Short Reviews

With this January 2021 issue, Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions introduces new form of collective and conjunctural book review. Inspired by the spirit of conversation and exchange that animates all of our work, and that lurks secretly behind each review, we are asking scholars to reflect collaboratively on recent publications in Romanticism. These reviews are new in another sense as well. Expanding beyond the constraints of periodization, these reviews seek to create conceptual and/or historical resonances between work in Romanticism and work situated elsewhere. In particular, these reviews are meant to spark a deeper engagement between monographs in Romanticism and Black studies, Gender & Sexuality studies, Indigenous studies, and work that is situated in a contemporary context. Perhaps most significantly, these reviews aim to make academic publications that are grounded in Romanticism more useful to us today, in both academic and non-academic contexts alike. Upcoming reviews will take up Matthew Sandler’s The Black Romantic Revolution (Verso, 2020) and Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe Burning Hot (UC Press, 2019), Ryan Hanley’s Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing 1770-1830 and Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, and Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation and Alexis Boyan, et al. Furious Feminisms: Alternative Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road.

If you would like to propose a collaborative review, please contact us at: lh117@nyu.edu

Samantha Matthews Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020). Reviewed by Kacie L. Wills.

Submitted by Ross Wilson on

Samantha Matthews, Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture: Poetry Manuscript, Print, 1780-1850 (Oxford UP, 2020). 304pp., 24 illus. (£60, ISBN: 9780198857945)

Kacie L. Wills

Illinois College

 

“as at a tavern, a bonfire, a picket line lunch”: a collaborative review of Red Round Globe Hot Burning (Peter Linebaugh) and The Black Romantic Revolution (Matthew Sandler). By Shelby Johnson and Joseph Albernaz

Submitted by Suzanne L. Barnett on

Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (University of California Press, 2019); Matt Sandler, The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery (Verso Books, 2020)

 Dear Joe,

 

I hope you're doing well! I'm just writing with a quick note to say that I'm about halfway through Red Round Globe Hot Burning, and I'll be so interested to hear your thoughts. My short take is that I wonder if this is an impossible book -- a book defined by failure, by incomplete archives, by irrecoverable experiences … 

 

Warmly,

Shelby 

 

*

 

Hey Shelby,

 

Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins. Reviewed by Kurtis Hessel

Submitted by Suzanne L. Barnett on

Griffiths, Devin, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 339 pp. (Hdbk., $55.00; ISBN 9781421420769)

Kurtis Hessel

University of Colorado Boulder

           

A collaborative review of Frances Botkin’s Thieving Three-Fingered Jack and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. Reviewed by Gabriella I. Johnson & Gregory Pierrot

Submitted by Suzanne L. Barnett on

Frances Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015 (Rutgers UP, 2017). 240 pp. (Paperback, $31.95 ISBN 9780813587387; Cloth, $120.00, ISBN 9780813587394; Kindle, 28.95, ISBN 9780813595733; EPUB, 31.95, ISBN 9780813587400; PDF, $31.95.ISBN 9780813587417).

 

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (U of NC P, 2000). 480 pp. (paperback, $47.50, ISBN 9780807848296; ebook $29.99, ISBN 9780807876121).

 

Marronage and Discomfort with the Black Rebel: a Collaborative Review

Gabriella I. Johnson, New York University 

and

Gregory Pierrot, University of Connecticut—Stamford

 

Matthew Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun. Reviewed by Jeremy Noel-Tod

Submitted by Ross Wilson on

Matthew Bevis, Wordsworth’s Fun (University of Chicago Press, 2019). 303 pp. (Hdbk., $82.50, ISBN: 9780226652054)

Jeremy Noel-Tod
University of East Anglia
 

It’s easy to laugh at Wordsworth. Connoisseurs of parody will know J.K. Stephen’s sonnet on the poet’s ‘two voices’: one sublime, one ‘an old half-witted sheep’,

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep

Joseph Drury. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. Reviewed by Deven M. Parker

Submitted by Suzanne L. Barnett on

Joseph Drury. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford University Press, 2018.) 272 pp., 8 B&W illus. (Hdbk., $90.00; ISBN 9780198792383.)

 

Deven M. Parker

Queen Mary University of London

Andrew O. Winckles. Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: 'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader'. Reviewed by Elizabeth Bishop.

Submitted by Suzanne L. Barnett on

Andrew O. Winckles. Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: 'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader' (Liverpool University Press, 2010). 288 pp. (Hdbk., $120, ISBN 9781789620184).

Elizabeth Bishop

Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler, eds, Lacan and Romanticism; Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation; and Seth T. Reno, Amorous Aesthetics. Reviewed by Alex Freer

Submitted by Ross Wilson on

Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler (eds.) Lacan and Romanticism (SUNY Press, 2019) 208pp. $95.
Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790–1850 (Liverpool University Press, 2019) 296pp. £90.
Seth T. Reno, Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (Liverpool University Press, 2019) 256pp. £90.

Alex Freer

Trinity College, Cambridge

Pages

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