Radical Reviews? Periodical Publishing and the British Reader in the 1790s.

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Much recent scholarship on the late eighteenth century has tended towards a productive blurring of the boundaries between Enlightenment and Romanticism. Yet too often this has focused on the period's imaginative literature; a trend which neglects the fact that the bulk of writing produced and read during the later eighteenth century was found in magazines and periodicals. Derek Roper's extensive study Reviewing before the Edinburgh: 1788-1802 (1978) paved the way for a reappraisal of the periodically disseminated literary criticism of the 1790s. Roper demonstrated that, far from being a time of stagnant aimlessness between the heyday of the monthlies (1740s-60s) and the new order of the quarterly Edinburgh Review (est. 1802), the 1790s were a decade which was highly conscious of and invested in the need to establish its place in history. Scholars are quick to view the 1790s as either the ending or beginning of something (the Enlightenment or Romanticism respectively), and have often failed to acknowledge the continuity underlying the practice of literary criticism; a continuity which stretches backwards to the encyclopaedism of the Augustan age and forward to the class-consciousness of post-Edinburgh literary journalism - indeed to the 21st century's split between popular and academic criticism. My study will seek to read the periodicals of the 1790s on their own terms as part of an ongoing project to investigate the sorts of readers (and by extension: economic, political and national subjectivities) eighteenth-century criticism was able to produce, affirming Stephen Botein's claim that periodicals 'not only reflected social realities, but played a role in shaping them.'While many studies have been devoted to the period's best-remembered radical reviewers (Wollstonecraft, Godwin, William Taylor), such biographically-inflected studies generally come at the expense of a more holistic critical perspective that takes broader editorial practices into account. These practices, I will argue, were the means through which periodicals asserted their positions in the fuzzy battle lines between a literary and public sphere.Reading closely into the differences between the 'radical' (e.g. the Analytical Review and Monthly Magazine) and middle-class (especially the Monthly Review) journals, I hope to uncover shared assumptions as well as points of divergence. By being wary of the rhetoric employed by the publications to discredit each other, and attentive to the common language of reduction ("...the contracted limits of our journal forbid us to take a wider scope." Monthly, 1783) and expansion ("In contemplating the French revolution, it is not easy to dilate the mind to a full conception of the magnitude of the event" Analytical, 1794), I will demonstrate that, despite their differences, most periodicals of the 1790s were deeply invested in equipping readers with the means to manage a literary landscape perceived as being overwhelming.Undeservedly, mainstream literary periodicals been written off as 'corpses left over from the age of Johnson' (John Clive). Yet to propagate this view is to limit our understanding of the phenotypes of readers/consumers of literary criticism that continued to evolve over the following centuries, whereas our broad history of literary criticism (indeed literature) would benefit from a hospitable rereading of such readily dismissed journals. Rather than seeing the Edinburgh Review as a radical break, I will want to consider how the middle-class periodicals of the 1790s created the readerly subjectivities that the Edinburgh then tried to counter, but that were ultimately taken up again by the post-Edinburgh periodicals and continued to play a constitutive role in forming the public for literary journalism for subsequent centuries. In so doing, I will want to trouble our notion of where 'radicality' should truly be located in the 1790s.