Katherine Hardun, “Ricardian Historiography: The Temporal Asynchrony of Richard Maidstone’s Concordia”

This essay explores how Richard Maidstone’s Concordia causes its readers to confront the queerness of time by voicing the losing side of history in a narrative poem about Richard II’s reign. It argues that readers of the text experience an instance of queer temporal asynchrony, as Carolyn Dinshaw terms it, and that this experience necessitates a reexamination of the ways in which current and historical editorial treatments of Richard Maidstone’s Concordia have influenced its reception and our understandings of Richard II’s reign. By rereading the poem, with its multiple histories in mind, the author suggests that this text is important to understanding what Ricardian history looks/ed like, and, further, that this text can serve as an example of how mainstream historiography normalizes certain erasures in order to tell its story.

Anthony Archdeacon, “Complete Works? Thomas Watson’s Authorship of Tears of Fancie”

That Thomas Watson likely wrote the sonnet sequence Tears of Fancie, published posthumously in 1593, has been generally accepted by scholars since the nineteenth century, but an article disputing the attribution was published in 1989. The lack of great critical interest in minor sonnet sequences of the 1590s has allowed doubts raised by that article to go unchallenged for three decades. When the editor of Watson’s Complete Works, Dana Sutton, omitted the sequence from his 1996 publication, credence was given to the idea that the Watson attribution was spurious. A second, online edition of the Works revived the issue in 2022, when Sutton spelled out his reasoning for the first time. This essay reviews the evidence, refutes the arguments that have been made against Watson’s authorship, and presents new arguments in favor of it, based on the similarities between the sonnet sequence and Watson’s English versions of Italian madrigals, published in 1590.

Melvyn New, “Last Words: The Conclusions of Amelia and Sir Charles Grandison”

Henry Fielding ends Amelia as he had his other fictions with a providential ending made feasible by the narrator’s ironies. Without irony, Samuel Richardson’s providential ending of Pamela drew Fielding’s scorn, turning Richardson toward a more theologically complicated ending in Clarissa where everything points to a world of truth beyond this one. In Sir Charles Grandison, his final novel, Richardson elaborates this vision by leaving his perfect hero with incomplete enjoyment: torn between two women, he can accept only one, a limitation echoing the wisdom acknowledged by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey: “there is nothing unmixt in this world; . . . enjoyment itself [is] attended even with a sigh.” Grandison agrees: “In the highest of our pleasures, the sighing heart will remind us of imperfection.” And again: “the human Soul is not to be fully satisfied by worldly enjoyments; the completion of its happiness must be in another, a more perfect state?”   

Caroline Heller, “Spring and Perennial Reading: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Season for Knowledge”

This essay focuses on Barbauld’s use of seasons in her early didactic series, Lessons for Children (1778–79), and work, Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), as well as her later poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), to connect reading the book of nature in the eighteenth century to reading climate in our own time. Barbauld’s works for children are unique in that they develop a program for interpreting everyday environments that is grounded in the activity of reading. Barbauld’s program for what I call “perennial reading” has two distinctive features. First, it uses seasons as a framing structure to scale down the book of nature. Second, perennial reading is ongoing and recursive because it is partial and imperfect: a scene in the book of nature is never the same upon a reader’s return precisely because of what they missed in prior readings. Perennial reading pursues comprehension despite the empirical gaps of the everyday.