244 NotesDavenport’s, which is the most reliable. For a shorter, more general
introduction to Robinson as a writer, I recommend Anne Janowitz’s
parallel survey of the careers of Barbauld and Robinson. Robinson’s
fiction also has received valuable critical attention from such scholars
as Brewer, Setzer, Shaffer, and Ty, among others.- Mole’s collection of essays, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture,
building on his work on Byron, features many usef ul ways of locat ing
the origin of celebrity culture in the Romantic period. For instance,
Jason Goldsmith explores Romantic- period celebrity culture as a col-
lective mass- media rumination on national identity. - For more on the strategies of Robinson’s Letter, see in particular
Ashley Cross’s “He- She Philosophers and Other Literary Bugbears”
and Jane Hodson’s “ ‘The Strongest but Most Undecorated
Language.’ ” Adriana Craciun’s “Violence Against Difference” was
the first substantial comparison of Robinson’s proto- feminism with
Wollstonecraft’s. Also, Dawn Vernooy- Epp considers Robinson’s list
in the light of anthologies, canonicity, and pedagogy. - My idea of networking is similar to Labbe’s discussion of formal
“communities” in the poetry of Robinson, Smith, and Barbauld; I
share with Labbe an interest in Robinson’s mutable poetic selves and
w ill develop t hroughout some of t he implicat ions of her d iscussion of
Robinson in her essay, but I will not relate them to “Romanticism” as
Labbe does (see “Communities”). - Wolfson’s article focuses on Wordsworth and Coleridge and opens
with Hazlitt’s remark, from “On the Living Poets” (1818), that
“rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular
metre was abolished along with regular government” (221). Hazlitt
is being ironic.
I should make it clear that my project here is to study the implica-
tions of Robinson’s formal choices; it is not a study of prosody. A
thorough prosodic analysis, such as Brennan O’Donnell’s expert The
Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art, is beyond the
scope of this book; and I venture to suggest that Robinson’s poetry
is not quite ready for such minute analysis. - Wolfson’s introduction to Formal Charges is an invaluable review
of the fortunes of formalist approaches in the twentieth century
and the relevance of such approaches to British Romanticism, so I
need not rehearse them in depth here. Wolfson’s book revives for-
mal approaches but with an historical and sociopolitical awareness.
Indeed, Wolfson’s book attests to the fact that historical approaches
to literature of the period ignore formal concerns at their own peril. - A survey of the recovery of women writers and of the issues involved
in Romantic- period canon revision would be superf luous here: see
Paula R. Feldman’s “Endurance and Forgetting” and two more
recent discussions by Beth Lau and Stephen C. Behrendt in the
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