Currently, it passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present. It can be hard to acknowledge that that past was not always thought to explain the present.1 Under the sway of habit, many scholars have staked their own critical agency on a recovery of the political agency of the enslaved, making the slaves’ “hidden history” a vital dimension of the effort to de ne black political goals in terms of a model of representation. The slave past has thus assumed a primacy in black critical thought that it did not necessarily have previously, entailing a particu-

On Failing to Make the Past Present

Paratextual Reading in the Romantic Period demonstrates that Maria Edgeworth, Robert Southey, and Walter Scott used paratext as a formal strategy to disrupt established relationships among readers, texts, and an increasingly global sense of context. Referring to this interrupted reading process as “paratextual reading,” this study shifts its attention towards paratext’s use as a tool to discipline the public’s reading habits for a new information age. As British imperial expansion brought distant cultural and geographical spaces closer to metropolitan readers, Romantic writers developed new genres – such as the “footnote novel” and the annotated long poem – to make representations of these spaces accessible to the British reading public. By grafting the knowledge produced by antiquarian and Orientalist scholarship onto popular narrative forms, these annotated texts reframe pleasure reading as an opportunity to gather information about the expanding world beyond the book. Alongside their newly referential paratexts, however, Edgeworth, Southey, and Scott also adapt eighteenth-century traditions of metafictional annotation, calling deliberate attention to their notes’ disruption of readers’ progress

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Paratextual Reading in the Romantic Period

Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867‐1917

Scholars often understand Maria Edgeworth as a belated Enlightenment writer in a Romantic age because she seeks to organize both her fiction and the history it represents so that they can be put to use. In this article, however, I argue that Maria Edgeworth’s Irish writing legitimates lived relationships between past and present that her politics wished to eradicate. Although she attempts to periodize within her fiction to shape a useful history—separating past and present in order to bring about an imagined future—her anachronistic aesthetics unsettle her historical periods and show the political value of discordance, contingency, and historical misuse. Focusing especially on An Essay on Irish Bulls and Castle Rackrent, I consider how Edgeworth’s anachronisms imagine political possibilities that do not simply support either union with England or Irish nationalism. The heterogeneity created by portable aesthetic forms—whether literary language that transcends its historical context or forms of me...

Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the “Uses” of History

This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).

Rereading Rape in the Critical CanonAdjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape

am going to argue that the nineteenth-century novel is anomalous using as an example an anomalous nineteenth-century novel. The anomalous novel, Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes (1852), is not well-known now, although it was well reviewed and popular in its time, and for about fifty years thereafter. A genre fiction in at least two ways—as a young adult novel and as an adven- ture fiction—it is also an emigration novel, which may or may not be a genre. It was written in Canada by a pioneer who is often described as "British-Canadian" and who began writing children's books at the age of sixteen to support herself and her family after her father died. The field, in Pierre Bourdieu's sense, might best be described as that of "colonial letters." 1 I mean "letters" in both the sense of belles lettres and in the sense of epistles written home. 2 Anglophone Canadian fic- tion and travel writing of the nineteenth century was not usually read by Canadians, but rather by Britons in Britain, who might or might not be prospective Canadians. The writers in the field of colonial letters who imagined and constructed fictional settlements such as the ones proposed in Canadian Crusoes "participate in domination, but as domi- nated agents; they are neither dominant, plain and simple, nor are they dominated." Parr Traill, as the wife of a British army officer, is mildly privileged in the colonial social hierarchy, but just by virtue of having to participate in emigration, she is among the dominated citizens of nineteenth-century Britain. Her participation in the representation of empire is accordingly complex: her writing encourages emigration to Canada's forested "north" and also depicts the intense hardship and tragedy that so often attends it. Bourdieu has argued that "literary fiction is . . . a way of making known that which one does not wish to know." We can bear novelistic revelations because they remain "veiled." 3 It is this figure that I wish to amplify and revise in what follows. I want to suggest a specifically "colo- nial effect." The idea of the "colonial" in this effect must be understood both literally and figuratively. It refers both to the way in which the

Elaine Freedgood

Papers

Fictional Settlements: Footnotes, Metalepsis, the Colonial Effect