dubious sources when confronting the massive array of search results
in online databases such as Google Scholar and JSTOR. They perceived
Broadview’s effort as a potential solution to that problem, for it includes a
manageable selection of critical essays (five or six per novel) vetted for quality.
At a time when reference librarians may be less accessible because they are
working remotely, online resources need to fill the void.
Unlike some Austen websites for advanced aficionados, the site is
streamlined. A student remarked: “I was pleasantly surprised [by] how
neatly the website was laid out ... I already know a lot more about
Jane Austen despite the fact that I am not familiar with this author.”
The interactive maps and timelines were the favourite elements. A self-
described “Austen fanatic” commented: “The maps were fun to play
around with ... it was very entertaining to have a visual representation of
where Austen’s characters move to throughout the course of her stories.”
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityCritiques 271
Yet there is considerable room for improvement. No list of the site’s
editors or compilers was included. A student pointed out: “There should
be a page that states where ... the information on the site is coming from.
This would make the site more credible.” Another student noted that
while the essays are grouped according to the novels on which they focus,
there is no further structure to their categorization. Each essay is prefaced
with a blurb summarizing its argument, but there is no explanation of why
it was chosen or the essay’s place in Austen scholarship. Users must click into
each PDF and scroll to the end to see publication dates. The site does not
render visible the extent to which views of Austen have developed over
time. Even brief excerpts from Deidre Shauna Lynch’s edited collection
Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000) and Devoney Looser’s The
Making of Jane Austen (2017) would help fill this gap.
While the content illuminates the time and place in which Austen
wrote, the site obscures the author and, at points, her readers. There are
no images or biography of Austen, nor is there a bibliography of her
work; students requested a biography page to complement the timeline.
Although such information could be accessed via search engines, these
are surprising omissions. “I would like more primary sources that reflect
the reception of Austen’s literature at the time that it was published,” one
student commented. That student added: “The critical readings provide
commentary on what critics and scholars think retrospectively, but I
would like information on how her work was received, what critics of the
day thought about it, and if/how people perceived her work in terms of its
social and political relevance.” Another suggested: “Give us information
on the people who read Austen’s novels. I’m not talking about critics and
scholars. I’m talking about the everyday people who read her novels.”
Some students perceived what one called a “pro-Austen” editorial slant
that primed students to admire her work rather than objectively assess it.
One observed: “Austen was not loved by all ... including commentary her
rivals may have said about her would create a well-rounded site.” Others
thought the site took for granted that student visitors already grasp the scope
of Austen’s literary innovations and the basis of her canonical status: “The
site does an excellent job providing context ... I understand, based on the
information provided, the political, social, and literary scenes of the time. I
don’t, however, feel like I totally got Austen’s place in it.” This student sought
more material devoted to “understanding her influence and legacy.” Another
student concurred: “It is obvious that Austen is significant, but it [the site]
does not explicitly state why she was significant.” In general, the site is geared
toward encouraging students to absorb content rather than generate their
own responses to Austen’s oeuvre. One student would like “a way to tag
items and compile a list” while brainstorming essay ideas.
Students recommended that the site add sections on Austen’s writings
beyond her novels, including her letters. One found it puzzling that the
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University272 Reviews maps detailed only two specific plot events, both from Pride and Prejudice. Visual aids for works beyond the major novels are less prevalent, and thus would add particular value to Broadview’s site. More advanced multimedia and digital humanities tools would enhance the site’s appeal to a new generation of students. The site could broaden its audience by addressing faculty as well as students. A password-protected instructor section could feature lesson plans and teaching-oriented articles such as Patricia A. Matthew’s “Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2019). The site could prepare instructors to teach about race and other complex topics. A student observed of the site: “There is not a lot about Jane Austen and her works in relation to prejudice and racism, at least when in comparison to other essays about her work.” Moreover, two of the four featured essays related to race or empire were initially published in the mid-1990s. The site thus would benefit from adding more twenty-first-century criticism, such as Sara Salih’s “The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Contextual Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era” (ECF, 2006), and Pamela Buck’s “Consuming China: Imperial Trade and Global Exchange in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 2019). Teaching of nuanced formal innovations could also be supplemented with site materials. Because Austen’s free indirect style can be difficult to grasp for undergraduates, the site could add readings to clarify its mechanics, such as excerpts from D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (2003) and Jenny Davidson’s Reading Jane Austen (2017). In an era of inclusive pedagogy, the site should provide tools for students of all abilities. “Integrating a free translation software would make the archive more accessible to international or ASL scholars,” one student advised. They also suggested: “An image description function for the interactive maps would be helpful for visually impaired scholars. Some computers come with screen-reading software, but images, especially heavily detailed ones such as the maps, cannot be translated without image IDs. In addition, some of the maps are too small.” Likewise, the images of paintings in the context section are close to thumbnail size and cannot be expanded. I have long relied on Broadview for editions with clear notes and appen dices that render literary classics approachable for students. I believe that this publisher will improve on the site’s promising foundations. The current version is likely the first iteration of what could be a go-to resource. Nicole Mansfield Wright is the author of Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel (2020). Her work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth- Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Toronto Quarterly. ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University
Critiques 273
Women, Performance and the Material of Memory:
The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 by Laura Engel
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xvi+169pp. £43.99. e-ISBN 978-1-137-58932-3.
Review by Alexandra L. Milsom, Hostos Community College
The field of tourism theory has always relied on the imagery of the
theatre as a vehicle. Dean MacCannell’s germinal 1973 paper on tourism
foregrounds this metaphor in its title: “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements
of Social Space in Tourist Settings” (American Journal of Sociology 79,
no. 3 [1973]: 589–603). MacCannell based his theory of tourism on
Erving Goffman’s influential work on our “back”- and “front”-facing
personae in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) to help him
explain what is happening when tourists travel. In short: tourists often
get presented with “front”-stage performances of local authenticity, such
as a gondolier singing opera while paddling Venetian canals, but they
are seeking “back”-stage access to authenticate their experiences. If you
note the ubiquity of words such as “hidden” or “local” in touristic
literature, you will see the premium placed on supposedly “back”-stage
sites. Literary scholars have made use of tourism theory from time to
time, but Laura Engel’s Women, Performance and the Material of Memory:
The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 renews this theoretical framework for
archival work, using its terms to propose a method of regarding one’s
own research practices. This theoretical reframing helpfully examines
the dynamics of voyeurism, what to make of physical contact with
objects in the archive, and notions of authenticity that arise in processes
of working with material objects from the past.
This articulation of tourism theory as a means for regarding archival
work is not the only theoretical breakthrough of Engel’s highly readable
monograph. Overtop this first framework—one rooted in the social
science of Goffman and MacCannell—Engel draws upon studies in per
formance and celebrity, more familiar than tourism theory to literary
scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to look at the
material objects under review in each chapter. Engel is explicit about the
stakes of this cross-pollination, explaining that “tourism is celebrating the
archives and the archives are filled with tourists. While there are many
ways to distinguish between the two, linking them may allow us to
imagine ourselves as dynamic embodied participants in the translation
between the past and the present” (19). In retraining the eye backwards
on the archival scholar as well as forward on the performance of identities
in eighteenth-century art, literature, and theatre, Engel plays a deft
trick—one that pays off.
To those already familiar with Engel’s two important books on
eighteenth-century performance and gender, her explicit and recurring
application of tourism theory throughout this latest volume only adds
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University274 Reviews to one’s appreciation of her deft analysis of materiality and performance. The objects of Engel’s inquiry, which she explains are “specifically tied to memory and the staging or representation/recreation of corporeal presence” (2), follow a chronological sequence. This sequence of chapters begins with an exploration of Elizabeth Inchbald’s pocket diaries. It continues with Thomas Lawrence’s portraits of and correspondence with Sarah Siddons and her daughters Sally and Maria, and then offers a chapter examining the Countess of Blessington’s estate sale through the lens of her Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822) (itself an important theoretical examination of tourism). The pen ultimate chapter assesses the significance of Isabella Beetham and her daughter Jane Read’s silhouettes and Madame Tussaud’s wax sculptures. The book concludes with Fanny Kemble’s plantation journal and Amelia M. Watson’s subsequent photographs of Kemble’s land. Working with the material objects that form the centre of this work, Engel is self- conscious of her role as the sorter and chronicler of materiality. She writes almost as a tour guide, leading readers deftly across the centuries and through diverse media. Most of the figures under scrutiny in this book were performers, artists, and celebrities, and Engel’s theoretical approach calls due attention to the feeling of self-consciousness that arises in the handling of their artifacts—the body of the scholar interacting with the artifacts of bodies from the past who were, in turn, consciously producing traces of their own materiality and physicality. Engel teaches us all to be more self-conscious of the materiality of the archival objects under our scrutiny as well as the effects and consequences of that same materiality. Engel’s introduction is a useful site for those interested in a precise articulation of tourism theory and its applicability to historical literary studies, but it does not fully prepare the reader for how cohesive and often moving the rest of the book will be. The most satisfying aspect of reading the book in its entirety lies in bearing witness to depictions of familial female relationships that Engel discovers while touring these particular material objects. When we get to chapter 4, for instance, we are surprisingly not finished with Inchbald (chapter 2) nor with Lawrence (chapter 3) because we learn of a previously unknown portrait of the former by the latter found in the Countess of Blessington’s estate auction catalog. And in chapter 6, we learn that Fanny Kemble is the grand-niece of Sarah Siddons (chapter 3). What might perhaps be considered the most moving story in the whole book also documents Engel’s formidable archival prowess: the sorrowful love triangle formed between Lawrence and the two Siddons daughters in the third chapter. First, by carefully reading Maria’s analysis of her sister Sally’s singing and songwriting, Engel diligently restores Maria’s reputation from the calumny of their famous mother’s biographers who characterized Maria as “flighty and superficial” (66). ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University
Critiques 275
Maria—in love with Lawrence—writes movingly about her sister’s new
song “When summer’s burning heats arise” (65), not knowing that the
song was written while Sally was secretly reconciling with Lawrence
herself; not knowing that in three months, she (Maria) would die.
Engel also restores to the record a letter Sally penned a few years
later of her own distant, painful final encounter with Lawrence at the
theatre: she sees him through a spy-glass and realizes that he no longer
loves her, for “she has ‘passed’ from his heart and will now be ‘mixed’
with the many who have gone before and were forgotten” (75).
In this love triangle, we see how the touristic theory lends itself so well
to the scholar’s self-scrutiny. In witnessing Engel looking at the archive,
resurrecting documents and letters heretofore deliberately erased by modest
biographers of yore, we also recognize the sadness of these intimate, private
moments, which were not meant for public or historical consumption.
These are artifacts of the unstaged moments of very hyper-staged people—
performers, artists, and celebrities. In caring about these artifacts as well as
her role as an archival tourist, Engel gives us a useful model by which scholars
can become better guides of history for all of their readers.
Alexandra L. Milsom, an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community
College (City University of New York), is currently completing a monograph
on the relationship between Catholic Emancipation and the evolution of
the nineteenth-century British guidebook.
Paper Minds: Literature and Ecology of Consciousness
by Jonathan Kramnick
University of Chicago Press, 2018. 298pp. $25. ISBN 978-0-226-57315-1.
Review by Wendy Anne Lee, New York University
By the time you are reading these words, Paper Minds will already have
been reviewed in several publications and you may know the basics: this is a
collection of essays that (1) doubles down on literary studies and its method
of close reading (see part 1: “On Method and the Disciplines,” which includes
an essay co-authored by Anahid Nersessian), (2) applies philosophies of
enactive perception to an “ecological” reading of Georgic poetry (see part
2: “Poetry and the Perception of the Environment”), and (3) features what
David Chalmers has called the “hard problem” of consciousness, that is to
say, the mystery of why phenomenal or subjective experience—the question
of What it is like?—even happens. For the readers of this journal, then, I will
focus on the import of the book’s third and final part, “Fictions of Mind,” to
consider its potential relevance to our field.
For starters, apart from localized passages of Robinson Crusoe and a
handful of pages on Sentimental Journey, little eighteenth-century fiction
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University276 Reviews
appears in Paper Minds. And while the meta-conversations about formal
ism, disciplinarity, and aesthetics will attract other reviewers, my remit is
to find the pay-off for the study of early fiction. It arrives at the very end
of Kramnick’s book, surprisingly in a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s
remarkable and much acclaimed 1980 novel, Housekeeping. Preceded
by an analysis of a panpsychism advanced by Margaret Cavendish’s The
Blazing World (1666), Kramnick’s reading of Housekeeping intensifies
and refines earlier, looser claims linking consciousness, materialism, and
writing. Like other theorists of narrative—in particular, those (including
Ann Banfield, D.A. Miller, Blakey Vermeule, and Frances Ferguson) who
elaborate the special powers of free indirect style—Kramnick roots much
of his textual analysis in point of view, fiction’s means of “putting you in
the position to be the subject of [another] creature’s perception” (144)
and thereby to experience, paraphrasing Robinson, “the feeling of reality
on another nervous system” (151). Notably, then, his analysis moves past
grammatical position (“Ruth’s first person at once expands in a watery
thinness and mutes as it is no longer just hers”) to take in the virtuosic
ways that focalized narrative can slip into a cosmic impersonality, shift
ing from “a view from one perspective” to “a view from no perspective”
such that “phenomenal experience seems at once to lace over every object
and belong almost to no one” (155). I can see how Kramnick’s account
of Robinson’s ability to “tamp down singular features of personality while
at the same time ... open up a vantage onto the strange, aqueous world
in which the novel is set” might spur other insights about, say, Bunyan,
Inchbald, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft (152).
Embedded in Kramnick’s valedictory nod to fictional language is the
claim that Housekeeping features “a simultaneous attention to experience and
disregard for the singularity of any character in whom such experience might
reside” (152). The articulation here of a narrative project to attend closely to
consciousness and, at the same time, to deindividualize its phenomenology
conveys a charge of ethical excitement that surpasses milder claims for the
discernment of a quantum universe or an “injunction to attend to the forms
experience takes” or the particularities of haptic experience (145). Indeed, the
book’s most vivid passage of literary interpretation expresses an ontological
commitment that diverges (for this reader, happily) from its earlier account
of literature’s “ready-to-hand” “affordances.” In an account of Housekeeping’s
“conspiracy of the senses with the world,” Kramnick attaches in the end to “a
dissolving or dissolution, as if the indifference between one’s own sentience
and the sentience of everything else meant a kind of final and permanent
unknitting of the person” (155).
All this is to point out that it is through his engagement with
Robinson’s fiction and ideas about fiction that Kramnick arrives at his
most sharpened formulations. For all of the disciplinary modesty and
genteel pluralism of the preceding chapters, the lede gets buried at the end:
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityCritiques 277
“The work of literary form is just to worry, tweak, and pose the relation
between the physical and the phenomenal” so that it is even possible to
posit “the idea that perception is the very wonder of the physical, not its
transcendence” (151). Narrative prose fiction or all literature, in other
words, exists to recast the enigmatic relation between the material world
and the experience of consciousness of being in that world—an uneven
terrain of objects that changes as I move, that I perceive imperfectly
through my species-specific organs of sense, that I navigate sometimes
with success and often with failure. Glossing Robinson’s essay on fiction,
“Freedom of Thought” (published in her 2012 collection When I Was a
Child I Read Books), Kramnick writes, “Science should remember that
the physical (whether conceived at the scale of particles or of neurons)
includes sentience, and fiction should recognize the felt property of mind
in physical matter” (151). In the designation of these tasks for science
and for fiction—one to remember and the other to recognize—we hear
an appeal that belies the accommodating spirit of “ontological pluralism,”
which characterizes the earlier essays. Robinson in “Freedom of Thought”
lays out “two questions I can’t really answer about fiction”: “(1) where it
comes from, and (2) why we need it” (7). Insofar as Paper Minds tells a
story about the novel’s co-emergence with paradigms of mind and matter,
it picks up and tries to answer those questions.
Wendy Anne Lee teaches in the English Department at New York University.
She is the author of Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (2019) and
writes largely about Enlightenment literature and philosophy.
Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850,
ed. JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields
Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 224pp. £75. ISBN 978-1474440349.
Review by Omar F. Miranda, University of San Francisco
Accounts of literal and metaphorical, forced or voluntary, displacement
have been at the heart of the human story since ancient times. Consider The
Epic of Gilgamesh, Ramayana, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Sappho’s lyrics, and
Sophocles’s plays as some indicators of the predominance of exilic narratives
across the globe and ages. As John Simpson argues in the introduction to
The Oxford Book of Exile, “Each of us is an exile ... We are exiles from our
mother’s womb, from our childhood, from private happiness, from peace
... The feeling of looking back for the last time, of setting our face to a
new and possibly hostile world is one we all know” ([Oxford University
Press, 1995], vii). But something about this universal truth changed dur
ing the eighteenth century and the age of revolution, in particular. The
introduction of the free market system, the industrialization of urban
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University278 Reviews
spaces, the emergence of the modern nation-state, and the growth and
decline of empires are among the many phenomena that contributed
to an unprecedented rise in migratory patterns across the world and a
subsequent transformation of our modern consciousness.
Even though the global movements of the period caused major upheavals
and population shifts, scholarship on this subject has been largely neglected.
High praise is thus merited for the present volume, which has responded
to this scholarly need through an interdisciplinary approach that brings
together the fine work of both European and American scholars. Recovering
and revising (literary) histories of mobility, these essays explore the “patterns,
conditions, and experience of migration at a moment that we might char
acterize as the beginnings of modernity” (1). Migration and Modernities
argues as a whole that the mass migrations and dislocations of the eighteenth
century indelibly transformed our modern subjectivity; it addresses the
sense of rootlessness and estrangement that came to classify these decades.
Tracking the effects of war, imperialism, technological advancements, and
uneven development across cultures and emphasizing the experience of the
“arrival and departure of migrants,” including that experienced by “itinerant
laborers, vagrants, sailors, and soldiers” (5, 6), the volume focuses on the
ruptures and removals from the comforts of place and the logic of the local,
that is, one’s culture, community, and nation. The essays also explore the
ironic relationship between the consolidation of political, ethnic borders
and the politics and aesthetics of occlusion and exile. And for these scholars,
such analysis is crucial to both individual and collective identity formations,
including the construction and consolidation of the modern nation-state.
What makes Migration and Modernities impressive is that it fittingly
introduces its subject matter on mobility, belonging, rights, and citizen
ship through a comparative and global framework. In the service of piecing
together a “global literary history of migration” (7), it offers refreshing
accounts on subjects within and well beyond Europe, from South America
and Southeast Asia to South Africa. Readers are brought to chapters
on Serbian and Peruvian migrations, as well as on the displacements of
Native Americans, Turks, and enslaved African people. Of course, any
such “global” scholarly aspiration limited to 224 pages must necessarily
exclude migratory accounts from certain regions and ethnicities. Still,
this collection is praiseworthy, especially when considering that in this
period few records have been available for accurately charting the sta
tistics of these migrations. As JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields claim
in their editors’ introduction, the eighteenth century lacked the mass
print technologies of the nineteenth century that better equipped the
dissemination of such knowledge and figures.
The eight essays are divided into two parts, with each half of the book
resisting customary organizational methods according to nation, culture,
or language; this atypical structure seems apt, given the vagaries of migrant
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityCritiques 279
experience itself. The first part, “Moving Voices: Competing Perspectives
on Migration,” shows the “alternatives to the domestic and realist fiction
that shapes most studies of particular national traditions” (3). Highlighting
the “migrants’ varying forms of mobility,” the essays examine authors such
as Lord Byron, Thomas Pringle, Mary Prince, and Margaret Fuller, while
drawing attention to the forced mass displacements of Africans in the
Atlantic slave trade and the involuntary resettlements of Native Americans.
Kenneth McNeil’s chapter on Prince and her editor, Pringle, is specifically
noteworthy, as McNeil traces how a white abolitionist, who was displaced
from Scotland to South Africa, came to sympathize, edit, and ultimately
promote Prince’s autobiography. The essay is emblematic of how the entire
section treats hybrid narratives of exiles, expatriates, and refugees across
racial, ethnic, gender, and class lines.
The second part, “Migrants as Cultural Mediators: Epistemes and
Aesthetics of Mobility,” extends the ambitious first half of the book by
analyzing a particular form of knowledge production—what DeLucia
and Shields call autoethnography, “the study of one’s own culture as
if from an outsider’s perspective” (8). The section begins with Patricia
Cove’s keen exploration of gender and national identity in Frances
Burney’s The Wanderer (1814); this is followed by Dragana Grbić’s in
vestigation of the relations between Serbian cultural identity and the
experience of migration in the autobiography The Life and Adventures
of Dimitrije Obradović (1783). Olivera Jokić’s essay then offers a com
pelling reading of letters from agents of the East India company, draw
ing attention unexpectedly to the vulnerability rather than the progress
of the British imperial state. Echoing Dominic La Capra’s ideas about
historiography, Jokić notes the distinctiveness of this “history of work
done by migrants—a history in transit” (170). The section ends with
Claire Gallien’s “first extensive exploration” of Ishmael Bashaw’s The
Turkish Refugee (1797), an adapted Christian conversion and slave nar
rative (202). These essays convincingly demonstrate the porousness
of “culture” and collective identity, as they tease out the tensions be
tween being at home and abroad. They demonstrate how otherness is
constructed and experienced from either a native or foreign position.
If one had to be critical of a volume that elicits much admiration from
the present author, I would offer two minor suggestions for improvement.
Betsy Bolton’s reading of “touring and forced migration” in Byron’s Don
Juan as well as M. Soledad Caballero’s account of “Transatlantic” South
American revolutionaries would have benefitted from direct engagement
with the life of the Venezuelan exile Francisco de Miranda (1750–
1816). In exile for thirty-three years and a resident in London for four
teen of them, Miranda served as an important precursor not only to
Simón Bolívar and his continent-wide independence movements in the
Americas, but also to Byron’s celebrity of exile, as I have argued elsewhere
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University280 Reviews
(Miranda, “The Celebrity of Exilic Romance: Francisco de Miranda and
Lord Byron,” European Romantic Review 27, no. 2 [2016]: 207–31).
Don Juan is, in fact, a testament to Byron’s South American celebrity
predecessor. The second recommendation is perhaps more obvious:
Why include a chapter on Byron (even if Bolton’s essay is unquestion
ably excellent) when the extra space could be devoted to the unexplored
and unrepresented peoples and cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific?
And I say this—uneasily—as a Byron scholar.
These minor criticisms aside, this volume persuasively traces one of
the most critical moments and subjects of modern history. Migration
and Modernities radically reimagines the boundaries of our discipline
and canon by boldly repositioning global narratives of mobility at the
heart of modernity. If this cross-cultural work is a sign of what is to come
in our field, the future of writing about the history of movements and
displacements in eighteenth-century studies looks most promising.
Omar F. Miranda is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco.
His research focuses on exile, celebrity culture, and performance in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
A History of British Working Class Literature, ed. John Goodridge
and Bridget Keegan
Cambridge University Press, 2017. 496pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1107190405.
Review by Thora Brylowe, University of Colorado Boulder
As John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan remind us in the introduction,
“working class literature is rarely received in other than partial or con
tingent ways,” subject to flattened (and flattening) assumptions about
what it means to be working class and what it means to claim for a work
the status of literature (3). This ambitious collection spans the eighteenth
to the twentieth centuries, and even makes a brief foray into the twenty-
first century, albeit in an essay by Cole Crawford, who writes in his
capacity as eighteenth-century expert on digital collections, many of
which will interest ECF readers. This is a substantial book. Of its twenty-
five essays, twelve are devoted to the eighteenth century and Romantic
period, a number that swells to fourteen if we count Crawford’s and a
brief afterword by Brian Maidment. Given space and the readership of
ECF, this review attends to (roughly) the first half of the collection.
The book starts strong, with Jennie Batchelor’s closely argued call
to expand the limits of working-class literature to include genres that
are often dismissed as valuable merely in the register of sociological
representation. She warns that in demanding of working people “good”
writing, we throw in our lot with the elite category of the aesthetic and risk
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityCritiques 281
missing the often sophisticated manipulation of literary genre wielded by
labouring people. As evidence, Batchelor close reads an archive of written
testimonials that were read aloud to Trustees of the Foundling Hospital.
Her rich reading finds evidence of poor women’s dependence on and
revision of pre-existing sentimental seduction and street ballad plots.
Poor women adapted these plots to suit a complex and contradictory
matrix of desperation, need for charity, and the obligation to appear as a
victim rather than as the perpetrator of a violation of social expectations.
Batchelor’s essay reads especially well with and against Scott McEthron’s
fascinating analysis of another London institution, the Literary Fund
Society, established in 1788 as a kind of stop-gap charity measure for
authors whose works were determined to promote the national good.
Later renamed the Royal Literary Fund, the institution neither granted
annuities nor funded particular projects. Rather, its aim was to support
with single lump-sum payments those authors of merit (or their survivors)
who had fallen on hard times. While Batchelor’s essay is concerned
with petitioners, McEthron reads his archive from the perspective of
benefactors, who, given their society’s mission, had to contend with
thorny questions regarding what constitutes literature worthy of charity.
Another highlight is Franca Dellarosa’s treatment of Edward Rushton’s
(1756–1814) posthumously published, untitled essay on race. Rushton
writes against both the popular climatological model of racial superior
ity and a pseudoscientific “polygenetic” justification for enslavement,
an argument that held that Africans were of a different species than
white Europeans. Dellarosa shows how Rushton’s careful rhetoric
makes a surprisingly modern case for the constructed nature of race,
which follows from his awareness of class position. Neither climate nor
genetics—nature—are responsible for what ultimately amounts to the
“edifice” (Rushton’s word) of race and class (121). Dellarosa takes her
title, “Behold the Coromantees,” from Rushton’s 1824 poem about the
plight of enslaved “Coromantees,” people of the Gold Coast, who were
forced to fight in a skirmish when French privateers boarded the vessel
on which they were enslaved and transported. In Rushton’s poem, the
Coromantees become “the synecdoche for those ‘millions’ who are the
casualties of any imperial power” (126).
Other essays fall more within the traditionally literary. Readers interested
in the work of the lauded poet/grain-thresher Stephen Duck (1705–56) will
find capable entries by Jennifer Batt and by William Christmas. Steve Van
Hagen’s discussion of Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and “the shoe-maker poet”
James Woodhouse (1735–1820) takes up the way these poets wrote verses
that resist and repurpose the concept of “natural genius” after breaks with
their respective patrons. Van Hagen urges his readers to rethink patronage
and “the conventions of their [that is, labouring poets’] promotion to
the reading public and about how they responded to those conventions”
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University282 Reviews
(57). A pattern emerged by which the unschooled, “natural genius” poet
is deemed worthy by a patron who recognizes and promotes that author’s
work. In their rerouting the idea of natural genius through the concept of
radical evangelical equality, Van Hagen finds for Yearsley and Woodhouse in
particular—and for labouring poets more generally—the potential to resist
class stratification and exploitation. By contrast, Kerry Andrews’s brief but
compelling formalist take on Yearsley examines her appropriations of the
elegy, a profoundly masculinist form. Expressly avoiding biography, Andrews
instead offers a psychological reading of Yearsley’s elegies that finds generic
consistencies opposed to the traditional masculine elegy’s “usual process of
separation, apotheosis, and distancing” (99).
Three essays in particular round out the British context in our period.
On the Scottish front, Gerrard Caruthers makes sense of the twists and
turns of Paisley poet Alexander Wilson’s (1766–1813) eclectic career.
Wilson, a weaver-turned-poet, wrote radical, anonymous broadsides
and conventionally moralizing tales of everyday life, such as “Watty and
Meg, or The Wife Reformed” (1792), a Robert Burns–style revision of
Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, much praised by Wilson’s Victorian
editors. Wilson’s biography proves fascinating and diverse. Caruthers’s
dense thirteen pages address Wilson’s relationship to his audience and
contemporary poets against the backdrop of Scottish politics and religion.
Mary-Ann Constantine’s discussion of eighteenth-century Welsh
poetic traditions puts pressure on the Anglocentric conceptualization
of working-class poetry by demonstrating the challenges posed to it by
the Welsh bardic tradition. Poetic fame seems to have worked quite
differently in Wales, since access to the poetic tradition did not require
formal education and since print circulation was not the only path
to authorial success. Constantine ends her lively essay with two case
studies, Edward Williams (1747–1826), a Welsh poet who tried his
fortune in London, and, much more briefly, Richard Llwyd (1752–
1835). She does so in order to highlight the difference between the
two, who both published English-language poetry at around the same
time. Jennifer Orr opens a rich literary history of Ulster’s linguistic
identity vis-à-vis a transnational Romantic tradition of working-class
poetry via a reading of Seamus Heaney’s 1998 “A Birl for Burns.” She
observes, “Heaney’s poetic recognition of Burns’s cultural influence on
his corner of Ireland might ... be seen as an important stage in a long
process of forgetting, rediscovery, and the eventual disinterment of
Ulster’s transnational culture” (133). Like Constantine, Orr cautions
against a tendency to lump working-class writers into broad (in this case
Unionist) national categories. Orr shows that the Romantic Ulster Scot
poets had a fully formed cultural and linguistic minority identity that
went almost completely unrecognized for two centuries.
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityCritiques 283
Finally, in a category all its own, is Ian Haywood’s profoundly
resonant analysis of James Gillray’s (1756–1815) eight-plate visual
satire The Life of William Cobbett, published in 1809. Haywood’s is
the only essay to tackle a visual object, and readers are provided with
reproductions of all eight prints, although the quality leaves much to
be desired. As Haywood explains, Cobbett (1763–1835) and other
radicals of the early nineteenth century leveraged a spotless character
and unwavering commitment to politics as a rhetorical tactic in order
to distance themselves from the Jacobin rabble-rousing of the 1790s.
This distancing meant that their autobiographical or “life writing”
was always written defensively. A resort to their own character left
radicals, especially country radicals like Cobbett, subject to intense bio
graphical scrutiny. Unfortunately for Cobbett, his detractors dug up a
whistleblowing incident, nearly 20 years past, in which he accused his
Army superiors of financial misconduct. A pro-government pamphlet
claimed Cobbett had falsely accused the officers in 1792 in order to
escape his duty and then had fled the country to avoid the exposure
that a false accusation would bring. Cobbett could only respond to
this assault on his character with further biographical details, leaving
his past open to further scrutiny and his character open to accusations
of egoism. Haywood shows how Gillray’s print series contributes to
the pro-administration misinformation campaign, producing a fake
biography of Cobbett in the style of a Hogarthian tale of moral decline.
In plate 1, Cobbett appears as a thuggish child, a vicious bumpkin
whose doting parents can be seen smiling proudly upon his misdeeds.
In an astonishing anticipation of recent events in American politics,
Haywood writes, “Plates 3–6 represent the main theme of the series in
which Cobbett becomes (in modern parlance) a whistle-blower. Gillray
replaces Cobbett’s righteous account of exposing regimental corruption
with an anti-Jacobin narrative of botched seditious conspiracy; stereo
typically, radicalism is presented as simultaneously threatening and
ludicrous” (182).
In the midst of other woes than Cobbett’s, we might take some solace
from the fact that Haywood convincingly argues that Gillray’s satire is
haunted by the contrapuntal spectre of revolutionary force. We might take
solace in this collection as a whole, which makes a significant contribution
to our understanding of the origins of the diverse and unruly category
that is working-class literature.
Thora Brylowe is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder
and author of Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–
1820 (2018), which examines a group of printers, authors, editors, painters, and
engravers, who worked with and against each other in and around London.
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster University284 Reviews
Philosophie des pornographes par Colas Duflo
Seuil, 2019. 312pp. €23. ISBN 978-2-02-140417-3.
Critique littéraire par Christophe Martin, Sorbonne Université
Le nouveau livre de Colas Duflo s’inscrit dans le prolongement direct
des Aventures de Sophie. La philosophie dans le roman au XVIIIe siècle,
paru en 2013, qui proposait de s’intéresser à un vaste corpus au siècle des
Lumières: celui des « romans à ambition philosophique », en examinant
les différentes formes et modalités de la présence de la philosophie
dans le roman de la période, ainsi que ses conséquences narratives et
philosophiques (voir notre critique de ce volume dans ECF 28, n° 3
[2016]). Duflo y indiquait déjà nettement que la philosophie ne pouvant
se ramener à un thème littéraire, le roman à ambition philosophique
pouvait se décliner en roman noir philosophique, en roman d’aventures
philosophiques ou encore en « roman pornographique philosophique »
(41). Mais si la place de ces romans philosophico-pornographiques était
déjà toute tracée, le paradoxe est que Les Aventures de Sophie ne leur
consacrait quasiment aucune analyse. Justice leur est donc rendue dans
ce nouveau livre qui démontre amplement que ce corpus méritait bien
plus qu’une étude annexe ou un simple chapitre supplémentaire. Non
seulement, les romans philosophico-pornographiques tels que Dom B***,
Portier des Chartreux, Thérèse philosophe, Les Bijoux indiscrets, Mémoires
de Suzon, ou Le Rideau levé appartiennent de droit au corpus plus vaste
analysé dans Les Aventures de Sophie, mais ils posent des problèmes
spécifiques et sans doute encore plus cruciaux pour notre compré
hension de la philosophie des Lumières.
Si le précédent livre de Duflo invitait à se défaire d’une conception
largement héritée du XIXe et du XXe siècle, selon laquelle la philosophie
et le roman relèveraient de domaines séparés, il s’agit ici de renoncer à un
préjugé sans doute encore plus puissant supposant que la pornographie
et la philosophie appartiennent à des univers parfaitement hétérogènes,
tant sur le plan de la finalité que de la légitimité. S’appuyant notamment
sur les travaux de Robert Darnton, cette Philosophie des pornographes
rappelle que, du point de vue de l’histoire du livre et de la circulation des
textes manuscrits et imprimés sous l’Ancien Régime, les récits libertins,
licencieux ou obscènes appartiennent au même ensemble que les textes
philosophiques hétérodoxes: celui de la littérature clandestine, la notion
d’« ouvrage philosophique » pouvant alors désigner aussi bien un essai tel
que De l’esprit d’Helvétius ou les traités du baron d’Holbach qu’une fiction
pornographique telle que Thérèse philosophe. Or, loin d’être marginale,
cette production romanesque eut un succès considérable: Le Portier des
Chartreux et Thérèse philosophe en particulier font alors partie des livres les
plus demandés et leur rôle ne saurait dès lors être négligé dans la diffusion
des idées philosophiques au siècle des Lumières. Car la caractéristique de
ECF 33, no. 2 © 2021 McMaster UniversityYou can also read
