What Are You Reading?: Jonathan Gonzalez

This month we had the honor of speaking to Jonathan Gonzalez, a final-year PhD candidate at the University of La Rioja. His dissertation, Writing to Last: Wordsworth’s Poetics of Immortality and the Cult of Romantic Genius, considers the Romantic cult of posterity, the construction of a textual life-after-death, and Wordsworth’s poetics of immortality. His broader research interests include nineteenth-century reading practices, the relationship between poetry and place, as well as Romantic-era walking and perceptions of landscape. He has written on Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and his first book, a critical edition of the latter’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, will be published by Routledge in 2021.

What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now?

I try to maintain interests in and keep up to date with new writing in the field—whether it is right up my street or not. Over the past few months Tom Duggett’s critical edition of Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (Routledge, 2018), Diego Saglia’s European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations (Cambridge UP, 2018), as well as Romanticism and the Letter (Palgrave, 2020), a collection of essays edited by Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe, have been essential in contextualising the edition of Letters from Spain and Portugal within the broader scope of Southey’s oeuvre, letter writing, and the international geo-political and economic contexts behind Romantic-era literature and culture. Having just finished the Southey edition, I am going sideways into reading other studies not necessarily central to my current Wordsworth research interests. Two of my most recent reads, which I thoroughly enjoyed, are Will Bowers’ The Italian Idea: Anglo-Italian Radical Literary Culture, 1815–23 (Cambridge UP, 2020), as well as a special issue of Romanticism (26.2, July 2020) co-edited by Paul Chirico, Mina Gorji, and Sarah Houghton-Walker, celebrating the bicentenary of John Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820). 

What are you working on at the moment, and which writing informs your current research?

Although Letters from Spain and Portugal is in production now, I am still wearing my Southey hat, as it were, trying to make the most of the material that could not be included in the textual apparatus of the edition. I have a forthcoming essay in a special issue of Romanticism on the aesthetics of pedestrian motion in Southey’s prose writings, and I am working on an article on his lifelong engagement with travel writing from a commercial viewpoint. This research is much indebted to the publication in Pickering and Chatto first, and in Routledge’s The Pickering Masters series second, of the nine-volume Poetical Works of Robert Southey under the general editorship of Lynda Pratt and Tim Fulford, completed in 2012, together with the ongoing Romantic Circles Online Edition of the Collected Letters of Robert Southey, under the general editorship of Pratt, Fulford and Ian Packer—which to this date covers the period 1791–1821. My main focus at the moment, however, is Wordsworth and his poetics of (literary) immortality. Lately, I have been working out how to incorporate into my arguments on the Wordsworthian outlook on writing to last Emily Rohrbach’s discussion of the future-oriented poetics of Romanticism in Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (Fordham UP, 2016), as well as Tim Fulford’s readings of the later poetry of Wordsworth in his latest monograph, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1815–1845 (Penn UP, 2019). I have also spent a fair amount of October conducting research at the British Library for an essay that makes sense of Wordsworth’s reading, collecting, and (re)writing of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 

What part of your reading of criticism on the Romantic culture of posterity is more crucial to your research? For students interested in this subject, where would you send them first?

The obvious starting point is Andrew Bennett’s seminal monograph, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge UP, 1999), which brought about a radical shift in the understanding of poetic reception in and beyond the Romantic period. H. J. Jackson’s Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame (Yale UP, 2015) and Michael Gamer’s Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2017) have since actualised Bennett’s position, producing the currently predominant conception of what contemporary and posthumous fame entailed for poets like Wordsworth. Taken together, these three monographs offer a complete approach to the multifaceted culture of writing to last, as well as interesting possibilities of examining how it played out in different writers. Wordsworth’s approach was a far cry from, say, Southey’s, which in turn differs significantly from the manner in which Byron or Scott embraced fame during their lifetime and beyond. 

What has been your favourite archival find? 

I have to confess that, although seemingly irrelevant, I was quite puzzled by the bizarre pencil sketch located at the very end of the 1829 catalogue of Wordsworth's library at Rydal Mount (MS Eng 880, seq. 105), held at the Houghton Library, Harvard. On a more relevant note, earlier this year—a couple of weeks before the announcement of a (first) national lockdown in the UK was made—I was fortunate enough to travel to the Keswick Museum & Art Gallery in the Lake District and work with their extensive Southey manuscript collection. I thoroughly enjoyed finding an unpublished holograph notebook fragment detailing the itinerary of his journey from Coruña to Madrid in December 1795. Southey used it to record the distances travelled each day, the state of the roads and inns, and some encounters with the local population along the way. It comprised the source material for some textual supplements appended to Letters from Spain and Portugal, while also giving Southey a timeline on which to structure the first half of the narrative. This finding was especially relevant—and somewhat entertaining. A comfortless Christmas day spent at the house of the local barber in San Miguel de las Dueñas, in northwest Spain, had Southey recording in this manuscript, with all the asperity of a frustrated reviewer on TripAdvisor, how ‘if you are distressd for a nights lodging—want to be shaved—bled—or to buy an old cock by way of a young capon—apply to the Barber Surgeon of this place!’ (NB18 MS S/431, fol. 1v). 

Have there been any mainstream articles or publications on the Romantics you would recommend?

I very much enjoyed Matthew Bevis’ new monograph, Wordsworth’s Fun (Chicago UP, 2019), and, more recently, a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (42.4, 2020) on 'Placing the Author in Ecologies of Literary Tourism', co-edited by Joanna E. Taylor and Amber Pouliot. I am also hoping to find time sometime soon to read Erica McAlpine’s The Poet’s Mistake (Princeton UP, 2020) as well as Kerri Andrews’ Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (Reaktion, 2020). 

Which books are on your bedside table to read at the minute?

Aside from a month’s backlog of TLS copies and my (very beaten-up) copy of The Prelude, at the top of my ever-growing pile lies Roddy Doyle’s newest novel, Love (Jonathan Cape, 2020). There is also Alexandra Harris' Weatherland: Writers & Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, 2015), which I have been reading on and off for the past couple of months. I recently finished Alix Nathan’s The Warlow Experiment (Penguin, 2019), which struck a chord what with the Coronavirus lockdown, and Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), a comic novel that anyone should read to lift up their spirits in these uncertain times. 

You can follow Jonathan on Twitter here. Look out for his edition of Southey's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal, which will be published by Routledge in 2021. 

You can read our other ‘What Are You Reading?’ interviews here. Perhaps you have a new publication in Romantic studies that you’d like to discuss in a future piece here on the K-SAA Blog, or perhaps you’d just like to tell what you are reading! We love to hear from our members and followers. Get in touch.