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What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity ? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.

This study argues that Victorian female characters like George Elioťs Maggie Tulliver in The MUI on the Floss (1860), denied the classical education their more practical male counterparts enjoy, attempt to create stories around their readings, anticipate plot developments, and finally come to realize the deficiencies of male worldly wisdom. As a result, they turn to out-of-this-world masculine wisdom, the Word of God, practice submission and self-renunciation, and ultimately escape their own plots in a heroic gesture, announcing, as it were, that heroines of the stamp of a Saint Theresa can no longer emerge from a Victorian society that systematically fails to educate its women. Maggie Tulliver is neither the first nor the last female character who struggles to combine a literary discourse of the past with newer forms of narrative discourse, yet she is perhaps the most vibrant example of the nineteenthcentury passive-aggressive reader. George Elioťs precocious female sage is at a crossroads historically, culturally, as well as ideologically, emblematically enacting the shift in reading practices that characterized the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader became part of a larger cultural movement transitioning from homogenous, selective reading to a heterogenous, scanning type of reading. Elioťs novels seem to be pivoting on this shift, allowing their readers to practice nonsequential reading of characters who themselves are readers of parts. This fragmentariness, as Eliot seems to say, defines the very psychology of nineteenthcentury print culture.

The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas.Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.

This article focuses on the periodicals with fashion content published in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century: O Espelho Diamantino (1827–1828), A Mulher do Simplício (1832–1846), Correio das Modas (1839–1840), O Gosto (1843), Espelho Fluminense (1843), and O Martinho (1851). First it discusses the rise of Brazilian fashion magazines against the background of the development in Rio de Janeiro of the printing and clothes industries. Second, by examining the section ‘Modas’/‘Fashions’ against the pictorial and other textual contents of the above-mentioned periodicals, it presents the principal characteristics of the first Brazilian fashion magazines and establishes the origins of the Brazilian fashion editorial as a journalistic genre.

Thomas reviews Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa by Christine Pawley.

Lupfer reviews Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa by Christine Pawley.

This article analyzes Jacobs’s editorial engagement with white print culture in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). It focuses specifically on Jacobs’s treatment of manuscript (handwritten) as well as printed documents—how she reprints but also prints for the first time a handful of white-authored letters, which she strategically juxtaposes in and around her own printed prose. The article begins by contextualizing Jacobs’s editorial work through a discussion of kindred efforts undertaken by William Wells Brown and William Still. It then turns to Incidents , exploring how Jacobs conjures and positions herself as a literary editor of the seduction novel through her presentation of white men’s use of letters to “seduce” her. Placing allusions to well-known white-authored British texts within the world of American enslavement her narrative describes, she likewise acts as their editor, subordinating the writers of the imperial metropole to her own story. Finally, Jacobs edits American writings that directly uphold enslavement, making Incidents itself an archive of white print culture’s violence—and her narrative’s a retaliation to it. Reading Jacobs as an editor creates productive potential for new approaches to other Black authors—to their engagements not only with white print culture but also with each other.

Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Revolutionary portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formulation of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals. This shift had major consequences for the course of modern art production and its engagement with the political and the contingent.

The article examines how La Pata de Cabra (The Goat's Hoof ), an over-the-top fantastical Spanish comedia de magia (magic play), came to figure centrally in serious debates about Mexican politics and society between 1845 and 1857. The article explores the play's popularity and its resonance in the press – it spawned at least half a dozen satirical newspapers – to argue that satire became a critical political language and form of expression that broadened and sustained debates in an era marked by volatile and often heavily restricted press freedoms. The article's focus on the La Pata phenomenon brings two fields of study, theatre and the press, into productive and necessary conversation.

Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘oświecony’ in Polish was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the noun ‘oświeconie’ became secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understanding of things in contrast to how traditional religious authority understood things. This is well known to scholars and students alike. But the question now arises, with the rise over the last 20 to 30 years of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as a fundamental new category in the humanities, how much has this category applicability in the Central European context? Studying book history and print culture, I shall argue, helps us to determine that in fact it does.