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

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• 批准号: 2268494
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2268494
• 关键词: Radical; Reviews; Periodical; Publishing; British

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.

最近关于18世纪后期的许多学术研究都倾向于模糊启蒙运动和浪漫主义之间的界限。然而，这种观点往往集中于这一时期的想象文学;这种倾向忽视了这样一个事实，即世纪后期产生和阅读的大部分作品都是在杂志和期刊上发现的。德里克·罗珀的广泛研究《爱丁堡之前的回顾：1788-1802》（1978）为重新评估18世纪90年代周期性传播的文学批评铺平了道路。罗珀证明，远不是一个停滞的漫无目的的时间之间的全盛时期的月刊（1740年代至60年代）和新秩序的季刊爱丁堡评论（est。1802年），1790年代是一个高度意识到并投资于建立其历史地位的必要性的十年。学者们很快就把18世纪90年代看作是某件事的结束或开始。（分别是启蒙运动或浪漫主义），往往没有承认文学批评实践的连续性;这种连续性可以追溯到奥古斯都时代的启蒙主义，又可以向前延伸到后爱丁堡文学新闻的阶级意识，事实上，21世纪大众批评和学术批评的分裂。我的研究将试图阅读18世纪90年代的期刊，作为一个正在进行的项目的一部分，以调查18世纪批评能够产生的读者类型（以及经济，政治和民族主体性），肯定斯蒂芬·博丹的主张，即期刊不仅反映了社会现实，而且在塑造它们方面发挥了作用。虽然许多研究都致力于这一时期最受欢迎的激进评论家（沃斯通克拉夫特，戈德温，威廉·泰勒），但这种传记式的研究通常是以牺牲更全面的批评观点为代价的，这种观点考虑到了更广泛的编辑实践。我认为，这些做法是期刊在文学和公共领域之间的模糊战线上确立自己地位的手段。通过阅读“激进”期刊（如《分析评论》和《月刊》杂志）与中产阶级期刊（尤其是《月刊》）之间的差异，我希望发现共同的假设以及分歧点。通过警惕出版物用来诋毁对方的言辞，并注意减少的共同语言（“.我们杂志的局限性使我们不能把范围扩大。“月刊，1783年）和扩展（“在思考法国大革命时，要将思想扩展到对事件规模的完整概念是不容易的”，分析，1794），我将证明，尽管它们之间存在差异，18世纪90年代的大多数期刊都深深地投入到为读者提供管理被认为是压倒性的文学景观的手段中。主流文学期刊被认为是“约翰逊时代遗留下来的尸体”（约翰克莱夫）。然而，宣扬这种观点会限制我们对文学批评的读者/消费者的表型的理解，这些表型在随后的几个世纪里继续发展，而我们广泛的文学批评（实际上是文学）历史将受益于对这些容易被忽视的期刊的热情重读。我不想把《爱丁堡评论》看作是一个彻底的突破，而是想考虑18世纪90年代的中产阶级期刊如何创造了读者的主观性，爱丁堡当时试图对抗这种主观性，但最终又被后爱丁堡期刊重新接受，并在随后的几个世纪里继续发挥着塑造文学新闻公众的重要作用。在这样做的时候，我想麻烦一下我们的概念，即“激进”在18世纪90年代应该真正位于何处。