The Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–1865 (also known as “The Cotton Panic” or simply “The Distress”) was largely caused by the Union blockade of Confederate goods, including cotton, during the American Civil War. The economy of the highly industrialized English county of Lancashire was heavily dependent on cotton. The poetry associated with this crisis represents a demographically diverse documentation of emotional response, commentary, and reportage. Almost four hundred poems have been collated and analyzed on the database developed at the University of Exeter, but it is known that there are hundreds more still to be added to this collection, which have yet to be processed or even discovered. The bulk of the poems were recovered from local Lancashire newspapers and other UK publications, but there is also verse published in Australia, France, Ireland, and dozens from publications representing both sides of the American Civil War itself. Almost all of the poetry first saw the light of day in newspapers, and in Lancashire these publications were local to each of the mill towns affected by the crisis. Towns such as Bolton, Rochdale, Blackburn, Preston, and Burnley had grown exponentially in the decades up to the Famine, and their populations, in many cases newly literate, were served by discrete periodicals performing important municipal services as conveyors of news, opinion, entertainment, and advertising. In addition, almost all British newspapers in the 1860s featured a weekly poetry or literature column, and though they sometimes included verse from classic living or historical authors, they often encouraged readers to submit poetry for publication. Cotton Famine poetry provides a window into the feelings and opinions of ordinary people in reaction to one of the most concentrated periods of industrial economic distress in the latter half of the 19th century.
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Cotton Famine Poetry: Technology, Trade, and Transatlantic Discourse
Simon Rennie
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Early Modern Literature and Food in Britain
Joan Fitzpatrick
Early modern literature about food is found in a range of genres that have traditionally appealed to literary critics, such as drama and poetry, as well as writings that can be less neatly categorized as literary but that tend to have a literary dimension, such as religious sermons, cookery books, and dietary literature, also known as regimens. Food in early modern literature often signals a complex relationship between the body, a sense of self, and the sociopolitical structures that regulated food’s production and consumption in the period. Writers mentioning food may thereby convey details of narrative, characterization, and motivation but also signal broader social concerns such as the role of women, religious obligations, treatment of the poor, and the status of foreigners. Ordinary staple foods such as bread feature heavily, but so too do exotic foods newly imported into England such as apricots and other fruits that were hard to grow. There is also a fascination with perverse consumption, such as cannibalism (sometimes metaphorical and sometimes literal), which functions as an indication of various modes of alterity. The consumption of food in early modern literature is often grounded in the period in which it was written. A common recurrence is the way in which patterns of consumption signal social and moral responsibility, so that eating and drinking to excess, or taking too much pleasure in them, is considered sinful. Also evident is the shift from medieval communal dining and a sense of feudal obligation and hospitality to strangers to a growing early modern sense of privacy and individualism. Food functions as a complex marker of national, religious, and cultural identity whereby certain foods signify Catholicism or Englishness and other foods, or their preparation, will signify strangeness. Yet food can also be a shorthand way to address issues such as hunger, desire, and disgust.
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Early Modern Literature and the Occult
Rachel White
The occult has been a source of fascination for writers and scholars over the centuries. It is often associated with magic, the macabre, spectacle, the diabolical, and the unknown, but it also encompasses aspects of science and new understandings of the world. The occult shadows the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, belief, and practice. The word “occult” comes from the Latin occultus meaning secret or hidden, though it became associated with esoteric knowledge and magic during the early modern period. Those who sought out new knowledge needed to frame their work within legitimate boundaries, and curiosity needed to be curtailed to avoid excessive intellectual inquiry. Printing enhanced the circulation of occult ideas, and contemporary writers such as Agrippa became representative of the early modern occult tradition as well as the more ancient sources such as the hermetic texts. Indeed, the critical history of the occult also bears out its varied role in the early modern period in terms of its extremes and indeterminate nature. Fascination with the secret and hidden provides perfect material for writers and scholars. Writers of the early modern period exploited the gap between legitimate knowledge and the perceived nefarious, illegitimate practices of individuals. The trope of the overreaching figure, encapsulated in Doctor Faustus, provided spectacle as well as a moral lesson, while the hidden qualities of words and signs added an extra dimension to any performance: would those hidden qualities be accidently unleashed by the actors? The theater played upon the occult as spectacle but was also prepared to parody it as figures such as John Dee are recognizably caricatured and referred to in plays of the period. Magi and powerful figures with knowledge of the occult also occupy prominent positions in prose and poetry. Like its theatrical counterpart, writers of printed works were also wary of the power of signs and written words to be harnessed by their readers. The debates around the occult are wide-ranging and encompassing of different beliefs and practices, from what 21st-century readers might recognize as scientific to the magical, beliefs and practices that were contemporaneously coded as legitimate and illegitimate.
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Literature and Disability in the English Renaissance
Alice Equestri
Disability—whether physical, mental, or sensory—is widely represented in Early Modern literature, and as such it has been attracting attention from 21st-century literary scholars, who apply the theoretical and critical tools of disability studies to Renaissance narratives and literary characters. Literary disability in its various forms can be analyzed in the light of various models of disability, including medical, social, moral, or cultural. This helps in understanding early modern representations and experiences of disability in culture and history and making sense of reactions to disability in the period: including stigma, mockery, proud identification with the disabled identity, or also a desire for it. Physical disabilities in the Renaissance encompass anything from deformity to bodily mutilation to dwarfism or monstrosity, and they are especially prone to be emphasized, explained, or scrutinized in search of their meaning. Sensory disabilities, including blindness, deafness, and mutism, prompt interpretations that connect physical impairment with the character’s inability or surprising ability to understand reality—whether in a pragmatic or spiritual sense. Intellectual and mental disabilities have many ramifications in early modern literature, some of which, such as fools and madmen, are staple types of drama. Intellectual and mental disabilities are often described in medical terms, but literary texts tend to differentiate between them, whether in technical or narrative terms. Foolishness normally turns into comedy, whereas madness is often connected with tragic characters undergoing mental breakdowns. Renaissance disability studies are also concerned with less obvious types of disability: disabilities that were disabilities in the past but not in the 21st century, concealed disabilities, and disabilities that are not actually disabilities but do foster a conversation that excludes the character who does not embody what society regarded as the ideal physical shape. Finally, instances of counterfeited disability and disability attached to concepts rather than people help understand how Renaissance culture often viewed the nonstandard body not only as something to beware of or reject but also as an image of empowerment.
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Lyric Poetry and Poetics
Daniel Tiffany
Lyric poetry is an ancient genre, enduring to the present day, but it is not continuous in its longevity. What happens to lyric poetry and how it changes during its numerous and sometimes lengthy periods of historical eclipse (such as the 18th century) may be as important to our understanding of lyric as an assessment of its periods of high achievement. For it is during these periods of relative obscurity that lyric enters into complex relations with other genres of poetry and prose, affirming the general thesis that all genres are relational and porous. The question of whether any particular properties of lyric poetry endure throughout its 2,700-year checkered history can be addressed by examining its basic powers: its forms; its figurative and narrative functions; and its styles and diction. The hierarchy of these functions is mutable, as one finds in today’s rift between a scholarly revival of formalist analysis and the increasing emphasis on diction in contemporary poetry. As a way of assessing lyric poetry’s basic operations, the present article surveys the ongoing tension between form and diction by sketching a critique of the tenets of New Formalism in literary studies, especially its presumptions about the relation of poetic form to the external world and its tendency to subject form to close analysis, as if it could yield, like style or diction, detailed knowledge of the world. Long overshadowed by the doctrinal tenets of modernist formalism, the expressive powers of diction occupy a central place in contemporary concerns about identity and social conflict, at the same time that diction (unlike form) is especially susceptible to the vocabularistic methods of “distant reading”—to the computational methods of the digital humanities. The indexical convergence of concreteness and abstraction, expression and rationalism, proximity and distance, in these poetic and scholarly experiments with diction points to precedents in the 18th century, when the emergence of Anglophone poetries in the context of colonialism and the incorporation of vernacular languages into poetic diction (via the ballad revival) intersected with the development of modern lexicography and the establishment of Standard English. The nascent transactions of poetics and positivism through the ontology of diction in the 21st century remind us that poetic diction is always changing but also that the hierarchy of form, figuration, and diction in lyric poetry inevitably shifts over time—a reconfiguration of lyric priorities that helps to shape the premises and methods of literary studies.
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The Oxford Movement
Elisabeth Jay
In 1833 a reforming government seemed to threaten the disestablishment of the Church of England. This provoked a small number of clergy associated with Oxford University to address Tracts for the Times (1833–1841) to fellow Anglican clerics. Reminding them that they derived their spiritual authority not from the state, but by virtue of ordination into a church which traced its direct descent from the body instituted by Christ and his apostles, the tracts ranged from scholarly argument to templates for the renewal of spiritual life. The tract writers included John Henry Newman, John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, Isaac Williams, and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Determined to reinterpret the Church of England to itself as the true Catholic church in England, they sought to counteract the perceived Protestant bias of the Book of Common Prayer by appealing to the early Fathers of the undivided church of antiquity, and by emphasizing the via media (middle way) favored by many 17th-century theologians.
The series that gave the movement its alternative name, Tractarianism, came to an abrupt end when in Tract XC (1841), Newman, the influential vicar of the University church, argued that the Prayer Book’s Thirty-Nine Articles, to which all ordained clergy and all Oxford students were then obliged to subscribe, could be interpreted as compatible with Roman Catholic theology. For many, Newman’s founding of a semi-monastic community to which he retreated in 1843, and his reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, where he was followed by a number of other Tractarians, marked the end of the movement. This impression was lent continued currency both by Newman’s own account, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and by subsequent 19th-century historians. However, the movement’s influence continued to be felt throughout the wider Anglican communion in renewed attention to sacramental worship, in church building, and in the founding of Anglican communities. The movement’s appeal to pre-Reformation theology led to its being associated with the revival of Gothic architecture, while Tractarian sacramental fervor later translated into obsessive observance of Prayer Book rubrics by the so-called Ritualists.
Admiration for the Lake Poets fed into a Tractarian aesthetic which saw poetic language as religion’s natural mode of expression, half revealing, half concealing heavenly truths, and poetic rhythm and structure as devices for controlling thoughts and emotions. As its title indicates, Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) was designed to accompany the liturgy: immensely popular, it carried the movement’s principles well beyond Anglo-Catholic circles. It was supplemented by further collections of Tractarian poetry. Institutionally male in origin, the movement nevertheless legitimated women’s work through sisterhoods, in education and as writers. Charlotte Yonge and Christina Rossetti are the two most notable exemplars of this impulse.
The movement provoked polemical fiction both from its ardent disciples and from disenchanted followers. In the popular press, Anglo-Catholicism quickly translated into Roman Catholicism, thus presenting a potential threat to English values. The revival of confession, sisterhoods, and the notion of celibacy seemed to undermine the Victorian domestic order, while priestly attention to liturgical vestments was attacked as unmanly. If Anglo-Catholicism’s long-term legacy was spiritual, its short-term effect was to politicize Victorian religion.
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Prosody
Meredith Martin
Prosody refers, most broadly, to versification and pronunciation. Historically, prosody referred to the branch of grammar that contained versification as a subsection, but since the late 19th century literary scholars and poets have interchanged versification and prosody, while linguists use prosody to refer to pronunciation. Since the beginning of the 20th century scholars have also referred to prosody as a “poetics,” or a system of meaning-making, and do not directly engage in analysis of meter but rather use the term prosody to signify any aspect of literary style or figurative language that might contribute to the affective register of verse-form. The philological register of prosody may use versification in order to make a claim about how a verse-form reflects a national, historical, or even ethnic character, a practice that began in earnest during the mid-18th century and persists into the 21st century, though with some critical distance. Because the measure of verse is subjective and historically contingent, debates and discussions about prosody are a constant and tend to repeat. There is no one progress narrative of prosody, writ large, but the progress narrative of poetry within prosodic discourse is one of its main tropes. That is, while there are theories of prosody that posit progression, there is little agreement about the evolution or even naming of prosodic systems. Each history of prosody therefore posits a new theory. Thus, the theory of prosody might always be seen as the proliferation of conflicting theories about prosody, in no way limited to one national language; in fact, theories of prosody from other languages applied to English are much older and more robust than theories of prosody that derive from only English—for instance, measuring English by Latin prosody, or French, or German, and so on. Despite the proliferation of conflicting theories, scholars who work on prosody nevertheless agree broadly that, like the subject of grammar under which prosody was historically a subset, prosody is a set of interrelated features in language that, according to how you measure these features, either appear to adhere to a particular system or do not. Also, scholars agree that, like grammar, prosody as an interpretive system often hovers between the prescriptive and the descriptive. In the conflicts over theories of prosody, adherents to one system attempt to convince adherents to another that theirs is superior, and these debates and conflicts continue unabated in linguistic prosodic criticism. Those who practice literary prosodic criticism in the 21st century tend to adopt a system of verse-measure with little interest in its history, or even with what linguistic prosodic critics might call a sharp disregard for its inaccuracy. Linguistic prosodists—who have made significant advances in the field—are sidelined by the momentum of a literary history that has rendered their ongoing work too specialized for general use. There are also those who believe that prosody—or, rather, specific paralinguistic features of prosody—exists, like grammar, in particular bodies, to be awakened or cultivated by a particular kind of reading or hearing ear or a particular kind of feeling body. Trends in cognitive science have influenced one strain of theorizing about prosody as a form of subconscious knowledge in no way dependent on the cultural formations that may have organized sonic features into recognizable systems. Historical prosodists, those who study the history of thinking about prosodic form but also practice prosodic reading, posit that prosody is culturally contingent and, along with phenomenology, might be better considered as a part of cultural criticism rather than a privileged key to poetic meaning. Finally, where prosodic theory happens is a live question. Whether discourse about prosody (or meta-metrical discourse, as in Gascoigne or the various grammars discussed here) is prosodic theory or whether poets writing in a variety of prosodic forms (whether interpreted by critics or not) posit prosodic theories in their practice is at the heart of what many mischaracterize as a divide between historical prosody and other theories of reading. This divide is artificial, but the fact is that disagreements about what and how prosody means have led to a variety of approaches to the study of prosody in poetry, and despite this disagreement prosody is nevertheless taught in most academic settings as if it has an agreed upon past, present, and future.
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Radio and English-Language Literature
Cheryl Higashida
An integral part of modern life and symbol of modernity, radio resonates throughout 20th- and 21st-century literature. While radio emerges from and operates through a range of wireless technologies including telegraphy, telephony, and the internet, it is as a “one to many” broadcast medium—the first electronic mass medium—that radio has most profoundly impacted the literary imagination and literary production. Writers around the world have incorporated radio’s voices, sounds, technology, and techniques into poetry, plays, and novels. They have written for radio, read their own and others’ work over the airwaves, and hosted and produced broadcast programs. Listening to, participating in, and working on radio spurred writerly interests in heteroglossia, monoglossia, and ventriloquism; mass culture and audiences; the destabilization of temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries; and the interrelationships of technology, the human body, and the modern sensorium. Even when working within national networks, writers deployed radio’s technology and techniques to challenge as well as affirm racial and imperial boundaries of nationhood, and to call into being local and transnational collectives united across space and time through mass-mediated listening. Radio interviews, readings, commentary, and adaptations have expanded and reconfigured literature’s presence in the world. In turn, literature and print have critically shaped broadcasting’s formats, ethos, and culture.
Radio and literature are thus intermedial forms that incorporate elements of each other as well as their broader media systems, mechanical and digital. The dynamic relationships among radio, literature, and other media can be understood in terms of remediation, the process by which media transpose and represent the content and properties of other media. Radio’s properties of liveness, immediacy, simultaneity, and intimacy are often perceived to be inherent to the medium. However, they are in fact engineered in response to historically and geographically specific social and political needs, pressures, and imaginations. In remediating radio’s properties, writers participate in the aesthetic and social production of radio’s effects, forms, practices, and relations.
Literary engagements with radio transmission began with early-20th-century avant-garde poets inspired by wireless telegraphy. With the inauguration of the first station broadcast in 1920, radio radiated through a wider range of literary genres and movements while spawning technologically mediated literary forms such as radio drama, the feature, and the talk. Poetry readings and radio drama emerged within the first years of commercial and public broadcasting. During radio’s so-called “golden age” from the late 1920s through the 1950s, literary modernism and realism flourished, competed, and resonated with the mass culture, apparatus, infrastructure, and institutions of radio. Writers attained especial prominence in radio broadcasting leading up to and during World War II when governments deployed writers’ craft and reputations in the service of propaganda aimed at their own citizens as well as international and colonial audiences. In the second half of the 20th century through to the present, poets, dramatists, and fiction and political writers have engaged with pirate, Black-oriented, alternative, internet, and other evolving forms of radio.
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Representations of Early Modern London in Literature, 1580–1615
Andrew Gordon
What is the literature of early modern London? During a period of unprecedented expansion, the early modern city also extended its claim to be the leading center of literary production. This cultural dominion was furthered through the material control over textual dissemination that the city came to exert with the expansion in print, even as it continued to be an important hub for the persistence of manuscript cultures of circulation. This process came to a head in the period 1580–1615 when the city’s development as a marketplace for literature, and the development of new readers and audiences, also expanded the possibilities of urban literature . Alongside a rapid change in the socioeconomic conditions of inhabiting early modern London, new cultural sites emerged and with them new forms of urban behavior. London itself, its spaces and places, its peoples and things, became a subject of literary inquiry. New literary forms developed in response to the new possibilities of urban living, not merely for the documentation of daily life but also in exploratory ways, innovating to investigate the new meanings of urban encounter, urban sociability, urban identity and the urban environment, and helping develop in their consumers a sense of urban competence. At the same time the novelty of urban living also provoked an interest in the urban past and historical memory, which itself yielded modes of textual innovation. The new literary interest in the writing of place took on particular concerns when applied to the matter of urban fabric and social order. The city’s cultures of performance also underwent a sea-change in this time. Tracing a link between theater and the pageantry of the early modern city, and the Lord Mayor’s shows in particular, frequently underestimated as vehicles for the representation of early modern London, it is possible to see a broader picture of competing representations of the early modern city. Exploring the development of the commercial stage’s professional interest in representing London draws attention to the representational challenges of staging the city, as well as the complexities of urban experience. Not only the representation of place but also the embodied sensory experiences, the spatial competences, the linguistic communities, and soundscapes of the city are all part of this inquiry.
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The Early Black Atlantic Conversion Narrative
Vincent Carretta
Prior to the last decade of the 20th century, literary critics generally, like Thomas Jefferson before them, dismissed the role religion played in the writings by and about the first generation of English-speaking authors of African descent. Christ’s injunction to his followers to bear witness to their faith, however, gave that first generation the sanction, means, motive, and opportunity to speak truth to power during the 18th-century period of the transatlantic Protestant Great Awakening and Evangelical Revival. The early Black evangelical authors, such as Phillis Wheatley in poetry and Olaudah Equiano in prose, used narratives of their religious conversions as both testaments to their own faith as well as models of spiritual belief and secular behavior for their primarily white readers to follow. The writings of Wheatley and Equiano also exemplify how early Black authors who adopted Christianity could appropriate its tenets to challenge the institution of slavery.
