ROMANTICISM IN PERSPECTIVE: TEXTS, CULTURES, HISTORIES General Editors: Marilyn Gaull, Professor of English, Temple University/New York University Stephen Prickett, Regius Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Glasgow This series aims to offer a fresh assessment of Romanticism by looking at it from a wide variety of perspectives. Both comparative and interdisciplinary, it will bring together cognate themes from architecture, art history, landscape gardening, linguistics, literature, philosophy, politics, science, social and political history and theology to deal with original, contentious or as yet unexplored aspects of Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenomenon. Titles include Richard Cronin (editor) 1798: THE YEAR OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS Peter Davidhazi THE ROMANTIC CULT OF SHAKESPEARE: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective David Jasper THE SACRED AND SECULAR CANON IN ROMANTICISM Preserving the Sacred Truths Malcolm Kelsall JEFFERSON AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF ROMANTICISM Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation Andrew McCann CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1790s: Literature, Activism and the Public Sphere
Ashton Nichols THE REVOLUTIONARY '1': Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation Jeffrey C. Robinson RECEPTION AND POETICS IN KEATS: 'My Ended Poet' Anya Taylor BACCHUS IN ROMANTIC ENGLAND: Writers and Drink, 1780-1830 Michael Wiley ROMANTIC GEOGRAPHY: Wordsworth and Anglo-European Spaces Eric Wilson EMERSON'S SUBLIME SCIENCE
1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads Edited by Richard Cronin Reader in English Literature University of Glasgow palg(ave
Selection and editorial matter e Richard Cronin 1998 Text Cl MacmiUan Press Ltd 1998 Sottcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 978-0-333-71408-9 AU. rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London Wl P OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be Identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers ltd {formerly Maanillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 978-1-349-26692-0 ISBN 978-1-349-26690-6 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26690-6 In North America ISBN 978-0-312-21558-3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest soul'(;es. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1798 :the year of the Lyrical ballads I edited by Richard Cronin p. em.- (Romanticism in perspective) I ndudes bi bllographi cal references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21558-3 (cloth) 1. Wordsworth, William, (1770-1850). Lyrical ballads. 2. Civilization, Modem-18th century. 3. Romanticism-England. I. Cronin, Richard. II. Series. PR5869.L93A616 1998 820.9'0006-dc21 98-3636 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
Contents Notes on the Contributors vii Introduction 1 Richard Cronin 1 The Year of the System 9 Clifford Siskin 2 Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Turn of the Century 32 Nicola Trott 3 'Dr' Baillie 68 Dorothy McMillan 4 Malthus on the Road to Excess 93 Marilyn Gaull 5 Gebir and Jacobin Poetry 108 Richard Cronin 6 Humphry Davy: Poetry, Science and the Love of Light 133 Alice Jenkins 7 England and France in 1798: the Enlightenment, the Revolution and the Romantics 151 Peter Jimack 8 Coleridge, Schlegel and Schleiermacher: England, Germany (and Australia) in 1798 170 Stephen Prickett 9 'Atmospheric Air Itself': Medical Science, Politics and Poetry in Thelwall, Coleridge and Wordsworth 185 Nicholas Roe v
vi Contents 10 Guardians and Watchful Powers: Literary Satire and Lyrical Ballads in 1798 203 Jane Stabler 11 Wordsworth's 'Leveling' Muse in 1798 231 James A. W. Heffernan Index 254
Notes on the Contributors Richard Cronin is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His books include Shelley's Poetic Thoughts (1981), Colour and Experience in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (1988) and Imagining India (1989). Marilyn Gaull is Professor of English at Temple University and New York University. She is the author of Romanticism: The Human Context, founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, joint editor with Stephen Prickett of the Macmillan series Romanticism in Perspective, and has published extensively on Romantic literature and on literature and science. James A. W. Heffernan is Professor of English at Dartmouth College. He has published extensively on English Romantic literature and on the relationship between literature and the visual arts. His latest book is Museum of Words: the Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, 1993). Alice Jenkins is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, specializing in literature and the physical sciences. She is the joint editor of Rethinking Victorian Culture and Rereading Victorian Fiction, both forthcoming from Macmillan. Peter Jimack is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Stirling and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on eighteenth-century French literature, especially Rousseau and Diderot. Dorothy McMillan is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on Scottish and women's writing, and is joint editor of A History of Scottish Women's Writing (Edinburgh, 1997). Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and President of the Society for the Study of Literature and Theology. He has published numerous books and many articles on Romanticism, literature and theology, vii
viii Notes on the Contributors and related topics, among them Words and the 'Word': Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986) and Origins of Narrative: the Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996). Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His books include Wordsworth and Coleridge: the Radical Years (1988), The Politics of Nature (1992) and John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997), and he is the editor of Romanticism. Clifford Siskin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Chair of the English Department. He works on problems of literary and social change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and on current issues in literary theory and cultural studies. An advisory editor on such journals as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Literature and History and Genre, his publications include The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford, 1988) and The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830 (Johns Hopkins, 1998). His chapter in this volume is part of a new project on The System. Jane Stabler is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. She is working on a Byron Critical Reader for Longman, a study of transitions in English Romantic poetry for Macmillan, and a study of Byron's modernity.