Poetics of Character

Susan Manning (1953-2013) was Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She published many books, book chapters and journal articles, including most recently Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 (edited with Eve Tavor Bannet, Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (edited with Thomas Ahnert, 2011).

• Prologue; Part I. Transatlantic Literary History and the Poetics of Character: 1. 'Is analogy argument?'; Part II. Reading Character in Comparison: 2. Transatlantic contagion and the seductions of allegory; 3. Characterless women; 4. Characters and representatives; 5. Literary friendship and transatlantic correspondences; 6. Subjects and objects: 'always joined, never settled'; 7. Historical characters: virtue ethics and the limits of romantic biography; 8. Poetics of character.

'Poetics of Character is a true masterpiece in Manning's areas of specialization - the literature and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Romanticism, transatlanticism - and, if I may be allowed the type of language that [James] Chandler employs, it displays Manning's thinking at its most agile and acute. A gift to multiple fields and the capstone of an impressive and influential career, [it] opens multiple new channels of thought for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic criticism, a fitting legacy for a scholar already seen as a trailblazer in the field.' Matthew Wickman, Review of English Studies