I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wa... more I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears. (VRM 5:76) From the title of the last book published before her death, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), we can guess that for Mary Wollstonecraft the word “residence” reflects little stability or rest. A short residence in three countries? Over the course of one summer? Upheaval writes itself into the title, and becomes the motor of this peculiar but lovely book. HereWollstonecraft takes the restlessness and dislocation that marked her own life, as well as the society she observed in northern Europe, and tries to shape them into a style, an argument, and a political stance. “The art of travelling,” she remarks elsewhere, “is only a branch of the art of thinking.” In the Short Residence the thinking subject herself cannot be distinguished from constant movement. Her travelogue thus tells us more about the mind of the traveler-subject, charting her path through a “heterogeneous modernity,” than about the three countries she visits. During her Short Residence , the narrator adopts several modes of travel but never settles: her account of boat trips, carriage rides, ferry passages, walks, and, most significantly, flights of fancy, purposefully has no end. As the Short Residence unfolds, however, the mobility of the subject, which had initially presented itself as both liberating and creative, modulates into something compromised, inescapable. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft first signaled this thought: “I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears” (VRM 5:76).
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) presented an engraving of a bookworm, a creature who devoured ... more Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) presented an engraving of a bookworm, a creature who devoured books and already figured the avid reader. The image launches a history of efforts to render visible—empirically verifiable—the bookworm. Repeatedly, the effort fails: Hooke is not the last to claim that he captured the critter, nor the last to mistake what he finds (his is a silverfish). Traces of devoured books appeared in every library, but what did devouring books look like? Unlike the scholastics before them, natural history’s proponents understood themselves as learning directly from nature, reading the bookworm as the sign of everything wrong about bookishness. Yet for centuries, empirical science could not nail down what (or if) a bookworm was, nor how it performed its work. Natural history thus shows itself as a sort of fable, creating the bookworm who destroys—and creates—the art of reading.
Preface: The Public Letter, or 'La Lettre Perfide' 1. History and the fiction of letters ... more Preface: The Public Letter, or 'La Lettre Perfide' 1. History and the fiction of letters 2. Letters or letters politics, interception and spy fiction 3. Helen Maria Williams and the letters of history 4. Mary Wollstonecraft and the business of letters 5. Jane Austen and the look of letters 6. The letters of Frankenstein Conclusion: the death of the letter-fiction, the Post Office and 'The English Mail Coach' List of works cited.
A collection of essays endeavouring to rethink and contest the traditional presumptions and assum... more A collection of essays endeavouring to rethink and contest the traditional presumptions and assumptions of romantic studies, attending to hitherto or newly unaccountable places, people, and issues.
... (1991) Ketcham: Shorter Poems, 18071820, ed. Carl Ketcham (1989) Curtis II: Last Poems, 1821... more ... (1991) Ketcham: Shorter Poems, 18071820, ed. Carl Ketcham (1989) Curtis II: Last Poems, 18211850, ed. Jared Curtis (1999 ... end of the Romantic century, the Marriage Act of 1836 recognized noncon-formist marriage, and the Divorce Act of 1857 began to pry open divorce ...
Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1994
... at this time: the political force always latent in, or extracted from the letter of fiction, ... more ... at this time: the political force always latent in, or extracted from the letter of fiction, takes over the public image of the letter. When the disturbing power of the letter comes to the fore, as it does in Marat Assassine', it not only challenges the formal order of" official art," but, more ...
Nowadays, you can often spot a work of poetry by whether it's in lines or no; if it's in ... more Nowadays, you can often spot a work of poetry by whether it's in lines or no; if it's in prose, there's a good chance it's a poem. While there is no lesson in the line more useful than that of the picket line, the line that has caused the most adversity is the bloodline . . . Charles Bernstein, "Of Time and the Line."(1) In a 1794 review of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes notice of one of the novel's "charming" pieces of original poetry. He reprints it because, as he says, "poetical beauties have not a fair chance of being attended to, amidst the stronger interest inspired by such a series of adventures."(2) His admonishing review of Matthew Lewis' The Monk similarly concludes with a poem excerpted from the novel: this "exquisitely tender elegy . . . will melt and delight the heart, when ghosts and hobgoblins shall be found only in the lumber-garret of a circulating library."(3) C...
I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wa... more I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears. (VRM 5:76) From the title of the last book published before her death, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), we can guess that for Mary Wollstonecraft the word “residence” reflects little stability or rest. A short residence in three countries? Over the course of one summer? Upheaval writes itself into the title, and becomes the motor of this peculiar but lovely book. HereWollstonecraft takes the restlessness and dislocation that marked her own life, as well as the society she observed in northern Europe, and tries to shape them into a style, an argument, and a political stance. “The art of travelling,” she remarks elsewhere, “is only a branch of the art of thinking.” In the Short Residence the thinking subject herself cannot be distinguished from constant movement. Her travelogue thus tells us more about the mind of the traveler-subject, charting her path through a “heterogeneous modernity,” than about the three countries she visits. During her Short Residence , the narrator adopts several modes of travel but never settles: her account of boat trips, carriage rides, ferry passages, walks, and, most significantly, flights of fancy, purposefully has no end. As the Short Residence unfolds, however, the mobility of the subject, which had initially presented itself as both liberating and creative, modulates into something compromised, inescapable. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft first signaled this thought: “I perceive, but too forcibly, that happiness, literally speaking, dwells not here. And that we wander to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears” (VRM 5:76).
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) presented an engraving of a bookworm, a creature who devoured ... more Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) presented an engraving of a bookworm, a creature who devoured books and already figured the avid reader. The image launches a history of efforts to render visible—empirically verifiable—the bookworm. Repeatedly, the effort fails: Hooke is not the last to claim that he captured the critter, nor the last to mistake what he finds (his is a silverfish). Traces of devoured books appeared in every library, but what did devouring books look like? Unlike the scholastics before them, natural history’s proponents understood themselves as learning directly from nature, reading the bookworm as the sign of everything wrong about bookishness. Yet for centuries, empirical science could not nail down what (or if) a bookworm was, nor how it performed its work. Natural history thus shows itself as a sort of fable, creating the bookworm who destroys—and creates—the art of reading.
Preface: The Public Letter, or 'La Lettre Perfide' 1. History and the fiction of letters ... more Preface: The Public Letter, or 'La Lettre Perfide' 1. History and the fiction of letters 2. Letters or letters politics, interception and spy fiction 3. Helen Maria Williams and the letters of history 4. Mary Wollstonecraft and the business of letters 5. Jane Austen and the look of letters 6. The letters of Frankenstein Conclusion: the death of the letter-fiction, the Post Office and 'The English Mail Coach' List of works cited.
A collection of essays endeavouring to rethink and contest the traditional presumptions and assum... more A collection of essays endeavouring to rethink and contest the traditional presumptions and assumptions of romantic studies, attending to hitherto or newly unaccountable places, people, and issues.
... (1991) Ketcham: Shorter Poems, 18071820, ed. Carl Ketcham (1989) Curtis II: Last Poems, 1821... more ... (1991) Ketcham: Shorter Poems, 18071820, ed. Carl Ketcham (1989) Curtis II: Last Poems, 18211850, ed. Jared Curtis (1999 ... end of the Romantic century, the Marriage Act of 1836 recognized noncon-formist marriage, and the Divorce Act of 1857 began to pry open divorce ...
Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 1994
... at this time: the political force always latent in, or extracted from the letter of fiction, ... more ... at this time: the political force always latent in, or extracted from the letter of fiction, takes over the public image of the letter. When the disturbing power of the letter comes to the fore, as it does in Marat Assassine', it not only challenges the formal order of" official art," but, more ...
Nowadays, you can often spot a work of poetry by whether it's in lines or no; if it's in ... more Nowadays, you can often spot a work of poetry by whether it's in lines or no; if it's in prose, there's a good chance it's a poem. While there is no lesson in the line more useful than that of the picket line, the line that has caused the most adversity is the bloodline . . . Charles Bernstein, "Of Time and the Line."(1) In a 1794 review of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes notice of one of the novel's "charming" pieces of original poetry. He reprints it because, as he says, "poetical beauties have not a fair chance of being attended to, amidst the stronger interest inspired by such a series of adventures."(2) His admonishing review of Matthew Lewis' The Monk similarly concludes with a poem excerpted from the novel: this "exquisitely tender elegy . . . will melt and delight the heart, when ghosts and hobgoblins shall be found only in the lumber-garret of a circulating library."(3) C...
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