Katherine Gustafson
Indiana University Northwest

In Mary Wollstonecraft, Pedagogy, and the Practice of Feminism, Kirstin Collins Hanley rereads Wollstonecraft’s corpus to argue that Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical beliefs are central to her reformist agenda. In so doing, Hanley ventures down a well-trod scholarly path. For at least three decades, feminist historians have demonstrated that educational literature provided Romantic-era female authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and others with a respected outlet for publication while enabling them to construct positive heroines and advocate for women’s education. While Hanley acknowledges her indebtedness to scholars like Laurie Langbauer (5-6), Mary Poovey (6), and Mitzi Myers (8), her book offers fresh and important insights into Wollstonecraft’s most famous works, as well as her least explored ones. As she insists, Wollstonecraft’s entire corpus reflects the Dissenting educational...

Travis Chi Wing Lau
University of Pennsylvania

Through four single-author case studies (Jeremy Bentham, the Marquis de Sade, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), Jeremy Davies considers the interrelationship between pain and literary production in Romantic writing. Intervening in both pain studies and Romanticism, his book smartly reconsiders the Romantic period not as a bizarre break in a teleological narrative of Enlightenment progress but as a crucial period where we might historicize shifting conceptions of pain outside of the frameworks of an increasingly professionalized medical establishment. For Davies, pain represents a valuable historical topos that can enable us to “see some Romantic-period thinkers in a new light” (xiii).

One of the book’s most useful chapters is the first, which offers a concise yet comprehensive review of contemporary pain studies. While simultaneously justifying pain as an object of historical inquiry,...

Brian Rejack
Illinois State University

Perhaps unsurprisingly, on display in Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters are several of the scholarly preoccupations central to his work over the last three decades or so of his illustrious career (among them: literature and history of the nineteenth century, digital humanities, textual studies, scholarly editing). That said, this book by no means feels stale. Quite the opposite—there is a sense of urgency and novelty accompanying assertions that one may recognize from earlier works like The Textual Condition (1991) or Radiant Textuality (2001). The territory might be familiar, but the trail through it is freshly blazed and entirely necessary. McGann’s primary argument is that we need to rethink our scholarly methods in light of the large-scale digital reproduction occurring in the current century if we have any desire to maintain scholarship’s role in curating cultural memory. As McGann recognized...

Aaron Ottinger
University of Washington

In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted Marina Abramović’s performance, The Artist is Present. For seventy-five days, Abramović sat in a chair while a succeeding rotation of museumgoers sat parallel to the artist and gazed into her face. Some patrons stared at Abramović for hours at a time; meanwhile, no words were exchanged. How can we characterize this strange encounter between artist and audience?

Nancy Yousef classifies the above relational experience as a modern version of Romantic Intimacy, after the title of her second book. In this important study of affect, Yousef demonstrates how our present-day understanding of intimacy in artworks and especially in psychoanalytic practice follows from Romantic-era writers like William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romantic intimacy, defined paradoxically as what is “most private [and] most shared” (119), modified the...