Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine:'An Unprecedented Phenomenon'

Romanticism and Blackwood's Magazine is inspired by the ongoing critical fascination with Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the burgeoning recognition of its centrality to the Romantic age. Though the magazine itself was published continuously for well over a century and a half, this volume concentrates specifically on those years when William Blackwood was at the helm, beginning with his founding of the magazine in 1817 and closing with his death in 1834. These were the years when, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1832, Blackwood's reigned as 'an unprecedented Phenomenon in the world of letters.' The magazine placed itself at the centre of the emerging mass media, commented decisively on all the major political and cultural issues that shaped the Romantic movement, and published some of the leading writers of the day, including Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, John Galt, Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.

'This much-needed volume reminds us not only why Blackwood's was the most influential periodical publication of the time, but also how its writers, writings, and critical agendas continue to shape so many of the scholarly concerns of Romantic studies in the twenty-first century.' - Charles Mahoney, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
'A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own': A Passage to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; R.Morrison & D.S.Roberts
PART I: BLACKWOOD'S AND THE PERIODICAL PRESS
Beginning Blackwood's: The Right Mix of Dulce and Ùtile; P.Flynn
John Gibson Lockhart and Blackwood's: Shaping the Romantic Periodical Press; T.Richardson
From Gluttony to Justified Sinning: Confessional Writing in Blackwood's and the London Magazine; D.Higgins
Camaraderie and Conflict: De Quincey and Wilson on Enemy Lines; R.Morrison
Selling Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1834; D.Finkelstein
PART II: BLACKWOOD'S CULTURE AND CRITICISM
Blackwood's 'Personalities'; T.Mole
Communal Reception, Mary Shelley, and the 'Blackwood's School' of Criticism; N.Mason
Blackwoodian Allusion and the Culture of Miscellaneity; D.Stewart
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the Scientific Culture of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh; W.Christie
The Art and Science of Politics in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, c. 1817-1841; D.Kelly
Prosing Poetry: Blackwood's and Generic Transposition, 1820-1840; J.Camlot
PART III: BLACKWOOD'S FICTIONS
Blackwood's and the Boundaries of the Short Story; T.Killick
The Edinburgh of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and James Hogg's Fiction; G.Hughes
'The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine'; M.Schoenfield
PART IV: BLACKWOOD'S AT HOME
John Wilson and Regency Authorship; R.Cronin
John Wilson and Sport; J.Strachan
William Maginn and the Blackwood's 'Preface' of 1826; D.E.Latané, Jr.
All Work and All Play: Felicia Hemans's Edinburgh Noctes; N.Sweet
PART V: BLACKWOOD'S ABROAD
Imagining India in Early Blackwood's; D.S.Roberts
Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood's, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad; A.Jarrells
Selected Bibliography
Index

ROBERT MORRISON is Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His book, The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was a finalist for the James Tait Black Prize. He has edited writings by Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and John Polidori.
DANIEL SANJIV ROBERTS is Reader in English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His publications include a monograph, Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (2000), and major critical editions of Thomas De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches and Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama; the latter was cited as a Distinguished Scholarly Edition by the MLA. He is currently working on an edition of Charles Johnstone's novel The History of Arsaces, Prince of Betlis for the Early Irish Fiction series.

Tragedy, Euripides, Melodrama: Hamartia, Medea, Liminality

This article examines socio-historical dimensions and cultural and dramaturgic implications of the Greek playwright Euripides’ treatment of the myth of Medea. Euripides gives voice to victims of adventurism, aggression and betrayal in the name of ‘reason’ and the ‘state’ or ‘polity.’ Medea constitutes one of the most powerful mythic forces to which he gave such voice by melodramatizing the disturbing liminality of Greek tragedy’s perceived social and cultural order. The social polity is confronted by an apocalyptic shock to its order and its available modes of emotional, rational and social interpretation. Euripidean melodramas of horror dramatize the violation of rational categories and precipitate an abject liminality of the tragic vision of rational order. The dramaturgy of Euripides’ Medea is contrasted with the norms of Greek tragedy and examined in comparison with other adaptations — both ancient and contemporary — of the myth of Medea, in order to unfold the play’s transgression of a tragic vision of the social polity.

Cold War Politics in Britain and the Contested Legacy of the Spanish Civil War

This article offers a sustained examination of how the vicissitudes of the Cold War shaped changing interpretations of the Spanish Civil War in Britain. Considering the perspectives of participants and historians, it focuses on the diverse strands of the Left that frequently drew on the civil war to attack each other and to make wider arguments about the global Cold War. First, with the aim of criticizing Communist take-overs in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the article analyzes retrospective assaults on Communist party tactics and Soviet foreign policy in Spain. Second, in order to argue that the Soviet Union took a counter-revolutionary line after 1956, it investigates the re-emergence of debates over the Spanish revolution. Third, to express disapproval of the United States, it examines the increasing use of the civil war as an analogy in Cold War international affairs from the 1960s. Fourth, in support of non-Soviet Left-of-Centre collaboration, most notably Eurocommunism in the 1970s and opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, it considers the renewed emphasis on the popular front. The trajectories of these debates reveal that, over time, the weight of the Left’s criticism moved from the Soviet Union towards the United States.

How to Manipulate an Incompatibilistically Free Agent

A prominent criticism of compatibilist theories of moral responsibility is that they do not deal adequately with cases of manipulation, and particularly with induced desires. So, for example, accounts that give the conditions for responsibility in terms of the reasons-responsiveness of the mechanism governing one's decisions, as Fischer and Ravizza (1998) do, seem to leave the door open to cases such as the following.

Beowulf Hondbona: the Literary Context for Emending Line 1520b

In this article I consider the debate over whether line 1520b ought to be read as the emended “hond sweng” or the scribal “hord swenge.” It is a small point philologically but it raises interesting cultural and literary questions about the attitude of the Beowulf poet to arms and armour, to aggressive and defensive war gear, and to swords in particular. It has widely been assumed that swords are important in Beowulf and yet, the question of what their significance might be has received very little attention. Throughout the poem the hero is plagued by breaking, melting, and failing swords. He borrows, finds, and is given swords but unlike other English and Germanic heroes he is never identified with a single, great sword. I suggest that this is because, ultimately, Beowulf is conceived as a hondbana, a designation which has implications for what kind of a hero he proves to be.

On Not Reading Fifty Shades:Feminism and the Fantasy of Romantic Immunity

This paper explores the politics of feminist criticism of the Fifty Shades novels as seen in both traditional media commentary and popular online news and cultural websites and blogs. I argue that much media commentary, in broadsheet and other ‘respectable’ outlets particularly, has featured avowedly feminist writers dismissing the books as ‘bad’, not only containing bad writing and bad sex but, ultimately, as being bad for their women readers. Situating these responses within a history of feminist discomfort with popular erotic and romantic fiction marketed to women I read these responses as a form of ‘anti-romantic’ fantasy in which the reader/critic is able to assert both her immunity from the romantic fantasy offered in the text and her cultural distance from those women who are subject to it. Further, this act of disavowal is often linked to a professed concern for the women who read the novel who the critic argues will, inevitably, replicate the abusive and harmful relationship dynamics that the novel represent. Such a move then positions the feminist critic as not only more culturally intelligent than women readers of the novel but enacts a fantasy of respectable, middle-class feminist cultural custodianship. Such a fantasy, I argue, is connected to the post-feminist era in which we live, which has produced a class of self-appointed ‘feminist’ cultural critics who seek to contest their own cultural marginalisation through enacting a governmental authority to worry about other women. This paper, therefore, is a critical investigation of the pleasures and politics of very publicly not reading Fifty Shades and its significance for analysing the contemporary politics of popular culture and feminism.

Unveiling Fairness for the Consumer:The Law, Economics and Justice of Expanded Arbitration

In recent years, the US Supreme Court has rather controversially extended the ambit of the Federal Arbitration Act to extend arbitration’s reach into, inter alia¸ consumer matters, with the consequence that consumers are often (and unbeknownst to them) denied remedies which would otherwise be available. Such denied remedies include recourse to class action proceedings, effective denial of punitive damages, access to discovery and the ability to resolve the matter in a convenient forum.

The court’s extension of arbitration’s ambit is controversial. Attempts to overturn this extension have been made in Congress, but to no avail. In contrast to American law, European consumer law looks at pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate directed at consumers with extreme suspicion, and does so on the grounds of fairness. In contrast, some argue that pre-dispute agreements in consumer (and employment) matters are consumer welfare enhancing: they decrease the costs of doing business, which is then passed on to the consumer. This Article examines these latter claims from both an economic and normative perspective.

The economic analysis of these arguments shows that their assumptions do not hold. Rather than being productive of consumer surplus, the use of arbitration is likely to have the opposite effect. The industries from which the recent Supreme Court cases originated not only do not exhibit the industrial structure assumed by the proponents of expanded arbitration, but are also industries which exhibit features that facilitate consumer welfare reducing collusion.

The normative analysis addresses the fairness concerns. It is explicitly based upon John Rawls’ notion of “justice as fairness,” which can provide a lens to evaluate social institutions. This Rawlsian analysis considers the use of extended arbitration in consumer matters in the light of the earlier economic results. It suggests that the asymmetries present in the contractual allocation of rights serve as prima facie evidence that such arbitration–induced exclusions are prima facie unjust/unfair. However, as asymmetry is only a prima facie test, a generalized criticism of the arbitration exclusions (of the sort found in Congress and underlying the European regime) is overbroad.

A Case Study in Policy Delivery:Examining Social Inclusion through Interpretation and Practice

The current body of literature regarding social inclusion and the arts tends to focus
on two areas: the lack of clear or common understanding of the terminology involved
(GLLAM, 2000) and the difficulty in measuring impact (Newman 2001). Further, much
of the literature traces the historical evolution of social inclusion policy within the arts
from a political and social perspective (Belfiore & Bennett, 2007), whilst others
examine the situation in the context of the museum as an institution more generally
(Sandell, 2002b). Such studies are essential; however they only touch on the
importance of understanding the context of social inclusion programmes. As each
individual’s experience of exclusion (or inclusion) is argued to be different (Newman
et al., 2005) and any experience is also process-based (SEU 2001), there is a need
for more thorough examination of the processes underpinning project delivery
(Butterfoss, 2006), particularly within a field that has its own issues of exclusion, such
as the arts (Bourdieu & Darbel, 1991). This paper presents case study findings of a
programme of contemporary arts participation for adults with learning difficulties
based at an arts centre in Liverpool. By focusing on practice, the paper applies
Wenger’s (1998) social theory of learning in order to assert that rather than search
for measurable impacts, examining the delivery of programmes within their individual
contexts will provide the basis for a more reflective practice and thus more effective
policy making.

In pursuit of regulatory compliance: a study of planning enforcement structures in Northern Ireland

As devolution expands across the UK, Northern Ireland (NI) is witnessing the development of new architecture to devolve planning powers. With serious criticism targeted at the legislative provisions for enforcement, this investigation endeavours to assess the robustness of the planning framework through a synergy of theory, law and practice. The paper demonstrates the value of theory in not only supplying a lens that allows both legislative frameworks and praxis to be deconstructed, but also in enabling the identification and scrutiny of underlying problems that pervade the system.

Discursive Control, Non-Domination and Hegelian Recognition Theory: Marrying Pettit’s Account(s) of Freedom with a Pippinian/Brandomian Reading of Hegelian Agency

The aim of this article is to combine Pettit’s account(s) of freedom, both his work on discursive control and on non-domination, with Pippin’s and Brandom’s reinterpretation of Hegelian rational agency and the role of recognition theory within it. The benefits of combining these two theories lie, as the article hopes to show, in three findings: first, re-examining Hegelian agency in the spirit of Brandom and Pippin in combination with Pettit’s views on freedom shows clearly why and in which way a Hegelian account of rational agency can ground an attractive socio-political account of freedom; second, the reconciling of discursive control and non-domination with Hegelian agency shows how the force and scope of recognition become finally tangible, without either falling into the trap of overburdening the concept, or merely reducing it to the idea of simple respect; third, the arguments from this article also highlight the importance of freedom as non-domination and how this notion is, indeed, as Pettit himself claims, an agency-freedom which aims at successfully securing the social, political, economic and even (some) psychological conditions for free and autonomous agency.

Living in The Matrix: Virtual Reality Systems and Hyperspatial Representation in Architecture

In the digital age, the hyperspace of virtual reality systems stands out as a new spatial concept creating a parallel realm to "real" space. Virtual reality influences one’s experience of and interaction with architectural space. This "otherworld" brings up the criticism of the existing conception of space, time and body. Hyperspaces are relatively new to designers but not to filmmakers. Their cinematic representations help the comprehension of the outcomes of these new spaces. Visualisation of futuristic ideas on the big screen turns film into a medium for spatial experimentation. Creating a possible future, The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) takes the concept of hyperspace to a level not-yet-realised but imagined. With a critical gaze at the existing norms of architecture, the film creates new horizons in terms of space. In this context, this study introduces science fiction cinema as a discussion medium to understand the potentials of virtual reality systems for the architecture of the twenty first century. As a "role model" cinema helps to better understand technological and spatial shifts. It acts as a vehicle for going beyond the spatial theories and designs of the twentieth century, and defining the conception of space in contemporary architecture.

The Kremlin's Scholar. A Memoir of Soviet Politics under Stalin and Khrushchev

The memoirs are dominated by two grand figures of Soviet history, Stalin and Khrushchev. The account of Stalin is riddled with ambiguities. There is an undoubted personal admiration for Stalin, his intellectual and political capacity (Stalin allegedly read 300 pages per day), his simplicity in daily life seen in "an old tunic, patched-up socks, almost constant isolation" (p. 190). At the same time, Shepilov acknowledged the paranoid aspects of Stalin's personality, especially towards the end of his life. Stalin's mechanisms of power are illustrated by Shepilov's account of work on a new book on political economy. Stalin personally chose key people for important tasks and controlled them at key junctures to ensure the desired outcome. In this light, Shepilov's claims that the Great Purges of the late 1930s could have been outside of Stalin's immediate control seem implausible, to say the least (p. 41).

All Stalin's deficiencies, however, pale in comparison with those of Khrushchev, the bête noire of Shepilov's memoirs. There is plenty of criticism of Khrushchev's policies, particularly in agriculture and foreign affairs. What comes across most pungently is, however, Shepilov's disdain of Khrushchev's personality and leadership style. In this respect, the book is unashamedly biased and remarkable for its omissions as much as for its revelations.