 We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands that we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people, past and present. Welcome to the second CASI Global Professorial Lecture. Tonight we have the privilege of listening to Will Christie. I'd like to welcome Paul Trink, who is going to introduce Will, of course. Thanks, Anna. It's a great pleasure to be here. At the moment I'm the Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences. My real job is as Director of the Research Group for Humanities and the Arts. And my real love is having been a former Fellow of the Humanities Research Centre. So for all sorts of reasons, it's a great pleasure to have the opportunity to welcome you to this lecture and also to introduce the head of the CASI, Professor Will Christie. Some of you will know that we've been trying to get Will to the A&U for quite some time. And thanks to Professor Travis and others. And thanks to Ian Young, we were able to convince Will to join us a couple of years ago from Sydney. And Sydney are not all that happy about that. Their loss is certainly our game. I don't really want to spend too much time, but it really belongs to Will. And I certainly don't want to spend time going through his CV, which is very extensive. The author of numerous important prize-winning books, Fellow of the Academy, Distinguished Career, A Long List of Areas of Expertise. That actually intrigued me. British and Irish Literature, two 00503. Other literatures in English, two 00508. They told me a while to realise that what we're doing now is putting our ARC codes. I wasn't my choice. I don't know about that because we used to run their years in Sydney. The last on the list of Will's research interests is still of Thomas, which actually brings to mind for me an interesting side story. I was at a party recently, a birthday party, and a corporate banker said to me, what are you doing in the arts and social sciences? I said, do you know Will Christie? Yes, I do. I've been in the college and he said, so you're Will Christie's boss? I said, I actually knew the story already. I said, so how do you know Will Christie? And he told me this wonderful story about the Gail Kelly's office at Westpac and wanted to have some bonding going on, and they decided that they'd exercise their joy in English literature. So they wrote up Sydney University and said, who can we talk to about that? And they went on to Will, who then proceeded to not only work with them, but I think coach them and write a play for them called Under Mulga Wood, which is a somewhat vernacular adaption I think of a play by someone else. And I'm told by some of the cast, one of them is related to me, that they had an absolute ball. And it's great to think that people in the humanities, in the academy, have got not only interest in the commitment, but also the good sense to get out and work in the corporate world and to allow people who don't get enough opportunity, I suspect, to work in the area of humanities to indulge and remember the love that they have of that. So I've said enough. It's my great pleasure to welcome Will. Please join me in welcoming Will. It's less than two years. It's actually only just over a year. So the idea of an inaugural lecture isn't quite as odd as it might otherwise seem, but already, as I look around the room, I'm aware of a number of really good friends. It's gratifying to see the people that I've already got to know. Thank you for coming. And we'll start with Percy Bish Shelley. Where else to start? I weep for Adonais. He's dead. I will weep for Adonais, though our tears thaw not the frost which binds so dear ahead. And thou, sad hour, selected from all years to mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compares, and teach them thine own sorrow, say, with me, died Adonais. Till the future dares forget the past, his fate and fame shall be an echo, and a light unto eternity. Percy Bish Shelley's rhapsodic pastoral elegy for John Key, Sadonais, was also an historical elegy for poetry itself, and a eulogy for fellow poets, real and imagined. Perhaps the only thing that all the writers of the Romantic period had in common was a marked anxiety about their audience, about how they were received by their contemporaries in the first instance, and then how or whether they would be read by future readers. It related to a more generalized anxiety about the status and function of poetry. In what the satirist Thomas Love Peacock in his Four Ages of Poetry called an Iron Age. When intellectual power, and I'm quoting Peacock, when intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels. Poetry and Peacock's provocative and only partly comic characterization is historically redundant. A hangover from when society thought as a child. The technological scientific future glimpsed in the early signs of an industrial revolution, the claims of common sense and logic, and the increasing prevalence of market forces would have no place for poetry. This anxiety of reception, to use Lucy Newland's phrase, explains why so much Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, like Adonais, is written about poetry itself. Beset by doubts about its own visionary and interpretative powers, while yearning to establish a unique epistemology and authority. This tense relationship between poet and audience in the early 19th century is manifest in one of the most resilient of the Romantic myths, of which Shelley's Adonais is an exalted, a rhapsodic expression. It's the myth of the vulnerable poetic sensibility damaged or destroyed by an indifferent, if not openly hostile world. Envy and calamity and hate and pain, to quote Adonais. Envy and calamity and hate and pain. The classic iconographic image is, of course, the death of Chatterton, the 17-year-old 18th century poet, celebrated here in a mid-19th century painting. The syncretic myth of sacrifice that Shelley creates in Adonais derives partly from classical mythology, where the beautiful, effeminate youths, a dinos, Narcissus and Hyacinthus, all die young to be resurrected annually as the flowers associated with their names, and partly from the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Whose nurturing of futurity with his blood, Shelley associates in the poem with pagan fertility rituals. Shelley's poet is despised and rejected of men in the words of Isaiah, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. From 1802, at the centre and representative of this hostile world, we find the figure of the critical reviewer, the occasion in fact and feeling of Shelley's lyrical mythologising. Both romantic and later Victorian readers were led to believe that Keats had died at Rome of the quarterly review, to quote Byron. Had died at Rome of the quarterly review, and that he was, as Byron also announced, snuffed out by an article. Byron was actually having to go at Shelley in that and not Keats. It was commonly believed in other words that a hypersensitive Keats had died as a result of a hemorrhage brought on by his vicious treatment at the hands of the critical establishment. The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful. And where canker worms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his endymion, which appeared in the quarterly review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind. The agitation thus originated, ended in the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs and a rapid consumption. Took over the death of Keats. Now as so often this story turns out to be a myth in both senses of the word. A myth in both senses, which is to say it's a fabrication. No less than it's a powerful story that expresses a collective anxiety, and it does that. Far from being naturally ethereal and retiring, John Keats, before contracting tuberculosis, was athletic, edgy and prone to belligerence. But the attack on Keats in the periodicals was real. Before being taken over by John Wilson Croker in the quarterly review, the attack had been launched in Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine by the Scottish critic and cultural commentator John Gibson Lockhart. It is with such sorrow, he says sarcastically, that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats. The frenzy of the poems was bad enough in its way, but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable, driveling idiocy of endymion. One day someone was going to say something that I've written. I live in fear. It's a wonder we publish at all. Isn't it? Driveling idiocy. There you go. These were part of a series of articles against what they called, of course, the cockney school, the cockney school. Okay, politically and socially inspired Lockhart's and later Croker's attacks focused on what they saw as Keats's lower middle class vulgarity and cultural illiteracy. This was the poet who used L'Ompire's classical dictionary in order to bone up on classical mythology. In Persons as Much as Principles, writes John Clanchor, the reviewers and critics of Romantic Britain positioned one another as often according to their social habitus as to their critical postures. Class and gender associations became means of crediting or discrediting a bewilderingly various array of critical positions. And you can only imagine what they did with female authors. If many of the periodic enlightenment's critical judgments strike the modern reader as cruel, irrelevant, and critically inept as they inevitably must, they were nonetheless typical. Typical of innumerable slashing reviews throughout the early 19th century. Lockhart and Croker were imitating, often exaggerating, a style of literary criticism developed in 1802 by the first of the big romantic periodical reviews. This is the review on which I've spent a good deal of my career. The Edinburgh review. It's a style that's best exemplified by that of the Edinburgh's editor, Francis Geoffrey. In his infamous reviews of William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Joanna Bailey, John Thelwall, Thomas Moore, and many, many others over the first decades of the early 19th century. The Edinburgh reviewers must be allowed the merit of having founded a new school destined to be the model for the critics of the 19th century. And model is what they were. The advent of the Edinburgh saw the advent of what Kim Wheatley has identified as the recurring themes of 19th century comments on the periodical press. And I quote, their relentless politicization of discourse, their reliance on an abuse of anonymity, their indulgence in so-called personality or personal attacks, and last but not least, their sway over public opinion. The cultural sway exercised by the big reviews by the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the first instance, but also by a whole host. In fact, over the course of the Romantic period, there were approximately 4,000 different periodicals started up. This is a very small selection, but all of these can be found at different times to be offering what they called slashing reviews. The cultural sway confirmed not only the extent to which Britain had become a culture of print, but also the extent to which that print culture had become a social and political battlefield. With the Napoleonic Wars raging throughout Europe, the imagery of war and combat dominated and informed the obsessive self-characterization of early 19th century literary culture. A war, to quote Mark Schoenfeld, fought over economics and information, over political and aesthetic norms, over the control of public opinion and the boundary between the public and the private. The dominance of the reviews is not surprising. If we think of the publishing revolution that had taken place in the 18th century, when booksellers had been obliged for various commercial and copyright reasons to advertise and promote their books more vigorously. But however exigent the commercial pressures behind the establishment and development of reviews, their centrality and their influence was never limited to promoting specific books as commercial objects. From the beginning, they were also engaged in the culture of ideas and ideologies. Reflecting and fueling political and cultural antagonisms that would become more open and divisive after the French Revolution. And it was to realize both the intellectual and the political potential of book reviewing that the Edinburgh Review, or note, critical journal was launched in October 1802. Largely maintained by a distinct and marked set of energetic and talented, but at the time politically disfranchised young Scottish Whig lawyers. Though the reviews only begetter as it happens was Sidney Smith, who was neither a Scott nor a lawyer. The Reverend Sidney Smith, of whom I hope many of you will know, and if you don't use should, is one of the funniest men. Thanks to some clever, aggressive and argumentative reviews the Edinburgh erupted into the intellectual life of early 19th century Britain. And before the end of its first year, Francis Geoffrey had been installed as editor. Indeed, he'd been editor from the beginning, as I've argued elsewhere. Over the first seven years of its publication, however, it also became more recognizably reformist and oppositional, if not radical. Certainly for the defensive Tories, for whom it was at times, Jacobinical. And those who know the period will know that that's roughly equivalent to commie. To this we owe the origin of the Edinburgh's main rival, the Pro-Ministerial Quarterly Review, a brainchild of a handful of Tory writers and intellectuals, including the poet and novelist Walter Scott. Scott had been reviewing for the Edinburgh Review and felt compromised by its politics and rather insulted by Geoffrey's reviews of his own poetry. So he abandoned the Edinburgh Review to set up the Quarterly Review in 1809. Co-conspirators on the Quarterly Review included second generation Scott who would become the Quarterly's publisher, John Murray, as well as the leader of the Liberal Conservatives, faction of the Tory party, George Canning. The Edinburgh and the Quarterly then dominated the period. Not just its book reviewing, but also its thinking. It was the changes to reviewing practice introduced by the Edinburgh and adopted by the Quarterly that enabled the two reviews to become such discursive forces throughout the whole and especially the first three decades of the 19th century. There was, for one thing, their selectivity. The older monthly review and the critical review had tried to discuss or at least to register everything. The Edinburgh Review chose only to select what it would review. In doing so, it went Quarterly. Going Quarterly for the first time gave it a totally different approach to what was available in print at the time. Paradoxically, it became more representative by being less representative. Only, of course, the choice was theirs. And the Edinburgh paid well. Exceptionally well a fact that very soon became public knowledge. Archibald Constable offered in the first instance 10 guineas a sheet for 16 printed pages, raising it to five years later to 15 and in 1812 to 25 guineas a sheet. As its editor, Geoffrey was able to offer individual reviewers as much as he chose and he would discriminate. They also negotiated in 1812 with Longman and Constable that the original collaborators would get a percentage of all the profits. What that meant was that by about 1816 Geoffrey could make as much as in equivalent in our terms $300,000 a year by editing the review and writing for it. Henry Broom was paid for one article of 40 pages the same that Jane Austen received for the copyright of Pride and Prejudice. He got 106 pounds. She got 110. And as every Austen scholar knows that was her most commercially successful. It was huge money. Geoffrey was getting 300,000 the equivalent of 300,000 a year as an editor. He was also Edinburgh's leading advocate for Barrister and he was paid accordingly. So he was getting a huge amount of money. I say this because it was a part of the myth of periodical reviewing in the periodical enlightenment that I'm talking about. It was a vital part of the shift and what it enabled, of course, was a shift of status. A shift of status in the idea of the reviewer itself. There the dividends. Even Tsar Peter, working in the trenches must accept the pay of a common soldier, says Walter Scott. In other words, everybody was forced to accept the money. We have to think about the implications of this. Byron, of course, if you know anything about the period would not accept money for his publications because he was an aristocrat and it was demeaning to do so. So occasionally he relented. These people insisted that everybody accept the pay that they were given and it was only under those conditions that they would all operate. So that would be in that sense a kind of equality operating and no one would feel besmirched by the exercise as Geoffrey originally did when it was suggested to him because it was dangerously close to being a trade. And the only way to get around that was to turn it into a profession. And to do that, you paid lots of money and that's what happened. That's what happened. And this was matched by the quarterly review and this bounty, as I say, became part of the aura of reviewing during the periodical enlightenment integral to the reception of these reviews. Payment was not only generous, it was compulsory and it enforced inequality. Book reviews, moreover, gradually expanded in length. In 1802, the Edinburgh Review published 29 reviews in its first issue. In 1829, when Geoffrey resigned the editorship, the same number of pages held nine reviews. Each one running to sometimes 30, 40, even 50 and in the hands of Thomas Babington McCawley, 110 pages. Irrepressible. They became many theses in their own right. And this did in fact affect the genre, obviously. They didn't just become longer, their priorities changed in the course of these 27 years. The reviewer and his ideas on the topic in question took more and more precedence over the publication under review. It often became merely an occasion or as Hazlett would say, a stalking horse for the particular reflections of the reviewer himself and in the Edinburgh and the Quarterly it was almost invariably himself. But the review becomes a sustained argumentative account of some idea, some event, considered by the reviewer to be of cultural significance. It's not just that the big reviews had barely concealed political priorities. Geoffrey famously said that his right leg was politics. It was more than that. From the opening article of Francis Geoffrey's on the French Revolution and its causes in 1802 in spite of all the radical differences in length the book review was striving to become a distinct and independent cultural form. Whatever we might think of the critical judgement of the reviewing profession, we need to look on the review or the review article as William Hazlett did, as an end in itself in a classic Hazlettian phrase. Periodical criticism is favourable to periodical criticism. It serves no one else but itself and it serves itself and its own improvement. We will content ourselves with announcing a truism, he says. Its contributors to its own improvement and its cultivation proves not only that it suits the spirit of the times, which indeed it did, but advances it. It certainly never flourished more than it present. It never stuck its roots so deep nor spread its branches so widely and luxuriously. Now we're not directly concerned with patrolling the borders of the Republic of Letters. The review article saw its responsibility as one of offering an intellectual and historical context for the work under review. What this often meant was simply showing off. Discussion of the text under review often had to wait until there were generalisations and an openly argumentative, often unapologetically didactic introduction. Sometimes the book never gets a look in. Henry Broom has reviewed a book, announced that he's reviewing it and never mentioned it in the course of the entire article. So, he establishes his own claim, says Haslett, in an elaborate, inaugural dissertation on every knowable thing and a few other things besides, before he deans to bring forward the pretensions of the original candidate for praise. Drawing on its heritage in the Scottish Enlightenment, the Edinburgh popularised and integrated cultural commentary in which history and politics were primary concerns. I've written at length of the way in which the scepticism and historical materialism of the Edinburgh view anticipates the cultural materialism of our own age, specifically of the new historicist movement in literature. Glimpsing beneath what George Steiner calls the seemingly autonomous life of artistic forms, the practical workings of historical circumstance. And indeed, there are few generalisations amongst contemporary critical accounts of the Romantic period that were not anticipated by the period itself. There's very little of what we're saying in scholarship about the early 19th century does not anticipate in some form or other. Public written representations of society and social relations, as Judith Newton has written, offered a sense of control over time and change, extending to those who could interpret the flux a kind of superior cultural authority. And like Newton, John Clanchor identifies a new kind of cultural semiotic competence in the generalising interpretative method of the periodical enlightenment. Their responsibility was to read the signs as they saw it. The high status of reviews was bound up with their self-elected cultural function as the observers and interpreters of historical science. To represent an historical state of affairs, as James Chandler has observed, is to begin to transform it, to state the case of the nation, and to do so in such a way as to alter that case. The Edinburgh view took every available opportunity presented by contemporary publication and sometimes no pamphlet was too slight or insignificant if it was a good excuse to rail. To state the case of the nation, and to try and alter that case. Another change introduced by the Edinburgh was a policy of editorial finneering. Walter Scott's word, finneering, a very Walter Scott word. One very successful expedient of the Edinburgh editor on which his popularity has in some measure risen is the art of giving life and interest even to the duller articles of his review. Basically to summarize, nothing that Geoffrey received passed through without some changes. Sometimes he would get rid of ten pages and insert ten pages of his own. Sometimes he would just modify it in the interests of copy editing but always he would change it to ensure that it reflected what he took to be the important values of the Edinburgh review itself. There are some classic exasperated letters written to Francis Geoffrey protesting about the way in which he has altered things and he invariably came back to say, I always said it had to satisfy the needs of the Edinburgh review. And the final innovation attributable to the Edinburgh review and adopted by reviewing generally was the critical severity with which I began this lecture. A severity threatened in the motto of the Edinburgh review. The judge stands condemned when the guilty are acquitted. The motto down here by the way was Sidney Smith's suggestion for all his Scottish colleagues. We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal as you know of course the Scots and horses eat oatmeal. They chose the former. Not surprisingly. A legacy of the legal background shared by so many of the Edinburgh's reviewers. This is a very typical statement that you get in the reviews themselves. Putting ourselves thus upon our country we certainly look for a verdict against this publication and have little doubt indeed of the result upon a fair consideration of the evidence contained in these volumes. Stressing the ethical and social accountability of the author, her or himself. And against the background of a burgeoning reading public as Neil Berry has remarked, reviewers in the early 19th century discovered a new power to terrorize authors. And we are back with the death of John Keats. Pre-emptive appeals to reviewers for clemency, complaints about their severity, their malevolence were not new. It wasn't the first time a writer had complained about her or his reception. But with the Edinburgh misrepresentation and severity become especially willful and especially skillful. Politically calculating and sometimes vicious and inexcusable. A letter from Sidney Smith to James McIntosh, not Cames, but James, to James McIntosh, 3rd of January, 1803, before they started the Edinburgh Review. It's one of my favorite quotations. If any of the members of the King of Clubs have a mind to barbecue a poet or two or strangle a metaphysician or do any other act of cruelty to the dull men of the earth, we are in hopes they will make our journal the receptacle of their exploits. Accordingly, John Thel will receive a celebrated measure of Geoffrey's patrician scorn, his snobbery, which drove Thel will publicly to defend himself in an acute analysis of the rhetoric initiated by the Edinburgh Review. Geoffrey's review of Thomas Moore or of his epistles, Odes and other poems provoked an equally celebrated mock-heroic duel between the two men and famously reconciled them and they became best friends. Indeed, throughout his life, Geoffrey was becoming best friends with the people he had provoked. He made a habit of it. The only person he couldn't make a friend of was William Wordsworth. Henry Broom's savaging of Lord Byron's Ours of Idleness led at first to despair and then to English Bards and Scots reviewers, in which Byron manages to inhabit both the antithetical worlds that are conjured in this spontaneous... sorry, in this spontaneous creative world of English poetry and the cold, analytical world of Scottish criticism. I'll come back to that at the end. Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist is also the but of Geoffrey's mockery and Joanna Bailey, Walter Scott. The antiquarian and Shakespeare scholar Francis Doos seems never to have recovered from the treatment that he received. And most notorious of all, of course, is the one I mentioned before. Geoffrey's hounding Wordsworth for 20 years, unrelentingly. In spite of a resolution to avoid similar excesses, the conduct of the quarterly review, once it came on board, only confirmed critical severity as a cultural habit. And it was not long before, along with Keats, the Shelleys, Hunt, Haslett, Walter Savage Lander, Sidney Owenson were all falling foul of a comparably paranoid politics. And these are only some of the better known more lurid cases to be found in the history and mythology of the big reviews. Jeffrey Croker and Haslett may not have slain with a review, writes Marilyn Butler, but it is not surprising that contemporaries fought them capable of it. Capable, in other words, of slaughtering John Keats. The civic-minded reviewers were fond of justifying their harshness of their criticism by citing the threat posed to society by bad taste and antisocial thinking. The rhetorical strategy in what they called slashing reviews was indeed a kind of affected or exaggerated lack of sympathy and unwillingness to suspend their disbelief. And this was particularly true of the critical attitude towards the new romantic poetics. The refusal even to try and understand manifest as indignation or outrage is a technique characteristic not of objective criticism but of political oratory and of satire. The review as a satirico-forensic exercise. Time and again, a poet will be criticised for failing to satisfy some essentially conservative demands of the satirist. The more wholesomely derisive, iconoclastic, the more aggressive the reviewing, the more it belongs in the genre of satire. But if critical reviewing was satirical, it was not satire just as it was not book reviewing. Instead, as we have seen, it has its own cultural and political and arguably aesthetic work to do. All these changes that I've been talking about in today's lecture, all these changes the selectivity, the enrichment, the Olympian historicity, the editorial finering, the critical severity encourage the rhetorical attitude of superior cultural authority to quote Judith Newton. An attitude that had an impact on writers no longer enjoying formal patronage and dependent for their livelihood on the sale of their works it had an impact on romantic writing itself. The uneasy relationship that already subsisted between the reviewer and the commercial author in the late 18th century dating back to when they were born and raised together by a rapidly expanding book trade reached a state of sustained critical tension during the periodical enlightenment. The reviewers often identifying with their readers as consumers conspiring with their readers against what they saw as the pretensions of authorship. Again and again it's hardly surprising to find a tendency amongst romantic writers and you can find this kind of thing in all of romantic writing to dismiss audiences as either mindlessly passive or voraciously appetitive or demonized reviewers as an army of talentless upstarts concealing their various envies behind the shield of collective anonymity. I'm quoting Lucy Newland. Geoffrey's reviews of Wordsworth, Lockhart's and Crocker's of Keats affected the poets financially. It retarded their literary reputations. Classic retaliatory documents from the period Shelley's Adonais would include along with a host of now forgotten pamphlets Byron's English Bards and Scots reviewers Coleridge's Biographia, Literaria Wordsworth's Preface to his poems 1815 and the supplementary essay and indeed Thomas Carlisle's Characteristics. Nay is not the diseased self-conscious state of literature disclosed in this one fact which lies so near so near us here the prevalence of reviewing for Carlisle, it was the disease of the age. He wrote this in the Edinburgh review. It was the only way Carlisle could make money. Far be it from us to disparage our own craft he says whereby we have our living only we must note these things that reviewing spreads with strange vigor that such a man as Byron reckons the reviewer and the poet equal. The subtitle of the book I wrote on the Edinburgh review is mammoth and megalonics because Byron saw the reviewer and the reviewer he said as a mammoth and a megalonics staring at each other across the table both of them out of date. And that at Leipzig fair there was advertised a review of reviews the anti-jackabin reviewer had had a reviewer of reviews from the very beginning. They were reviewing each other as much as they were reviewing the literature of the period throughout the time. Thus does literature also like a sick thing super abundantly listen to itself so Carlisle and so wonderfully knotty and so right in many ways. He saw reviewing as the symptom of a hopelessly self-conscious literary culture unable as it were to unshackle itself from its rather narcissistic obsession with its own its own production. Okay now the often antagonistic attitude adopted by the 19th century reviews towards writers and towards writing while it helped to precipitate resilient romantic myths like that vulnerability of genius it also played a crucial role in reinforcing the self-consciousness of creative writers and indeed as Coleridge's biography makes abundantly clear it was the rapid development of competitive commercial publishing and the proliferation of commercially viable publications like periodicals that helped to precipitate the romantic redefinition and valorization of literature as a uniquely imaginative form it forced a revision of an understanding of what literature is. Creative genius becomes by definition that which is bound to escape or transcend the recognition of a critical reviewer. We know it's good he missed it completely using the act of writing down his own considered response is this fair is this fair is it fair that Coleridge compares reviewers with eunuchs self-elected to superintend the creative activity of the hurry. Certainly Geoffrey himself reviewed creative literature solely as a critic and a consumer not as a fellow poet not as a fellow creative writer as we would say Geoffrey's practical experience as a literary critic was on the other hand immense. His reading of classical of French literature and all of English literature was extensive as a young man in the 1790s he wrote thousands of pages because every time he read something he would write a review of it. He operated from the very beginning to respond and to get his responses on paper and in this one sense at least the line from the professional literary reviewer of the periodical enlightenment to the modern literary critic working in a university department to me and to many of you is a direct one. Neither of us needs to be a creative artist in order to assume critical authority but we do. One result of this is that we have inherited from the romantic period what I referred to earlier as a state of sustained critical tension between the creative writer and the professional critic. A tension captured in Byron's title English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The English artist in Byron's conflicted imagination struggles to conceive and quicken is on the side of life. The Scottish critical reviewer murders to dissect murders to dissect in Wordsworth's famous phrase. Scottishness as Stephen Cheek remarks is represented as hardened to reality, un poetical. It became nationalistic in the period though it's very hard to get people to talk about that. Deaf and blind to the greatness of mind and soul is the assumption. So today the professional critic and the professional writer each still depended on the other yet both keen to get on with their own work look upon each other with mutual suspicion. Still. Thank you. That was a fantastic lecture and I was totally persuaded by it but I have a question because I take it the point about there's nothing the critics are saying today about romanticism that the romantics are saying about themselves but it's still a romantic situation because is anything after this conceivable, desirable what would it look like? I mean what would it be to be post-romantic in the conception of literature and to think about these relationships? In my in my lifetime so to speak what I've argued elsewhere is that the shift that I've identified in literary studies that mirrors a curious return to some of the assumptions of the early 19th century reviewing certainly the assumptions about the materialist assumption the approach to literature that has been adopted pretty well since about 1980 in most literary departments the idea of an integrated cultural and historical commentary as essential to the work of the critic the obligation for the critic is something that we've recovered in romantic studies specifically it's associated with a critic called Jerome McGann who has introduced some really quite radical changes he and people like Marilyn Butler quite radical changes in sort of romantic studies but what I'm talking about is the way in which it's reprising some of the assumptions and with that implicitly of course perhaps some of the obliquities and insensitivities of and of course it hasn't it hasn't come without contest it's variously argued since then but I think that it has effectively established itself within the academy and certainly within the British Academy historical criticism of the kind that was practiced by the Edinburgh Review is very similar can we get out of it in a way while I could be accused of demonizing them what I'm trying to do is to look at them as clearly as I can to understand what they're doing I think implicit in what I'm saying is the alternative that you're talking about implicit in what I'm saying is that we need something much more objective but we have to establish in the first instance our own criteria and those criteria are looking suspiciously similar in many ways between say 1980 and 1802 which I find both fascinating and a little bit worrying does that make sense to yeah Howard I think you would yeah and again that was a fascinating lecture towards the very end you hinted at a kind of a change in direction evaluation away and I'm not sure whether it was a way for content towards the appreciation of the genius of the writer and in a sense I imagine that that is moving towards criteria that are associated with aesthetics rather than content because and I'm wondering how that might relate to similar kinds of changes that are happening in the case of the visual arts where again perhaps very different kinds of reasons there was a sort of movement in which gradually aesthetics and the individual genius in relation to form was becoming prominent short answer yes I think in various ways at least in the kind of iconography that I was looking at with the Chadderton the way that that was sort of celebrating and if you look at the way I use the word mythologizing to some extent in inverted commas but I think it is a romantic mythologizing in so far as it but I don't mean it as a pejorative I mean it as a and if we look at what's done with painters like Turner in the romantic period there's a similar kind of celebration of the kind that you're talking about that's always there what the 20th century inherited was to some extent or at least shall we say what the 1940s, 50s and 60s inherited was to some extent a version of romanticism that was romanticism's own I was brought up as an undergraduate as it were listening to words worth listening to college and taking them very seriously indeed as the college tries to define the imagination I sit there and I agonize about the accuracy of the characterization to see if it's adequate to the experience of creativity and that sort of thing and then suddenly we're taught to see this as an obfuscating gesture in a sense as poetry covers its own backside under threat from a progressively and aggressively culture that in a way is not going to take it at its own word but it's going to ask questions which is what I was saying before when I was answering Knox's question that I've watched the way in which it's sort of shifted the sort of valorization of the literary work of art has sort of shifted there have been various formalist protests against this some of the more eloquent than others some of the more persuasive than others but still I think to some extent it charges on and we are left with that in fact I was talking today with Retta about periodization and the way in which periodization has taken hold to some extent it's very hard to release ourselves from that in some ways and that brings with it because it's historical in its origins some of the materialism that goes with any kind of historical assessment in a way but yes with visual arts I think you could probably establish some quite intimate parallels between the shifts that have been going on both in the romantic period itself most obviously but also in the reactions of the 20th century in the way in which various forms of criticism have shifted rather distrustfully to start asking questions of what at one stage we took for granted as it were the aspirations of the work of art is aspirations to autonomy to transcendence and all those things which we are really not allowed to get away with anymore Yes Thank you, I mean that image of you as an undergraduate and of mass culture and I suppose I think of myself as an English undergraduate in the last days of Leedsism here and then talked by Sam Goldberg just wondering if you add to that equation of the artist, the poet and the reviewer and the modification of professionalization reviewing the third element of the reader who is reading this reviewing what is the market and how has that market in a sense changed for this cultural production from the 19th century to the present That's a really big question In the first instance, Nicholas the reader is invariably invoked by the reviewer says I'm doing this on behalf of readers The reviewer establishes in this case himself as a representative reader and consumer So to that extent what he's trying to establish is a kind of complicity or conspiracy between himself and the reader against the pretensions as I said I think in the lecture of the author himself So to that extent at least rhetorically that's where the reader is situated I think about the reader in reality as it were and of course we can only use things like sales figures and that kind of thing to measure and any kind of reputational guesstimate has to be an overlay of various different kinds of evidence like what the sales are what the critical reputation is and in the romantic period it's interesting both to see the way in which popularity can seem to confirm reputation and also deny reputation both and that's particularly happened again in the 20th century in a more sort of in a later development so that you have people like Walter Scott and Byron everybody will recognize as major figures and bestsellers Byron and his 10,000 copies a day Byron as I'm fond of reminding undergraduates could sell more poetry than one day than any poet is ever able to sell again but then that's because Byron was doing many different things and he was doing what people are getting from films and television So Byron's reputation was massive throughout Europe and indeed as was Walter Scott's and in both their cases but arguably Wordsworth had a very strong particularly amongst poets even though he wasn't selling and one of the reasons he wasn't selling was Francis Jeffrey he was making it very hard for him to develop a reputation in the 20th century we experienced a strange particularly early in the 20th century a strange kind of reverse in which Scott's popularity suddenly disqualified him from pretensions to serious literature and it's only recently that he's been to some extent recovered and reinstated as a novelist of interest but not surprisingly because of his interest in the historical novel history likes Scott because he's an a starist in a way other kinds of criticism are a bit more distrustful so it's a sort of difference It's true, it's true in the Romantic period as well, a lot of the writers were also reviewers in the Romantic period as well it's just that the institution that I'm talking about they were all professional critics No, that's alright, sorry I wasn't trying to It was just that you did set up this this dichotomy between the two and that that was then became part of the definition of indeed the art of literature as opposed to the cranking out of the review, right? So when the writer starts to also write the review and he understands the process of writing itself he's not going to mythologise in the same way so I was just wondering if that in the 20th century had an impact on the antagonism between those two groups if you like? Well I think that is definitely true and if we look at say something like contemporary Australian literary culture you find that the vast majority, not all but the vast majority of reviewers are also writers themselves that you still have an academic contingent as part of that who will not necessarily be practising writers but they will assume the critical authority to be able to comment on that I think what I was suggesting was that it was a legitimate authority insofar as a critic is actually not a representative writer but a representative reader to go back to your question and therefore to that extent has an authority as a reader to be able to but in many cases there are crossovers what was interesting about particularly the Edinburgh review because even the quarterly review it's major reviewers, literary reviewers were Robert Southey, poet, writer also critic, prolific critic trying to keep himself and colleges family alive with all the money and Walter Scott he was a writer, critic he did everything in a way but particularly in the case of the Edinburgh review they were professional critics when Jeffrey read a contemporary novel or a contemporary poet he read it as a critic can I slip one of those questions in there and say did they write positively about anything then? oh yes I'm sorry the other side of it is they're just slashing I have failed in order to slag yes yes yes Wordsworth fortunes were obviously affected by reviewing George Crabb was offered £3,000 for his next volume of poems after a decent review in the Edinburgh review £3,000 and certain writers did very well out of reviewing because they wrote the way in certain ways it's just interesting to see the way in which the poets that we might want to rescue would cover didn't fare so well it was quite schizophrenic in that sense Byron and Walter Scott were unquestionably both well reviewed well respected and well bought if you see what I mean so it's hard to generalise in a way but yes there were many people like Byron, like Scott Byron got all sorts of interesting responses but even the bad reviews as they say as we all know were good publicity for Byron and invariably kept him going even his divorce helped him so it did depend it did vary and yes many were it's just that the ones that stand out to us people like Wordsworth and Kitt were savaged in ways that were quite characteristic of the period that was all there were plenty of others yes so there was a policy there's no question the policy and you can tell the policy is what I was talking about before affecting a lack of sympathy affecting a lack not trying to understand this work of art because you can get more mileage out of contesting and whinging about something and there's no question to some extent dependent not on those lovely reviews of George Crabb but of those savage reviews of Wordsworth and John Telwell and all the others that's how Jeffrey became a multimillionaire interestingly and then squandered it all by becoming a member of Parliament he was the Lord Advocate of Scotland in the 1830s and with Henry Broom his friend Henry Broom who was also an Edinburgh reviewer became the Chancellor of England and the two of them one was Lord Advocate the other was Chancellor of England designed the reform bill in 1832 they meant what they were doing but everybody else in a sense had to suffer for their agenda in a way thank you