I recently read and reviewed two books on the social venues of Romantic literature: Ian Newman’s The Romantic Tavern and Sarah Zimmerman’s The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain. Zimmerman offers a deep dive into the lecturing practice of figures like Coleridge, Hazlitt, Campbell and Thelwall, and shows how public, performative lectures played a role in shaping the institutional study of literature. Newman looks at the different types of convivial meetings that took place at taverns, with special attention to how they became political venues, and to the genres that emerge from those meetings—from “Anacreontic” song and bawdy ballads to the social art of toasting. My full review essay is due out soon in European Romantic Review, but the short story is that both of these books make an important contribution to literary history by reconstructing these often ephemeral sites of gathering and performance, and by giving life to them as embodied, social spaces.

On a different note I also finally read George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and would especially recommend reading it with John MacNeill Miller’s excellent review at Electric Literature, which sets it and Jim Crace’s Being Dead (also 2017) in light of the death positive movement.