Re-Reading Box Hill: Reading the Practice of Reading Everyday Life

The idea for this forum on the Box Hill episode in Emma came almost immediately in the aftermath of a meeting of the Washington Area Romantics Group. The choice of the Box Hill episode as an object of inquiry—as something that critics with a more-than-casual interest in Romanticism might be interested in exploring —was the idea of Neil Fraistat and Orrin Wang. Nevertheless, the identification of Austen as a topic for a volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series seemed sufficiently useful in the wake of disciplinary initiatives and transformations, following which British “Romanticism” has increasingly stood poised between a movement, with constitutive parameters and orientations, and a period or time line, in which crucial distinctions are dissolved or revised in the welter of contemporaneity. The issue assembles a group of diverse yet strangely cooperative readings, namely on the bearing of Austen on Romanticism and of studies in Romanticism on Austen.