Translation plays a significant role in Chapter Ten, which maps out women writers’ contributions to a transnational European culture, focussing on British and French fiction. Although not exclusive to the Romantic period, connections between literary women were particularly productive. If Staël served as an important model, other influential women whose lives and works complicate notions of a distinct national literature also contributed to an international Romantic culture, including Brun, Genlis, Charrière, and Krudener. Popular genres that engaged with the foreign in the 1790s included émigré novels and travel writing. Women also participated in the public sphere through the unfairly trivialised salon culture. After reviewing a number of salons, including those of Albrizzi, von Kurland, Varnhagen, Moira, and the Hollands, the chapter then explores female contributions to education theory, including Madame de Genlis’s British legacy; women’s place in the novel market, contextualising Austen by placing her side by side with two little known novelists, Mary Charlton and Elizabeth Meeke; female translations as important forms of cultural mediation, particularly those of Isabel de Montolieu; and, finally, female-edited or -authored periodicals, concluding with Sarah Harriet Burney and her possible translation of Feijoo’s defence of women.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

What is it to forget a concept, confuse one, or lose one? These are familiar terms of criticism for Kierkegaard, but they can seem strangely otiose or themselves confused. In his essay, Cavell elucidates these terms, their critical purport in Kierkegaard’s practice, and he seeks to offer an assessment of that practice – in particular, to assess whether the practice is itself philosophical. Cavell’s assessment leads him to discuss (early in the essay) the connection between the religious and the psychological and (late) the connection between the aesthetic and the psychological. Jolley reassesses Cavell’s assessment: he refocuses on the forgetting, confusing, or losing of concepts, and on the use of such terms of criticism – in Kierkegaard’s specifically, but also more generally in many philosophical practices that understand themselves as at once logical and dialectical. E.g., What is the difference, for Kierkegaard, between qualitative dialectic and quantitative? Is the making of such a distinction an application, a moment, of one or the other dialectic, and if so, what are the consequences of such self-application? Along the way, Jolley revisits Cavell’s understanding of the connection between the religious and the psychological, and the aesthetic and the psychological.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

This chapter focuses on the picture of the dead hand, as it recurs across the nineteenth-century novel, from Wollstonecraft to Austen to Dickens, Zola, Eliot and Melville. It suggests that the obsession with the dead hand arises from the capacity of the novel to engage with biomaterial, and to make of such material the living stuff of being. The novel enters into a conjunction with the prosthetic – with the dead hand – to give animation to our being, as it is reshaped by the forces of industrialisation. But the chapter also argues that the novel encounters a resistance, a refusal of prosthetic material to give way to the demands of mind – a refusal which is central to the operation of the prosthetic imagination.