Miranda Burgess

This essay situates Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ at the intersection of neurology, epidemiology, and transportation history, and alongside the emergent discipline of tropical medicine that united them. One artifact of this nexus of disciplines, it argues, was a persistent tropicality, or high figurality: the metaphoric processes in which physicians and engineers sought to establish and confirm Britain's, and Briton's, insularity were plagued by eruptions of metonymic instability. Proposing that Shelley's novel was informed by more than tropical medicine's preoccupations with insularity, contagion, and mental hygiene, this essay explores Shelley's uses of metaphor and her enactment of metonymic seriality on the level of narrative form. The essay makes the case for restoring the connections between subjectivity and the emergence of global networks in our current approaches to Romantic affects and mobilities, and for the indispensability, especially in this context, of attending closely to the poetics of non-poetic texts.

This essay explores two approaches to affect in literary theory. The first of these approaches locates affect in discrete bodies and persons. The second views affect as a phenomenon anterior to the distinction of persons: a flow of energy among bodies as well as between bodies and the world. The essay argues that the first tends to function in recent theory as a stand-in for the other. Drawing a parallel with the operations of metaphor in William Wordsworth's poetics, the essay elaborates a late eighteenth-century context for the emergence of what I argue is the similarly metaphorical relation between the two dominant conceptions of affect in theory: the development of systems of transport that seemed to threaten the autonomy of persons and feelings by putting into circulation feelings and persons from abroad; and the emergence of philosophical ideas about sympathy (Adam Smith) and aesthetic pleasure (Immanuel Kant) that reassuringly asserted, and gave priority, to the essential autonomy of the feeling self. Arguing for an understanding of metaphor as a formal enactment of displacement, for displacement as constitutive of anxiety, and thus for metaphor and displacement as the media through which late eighteenth-century anxieties about the mobility of affect were negotiated, I trace the philosophical genealogy through which this figural mode is inherited by recent theory, even in the absence of the unease that originally impelled the turn to metaphor. This essay demonstrates how narrative form may offer a conceptual alternative to figuration in affect theory, and how a model for rethinking affect may go beyond the bounded body.

This essay examines some ‘new media’ practices of the 1990s together with late twentieth-century critical commentaries on computer-mediated communication and electronic textuality. It compares both with discussions of changes in communications technologies and readerships from the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on observations about narrative form—especially the mutual metaphoricity of the nation and the book—in conjunction with the associated qualities of self-consciousness about sociability, historicity, and mediatedness that emerge from this study, I propose an understanding of genre formation as a characteristic, and under-recognized, response to the experience of media change and outline the possible contributions a more self-conscious theory of genre could make to existing theories of media, mediation, and media succession.

My subject is the relationship between Jane Austen's novels and sensibility, that complex of emotional demonstrativeness and analysis, aesthetic taste, and empathic response that historians treat as a pervasive literary and social movement (or, as GJ Barker-Benfield, 1992, would have ...

The Scottish Regalia and the Scottish Nation, 1999/1822 Miranda Burgess ON JULY 1, 1999, ELIZABETH II WAS DRIVEN ALONG THE ROYAL Mile from Holyrood to the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, where she was to open the devolved Parliament of ...

Page 1. Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland, 1796-1806 Miranda J. Burgess ow to represent Ireland: At the end of the 1790s the question H confronted Irish intellectuals with unprecedented urgency. As a ...