Number 76, Spring 2021 Romantic Futurities Guest-edited by Colette Davies and Amanda Blake Davis

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This article examines William Godwin Jr.’s only novel Transfusion (1835) as an anticipation of transness. Building on existing scholarship that argues Godwin Jr. as attempting to remedy his position as an outsider to the Godwin-Shelley circle through presenting biological, familial ties as inviolable, this article extends the conversation to how the fixity of blood ties also informs his presentation of the fixity of biological sex. Albert’s transfusion of his soul into the body of his sister Madeline proves fatal: employing trans theory, primarily Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, I argue the author affirms fixed sexual boundaries by presenting a female/male fusion as being inherently destructive, diseased, and ultimately unlivable. I then document how this contrasts with Godwin Jr.’s half-sister Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s interrogation and destabilisation of sexual boundaries in Frankenstein (1818) through analysing Victor’s creation—and destruction—of the Female Creature. While Godwin Jr.’s entity dies directly as a result of an intrinsic and unavoidable “failing mechanism” within the body itself, the Female Creature’s extrinsic and avoidable death comes about because of Victor’s fear that she may “refuse to comply” with the narrowly defined, deterministic role he designates for her as being only a romantic partner for the Creature.

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Scientific discoveries have often been preceded by shifts in ways of seeing. This article argues that William Blake’s critique of eighteenth-century medicine is grounded upon a Romantic view of organic form shared by contemporary scientists such as Lorenz Oken. Eighteenth-century anatomists and microscopists sought to isolate the elementary unit of living matter, which was thought to be the fibre by some, and the globule by others. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, scientists began to question the assumption that a living organism was an agglomeration of parts, framing the individual part as something produced only by the division and analysis of the whole. In doing so, they set the terms for the development of modern cell theory in the 1830s. Blake’s evocative descriptions of the fibres and globules which make up living organisms show him undermining the reductionist search for a fundamental unit of life. However, an artist rather than a biologist, Blake is also able to use a metaphorical language of graphical form to challenge his readers to see individuality as a matter of perspective rather than a matter of fact, ultimately helping to craft the epistemic environment that would make later theories of the organism possible.

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Shelley’s much-neglected prose fragment, “On a Future State,” considers a future state after death in shifts between scepticism and idealistic pathos that owe more to the poet’s readings and translations of Plato’s dialogues than has been previously recognised. Following Alan Weinberg’s redating of the fragment’s composition to the winter of 1818-19, “On a Future State” looks before and after to Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium in July 1818 and the Phaedo in May 1820. Centring upon “On a Future State” and Shelley’s persistent interest in “a future state,” this article explores how the fragment connects disparate modes of composition, where prose becomes an intermediary form linking translations to original poetry. “On a Future State” adumbrates Shelley’s thoughts upon translation and futurity in A Defence of Poetry (1821), embodying the poet’s claim that “the popular division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.” By considering Shelley’s poetry alongside his translations of Plato, this article explores how the meditation upon death in “On a Future State” blends poetry and prose with an indebtedness to Plato’s poetic prose and his dialogue upon Socrates’ death, the Phaedo. “On a Future State” evidences how the vitalising act of translation breathes new life into the dead.

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The debate about the value of history and romance occupied a central place in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses. Both historical and fiction writing aimed to provide narrative frameworks that would help explain the rapidly changing contexts of modernity and people’s understanding of these changes. Although history was generally considered a male province, women writers incorporated historical material in their works to address social and political issues. This article discusses the uses of history in Helen Maria Williams’ and Charlotte Smith’s poetry, namely Williams’ epic Peru (1784), later revised as Peruvian Tales (1823), and Smith’s Beachy Head (1807). It focuses on how Williams and Smith used poetry as a vehicle to explore the connection between the past, the present, and the future by manipulating historical fact and evoking significant events as contemporaneous with the current political situation to address issues such as militarism, nationhood, and empire. It examines how Williams and Smith blurred the boundaries between the historical past and the present, while also merging the grand narrative of history with the little narratives of individual histories to negotiate the relationship between the two and interrogate the moral implications of progress.

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This article provides a targeted exploration of how one Minerva Press author, Eliza Parsons, engaged with Romantic era discourses about imitation and originality in literature through the paradigm of jewellery. It investigates how specific materials, jewels and foils, were perceived in wider Romantic culture and highlights the incongruencies between the literary critics’, authors’, and wider society’s responses to them. By placing Parsons’ prefaces in dialogue with commentaries on imitation, originality and aesthetic paradigms by Edward Young, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, this article argues that the jewellery analogy afforded Parsons the opportunity to intervene in the era’s denigrating ideologies about the value of imitation in novels. It reads Parsons’ analogy comparing her work to foil in the preface of Ellen and Julia (1793) as a strategy which proposes that imitation does not preclude literary or commercial or cultural value. This paradigm indicates that imitative works are valuable for their wide appeal and for how they innovate upon tropes they imitate. The article concludes by suggesting that the jewellery and foil analogy posits that all works may originate from imitation to differing extents, just as diamonds can be made from foil.

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This essay explores how the theater supplied a visual and sonic language for understanding the far-flung reaches of the world and spectatorship more generally. While beginning with Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle, its primary focus is the aftermath of Captain Cook’s first and second voyages in the 1770s and 1780s, especially the roles played by the Royal Academy of Science, the Royal Academy of Art, and London’s Theatre Royals in creating the visual and sonic vocabularies by which British subjects came to imagine the islands and peoples of the South Pacific. Theater’s intense topicality requires taking full stock of the cultural bodies and institutions with which it interacts, and nowhere are such collaborations more visible than in early spectacles that introduced the islands of the South Pacific to the British public. Surveying Harlequin Robinson Crusoe (1781) and Omai; or, A Voyage around the World (1785), the essay explores the roles played by Joseph Banks, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Thomas Linley, and others in shaping how London—and eventually provincial—audiences understood the meaning and import of Cook’s voyages of exploration and colonization.