Alex Watson | Meiji University (original) (raw)

Books by Alex Watson

This book examines the reception of British Romanticism in India and East Asia (including China, ... more This book examines the reception of British Romanticism in India and East Asia (including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan). Building on recent scholarship on “Global Romanticism”, it develops a reciprocal, cross-cultural model of scholarship, in which “Asian Romanticism” is recognized as itself an important part of the Romantic literary tradition. It explores the connections between canonical British Romantic authors (including Austen, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth) and prominent Asian writers (including Natsume Sōseki, Rabindranath Tagore, and Xu Zhimo). The essays also challenge Eurocentric assumptions about reception and periodization, exploring how, since the early nineteenth century, British Romanticism has been creatively adapted and transformed by Asian writers.

The Palgrave " Asia-Pacific and Literature in English " series presents exciting and innovative a... more The Palgrave " Asia-Pacific and Literature in English " series presents exciting and innovative academic research on Asia-Pacific interactions with Anglophone literary tradition. Its central focus is from the voyages of Captain Cook to the early twentieth century, but it will also consider previous encounters in the early modern period, as well as reception history continuing to the present day.

"Asia-Pacific " is interpreted broadly to include China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, Australasia, and other relevant areas. Monographs and essay collections in this series will display the complexity, richness and global influence of Asia-Pacific responses to English literature, focusing on works in English but also considering those from other linguistic traditions. The series will address the imperial and colonial origins of English language and literature in the region, but will also seek to highlight and showcase other forms of reciprocal encounter, circulation, and mutual transformation, as part of an interdependent global history.

Key words: Romanticism, paratexts, annotation, history of the book, British colonialism, post-col... more Key words: Romanticism, paratexts, annotation, history of the book, British colonialism, post-colonialism

This is the first critical study of Romantic-era annotation or marginalia–footnotes, endnotes, and glossaries. Annotation is a remarkably pervasive phenomenon in Romantic-period literature: from Lord Byron’s attack on Lord Elgin in a footnote to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811): to Sir Walter Scott’s notes for the “Magnum Opus” edition of the Waverley novels (1829–33). Yet, critics, editors and readers have tended to disregard annotation. I challenge this oversight, drawing attention to how the margins provided a vital site for a variety of literary interactions. While the Thomas James Mathias deployed extensive annotations to launch cloak-and-dagger attacks on political opponents, the poet William Wordsworth utilized notes to position himself as the central figure in his creative collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the poet Charlotte Smith created annotations to display her mastery of male-dominated spheres of knowledge, botany and ornithology.
In particular, texts of the period were marked by an abundance of ethnographic, linguistic and anthropological details about the people that the emerging British nation-state was seeking to absorb. I argue that writers tried to marginalize forms of political and regional identity that conflicted with the interests of the nation-state by locating them on the borders of the page. In the extensive annotations for his Oriental epic Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Robert Southey created an imperial collection of Islamic sources. Likewise, Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott sought to marginalize Irish and Scottish nationalist voices by placing them on the margins of their novels. Just as these writers evidence an anomalous attitude towards annotation—both dismissing and relying upon it—so they placed colonized peoples in a contradictory position; as locations ancillary to the nation, yet foundational to it. The Romantic-period text therefore manifested a new structure of global power, as metropolitan centres imposed coherence and command over a variety of internal and external “peripheries”. Other writers, such as Robert Burns, Lord Byron and Maria Edgeworth sought to challenge the emerging hegemony of the British state by forging anti-imperial archives in their annotations.
Examining such margins not only draws our attention to neglected aspects of texts frequently deleted by later editors, but also asks us to reconsider our understanding of the printed book in our current age of hypertext and globalization. This book was described as ‘a brilliant achievement’ (Nigel Leask, Regius Professor, University of Glasgow), ‘an extremely useful and scholarly production, full of valuable close readings and larger ideas’ (Peter J. Kitson, European Romantic Review), ‘foundational…ground-breaking’ (Michael Edson, Keats-Shelley Journal), and ‘a considerable and welcome addition to Romantic studies’ (Tom Williams, Times Literary Supplement).

Book chapters by Alex Watson

This paper asks what Roland Barthes’ seminal 'The Pleasure of the Text' (1973) can tell us about ... more This paper asks what Roland Barthes’ seminal 'The Pleasure of the Text' (1973) can tell us about annotation and vice versa. I argue that an unacknowledged affinity exists between Barthes’ project and the act of footnoting. In particular, the textual margins offer an avenue within which readers and writers can engage in the same ludic self-negation that Barthes relishes and identifies as being central to literary expression. I examine Barthes’ annotation and paratexts for 'Pleasure' and other works, claiming that a central tension exists within English-language editions of his work: editors have used annotation and other paratexts to enfold his works within a single reading and present Barthes as a canonical theorist: yet Barthes’ own critical claims and annotational and broader paratextual practices resist such anointment, undermine his own authority and open the text to multiple interpretations. In the conclusion, I investigate whether Barthes’ espousal of textual interruption is as liberating as he believes it to be within the culture of twenty-first-century capitalist countries, in which new technologies and globalization are making constant disruption a norm. I close by suggesting that the crucial difference is that Barthes calls for a form of interruption more open and revolutionary than that experienced currently in advanced economies.

Publisher: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781611462524/Annotation-in-Eighteenth-Century-Poetry This... more Publisher: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781611462524/Annotation-in-Eighteenth-Century-Poetry

This book chapter explores Robert Southey’s extensive endnotes for his eccentric medieval Welsh and Aztec conquest epic Madoc (1805). In the verse of this idiosyncratic piece, Southey retells the legend of Madoc, the Welsh prince who escaped dynastic conflict by sailing to South America and establishing a colony in Mexico. In his copious endnotes, Southey displays an exotic compendium of extracts from volumes of Portuguese poetry, histories of American Indians, Welsh druids, and South American conquistadors, as well as travel accounts of Canada, China, the West Indies, and the South Sea Islands. I argue that Southey’s annotations should be regarded as imprints, imprints with which we can trace his journey from the political radical he was in the last years of the eighteenth century to the conservative poetic and political identity that would define him as a man of letters in the nineteenth century.

One of the distinctive elements of the science-fiction writer and memoirist J. G. Ballard’s work ... more One of the distinctive elements of the science-fiction writer and memoirist J. G. Ballard’s work is his preoccupation with different forms of physical and psychological ruination: from the wrecked automobiles of his ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970 and his notorious novel Crash (1973); to the deserted suburbs, crashed bombers, abandoned hotels and shattered psyches that frequent his short stories. This essay will focus on Ballard’s redeployment and refashioning of this Gothic motif in his autobiographical novel 'Empire of the Sun' (1984), considering examples such as the Chinese coffins decked with paper flowers that the protagonist Jim witnesses floating across the Yangtze; and the drained swimming pool that Jim encounters on his return his parent’s house in the Shanghai International Settlement after War been declared. I argue that Ballard reactivates and expands this Gothic image so as to capture a profound reformulation of global power, as the overtly hierarchical and imperialist style of nineteenth-century European capitalist hegemony yielded to the apparently more libertarian ethos of twentieth-century American consumer capitalism. Considering the Gothic landscape of Ballard’s ruins enables us thereby to recognize the dynamism and destructiveness─the fundamental moral complexity─of capitalist modernity.

Publisher page: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319331645

This essay demonstrates that ‘paratexts’─interstitial textual spaces such introductions and inter... more This essay demonstrates that ‘paratexts’─interstitial textual spaces such introductions and intertitles, epigraphs and endnotes─are an important, if often overlooked, aspect of travel-writing. I show how travel writers as varied as Sir Walter Raleigh, Captain James Cook, James Bruce, Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Burton, Isabella Bird and Amitav Ghosh use ‘Prefaces’ and footnotes to construct an authorial persona and establish their credibility. I seek to challenge Gérard Genette’s claim, in his influential study, 'Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation' (1987; trans. 2001), that ‘the correctness of the authorial (and, secondarily of the publisher’s) point of view is the implicit creed and spontaneous ideology of the paratext’. Instead, I argue that the paratext is a complex location, in which publishers, editors and writers can make surreptitious and occasionally contradictory gestures that resist stable ideological location. While Genette proposes a binary model, in which the text is master and the paratext its servant, I suggest a rhyzomic approach, in which the text is defined as a complex network of competing structures.

Publisher page: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137457578

Articles by Alex Watson

Review of Asian and Pacific Studies, 2020

In his elusive and eccentric 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Al... more In his elusive and eccentric 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe presents a sensation first-person account of his fictional title-character’s experiences of cannibalism, mutiny and shipwreck as a stowaway on the South Seas. He adds a series of footnotes and an extensive endnote that point out Pym’s factual errors and lack of documentary evidence. In the “Preliminary Notice at the beginning of the novel, Poe has the fictional character Pym admit that the real-life Poe is the author of the earlier sections, even claiming that Poe had them serialized in the periodical The Southern
Literary Messenger “under the garb of fiction”. In this article, I argue that, in spite of their ostensibly marginal position, the notes Poe creates for Pym help us better to understand Poe’s play with fact and fiction throughout his writing. Poe uses these annotations to achieve an effect of ludic anticlimax, in which the flaws in his plot and characterization accrete so as to disintegrate the narrative the moment before its expected culmination. Poe thereby exploits the footnote’s capacity to bring exuberant reverie into collision with plain information, and to traverse the boundary between fact and fiction, ripping away “the garb of fiction” to reveal the intricacy of his fabrication.

Studies in English and American Literature, 2014

Japan Women's University Studies in English and American Literature, 2012

International Journal of Scottish Literature , 2010

We have read Burns too much through glossaries and not enough through dictionaries' announced Mur... more We have read Burns too much through glossaries and not enough through dictionaries' announced Murray Pittock at the Robert Burns Conference in January 2009.[1] In his paper, Pittock drew attention to the multiple meanings of the Scots words in Burns' 'To a Louse', arguing that -by relying too frequently on glossaries -critics and readers have shut themselves off from the poem's rich polysemy. Pittock's statements are of considerable importance for the future of Burns studies, given that he is one of the main authorities involved in the construction of the new Burns critical edition and a key player in recent calls to put Burns at the centre of the British literary canon. But they are also of significance for their recognition of the key role played by the glossary in mediating between reader and Burns' text. From the glossary Burns himself created for his debut 1786 Kilmarnock edition onwards, his poetry has frequently been accompanied by a paratextual lexicon, translating his Scots into English: from John Cuthbertson's eccentric, encyclopaedic 1886 Complete Glossary; to James Kinsley's careful annotations to the 1968 critical edition; to Clark McGinn's verse translation of 'To a Haggis' in his 2008 The Ultimate Guide to Being Scottish. As I will show, while readers are likely to consult only one glossed version of the poem, their reading experience can differ

This article examines the handwritten notes Byron scribbled in 1816 in a copy of the fourth editi... more This article examines the handwritten notes Byron scribbled in 1816 in a copy of the fourth edition of his 1809 poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It argues that these notes shed new light on both Byron's composition practice and the complex interplay the poet creates between fixed and unstable versions of his authorial identity. It also claims that the notes highlight the need for scholars to establish a more sensitive understanding of Romantic-period textual practices.

Journal page: http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.1353/byr.0.0061

Journal Edited by Alex Watson

POETICA, 2014

A special issue of the leading Japanese English-language journal for Linguistic and Literary stud... more A special issue of the leading Japanese English-language journal for Linguistic and Literary studies dedicated to the theme of 'Romantic Connections', based on the three-day supernumerary conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism that took place at the University of Tokyo in June 2014.

Educational Materials by Alex Watson

Eighteenth-Century Paratext Research Network, 2020

Our contemporary world of digital communication and hypertext has inspired recent scholars to re-... more Our contemporary world of digital communication and hypertext has inspired recent scholars to re-examine how the conventions of the printed book enable the transmission of meaning. Within this context, the humble footnote has achieved a new prominence. Although footnotes can be found in works published earlier, annotation not only became ubiquitous in the long eighteenth century, it appeared to embody the period’s spirit of combative empiricism (Thomas De Quincey described them as ‘a practice purely modern’).[1] This brief article identifies and summarizes five key writings on the topic.

https://18thcparatext.wordpress.com/2020/04/16/footnotes-in-the-long-eighteenth-century-recommended-secondary-reading/

This annotated biblio/film/discography came out of a priming project funded by the University of ... more This annotated biblio/film/discography came out of a priming project funded by the University of York's Culture and Communications Research Champions funding during summer 2016. It is being expanded in 2017-18, due to Daiwa and ESRC funding and we invite you to leave comments, suggestion and works you'd like to add via the comments function on this Google doc. Sharing it as a resource is intended to offer starting points for teachers, students and researchers interested in the influence of British Gothic monsters (with a focus largely on the nineteenth century) on twentieth-‐ and twenty-‐first century East Asian culture. The rationales for the project are that existing research focuses almost exclusively on identifying Orientalism in British Gothic monster texts. This is despite the fact that for over two hundred years, British Gothic literature has been highly popular in East Asia, inspiring a slew of adaptations & reinventions i.e. 'afterlives' focus. Our aim beyond the priming project is to develop a more reciprocal, cross-‐cultural model of scholarship, in which 'Asian Gothic' is recognised as an important part of the Gothic tradition.

CFP by Alex Watson

An interdisciplinary symposium exploring paratexts in writing from and about the Pacific Plenary ... more An interdisciplinary symposium exploring paratexts in writing from and about the Pacific Plenary lectures: Rod Edmond (University of Kent); Anna Johnston (University
of Queensland)
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, 7-8 November 2020