In 1816, the British government did something no one had ever done before: it introduced the firs... more In 1816, the British government did something no one had ever done before: it introduced the first official gold standard in history. Through a close analysis of the pamphlets, reviews, lectures, journalism, editorials, poems, and novels surrounding the gold standard, this book examines its significance to the culture and literature of Romantic-era Britain. The gold standard was not a material object or universal concept, but a self-reflexive discourse that raised fundamental questions about knowledge, value, and social life. While politicians and financial experts believed that gold was the key to the nation’s economic confidence, writers such as Ricardo, Malthus, Coleridge, Shelley, Austen, and Scott transformed the debates on the standard into a new disposition reflecting the difficulties and ambivalence of modern commerce: embarrassment.
With contributions from leading Romanticist scholars who draw on literary history, performance st... more With contributions from leading Romanticist scholars who draw on literary history, performance studies, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, Spheres of Action examines the significant intersections between language and performance during the Romantic period. These essays consider cultural phenomena such as elocution and political oratory, newspaper journalism, public mourning, the function of gesture and clothing in theatre - even a long-distance walking contest. They examine the problematic relationships among action, agency, and language in a variety of cultural institutions and media from the era. Exploring aspects of public speaking and body language, these essays propose that understanding the culture and institutions of the Romantic period requires nuanced approaches to performance and agency. The collection also studies the ways in which the Romantics discovered both the potency and limitations of performativity. Presenting a boldly multifaceted portrait of Romantic culture, Spheres of Action is essential reading for Romanticists, historians, and scholars with interests in language and performance.
This collection brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis t... more This collection brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read eighteenth-century British philosophy in its historical context. The essays analyse how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their own writing; how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness; and how our academic legacy is a result of these philosophers' experience as writers.
Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash pay... more Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash payments, which, from 1797 to 1821, disallowed customers from exchanging notes for coin at the Bank of England and effectively made Britain the first paper money economy in modern history. Like their colleagues in eighteenth-century and Victorian studies, Romanticists in the 1980s and 90s assumed the structural homology between money and language derived from Marx, Freud, and the Cambridge historians (Brewer, Pocock) that made the study of money in literature akin to the general thematic of representation. Recent work, by contrast, has shown that before and during the Romantic period, as commercial value came to replace the social meanings it had once embodied, questions about what money is, what form it should take, how it should circulate, and by whom were more contentious than previously understood. These contentious played a significant role in shaping the dialectical character of Romantic literature. Recent discussions of these debates have also opened up fissures in the field of economic criticism between advocates of “historical description” and adherents of “close reading” that will likely galvanize the field of British Romantic studies.
I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as one of a n... more I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as one of a number of responses to the government and the Bank of England’s disastrous campaign of forgery prosecutions in the wake of the suspension of cash payments. Many economic writers claimed that the value of money could not be secured by law but only through the operations of the free market, at the center of which was the gold standard, passed into law in Britain for the first time in 1816, but not put into practice until 1821. Radical journalists like Cobbett and Wooler, by contrast, argued that the real standard of value lay with sincere understanding and fellow feeling: any government imposed standard was tantamount to fraud. Shelley agreed in principle with both of these recommendations. But he did not recommend either a gold standard or a moral standard but rather a literary standard. The market should be regulated not by economic forces but by a collective consciousness of natural rights enshrined in the productions of imaginative geniuses.
List of Illustrations Preface 1. Realms of Gold 2. The Bullion Controversy 3. The Idea of Paper M... more List of Illustrations Preface 1. Realms of Gold 2. The Bullion Controversy 3. The Idea of Paper Money 4. Monetary Forgery and Romantic Poetics 5. Standard Novels Conclusion: A Romantic Economy Notes Bibliography Index
This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the ... more This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the Summer of 2022 into a collaboratively constructed discussion. It reflects on what a recent “coastal turn” in ecocriticism, critical geography, and related fields might contribute to Romantic studies, and considers how coastal geographies (real and imagined) have informed aesthetics, politics, and lived experience, especially in settler-colonial contexts. Ranging from seventeenth-century poetry to contemporary fiction, from British waterways to the Mississippi Basin, it strives to bring Romantic accounts of coastal life into conversation with current modes of ecological thought and new forms of theoretical interrogation.
In 1816, the British government did something no one had ever done before: it introduced the firs... more In 1816, the British government did something no one had ever done before: it introduced the first official gold standard in history. Through a close analysis of the pamphlets, reviews, lectures, journalism, editorials, poems, and novels surrounding the gold standard, this book examines its significance to the culture and literature of Romantic-era Britain. The gold standard was not a material object or universal concept, but a self-reflexive discourse that raised fundamental questions about knowledge, value, and social life. While politicians and financial experts believed that gold was the key to the nation’s economic confidence, writers such as Ricardo, Malthus, Coleridge, Shelley, Austen, and Scott transformed the debates on the standard into a new disposition reflecting the difficulties and ambivalence of modern commerce: embarrassment.
With contributions from leading Romanticist scholars who draw on literary history, performance st... more With contributions from leading Romanticist scholars who draw on literary history, performance studies, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, Spheres of Action examines the significant intersections between language and performance during the Romantic period. These essays consider cultural phenomena such as elocution and political oratory, newspaper journalism, public mourning, the function of gesture and clothing in theatre - even a long-distance walking contest. They examine the problematic relationships among action, agency, and language in a variety of cultural institutions and media from the era. Exploring aspects of public speaking and body language, these essays propose that understanding the culture and institutions of the Romantic period requires nuanced approaches to performance and agency. The collection also studies the ways in which the Romantics discovered both the potency and limitations of performativity. Presenting a boldly multifaceted portrait of Romantic culture, Spheres of Action is essential reading for Romanticists, historians, and scholars with interests in language and performance.
This collection brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis t... more This collection brings together scholars who use literary interpretation and discourse analysis to read eighteenth-century British philosophy in its historical context. The essays analyse how the philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed their own writing; how their institutional positions as teachers and writers influenced their understanding of human consciousness; and how our academic legacy is a result of these philosophers' experience as writers.
Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash pay... more Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash payments, which, from 1797 to 1821, disallowed customers from exchanging notes for coin at the Bank of England and effectively made Britain the first paper money economy in modern history. Like their colleagues in eighteenth-century and Victorian studies, Romanticists in the 1980s and 90s assumed the structural homology between money and language derived from Marx, Freud, and the Cambridge historians (Brewer, Pocock) that made the study of money in literature akin to the general thematic of representation. Recent work, by contrast, has shown that before and during the Romantic period, as commercial value came to replace the social meanings it had once embodied, questions about what money is, what form it should take, how it should circulate, and by whom were more contentious than previously understood. These contentious played a significant role in shaping the dialectical character of Romantic literature. Recent discussions of these debates have also opened up fissures in the field of economic criticism between advocates of “historical description” and adherents of “close reading” that will likely galvanize the field of British Romantic studies.
I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as one of a n... more I read the famous lines on paper money and forgery in Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy as one of a number of responses to the government and the Bank of England’s disastrous campaign of forgery prosecutions in the wake of the suspension of cash payments. Many economic writers claimed that the value of money could not be secured by law but only through the operations of the free market, at the center of which was the gold standard, passed into law in Britain for the first time in 1816, but not put into practice until 1821. Radical journalists like Cobbett and Wooler, by contrast, argued that the real standard of value lay with sincere understanding and fellow feeling: any government imposed standard was tantamount to fraud. Shelley agreed in principle with both of these recommendations. But he did not recommend either a gold standard or a moral standard but rather a literary standard. The market should be regulated not by economic forces but by a collective consciousness of natural rights enshrined in the productions of imaginative geniuses.
List of Illustrations Preface 1. Realms of Gold 2. The Bullion Controversy 3. The Idea of Paper M... more List of Illustrations Preface 1. Realms of Gold 2. The Bullion Controversy 3. The Idea of Paper Money 4. Monetary Forgery and Romantic Poetics 5. Standard Novels Conclusion: A Romantic Economy Notes Bibliography Index
This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the ... more This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the Summer of 2022 into a collaboratively constructed discussion. It reflects on what a recent “coastal turn” in ecocriticism, critical geography, and related fields might contribute to Romantic studies, and considers how coastal geographies (real and imagined) have informed aesthetics, politics, and lived experience, especially in settler-colonial contexts. Ranging from seventeenth-century poetry to contemporary fiction, from British waterways to the Mississippi Basin, it strives to bring Romantic accounts of coastal life into conversation with current modes of ecological thought and new forms of theoretical interrogation.
In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling defined ‘the sentiment of being’ as ‘the criterion... more In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling defined ‘the sentiment of being’ as ‘the criterion by which Jane Austen judges the quality of the selves she brings into her purview. Whoever in her novels wins her regard — her compassionate or comic indulgence is another thing — possesses in a high degree the sentiment of being, with all that this implies of self-sufficiency, self-definition, and sincerity.’1 Trilling was adapting an obsolete definition of sincerity, ‘freedom from falsification, adulteration, or alloy; purity, correctness’ as opposed to ‘honesty, straightforwardness,’ or ‘genuineness.’2 He then offered a material corollary for his usage: ‘the sufficiency and decorum of fortunate domestic arrangements’ Austen never ‘questions the “ideal” of the “noble” life which is appropriate to the great and beautiful houses with the ever-remembered names — Northanger Abbey, Donwell Abbey, Pemberley, Hartfield, Kellynch Hall, Norland Park, Mansfield Park. In them ‘existence is sweet and dear’ at least if one is rightly disposed; they hold nothing less than the meaning of life for those who are fitted to seek it and cherish it when it is found. With what the great houses represent the heroines of the novels are, or become, wholly in accord.’3
Page 1. CONTEST FOR CULTURAL AUTHORITY and the Distresses of the Regency Robert Keith Lapp i m m ... more Page 1. CONTEST FOR CULTURAL AUTHORITY and the Distresses of the Regency Robert Keith Lapp i m m a Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. ... New (continued on back flap) Page 7. Page 8. Page 9. CONTEST FOR CULTURAL AUTHORITY This One 4KS8-T37-JL9U Page 10. Page 11 ...
Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash pay... more Scholars of British Romanticism have of late become very interested in the suspension of cash payments, which, from 1797 to 1821, disallowed customers from exchanging notes for coin at the Bank of England and effectively made Britain the first paper money economy in modern history. Like their colleagues in eighteenth-century and Victorian studies, Romanticists in the 1980s and 90s assumed the structural homology between money and language derived from Marx, Freud, and the Cambridge historians (Brewer, Pocock) that made the study of money in literature akin to the general thematic of representation. Recent work, by contrast, has shown that before and during the Romantic period, as commercial value came to replace the social meanings it had once embodied, questions about what money is, what form it should take, how it should circulate, and by whom were more contentious than previously understood. These contentious played a significant role in shaping the dialectical character of Romantic literature. Recent discussions of these debates have also opened up fissures in the field of economic criticism between advocates of “historical description” and adherents of “close reading” that will likely galvanize the field of British Romantic studies.
This special issue brings together papers from the 2010 meeting of NASSR, which took place in Van... more This special issue brings together papers from the 2010 meeting of NASSR, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia from 822 August 2010, co‐hosted by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in association with the University of Victoria. The ...
In this paper, I outline a genealogy for the liberal temperament of English literary criticism an... more In this paper, I outline a genealogy for the liberal temperament of English literary criticism and cultural studies in the Romantic‐era debates over the standard of value.
... The rhetoric of Christian doctrine was used to justify "the machinery of the market"... more ... The rhetoric of Christian doctrine was used to justify "the machinery of the market" (125). But that does not mean that the same rhetoric "produced Trevelyan's per-ception. The ... them. ALEX J. DICK, University of British Columbia
... ucts of verbal creativity.4 Kurt Heinzelman has similarly proposed that ... mous "enclos... more ... ucts of verbal creativity.4 Kurt Heinzelman has similarly proposed that ... mous "enclosures" of economic policy and literary convention.5 Available historical and biographical evidence supports Heinzelman's and Langan's readings. ...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 10509580701443364, Jun 22, 2007
... DOI: 10.1080/10509580701443364 Alex J. Dick * ... Only during the Romantic period, however, w... more ... DOI: 10.1080/10509580701443364 Alex J. Dick * ... Only during the Romantic period, however, was the death penalty routinely enforced. ... View all notes. Not until Matthew Boulton developed the precision instruments necessary to produce standard weight coins in the 1780s was ...
This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the ... more This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the Summer of 2022 into a collaboratively constructed discussion. It reflects on what a recent “coastal turn” in ecocriticism, critical geography, and related fields might contribute to Romantic studies, and considers how coastal geographies (real and imagined) have informed aesthetics, politics, and lived experience, especially in settler-colonial contexts. Ranging from seventeenth-century poetry to contemporary fiction, from British waterways to the Mississippi Basin, it strives to bring Romantic accounts of coastal life into conversation with current modes of ecological thought and new forms of theoretical interrogation.
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