Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer ed. by Alessa Johns (review)

This book takes a thematic look at processes of cultural transfer during the time of the Anglo-Hanoverian Union, 1714–1837, concentrating especially on those undertaken by Bluestocking feminists, and which “furthered social reform” (2). Johns favors the term “cultural transfer” as it implies an “expansive exchange” beyond the post-colonial model, which usually implies imposition or critique. Instead, Johns wants to imply and explore trilateral and multilateral strands of transfer “occurring in a complex power setting” (2). To this end, she identifies four pivotal moments: the expansion of the Anglo-German book trade between 1750 and 1789, including the collections of Philippine Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; the rage for translation, especially in the 1790s; the effect of revolution on intra-European travel into the 1820s, using the volcano as visual symbol; and the impact of “transatlantic journeying on visions of reform” (3) into the 1840s. The first two moments occurred mainly at the University of Göttingen, the last two in Weimar. A coda explores a fifth site, the duchy of the enlightened Prince Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau. Each moment looks at a different genre or through a different disciplinary lens: first, the history of the book and the history of collecting, including that of Philippine Charlotte; second, the genre of translation; third, literary and aesthetic criticism; and fourth, reformist discourses, especially those of Anna Jameson, the implicit heroine of Johns’s book (3, 166).

The author argues that scholars should follow the “geographic turn” and track interconnections between Britain and Hanover. Such an endeavour will encourage scholars to move beyond the Britain–Hanover nexus into terrains vastes — the spatial counterpart to the longue durée. Jameson’s oeuvre alone takes her to England from Ireland, then to Germany and Canada, and back to Germany. Johns’s analysis is inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory, because it offers a “more inclusive model of connections and activity” (14). It also helps the feminist historian cross “borders to approach particular concerns transcending the nation–state especially those about gender” (14). Johns also believes that Donna Haraway’s elaboration of Latour will enable the historian to include more readily “white women, people of colour, the sick, and actors with reduced powers of self-direction” (15). In her conclusion, the author concedes that Latour’s model can mean pursuing infinite regression that ends up “with confusing and undifferentiated reams of information” (169). However, she is convinced that the historian can reach a fruitful point of “saturation” rather than confusion where the networks of association “take a shape that is meaningful, and at that instant the historian should bring to bear … the kind of judgement and conclusions that the associations suggest and warrant, informed, naturally, by the historian’s goals and knowledge” (169). This statement suggests that the historian must be trusted to know when to stop and take stock of her material, relying on her intuition as much as her evidence — for and against. In this context, one worries that opposing interpretations and different emphases will be underplayed. In fact the third section comes close to implying that there is a unified feminist outlook among women, across time and between cultures, pertaining to the reading of landscape, of which I remain completely unpersuaded. The opening paragraph of her introduction immediately raises questions about her interpretations when she makes the unfortunate assertion that “Britain and Germany, by contrast with America and France, sidestepped revolution but nonetheless generated discourses of individual and social liberty” (1).

If you discount the Austrian Netherlanders’ revolt in 1790 against the reforms of the Austrian Habsburg ruler Joseph II, the Germanies can seem very quiescent. But there is no avoiding the fact that the old German empire was completely destroyed after 1792, and was formally dissolved in 1806. It seems perverse to talk about Germany sidestepping revolution when its subjective and objective experience was of decades of...