Romantic writers such as Robert Southey and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge aspired to rise above the so-called
"age of personality," a new culture of politicized print
gossip and personal attacks. Nevertheless, Southey,
Coleridge, and other Romantic-era figures such as Leigh
Hunt, William Hazlitt, Sydney Owenson, and the explorer
John Ross became enmeshed in lively feuds with the major
periodicals of the day, the Edinburgh Review and the
Quarterly Review. Kim Wheatley focuses on feuds from the
second and third decades of the nineteenth century,
suggesting that by this time the vituperative rhetoric
of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had developed into
what Coleridge called "a habit of malignity." Attending
to the formal strategies of the reviewers' surprisingly
creative prose, she traces how her chosen feuds take on
lives of their own, branching off into other print
media, including the weekly press and monthly magazines.
Ultimately, Wheatley shows, these hostile exchanges
incorporated literary genres and Romantic themes such as
the idealized poetic self, the power of the
supernatural, and the quest for the sublime. By turning
episodes of print warfare into stories of
transfiguration, the feuds thus unexpectedly contributed
to the emergence of Romanticism.
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