Noel Jackson

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Yasmin Solomonescu’s John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination has as its cover image one of the better-known plates from William Blake’s For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise.  Captioned “I want! I want!,” the illustration shows a human figure taking the first step onto an impossibly long ladder extending (presumably) to the moon while an earthbound couple looks on. It is an arresting image for the cover of a book about the figure whom an anti-Jacobin periodical derisively named “Mister Surgeon Thelwall,” and whom Francis Jeffrey later labeled “The Champion of Materialism.” More than an eye-catching device, the image emblematically represents the subject and subject-matter of Solomonescu’s book, which confronts and reevaluates some of the long-standing characterizations of Thelwall’s materialism.

Solomonescu’s focus in the title on Thelwall’s “materialist imagination” trains attention on...

Christine Woody

University of Pennsylvania

In this meticulously researched book (now available in paperback), Eberle-Sinatra deepens our understanding of Leigh Hunt’s work during the first half of his career. Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene unites the reception history of Hunt’s poems with an examination of his earlier theatrical criticism, extending rather than challenging our growing critical understanding of Hunt. Eberle-Sinatra’s central claim is for Hunt’s positive influence on different genres in the Romantic period. He works assiduously to make and explore connections between Hunt and key Romantic figures, moving us beyond Hunt’s mentorship of Keats to explore the links between Wordsworth’s linguistic project and Hunt’s own and the impact (largely negative) of Hunt’s friendship with Byron on his reception.

The first chapter is devoted to Hunt’s theatre criticism before the Examiner. Eberle-Sinatra argues for the uniqueness of...

Peter Hulme

Emeritus Professor

University of Essex

The literature of Romanticism ran parallel to the British movements for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself.  What Elizabeth Bohls calls “the capacious genre of travel writing” (3) provided several of the key texts that fuelled these debates, most of them centred on the West Indies.  These books, by John Gabriel Stedman, William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Edward Long, Bryan Edwards, Marcus Rainsford, Olaudah Equiano, Janet Schaw, Maria Nugent, and Mary Prince, provide the material for Slavery and the Politics of Place.  The books are well-known, at least to Caribbeanists, but the fine-grained analyses offered here are welcome additions to the scholarship on Romanticism, slavery, and travel writing.

As always in travel writing, description of place plays an important part, so it’s no surprise to see the language of the picturesque featuring so strongly in all the books...

Brian Rejack
Illinois State University

One can’t help but feel slightly immodest when carrying around a book titled Keats, Modesty and Masturbation. While engaged in reading the book in question, this humble reviewer unabashedly displayed it on his coffee table, which resulted in a non-academic friend regarding it—and by extension, its reader—skeptically, perhaps even accusatorily (the response: “yes, of course this is the kind of thing we do in academia!”). But fear not, gentle readers; Rachel Schulkins’s book will not betray your delicate sensibilities. What it will do is educate you on a significant aspect of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period and offer readings of Keats’s romances (and some shorter poems) which challenge and productively expand the scholarship on Keats and gender.

To begin, the term “masturbation” during the Romantic period denotes something not quite as specific as it does today. Instead of referring primarily to “...