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Abstract

As the most infamous novel publisher of the Romantic period, William Lane’s Minerva Press garnered significant attention in the book review periodicals of the day. This article uses the Novels Reviewed Database, 1790–1820 and quantitative methodologies to track the ways that Lane, his press and the novels it published, were presented to England’s reading public while the press flourished. The Reviews critique the novels’ subject matter, originality, the material makeup of the printed books and gendered authorship. Taking up that data, this article provides a qualitative analysis of the long reaching implications of the rhetoric deployed by the Reviews in their scathing criticisms, and traces how it continues to pervade modern scholarship on the press today.

Keywords: Romanticism, fiction, periodicals, Minerva Press, databases, women's writing, William Lane, quantitative analysis, Monthly Review, Critical Review, reviews, rhetoric, digital humanities, book history

How to Cite: Peiser, M., 2020. William Lane and the Minerva Press in the Review Periodical, 1790–1820. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, (23), pp.124–148. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18573/romtext.76