British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism

215 Pages·2009·1.07 MB·English

by  Anne Frey

British State Romanticism

British State
Romanticism
authorship, agency, and
bureaucratic nationalism
Anne Frey
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
This book has been published with the assistance of the Department of English
and the AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frey, Anne, 1972–
British state romanticism : authorship, agency, and bureaucratic nationalism / Anne Frey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-6228-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and state—Great
Britain. 3. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain.
I. Title.
PR457.F74 2010
820.9'35841—dc22 2009029787
Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/14 Adobe Garamond
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Literature and the State in Post-Napoleonic Britain 1
1. Fragment Poems and Fragment Nations: The Aesthetics of
Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Late Work 21
2. Wordsworth’s Establishment Poetics 54
3. Speaking for the Law: State Agency in Scott’s Novels 88
4. A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of
Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion 116
5. De Quincey’s Imperial Systems 140
Notes 165
Index 199

Acknowledgments
This book began as a dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, and my
greatest debt is to Jerome Christensen, who helped me conceive the original
dissertation and whose brilliant readings remain a model for me. I also owe
tremendous thanks to Ronald Paulson both for his helpful comments on the
dissertation and for the solid grounding his teaching provided me. Stephen
Behrendt and my fellow participants in the 2003 NEH Seminar “Rethink-
ing Romantic Fiction” greatly increased the breadth of my engagement with
Romantic literary culture. And Karen Fang has my heartfelt gratitude both
for her generous and astute attention over the years to this and many more
of my texts, and for her friendship. I would also like to sincerely thank
Peter Manning and the anonymous reader for Stanford University Press,
both of whose careful and engaged critiques greatly improved the book. I
only regret that I could not incorporate all of their wise suggestions. I am
also immensely grateful to the editors and the production staff at Stanford
University Press. I would like to especially thank Emily-Jane Cohen for her
interest in and support for the project, Sarah Crane Newman and Mariana
Raykov for seeing it through, and Jeff Wyneken for his careful copyediting.
And I would like to express my appreciation to Karen Swann and my other
undergraduate teachers for introducing me to the study of literature in an
environment that was both encouraging and intellectually rigorous.
I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University
New Orleans for supporting my research and to the Department of English
and AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University (TCU)
for supporting the publication of this book. Thanks also to my colleagues
in the English department at Loyola for their unflagging support in my
first academic position, and to my colleagues at TCU for creating such a
welcoming environment. At TCU, Bonnie Blackwell, Karen Steele, and
Marnin Young also helpfully commented on individual chapters.
viii acknowledgments
An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction
38 (2005): 214–34. I would like to thank Nancy Armstrong and the editorial
board of Novel for their suggestions, and Johns Hopkins University Press
for permission to reprint the article here. A shorter version of Chapter 5
appeared in Studies in Romanticism 44 (2005): 41–61 and is reprinted here
courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Robert and Eileen Frey, and
my sister and brother, Linda and Alex, for their continued support of my
academic work and of all my other endeavors. Daniel Gil has in so many
ways enabled me to complete this book, as well as immeasurably improved
it through his generous and intelligent readings, and Madeleine has kept me
cheerful through it all. Such as it is, I dedicate this book to them.
British State Romanticism