Romantic Feuds: Transcending the “Age of Personality” by Kim Wheatley

622 BOOK REVIEWS change and grow” (207). Euthanasia’s presumed death at sea does not, moreover, indicate the end of this more promising mode of prophecy; the persistence of her handkerchief is, like Desdemona’s, “a sacred relic” wo­ ven, as Shakespeare has it, by “A sibyl,” that turns up again in the fictional Introduction of The Last Man (210). Smith considers the actual effects of Evadne’s curse in this latter novel—the global Plague—“not as horrify­ ing as the ‘mental creations of almighty fear’ that terrify the survivors,” most significantly the word “plague” itself (216). As in Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” where the title’s protracted writing-out suggests a post-apocalyptic world somehow persisting eleven years beyond the End (185), words in The Last Man become newly potent after the end of history, opening a future of artistic and political possibilities in the mo­ ment of its apparent foreclosure. Chris Bundock Huron University College, Canada Kim Wheatley. Romantic Feuds: Transcending the “Age of Personality.” Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xii+191. $104.95. Romantic Feuds is a study of the often-acrimonious relationships between literary and periodical writing in the Romantic period. Kim Wheatley re­ covers and examines four feuds that played out in the pages of periodicals, pamphlets, and books. Throughout, she returns to issues that are important both for the study ofperiodicals and for students ofthe period more gener­ ally. First, she explores the convention of anonymity in periodical writing. Anonymity was often penetrable—the identity of the authors was an open secret—but it still remained rhetorically useful. Relatedly, she investigates the discourse of “personality” in interesting ways. Attacks that were deemed to be “personal” justified a response, but since the allegation that someone had indulged in personal attacks could itself be understood as a personal attack, that response could often produce a counter-response, which soon led to a war of words, or what Wheatley calls “a multiauthored , self-generating text” (22). Finally, she “finds an aesthetic ele­ ment” (1) in the periodical writing she analyzes, and shows how it engages with some of the issues usually associated with high Romanticism, such as the nature of selfhood, the relation between the self and nature, transcend­ ence, and the sublime. The first feud Wheatley examines is the controversy surrounding the publication of Robert Southey’s fiercely Jacobin play Watt Tyler. Southey had written the play in his youth, and approached the radical publisher SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) BOOK REVIEWS 623 James Ridgeway with it in 1795. Ridgeway never published the play, and Southey never recovered the manuscript. In 1817, another publisher issued the play and it was widely reprinted. By this time Southey was poet laure­ ate, and a fiery public critic of those who still shared his own earlier politi­ cal views. He found himselfin the odd position ofseeking an injunction to prevent the publication ofhis own play, which was now an embarrassment to him: the injunction was denied. Matters got worse for Southey when William Smith, MP, described Watt Tyler in the House of Commons as “the most seditious book that was ever written.” These events sparked a battle of words in the pages of the reviews, and produced a number of pamphlets and other publications. Hone, Jeffrey, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hunt, and Byron were all involved. Wheatley recon­ structs the controversy thoroughly and engagingly and provides a com­ mentary on it that elucidates the many cross-references among the articles that would not be apparent if they were read in isolation. She shows how the affair took on its own momentum and continued despite writers on both sides declaring that they had now had the last word. She argues that Coleridge’s attempt to defend Southey and Southey’s attempt to defend himself both backfired and provided more ammunition to Southey’s de­ tractors. But she also shows how Southey’s critics, such as William Hazlitt, ironically represented him as sublime even as they attacked him, and how Byron’s The Vision ofJudgement “does Southey a huge favour by choosing to immortalise him” (53). Throughout, she shows how the controversy draws on assumptions about subjective development and poetic...

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