“Far Other Times Are These”: The Bluestockings in the Time of Ossian
As early as 1761 Elizabeth Montagu, Queen of the Blues, began hold ing eccentric dinner parties, during which guests "had the feast of shells and drank out of a nautilus shell to the immortal memory of Ossian."1 In honor of Ossian, the recently rediscovered Highland bard, Montagu recreated-down to the unconventional stemware-the ceremonial meals of the Highland warriors described by Ossian's self-proclaimed translator, the controversial James Macpherson.2 Montagu even counted "the Bard Macpherson" among the "tuneful train" who attended her Highland feasts held throughout the 1760s and 1770s (Montagu to Lyttleton, 17 November 1761). A letter dated 13 February 1772 from Montagu to Elizabeth Vesey, a close friend and fellow Bluestocking, describes another "feast of shells" more than ten years later attended by Macpherson (who seems to have been a regular), Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Lyttleton, and the playwrights Richard Cumberland and Alexander Dow.3 Montagu's feasts are just one example of the Bluestockings' passion for Ossian, a passion that crops up repeatedly in their voluminous correspondence and, most strikingly, in Catherine Talbot's imitations of the Ossian poems. These sources also establish the Bluestockings' indifference to the raging debates over the poems' authenticity, a subject to which much recent criticism has been devoted.4 In fact, in a letter to Lord Lyttleton, 31 October 1760, Montagu made light of the forgery accusations leveled at Macpherson soon after the initial publication of the Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760: "The Bishop of Ossory tells me Mr. Macpherson receives 100 per annum subscription while he stays in the Highlands to translate the poems; if he is writing them, he should have a thousand at least" (II, 211). The significance of the Ossian poems for Montagu and her fellow Bluestockings did not lie in their historical accuracy or ancient author ship, but rather in their egalitarian vision of gender. In many ways, the Ossian poems provided a template for Bluestocking salons, where both sexes debated issues of literary, social, and political interest. Although the term Bluestocking typically conjures the image of a socially awkward learned lady, whose devotion to study and the betterment of the female condition make her poorly suited for her domestic duties, this understand ing of the term did not emerge until the late eighteenth century. Among
Primitive Inventions: Rob Roy, Nation, and World System
Over the last few years, something like a critical consensus has emerged regarding the function of the novel in the symbolic formation of national identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Great Britain, and, in particular, the influential role played in that formation by Walter Scott's Waverley novels. The consensus takes its cue from Benedict Anderson's account of the novel as one of the major cultural institutions that produces the "imagined community" of the modern nation. According to Anderson, the novel synchronizes the subjectivity of its readers with secular history and a calendrical order of "homogeneous, empty time," by representing a temporal simultaneity across the diverse spaces and populations of the national territory.1 This imaginary standardization marches with the projects of political, legal, and economic rationalization that constitute modernization in other domains. The ideological power of Scott's novels, following this account, lies in their explicit representation of modernization as a complex, overdetermined historical process, in which a set of political, legal, economic, and cultural transformations bear together on an inevitable outcome: here and now, the only real world, the commerce-based
The Historical Novel
Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is now recognized as one of the most innovative and best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century. Trained in the German philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1933. There he faced a new set of problems: Stalinist dogmatism about literature and literary criticism. Maneuvering between the obstacles of censorship, he wrote and published his longest work of literary criticism, "The Historical Novel", in 1937. Beginning with the novels of Sir Walter Scott, "The Historical Novel" documents the evolution of a genre that came to dominate European fiction in the years after Napoleon. The novel had reached a point at which it could be socially and politically critical as well as psychologically insightful.Lukacs devotes his final chapter to the anti-Nazi fiction of Germany and Austria. Georg Lukacs' works include "The Theory of the Novel" (1920), "The History of Class Consciousness" (1923), "Studies in European Realism" (1948), and "The Young Hegel" (revised edition, 1954). Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of the Graduate Program in Literature, and Director of the Duke Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. He is the author of many articles and books, including "Marxism and Form" (1971), "The Prison-House of Language" (1972), "The Political Unconscious" (1981), and "Postmodernism", or, the "Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991).