Table Of ContentRomanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity
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Romanticism, Sincerity
and Authenticity
Edited by
Tim Milnes
and
Kerry Sinanan
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Tim Milnes
and Kerry Sinanan 2010
Individual chapters © contributors 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-20893-3
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First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
Kerry Sinanan and Tim Milnes
Part I Forging Authenticity
1 Genuity or Ingenuity? Invented Tradition and
the Scottish Talent 31
Margaret Russett
2 ‘A Blank Made’: Ossian, Sincerity and
the Possibilities of Forgery 58
Dafydd Moore
3 Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton’s
‘Memoirs of a Sad Dog’ and Magazine Culture 80
Daniel Cook
Part II Acts of Sincerity
4 The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon 101
Angela Esterhammer
5 Making Sense of Sincerity in The Prelude 120
Tim Milnes
6 Too Good to be True? Hannah More, Authenticity,
Sincerity and Evangelical Abolitionism 137
Kerry Sinanan
7 Sincerity’s Repetition: Carlyle, Tennyson and
Other Repetitive Victorians 162
Jane Wright
Part III Marketing the Genuine
8 By Its Own Hand: Periodicals and the Paradox of
Romantic Authenticity 185
Sara Lodge
v
vi Contents
9 Acts of Insincerity? Thomas Spence and
Radical Print Culture in the 1790s 201
John Halliwell
Part IV The Case of Austen
10 Austen, Sincerity and the Standard 221
Alex J. Dick
11 ‘Facts are Such Horrible Things!’: The Question of
Authentic Femininity in Jane Austen 238
Ashley Tauchert
Select Secondary Reading 260
Index 262
Notes on Contributors
Daniel Cook is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the
University of Bristol. Before this, he worked as an AHRC-funded Research
Fellow on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and received
his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He has recently completed
a book entitled Antiquaries and Romantics: The Rise and Fall of Thomas
Chatterton.
Alex J. Dick is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is editor (with Angela Esterhammer
of Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (2009) and
(with Christine Lupton) of Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century:
Writing between Philosophy and Literature (2008). He is currently complet-
ing a book project on money and value in the Romantic period.
Angela Esterhammer is Professor of English at the University of Zurich.
She is the author of Romanticism and Improvisation 1750–1850 (2008) and
Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (co-edited
with Alex J. Dick, 2009). Previous publications include Creating States:
Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake
(1994) and The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and
German Romanticism (2000). She has edited several collections of essays,
the most recent of them being a volume of international, comparat-
ist papers entitled Romantic Poetry (2002). Her current research inter-
ests include performance, print culture, and mediality during the late
Romantic period.
John Halliwell is the Research Assistant for the Centre for Romantic
Studies at the University of Bristol and is currently completing his PhD
on Political Satire in periodicals of the Romantic period.
Sara Lodge is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, UK.
She is a specialist in nineteenth-century literature, with a particular
interest in poetry, print culture, comedy and work produced between
1820 and 1850. She has published various articles on nineteenth-
century poetry and periodical literature and is the author of Thomas
Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics (Manchester
University Press, 2007) and Jane Eyre: an Essential Guide to Criticism
(Palgrave, 2008).
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Tim Milnes is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University
of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Knowledge and Indifference in
English Romantic Prose (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and The Truth
about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge
(Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has also published articles on
Coleridge, Bentham, Hazlitt, Percy Shelley and Charles Lamb.
Dafydd Moore is Associate Dean and Head of the School of Humanities
and Performing Arts at the University of Plymouth, UK. He is author of
Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of Ossian (Ashgate, 2003) and
has edited and introduced Ossian and Ossianism, 4 volumes (Routledge,
2004). He has also written numerous book chapters and articles
on Macpherson, including contributions to Eighteenth-Century Life,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, the British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies,
the Review of English Studies and the New Edinburgh History of Scottish
Literature.
Margaret Russett is Professor of English at the University of Southern
California, USA and has held visiting appointments at the Breadloaf
School of English and Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her teaching and
research focus on British Romantic literature, the gothic novel, literary
theory and contemporary fiction. Her most recent work has addressed the
relationship between literary imposture and Romantic aesthetics. She is
the author of De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of
Transmission (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Fictions and Fakes: Forging
Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and
articles published in such journals as ELH, Studies in Romanticism, SEL,
Genre, and Callaloo.
Kerry Sinanan is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the West
of England, UK. She has published on the Atlantic slave trade, including
‘Slave Narratives and Abolitionist Writing’ for the Cambridge Companion
to Slave Narratives (2007). She is completing a monograph, Slave Masters
and the Language of Self, and is co-editing a collection, Slavery and its
Contradictions.
Ashley Tauchert is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Exeter, UK. She is author of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the
Feminine (Palgrave, 2002) and Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism
and the Possibility of a Happy Ending (Palgrave, 2005). She currently
directs the Exeter English Studies MA Programme and coordinates the
Eighteenth-century Narrative Project.
Notes on Contributors ix
Jane Wright is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol,
UK and is a specialist in nineteenth-century poetry. She is currently
working on a project entitled ‘Strains of Sincerity in Victorian Poetry’,
is co-editing and contributing to Coleridge’s Afterlives, 1834–1934 for
Palgrave (forthcoming), and has published articles in The Explicator and
Victorian Poetry.
