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

最近关于18世纪晚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，人们往往把注意力集中在那个时期富有想象力的文学作品上；有一种趋势忽视了这样一个事实，即在18世纪后期产生和阅读的大部分作品是在杂志和期刊上发现的。德里克·罗珀（Derek Roper）的广泛研究《爱丁堡之前的回顾：1788-1802》（1978）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，在《爱丁堡评论》季刊的鼎盛时期（1740 -60年代）和新秩序（1802年出版）之间，1790年代远不是一个停滞不前、漫无目的的时期，而是一个高度意识到并投入到确立其历史地位的十年。学者们很快就把18世纪90年代视为某种事物的结束或开始（分别是启蒙运动或浪漫主义），而且往往没有认识到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百科全书式写作，也可以追溯到后爱丁堡时代文学新闻的阶级意识，甚至可以追溯到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（以及延伸：经济，政治和国家主体性），肯定斯蒂芬波特恩的说法，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。虽然许多研究都是针对那个时期最令人难忘的激进评论家（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视角为代价的，这种视角需要考虑更广泛的编辑实践。我认为，这些做法是期刊在文学领域和公共领域之间模糊的战线上坚持自己立场的手段。仔细阅读“激进”（如《分析评论》和《月刊》）和中产阶级（尤其是《月刊》）期刊之间的差异，我希望能发现共同的假设以及分歧点。通过警惕出版物用来诋毁彼此的修辞，并注意减少的共同语言(“……我们日刊的限制，使我们不能看得更广。”月刊，1783年)和扩展（“在思考法国大革命时，要把思想扩展到对事件的重要性有一个完整的概念是不容易的”，分析，1794年），我将证明，尽管它们之间存在差异，1790年代的大多数期刊都在为读者提供管理被认为是压倒性的文学景观的手段上投入了大量资金。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），这是不应该的。然而，传播这种观点会限制我们对文学批评读者/消费者表型的理解，而文学批评（实际上是文学）的广泛历史将受益于对这些容易被忽视的期刊的热情重读。我不认为《爱丁堡评论》是一种激进的突破，我想要考虑的是，18世纪90年代的中产阶级期刊是如何创造出读者的主体性的，而《爱丁堡评论》后来试图反驳这种主体性，但这种主体性最终又被后爱丁堡期刊所接受，并在随后的几个世纪里继续在形成文学新闻的公众中发挥着基础性作用。在这样做的过程中，我想让我们对“激进主义”在18世纪90年代应该真正定位的概念感到困惑。

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.