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

最近关于十八世纪末的学术倾向于有效地模糊启蒙主义和浪漫主义之间的界限。然而，这往往集中在那个时期的富有想象力的文学上；这一趋势忽视了这样一个事实，即18世纪后期创作和阅读的大部分作品都出现在杂志和期刊上。德里克·罗珀在《爱丁堡：1788-1802》(1978)之前的广泛研究回顾，为重新评价18世纪90年代周期性传播的文学批评铺平了道路。罗珀证明了这一点，在月刊的全盛时期(17世纪40年代至60年代)和《爱丁堡评论》季刊的新秩序之间，远非停滞不前的无目标时期。1802年)，17世纪90年代是高度意识到需要在历史上确立其地位并投入资金的十年。学者们很快就将18世纪90年代视为某种事物(分别是启蒙运动或浪漫主义)的结束或开始，但往往未能承认文学批评实践背后的连续性；这种连续性可以追溯到奥古斯丁时代的百科全书主义，并向前延伸到后爱丁堡文学新闻的阶级意识--实际上是21世纪流行批评和学术批评之间的分裂。我的研究将寻求以自己的方式阅读18世纪90年代的期刊，这是一个正在进行的项目的一部分，该项目旨在调查18世纪批评能够产生的读者类型(以及经济、政治和国家主观性)，证实了斯蒂芬·博廷的说法，即期刊不仅反映了社会现实，而且在塑造社会现实方面发挥了作用。尽管许多研究都致力于那个时代记忆最深刻的激进评论家(沃尔斯通克拉夫特、戈德温、威廉·泰勒)，但这种受传记影响的研究通常是以牺牲更全面的批评视角为代价的，后者考虑到了更广泛的编辑实践。我会争辩说，这些做法是期刊在文学和公共领域之间模糊的战线上确立自己地位的手段。仔细阅读“激进”期刊(如《分析评论》和《月刊》)和中产阶级期刊(特别是《月刊评论》)之间的差异，我希望能发现共同的假设和分歧之处。通过警惕出版物用来诋毁彼此的修辞，并注意通用的简化语言(……我们期刊的合同限制禁止我们采取更广泛的范围。)《每月》(1783年)和《扩张》(《在思考法国大革命时，不容易将头脑扩张到对事件规模的完整概念》《分析》，1794年)，我将证明，尽管存在差异，但17世纪90年代的大多数期刊都投入了大量资金，让读者有能力管理被认为压倒性的文学景观。主流文学期刊被不恰当地写成“约翰逊时代遗留下来的身体”(约翰·克莱夫)。然而，传播这一观点将限制我们对文学批评读者/消费者表型的理解，这些读者/消费者在接下来的几个世纪里继续演变，而我们广泛的文学批评历史(实际上是文学)将受益于热情好客地重读这些容易被摒弃的期刊。我不会把《爱丁堡评论》视为一次彻底的突破，而是想看看18世纪90年代的中产阶级期刊是如何创造出《爱丁堡周刊》当时试图反驳的读者主观性的，但这种主观性最终又被后爱丁堡时代的期刊所利用，并在后来几个世纪的文学新闻公众的形成过程中继续发挥着重要作用。在这样做的时候，我想要扰乱我们的观念，即在17世纪90年代，‘激进’应该真正位于哪里。

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.