JoEllen DeLucia - Böcker

The first volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints excerpts from rare Gothic novels to chart the relationship between Gothic aesthetics and the shifting economic, technological and legal affordances of print in the long nineteenth century. Highlighting the anonymous and pseudonymous authors, commercial presses and circulating libraries—such as the Minerva Press—that shaped the early Gothic more than any one author, the first half of the volume makes possible a revaluation of the collective voice of early Gothic fiction. The second half considers the increasingly sophisticated mediation and dissemination of Gothic novels. Victorian Gothics, such as James Malcom Rymer’s penny blood The Apparition and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Windsor Castle, were published both serially and in volume form. The movement between serial publication and volume formats provides a new context for study of the Gothic novel’s reliance on inset tales and cliffhangers, which can be understood as an effect of their publication within magazines and newspapers. Finally, the transatlantic publication circuits of May Agnes Gordon’s Midnight Queen and Julien Gordon’s Vampires shed new light on the Gothic and the development of international copyright law.

The second volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints Gothic chapbooks. These shorter and cheaper pamphlets capitalized on the Gothic’s popularity and were marketed to working-class audiences. Chapbook publishers such as Ann Lemoine and Thomas Tegg took advantage of copyright law’s failure to address formats beyond the book in order to abridge, excerpt and adapt versions of popular novels and dramas, particularly works by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. By commissioning elaborate frontispieces for almost all Gothic chapbooks, publishers also pioneered a visual language for the Gothic. Although many chapbooks were published anonymously, prolific chapbook writers, such as Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson, have been dismissed as hacks because of their reliance on Gothic formulas and practices of adaptation. The Gothic chapbooks included in this volume challenge the marginalization of chapbook writers and publishers and frame the interplay between original and adaptation as central to studies of not only the chapbook form but also the Gothic itself.

The third volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints short Gothic fiction published in miscellaneous magazines. In doing so, it places Gothic fiction in direct conversation with the editorials, the advice columns, the travel accounts and the social and political commentaries that these magazines featured. These magazines also highlight the Gothic’s own miscellaneous nature, its tendency to incorporate poems, songs, translations, travel narratives and antiquarian materials. Early in the century, Gothic fiction was published primarily in women’s magazines such as The Lady’s Magazine and La Belle Assemblée. This shifted in the mid-century magazine. Gothic fiction by Samuel Ferguson and George Augustus Sala engages with the scientific content of Blackwood’s and the social commentary of Household Words, while Irish Gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu and James Mangan appeared alongside the antiquarian and political features of the Dublin University Magazine. This volume finds parallels between the history of the magazine and the history of the Gothic and, in doing so, links the Gothic in new ways to biography, translation, fashion, history and politics.

The fourth volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints Gothic plays that foreground the complex relationship between print and performance and the role of theatre in the development of Gothic conventions. Gothic dramas helped consolidate the Gothic tradition, keeping Gothic fiction from the late eighteenth century alive in an alternate form and extending the Gothic canon in new directions through the spectacular stage effects demanded by the nineteenth-century theatre. Novels that in the late eighteenth century were shocking reappeared later in the nineteenth-century theatre as parodies, poking fun at what was once considered terrifying. Toy theatres gave domestic consumers a chance to rehearse and revise their favourite Gothic dramas in miniature, and acting editions kept Gothic plays alive decades after their initial release, helping to build the Gothic canon. The Gothic pantomimes, melodramas and spectacles included in this volume invite new questions about the relationship between theatre, adaptation, print culture and the development of the Gothic.

Revises established understandings of British women writers’ contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women’s literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of “women’s progress” from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion’s role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women’s literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use “women’s progress” to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.Key FeaturesEstablishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development Uncovers evidence of women writers’ participation in the Scottish Enlightenment’s theorization of sentiment and historical progressProvides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect

Recovers a comparative literary history of migrationThis collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. These essays together traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.Key FeaturesOffers a comparative framework for understanding the modern history of migration and the aesthetics of mobilityForegrounds interdisciplinary debates about belonging, rights, and citizenshipDemonstrates how mobility unsettles the national, cultural, racialized, and gendered frames we often use to organize literary and historical studyBrings together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the emergence of modernityEmphasizes the globalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries