Recent scholarship has examined the fraught processes of literature’s evolving distinction both from other modes of writing and from other artforms in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. This panel contributes to consideration of this history from two perspectives. The first concerns literature’s multiple material entanglements. Collectively, the papers illuminate relations between would-be literary writing and other crafts of creative manufacture. The second, complementary, perspective emphasises the tension between seriality and reproducibility, on the one hand, and claims to unrepeatability, on the other. In bringing these two perspectives together, the panel develops an alternative history of the evolution of literature in its distinctly material contexts. To promote discussion of the varied materials we are constellating around a central topic, we have selected three panelists who will be limited to 15-minute papers.

In his Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography (forthcoming 2023), Stefan Uhlig develops a novel account of the historical formation of the field of literature. In his paper for this panel, Uhlig extends this enquiry to encompass the textualisation of an under-examined moment in the history of aesthetics. In 1766, the art historian d’Hancarville suggested that the vases William Hamilton had acquired around Naples showed how ancient artists had “diversified” their formal features “almost to infinity,” in effect rendering each vase a singular achievement. Contrastingly, modern craftsmen failed to satisfy the “search for novelty,” though economic “opulence” was “eager to pay largely for it.” In response, Josiah Wedgwood’s manufacturing creativity relayed aesthetic value in a medium that thrived on its commodified success. Wedgwood’s engagement of aesthetic theorizing with his serial creativity became especially conspicuous in the effort to remake the Portland Vase, a truly one-off piece of Roman glassware. In his account of Wedgwood’s legacy in The Economy of Vegetation, Erasmus Darwin textualized the “hieroglyphic” tension between material singularity and forms that were aesthetically charged, yet reproducible. What Darwin celebrated as “fine forms” across contrasting media resisted the divisions Kant introduced between instruction, desire, and aesthetic form.

Building on Uhlig’s discussion of different crafts and their media, Ross Wilson examines an unstudied moment in the early nineteenth-century imagination of the periodical press. Developing his recent work on forms of critical writing (Critical Forms (forthcoming 2023)), Wilson begins with Leigh Hunt’s 1808 claim that one of the advantages of the periodical essay is the ease of disposing of it – “if you are not rich enough to possess an urn or a cloth-holder,” for instance, “it may save you a world of opodeldoc by wrapping the handle of your tea-kettle.” This paper traces the strange persistence of opodeldoc – a medical liniment invented by Paracelsus – in the imagination of the material versatility of the literary periodical. Writing thirty-five years after Hunt, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Thingum Bob” signs the ill-fated compositions he attempts to place in journals “‘Oppodeldoc’ (a fine sonorous name)”. The composite nature opodeldoc makes it an apt metaphor for the periodical, but its materiality ultimately dissipates in the “fine” sonority of a “name” – which, it will be shown, was in fact the material affordance of “opodeldoc” that made it appeal to the nineteenth-century ear.

Further developing concerns with materiality and seriality, the panel culminates with Clare Pettitt’s paper, which represents an initial stage in the development of the final instalment of her trilogy on nineteenth-century seriality (see Serial Forms (2020) and Serial Revolutions 1848 (2022) so far). The poet and Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner spent eight months in 1852-3 digging in the gold fields of Australia without much success. Returning to Melbourne, he began sculpting plaster medallions for colonial families in Victoria. In 1854, as Woolner was leaving Australia, the Select Committee on Aborigines in Victoria commissioned a report on the heads of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people from phrenologist and cast-maker Philemon Sohier. This paper suggests that both types of cast were the racialized product of white colonial power applied in different directions. When Woolner returned to England, he worked with Palgrave and Tennyson on The Golden Treasury. Both Palgrave and Woolner saw extraction as necessary to building a white Anglo-world and thus both sculpture and poetry became imperial commodities.

Through its examination of writing’s material entanglements, this panel situates the historical evolution of literature in relation to an ancient past, a commercial present, and an imperial future. These histories involved literature’s negotiation with material crafts and products from which it would differentiate itself – but to which it remained intricately bound.