Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ed. by Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole

Reviewed by: Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine ed. by Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole, eds., Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. vii + 276, $105/£80 cloth and e-book. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s early history is well-covered ground. The magazine’s own self-mythologizing aside, studies of the Blackwood publishing firm and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine by David Finkelstein, Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Mark Parker, Mark Schoenfield, and Kim Wheatley have been published over the last two decades. However, Blackwood’s first decade is worth reassessing within a framework of Romantic-era periodical studies, as the new edited collection Romantic Periodicals in the Twenty-First Century: Eleven Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine demonstrates. In their introduction to the collection, editors Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole advocate for an approach to the study of Blackwood’s that attends to both the distinctiveness of Romantic-era periodicals and recent methodological developments within the field of periodical studies. The editors have selected the first ten years of Blackwood’s as a “laboratory for exploring the range of uses twenty-first-century scholars might make of Romantic-era periodicals” (10). The essays in this collection seek to expand the critical understanding of Blackwood’s while also exploring the magazine within the broader scope of Romantic-era literary periodicals. The eleven essays or case studies of the collection span five thematic sections. In “Part I: Book History, Bibliography and Archival Method,” Jon Klancher and Megan Coyer meditate on their experiences with the digital [End Page 373] periodical archive and the impact of the digital turn on Romantic-era periodical studies. Klancher compares his experiences of browsing the open print periodical archive at UCLA, when he did the research for The Making of English Reading Audiences (1987), with his experiences researching in the twenty-first-century digital periodical archive. In so doing, he addresses browsing versus searching and the ways that digital archives recreate bound volumes or emphasize the page divorced from the periodical issue. Klancher concludes that digitizing single issues would “restore digitally the periodical’s full existence as a medium in history” (18). Coyer meditates on the multiplicity of approaches she has taken to trace medical discourse in Romantic-era Blackwood’s. She discusses the ways she combined initial survey work through the table of contents, volume index, and keyword searching in British Periodicals with a “sideways” approach that looks at “discourse and ideology, genre, and authorship” to identify embedded medical discourse (51). In “Part II: Aesthetics, Innovation and Taste,” Tom Mole and Christine Woody both use J. L. Austin’s work on performative utterance to examine the finer points of Blackwoodian editorial personae. Mole explores how Blackwood’s modeled its book reviews on the libel courts in order to exercise authoritative control in its critical judgments while also enabling reviewers “to cultivate a professional identity” (69). Woody’s lively analysis traces the various performances of Blackwoodian editorial and authorial personae with case studies focused on the “narrow periodical persona” of Christopher North, the “wider periodical persona” of Thomas De Quincey’s “English Opium-Eater,” and the “hijacked persona” of James Hogg and the Ettrick Shepherd (84, 85, 88). “Part III: Reviewing Politics and Politics of Reviewing” includes chapters by Mark Parker, Mark Schoenfield, and Alexander Dick on the review essay genre and reviewing’s connections with readers. Parker situates reviews of the Cockney School of Poetry within the rules Blackwood’s established with its readers. He argues that these rules, particularly the use of Menippean satire in the Noctes Ambrosianae, shaped their critique. Schoenfield uses three case studies to demonstrate how Blackwood’s employed “a double strategy of secrecy and exposure” to establish intimacy between the magazine and its audience (116). Dick’s essay examines how Blackwood’s used the prose pastoral to counter the prose georgics of the Edinburgh Review and offer “‘national culture’ as an alternative basis for social stability” (141). In “Part IV: Gender, Race and Romantic Periodicals,” Nicholas Mason and...

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