"Response for 'Romanticism, the Canon, and the Web' "
Michael Gamer, Dept. of English, U. Penn

As of late, I've been thinking about the ways in which "The Information Age"--at least in its first stages--has reproduced biases already inscribed in the Romantic Canon. I'm thinking particularly of "early" electronic text collections, like those compiled before June 1994 at Oxford, Toronto, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon, to name a few. When I recently browsed the collection called "Alex" at Oxford by date from 1775 to 1820, for example, it yielded texts by Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, Goethe, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron. Toronto's "Representative Poetry Archive" responds to the same search with poems by Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Cowper, Landor, Moore, Byron, and so on. Even when looking at the Jack Lynch's list of English resources or The Voice of the Shuttle's expansive indices of electronic texts on the net, however, I find a list remarkably similar to the Romantics' section of the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of British Literature: heavily masculine, heavily tilted toward poetry, heavily tilted toward the lyric.[1]

While anyone who has scanned and cleaned up electronic text understands the web's predilection for short and therefore poetic texts, the overwhelming canonicity of the authors in Romantic Text Archives nevertheless stems from the same hegemonic forces that have produced and maintained the Romantic canon since the 1830s. What I find jarring about the list of authors available--not to mention the amount of verse available by someone like Wordsworth compared to someone like Hemans[2]--is that it confirms for me just how powerful these cultural forces are. As a medium providing the possibility of "instant" publication for any author or text published before 1904, the world wide web has only recently become a repository for long-out-of-print, "non-canonical" texts; it's as if we first had to put on the complete works of Wordsworth and Keats before we were even able to see the web as a way of making romantic texts that were out-of-print available. As someone interested in processes of canon-formation, I've always believed, until recently, that the real obstacle to getting authors like Baillie and Tighe back into print has been economic--that publishers simply were not willing to publish books for which there was little or no market.

That the profit-driven economics of book-publishing is now affecting university presses to a greater extent than ever before has become so well-known to us that the predicament of academic publishing has even found its way to the front page of the New York Times, who six weeks ago published an article chronicling the particular economic forces that have increasingly made potential profitability rather than merit a primary factor in accepting or rejecting a critical manuscript. Profitability has driven the production of paperback editions for far longer. I find perhaps the most telling moment of the last three years the moment of the publication of The Poems of Charlotte Smith on the Oxford Women Writers Series. Just as Oxford brought out Smith's poems, their edition of The Old Manor House--the only Smith novel in paperback--went out of print. Currently, if the information of my colleagues is correct, neither text is available for our students to buy for courses in Romanticism. Whether Curran's edition is merely out of stock temporarily or out of print permanently remains to be seen.

Given that the world wide web removes these very economic forces by allowing us to publish these texts without the intermediary of the bookseller, I find the canonicity of current electronic text collects all the more startling--particularly at a moment when our notions of what constitutes the Romantic canon are expanding so rapidly and with such excitement. Even when the economic constraints of publishers are removed, only certain authors are seen as being worth the time it takes to scan and edit them. This has produced the interesting contradiction that the only novelists from 1790-1820 on line are Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, while men dominate collections of political writing from these same years--an "accident" that reproduces early nineteenth century assumptions about the gender of poetry, of non fiction prose, and of prose fiction.

I'm wondering, in other words, whether the economic constraints of university presses are the real issue here, and I welcome your questions and observations regarding this. While it may be too early to historicize the web--something still in the process of becoming--I want to ask us to do it at least as a way of surmising its trajectory--as well as a way of discussing what the web will become and what it should become (not necessarily the same things) in the next decade.




Notes

[1] This response was written in October of 1996. Even in the few months that have elapsed since its completion--it is currently January 1997--available Romantic texts on-line continue to diversify in heartening ways. I can only urge us all to continue this process. [Back to text] [2] Currently, there are approximately 30 poems by Hemans available on-line, compared to the complete works of Wordsworth (1888 edition). [Back to text]