Deven M. Parker

Queen Mary University of London

Joseph Drury’s Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain breaks new ground in the field of technology and literary studies not just because it offers deep historical dives into several under-researched areas of eighteenth-century technology and science—musical instruments and medicine, carriage and road design, and theatrical engineering, among many others—but even more so because it theorizes a mutually constitutive and constantly evolving relationship between technology and literary form. The argument at the book’s center is that eighteenth-century novelists sought to transform the novel into a machine that could produce knowledge about the world, much like those other Enlightenment machines, such as air pumps and automata, that scientific philosophers believed could recreate natural phenomenon in order to help them better understand it. It follows, then, that if the novel...

Diego Saglia

Università di Parma, Italy

A major product of Britain’s geo-cultural imagination, early nineteenth-century manifestations of Italia romantica were intricate knots of fact and fiction, distant observation and personal involvement, resting on a solid bedrock of age-old myths and stereotypes. Given its extent and complexity, many features of this vision of Italy remain opaque, continuously inviting critical questioning that often results in significant contributions to our understanding of what the Romantic-period imagination ‘did’ with Italy. One such is Keith Crook’s book on Joseph Forsyth and his Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803. Building on Crook’s 2001 critical edition of Forsyth’s Remarks, this is actually two books in one. The first part is an informative, insightful and enjoyable study of Forsyth’s Remarks. It starts from a reconstruction of its...

Rebecca Anne Barr

University of Cambridge

Irish writing of the romantic period is often neglected by literary scholars and marginalized by universities keen to entice their post-romantic students with more brand-familiar fare. As a result, pre-1900 works are frequently dismissed as being of purely historical interest. Claire Connolly’s Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830 is a riposte to such views. This period above all others, Connolly argues, is ‘the crucible of Irish writing in English’ (9). As Pat Coughlan has noted, Connolly’s book is ‘a gauntlet thrown down’ to political histories of Irish literature, whose approaches have long dominated Irish Studies. By prioritizing the literary, the volume challenges the historicist prejudice that literature in Ireland is merely an amanuensis of political and social change. In contrast, the works analyzed here are internationally attuned, critically self-aware, and responsive to aesthetic developments and...

James Rovira

G.A. Rosso’s The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism is a carefully and densely argued analysis of William Blake’s critique of the relationship between British state religion and imperial ambitions in Vala or The Four Zoas, Milton a Poem, and Jerusalem. Rosso defends the idea that Blake critiqued these interrelationships rather than succumbed to his own version of British nationalism through masterful close readings of Blake’s poetry and art focused on the character of Rahab, approaching Rahab through both Blake’s and his own readings of the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, readings informed by twentieth-century Biblical scholarship. Because of Rosso’s approach, I would like to emphasize in this review that Rosso here studies Blake’s political theology. His work should be taken as a significant step forward in the study of Blake and religion, which at different times in the...