Anglophone Riot

Dear Colleagues,

“Riot” is an ambivalent term with complexly interlaced referents.  In the domain of the social and the economic, “riot” refers to “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd,” as the OED reports.  In the domain of the aesthetic, the term “riot” has long named “a roaringly successful show, performer, etc” as well as “a person […] or thing which is extremely popular or makes a big impression.”  In contemporary anglophone vernacular, riot occurs in streets, in prisons, in protests, and in spaces of exceptional social combustibility—spaces that are nowadays increasingly “common” in three senses: frequent, popular, and public.  Riot also occurs in aesthetic space: there are riots of color, riotous performances, riotous behavior, and riot as aesthetic judgement, as in, “the book was a riot.” Importantly, there were also riotous developments in language and pedagogy.  This issue zeroes in on the varied meanings of riot in the period, as well as now.  For Romanticists, the doubledness of this term is hidden in plain view in Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, which is as familiar as the air we breathe.  “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Wordsworth writes, and from the perspective of 2024 we know too that the “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is also one of the primary definitions of “riot.”  

This special edition invites papers on the archive of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century riot literature as it relates to an increasingly global anglophone world—by which we mean the motley archive of news, stories, poems, and plays that document bread riots, swing riots, dock riots, theater riots, colonial riots and more—is an important mediator of aesthetic practice during the Romantic period. “No one knows what the riot wants,” writes Alain Badiou in his recent book on the subject, to which we can add that because riot itself is amorphous and unpredictable, capturing it in poetry, on stage, or in the novel poses interesting aesthetic problems.  Departing from social historian E.P. Thompson’s (and more recently Joshua Clover’s) periodizing conclusion that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time when riots were ambient features of social and economic life, and, given the well-known fact that Wordsworth and Romantic-era writers in general were bravura upcyclers of “situations from common life,” this paper takes seriously the notion that reports of political “riot” were remediated through the literary into new and novel poetic and literary forms. From this perspective, it is possible to see the commons as a maker of Romanticism rather than the more conventional view in which the Romantics represent the commons. 

Dr. Daniel DeWispelare
Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods
Guest Editors

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• riot
• literature
• anglophone world