10 September 1999

Special Issue: Romantic Parody

From the Guest-Editor John Strachan

This special issue of Romanticism on the Net seeks to introduce the often neglected pleasures of Romantic parody to a wide audience. Entertaining but critically insightful, in turn acerbic and admiring, parody is both an important interpretative method and a significant creative form in its own right. The old critical orthodoxy that the Romantic period is not one which manifested much significant comic writing is crumbling; the last few years have seen an upsurge in attention to Romantic period parody and satire, with the publication of important monographs and scholarly editions  and this issue seeks to contribute to ongoing debates surrounding these writings. The special issue attends to a range of parodic writings, spanning the ideological gamut from the Anti-Jacobin to John Thelwall, and addressing the use of parody by figures both neglected (W. F. Deacon, D. M. Moir) and celebrated (William Cobbett, S. T. Coleridge). It attends to parody’s critical engagement with Romanticism and to the nuanced use of the form by Romantic authors themselves.

1999 is an appropriate time for this special issue, as it marks the bicentenary of two key events in the history of the form: the publication of perhaps the greatest anthology of parodic writing, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, and the birth of William Frederick Deacon, one of the finest practitioners of the form and whose Warreniana (1824) has only James Hogg’s The Poetic Mirror to rival it in post-Napoleonic parody. Both the Anti-Jacobin and Warreniana have recently been provided with scholarly editions in Graeme Stones and John Strachan’s five-volume edition Parodies of the Romantic Age (Pickering and Chatto, 1999) and both are discussed here. It is the Anti-Jacobin which Kenneth R. Johnston addresses in his essay, ‘Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?’. From the publication of its first number in late 1797, this periodical was an arm of government at a time of national crisis and its urgent, hilarious and unscrupulous parodies set about the range of liberal and radical opinion. One of the Anti-Jacobin’s principal targets was what it labelled the ‘NEW SCHOOL’ of poetry and Johnston argues that the journal’s engagement with the school was deeper than has hitherto been imagined, extending beyond Southey and Coleridge to the figure we now denominate its most significant member, William Wordsworth. He makes a provocative and original case that the highlight of the last issue of the Anti-Jacobin, ‘New Morality’, offers a coded message to Wordsworth and that, in return, the poet replied to the journal in his most important early poem and most significant critical document: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Deacon’s Warreniana is a remarkable collection of parodies which imagines a world where the notable manufacturer of shoe polish Robert Warren, whose famous advertisements often employed jingle verse, has engaged the most notable writers of the day - Byron, Coleridge, Scott and Wordsworth amongst them - to eulogise his product in their own particular styles. It is the subject of my own essay, which sets Deacon’s work in its context of early-nineteenth century developments in advertising and examines other late Romantic period parody and satire, by Thomas Moore and William Hone amongst others, which engages with contemporary marketing. Deacon is also one of the principal themes of Chris Koenig-Woodyard’s essay, ‘sex/text: "Christabel" and the Christabelliads’, which ably surveys the parodic response to Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. Koenig-Woodyard builds a case for the critical significance of the seven verse parodies of ‘Christabel’ which were published between 1816 and 1832, and offers a sustained discussion of their imitative critiques of Coleridge’s supernatural and sexual atmospherics. Koenig-Woodyard’s account of ‘Christabel’ parody is well complemented by Steven E. Jones’s ‘"Supernatural, or at Least Romantic": The Ancient Mariner and Parody’, which examines the parodic response to a still more notable Coleridgean poem. However, Jones’s focus is also upon Coleridge’s role as a self-parodist and upon the way in which parody shaped the poet’s revisions of his poem. Jones argues that parodic manoeuvrings are at the heart of Coleridge’s 1817 revisions of the Ancient Mariner; here parody serves to enhance the metaphysically transcendent and aesthetically symbolic nature of his text. Adeline Johns-Putra’s essay sheds valuable light on an area of Romantic period women’s writing - burlesque poetry by women - which has hitherto been neglected. Her essay is an important discussion of the politics – both parliamentary and sexual – of female-authored burlesque and the implications for women of assuming the role of Juvenalian satirist. Moving from matters of gender to those of race,  is a timely meditation on the role of parody in Romantic period discussions of race and the way in which William Cobbett and John Thelwall, despite their adopting radically opposed positions on the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, both operate forms of Burkean parody in their writings on these issues.

Note

(1) Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style (1997), Steven E. Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation and Authority (1997), Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture (1994); David A. Kent and D R Ewen, eds. Romantic Parodies 1797-1831 (1992), Graeme Stones and John Strachan, eds. Parodies of the Romantic Age (5 vols, 1999). (back)

Readers of the journal might be interested in the following announcements:

The International Gothic Association is pleased to announce the publication of Gothic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The first issue, guest edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, is out this month (August 1999). Contents include an introduction by the guest editor, and articles by Benjamin F. Fisher, Robert Miles, William Veeder, Joan Dayan, and David Punter on topics ranging from American to Contemporary Scottish Gothic, from eighteenth-century romance to Henry James.

For more information, contact Robert Miles. For information about submitting essays for publication, contact the editor William Hughes. For information about subscriptions, contact Mike Carr or see the Manchester University Press web site.

The Seventh Coleridge Summer Conference organised by the Friends of Coleridge will be held 20-26 July 2000, at Cannington College, Somerset - just three miles from Coleridge's Nether Stowey by the beautiful Quantock Hills. The College has a modern campus, although our conference is held in the buildings and delightful gardens of an eighteenth-century nunnery. After days of intense academic debate in the world's strangest lecture room, participants enjoy the the later evening hours in the convivial Globe Inn just two minutes' walk away from the College.

The Conference programme consists of lectures and papers presented in panels. By popular request we do not have parallel sessions so that all delegates can attend all parts of the Conference programme. Speakers at STC 2000 include John Beer, Kelvin Everest, David Fairer, Reg Foakes, Anthony Harding, Raimonda Modiano, Seamus Perry, Anya Taylor, Nicola Trott, with more to be announced. Conference excursions will be to the wonderful eighteenth-century landscaped gardens at Hestercombe, and to Nether Stowey and the Quantocks.

The Call for Papers will appear here later this autumn, when we will also announce the conference fee structure. In the meantime, general inquiries about the academic programme may be e-mailed to Prof. Nicholas Roe, nhr@st-andrews.ac.uk ; inquiries about conference arrangements, accommodation etc. should be e-mailed to the Conference Secretary Graham Davidson at 113223.2774@compuserve.com.

William Gibson's cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, even as it invented the future now up on the screen in The Matrix, winked back at the past with his evocative title. 'Neuron' 'Romancer' for sure, but also, 'New' 'Romance' --or 'New Romantic'. The connections between science fiction and romanticism are not limited to cyberpunk allusion. The claim that Mary Shelley 'invented' science fiction in Frankenstein and The Last Man has been made for some time, while the continued reworkings of the former in film and novel argue for its foundational importance to the genre. Other authors could be offered as inventors--William Godwin's alternative history in St. Leon, Percy Shelley's Queen Mab's utopic imagininings, Edgar Allan Poe's balloon hoaxes--but the very Wordsworthian phrase, 'something ever more about to be' suggests how important the future was to romanticism. A propos of the millenium, Romanticism on the Net will devote a special issue to science fiction and romanticism in February 2001. Articles on science fiction's roots in romanticism and romanticism's persistence in science fiction will be welcome. More broadly, we will also welcome papers about scientific imagining in the period. Finally, how does seeing romanticism as 'science fiction' enable us to see it differently? Potential contributors might be interested in the bibliography 'Fictional Representations of Romantics and Romanticism', available at Romantic Circles.

Submission deadline: 15 February 2000. For more information, please contact Robert Corbett.

Articles:

 

Kenneth R. Johnston (Indiana University): 'Romantic Anti-Jacobins or Anti-Jacobin Romantics?'

John Strachan (University of Sunderland): '"'The Praise of Blacking": William Frederick Deacon’s Warreniana and Early Nineteenth-century Advertising-related Parody'
Chris Koenig-Woodyard (St. Edmund Hall, Oxford): 'sex—text: 'Christabel' and the Christabelliads'
Steven E. Jones (Loyola University Chicago): '"Supernatural, or at Least Romantic": the Ancient Mariner and Parody'
Adeline Johns-Putra (Monash University): 'Satirising the Courtly Woman and Defending the Domestic Woman: Mock Epics and Women Poets in the Romantic Age'
Marcus Wood (University ): 'William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics'

Reviews:

 

Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University): 'Richard Cronin, ed. 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads'

Julia M. Wright (University of Waterloo): 'Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity'
A. A. Markley (Penn State University, Delaware County) :'Lost and Found: Mary Shelley, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Tale. Edited with an Introduction by Claire Tomalin'
Dino Felluga (Purdue University): 'Richard E. Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800 '
Jacqueline M. Labbe (University of Sheffield): 'Is There a Gender to this Text?: Laura L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660-1790 '
Thaine Stearns (University of Washington): 'Paul Patton, ed. Deleuze: A Critical Reader'

• Richard Gravil (College of St. Mark & St. John): 'James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund Burke'
• Jeffrey N. Cox (University of Colorado at Boulder): 'Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' "Other"'
• Greg Kucich (University of Notre Dame): '"The Wit in the Dungeon": Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coterie'
• Ayumi Mizukoshi (Teikyo Heisei University): 'The Cockney Politics of Gender -- the Cases of Hunt and Keats'
• Kerry Ellen McKeeverr (University of Idaho): 'Writing and Melancholia: Saving the Self in Mary Shelley's "The Mourner"'
• David Chandler (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): 'Wordsworth's "Are There no Groans?": Source, Meaning,Significance'

• Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University): 'Mary Robinson and the Abyssinian Maid: Coleridge's Muses and Feminist Criticism'
• H. J. Jackson (University of Toronto): 'Lucy Revived'
• Cynthia Whissel (Laurentian University): '"'Tis more than what is called mobility": Structure and a Development towards Understanding in Byron's Don Juan'
• Richard S. Albright (Lehigh University): '"In the mean time, what did Perdita?": Rhythms and Reversals in Mary Shelley's The Last Man '
• Gary Farnell (King Alfred's College, Winchester): 'Wordsworth’s The Prelude as Autobiography of An Orphan'

• from Thomas C. Crochunis, Guest-Editor of 'British Women Playwrights around 1800 - a special issue of Romanticism On the Net'
• Nora Nachumi (City University of New York): 'Acting Like a "lady": British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Stage'
• Thomas C. Crochunis (The LAB at Brown University): 'The Function of the Dramatic Closet at the Present Time'
• Catherine Burroughs (Cornell University): 'Teaching the Theory and Practice of Women's Dramaturgy'
• Tracy C. Davis (Northwestern University, Evanston IL): 'The Sociable Playwright and Representative Citizen'
• Margaret J. M. Ezell (Texas A&M University): 'Revisioning Responding: A second look at Women Playwrights Around1800'
• Marjean D. Purinton (Texas Tech University): 'Revising Romanticism by Inscripting Women Playwrights'
• David Chandler (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): '"The Conflict": Hannah Brand and Theatre Politics in the 1790s'
• Ken A. Bugajski (Texas A&M University): 'Joanna Baillie: An Annotated Bibliography'

• Matthew Scott (Somerville College, Oxford): 'The Return to Poetics - A Review-Essay on Timothy Clark's Theory of Inspiration and Theresa Kelley's Reinventing Allegory''

• William Brewer (Appalachian State University): 'Unnationalized Englishmen in Mary Shelley's Fiction'
• Clarissa Campbell-Orr (Anglia Polytechnic University): 'Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, the Celebrity Author, and the undiscovered country of the human heart'
• David Chandler (Corpus Christi College, Oxford): 'Vagrancy Smoked Out: Wordsworth "betwixt Severn and Wye"'
• Ruriko Suzuki (Tohoku-Gakuin University): 'The idea of "the real language of men" in the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac'

• Laura Mandell and Michael Gamer (Miami University and University of Pennsylvania): 'On Romanticism, the Canon, and the Web' - A Special Issue of Romanticism On the Net
• Neil Fraistat, Steven Jones, and Carl Stahmer (University of Maryland, Loyola University, University of California Santa Barbra): 'The Canon, The Web, and the Digitization of Romanticism'
• Catherine Decker (California State University at San Bernardino): 'Crossing Old Barriers: The WorldWideWeb.
• Douglass H. Thomson (Georgia Southern University): 'The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production'
• Elizabeth Fay (University of Massachusetts - Boston): 'The Bluestocking Archive: Constructivism and Salon Theory Revisited'
• Chris Koenig-Woodyard (St. Edmund Hall, Oxford): 'A Hypertext History of the Transmission of Coleridge's 'Christabel,' 1800-1816'

• from Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry, Guest-Editors of 'Lyrical Ballads, 1798-1998' - a special issue of Romanticism On the Net'
• Keith Hanley (Lancaster University): 'Wordsworth's Revolution in Poetic Language'
• James Treadwell (Christ Church, Oxford): 'Innovation and Strangeness; or, Dialogue and Monologue in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads'
• Bruce Graver (Providence College) and Ronald Tetreault (Dalhousie University): 'Editing Lyrical Ballads for the Electronic Environment'
• Christopher J. P. Smith (Open University): 'Robert Southey and the Emergence of Lyrical Ballads'
• Joel Pace (Blackfriars, Oxford): '"Gems of a soft and permanent lustre": The Reception and Influence of the Lyrical Ballads in America'

• from Fred Frank, Guest-Editor of 'Matthew Lewis's The Monk' - a special issue of Romanticism On the Net
• Clara Tuite (University of Melbourne): 'Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, The Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution and The Monk'
• Ann Campbell (Emory University): 'Satire in The Monk: Exposure and Reformation'
• Jerrold E. Hogle (University of Arizona): 'The Ghost of the Counterfeit -- and the Closet -- in The Monk'
• James Whitlark (Texas Tech University): 'Heresy Hunting: The Monk and the French Revolution'
• Syndy M. Conger (Western Illinois University): 'Confessors and Penitents in M. G. Lewis's The Monk'
• Lisa Wilson (State University of New York at Buffalo): '"Monk" Lewis as Literary Lion'
• Marie-JosŽ Tienhooven (University of Rochester): 'All Roads Lead to England: The Monk Constructs the Nation'
• Frederick S. Frank (Allegheny College): 'The Monk: A Bicentenary Bibliography'

• Alan Richardson (Boston College): 'British Romanticism as a Cognitive Category'

• from Laura Mandell, Guest-Editor of 'Romantic Anthologies' - a special issue of Romanticism On the Net
• Susan Wolfson (Princeton University): 'Anthologizing Romantic-Era Writing For the Commercial Market: An Introduction to a Public Discussion'
• Duncan Wu (University of Glasgow): 'Editing Student Anthologies: The Burning Question'
• Anne Mellor (University of California, Los Angeles) and Richard Matlak (College of the Holy Cross): 'Anthologising the New Romanticism'
• Laura Mandell (Miami University of Ohio): 'Canons Die Hard: A Review of the New Romantic Anthologies'

• Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University): 'Memory at the End of History: Mary Shelley's The Last Man '
• Daniel E. White (University of Pennsylvania): '"The god undeified": Mary Shelley's Valperga, Italy, and the Aesthetic of Desire'
• Lidia Garbin (University of Liverpool): 'The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck : Walter Scott in the writings of Mary Shelley'

• David S. Hogsette (New York Institute of Technology): 'Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"'
• Simon Malpas (University of Wales, Cardiff): '"I cried 'Come, tell me how you live!' / And thumped him on the head": Wordsworth, Carroll and the "Aged, Aged Man"'
• Maureen B. Roberts (University of Adelaide): '"Ethereal Chemicals": Alchemy and the Romantic Imagination'

• Titus Bicknell (University of York): 'Calamus Ense Potentior Est : Walter Savage Landor's Poetic War of Words'
• Robert M. Corbett (University of Washington): 'The Violence of the Sacred: The Economy of Sacrifice in The Cenci'
• Seamus Perry (Lincoln College, Oxford): 'Coleridge, the Return to Nature, and the New Anti-Romanticism: An Essay in Polemic'

• Michael O'Neill (University of Durham): '"The Words He Uttered": A Reading of Wordsworth'
• David M. Baulch (University of Washington): 'The Sublime in the Bible'
• Rakefet Sheffy (Tel Aviv University): 'Models of Nature and Landscape Description: Their Sources and Functions in the Canonization of Late Eighteenth Century German Prose-Fiction'

• Duncan Wu (University of Glasgow): 'Tautology and Imaginative Vision in Wordsworth'
• Ruriko Suzuki (Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan): 'Translation in the 1790's: a Means of Creating a Like Existence and/or Restoring the Original'
• Matthew Scott (Magdalene College, Oxford): 'The Circulation of Romantic Creativity: Coleridge, Drama, and the Question of Translation'

• Kris Steyaert (University College London):  'Poetry as Enforcement: Conquering the Muse in Keats's "Ode to Psyche"'
• David S. Miall (University of Alberta): 'Electronic Romanticism: The CD'
• Joel Pace (Blackfriars, Oxford): 'Emotion and Cognition in The Prelude'
• Bruce Graver (Providence College): 'Duncan Wu's Wordsworth's Reading: 1770-1799: A Supplementary List with Corrections'

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