French hash? Southey's editing of the Annual Anthology

Jarvis, Robin

Abstract

Robert Southey’s Annual Anthology, which aimed to present a selection of current poetry and drew largely on his own friends and acquaintances, ran for just two volumes between 1799 and 1800. Although critics have shed light on individual poems and relationships among key contributors, there has been little attempt to consider the anthology project in the round. This essay provides an overview of the production and contents of the two volumes before examining in detail Southey’s role as editor. His apparently random ‘mixed arrangement’ perturbed contemporary reviewers, but I argue that Southey took the job of editor seriously and thought carefully about which poems to place side by side. The essay proposes and illustrates four types of contiguity to explain the different effects he achieved by juxtaposing particular poems. What one of his closest friends described as a ‘hash’ is revealed as a much cleverer, altogether more artful editorial construct.

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Acceptance Date: Sep 29, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Mar 1, 2020
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Mar 31, 2020
• Journal: Romanticism
• Print ISSN: 1354-991X
• Electronic ISSN: 1750-0192
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 75-88
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2020.0449
• Keywords: Literature and Literary Theory
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5827956