Nicholas Mason
Brigham Young University

As we pass the quarter-century mark of the current wave of interest in book and media history, one might expect a flood of new titles to have appeared on what may very well be the premier multi-media genre of the British nineteenth century: the literary annual. Yet, despite groundbreaking work on the subject by Lee Erickson, Lorraine Kooistra, Patrick Vincent, Kathryn Ledbetter and Terence Hoagwood, and others, the authoritative studies on the annuals craze of the 1820s and 1830s have largely remained books first published nearly a century ago. Of course, scholars of the late-Romantic work of such authors as Wordsworth, Hemans, Clare, Landon, and Hogg have long grappled with how these writers adjusted to a literary marketplace increasingly driven by lyrics and tales commissioned specifically for the annuals. But, when it comes to the history of the genre as a whole, there are still...

Chris Washington
Francis Marion University

There is a spectre haunting Byron studies. And oddly, and paradoxically, enough, as Gavin Hopps claims in his introduction to this volume of essays, this spectre is materialism, which, as Hopps also asserts, has long haunted romanticism itself. Byron’s Ghosts, then, as the collection’s title indicates, attempts to restore attention, contra materialist studies, to the various ghosts, spectres, spirits, and other numinous presence-absences that pervade Byron’s work.

The first essay, Bernard Beatty’s, thoroughly canvases Byron’s oeuvre to track the various ghosts that populate it, giving us a graveyard tour of these literary hobgoblins. Beatty’s essay provides a valuable map (and calculus, since by his reckoning ghosts appear in fifty percent of Byron’s work [33]) even while it makes concrete distinctions the other essays will challenge. He claims, for instance, that, for Byron, ghosts have once been alive whereas...

Travis Chi Wing Lau

University of Pennsylvania

Since her first book, Shelley and Vitality (2005), Sharon Ruston has modeled innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship that intervenes in both the history of science and medicine, as well as Romanticism. Her newest book begins with the observation that scholars in Romanticism have long failed to recognize the scientific origins of ‘Romanticism’ itself. As opposed to merely contextualizing the Romantic period in terms of certain developments in science and medicine, Ruston argues that scientific and medical writing actually produced and underpins “what we now, anachronistically, call ‘Romanticism’” (9). In line with recent scholarship attempting to reframe Romanticism beyond it being a period of “anti-science” or a break in the long-standing Enlightenment progress narrative, Ruston calls for us “to rethink the relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism,” in which the former persists powerfully into the...

Nicholas Halmi

University of Oxford

Critics of Coleridge have long been divided into two basic camps: one that treats him primarily as a poet and literary critic and the other, rather smaller, that treats him primarily as a philosophical and theological thinker. The former typically regards Coleridge’s philosophical writings, which occupied him for most of his last seventeen years, as at best an irrelevance or at worst an unfortunate distraction from his true calling as a poet. The latter, while not denying Coleridge’s poetic achievement, has always had a more challenging task because it has to contend not only with the traditional suspicion, in the anglophone world, of anything smacking of “German metaphysics,” but equally with the self-undermining tendencies manifested in Coleridge’s plagiarisms and unsystematic treatment of philosophical issues. Can Coleridge be claimed as a philosophical writer without special pleading?

            This question can be...