Chapter 1 - Periodicals and the Construction of European Literatures

Summary

Chapter I focuses on periodicals as crucial instruments for the promotion of knowledge about European literatures against the backdrop of English, British and Continental history and politics. It starts from an assessment of the ways in which the critical output of Madame de Staël and her coterie at Coppet was debated in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Review near the end of the Napoleonic emergency. It then considers the new forms of cultural translation and appropriation in the innovative series of essays entitled ‘Horae Germanicae’, which ran in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1819 to 1828, and their definition of a conservative political and cultural agenda. Subsequently, the chapter explores liberal and radical attitudes to Continental literatures by focusing on the foreign literary policy of two of Blackwood’s main competitors in the 1820s, the Whig New Monthly Magazine and the Benthamite Westminster Review. The final section briefly considers the fraught launch of the Foreign Review and Foreign Quarterly Review in 1827 as emblematic evidence of how, by the later Romantic period, foreign literatures had become contended goods endowed with significant cultural and ideological capital.