{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028972247636474536, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0036596523330283625, 'mean_word_length': 5.4950495049504955, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode, by Sandro Jung

In their important 1987 article “On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem,” Harriet Guest and John Barrell concluded that the generically innovative English long poem had played no role in literary history’s conclusions about the nature, function, or quality of eighteenth-century poetry, nor did it challenge or overthrow habituated perceptions and assumptions about the period as a time of generic rigidity and banality. Interestingly, twenty-two years later Sandro Jung’s monograph also takes up the issue of the innovatory English long poem to illustrate his key argument that, contrary to the received wisdom of mainstream eighteenth-century literary history, the “Poetry in the period is, above all, a locus for generic variation and experimentation” (12). Accordingly, he pointedly aligns his study with a slowly growing body of revisionist eighteenth-century literary history, citing Margaret Anne Doody and Christine Gerrard, among others, as critics who have worked hard to counter inaccurate views about attitudes to genre and writing in the period; such revision is necessary if readers are ever to go beyond the narrow bounds of the “Augustan” and engage with and appreciate the richness of eighteenthcentury poetry. To that end, Jung stakes the validity of his revisionary credentials on an investigation into what he calls the “fragmentary mode” (12). This mode, which should not be confused with clearly unfinished works, he defines as a consciously developed generic feature found in a range of eighteenth-century poetry. Significantly, rather than seeing the fragmentary as an inconsequential feature found in mainly minor eighteenth-century poetic writing—a feature, moreover, which would seem to indicate a failure of poetic vision—Jung identifies and explores the myriad ways in which writers developed the fragmentary as a generic mode, as a strategy of imaginative engagement. Jung shows that the fragmentary emerges through a process in which writers drew upon and appropriated specific stylistic features found in a wide range of poetic forms—for example, abrupt transitions in odes, digression in the long poem, invocations, and apostrophes. The fragmentary emerges, too, as part of cultural and social developments such as the interest in history, national identity, ruins, and Gothic. As Jung argues, the fragmentary mode provided a powerful writing strategy that “was deliberately (and, often, successfully) used by poets who associated the fragmentary with ideas ranging from the incomplete, the sublime, memory, the past, authenticity, and the Gothic” (14). The ubiquity of the strategy thus reflects a widely shared experience of instability: “Writers frequently voiced anxieties about personal and national identity, as well as the feared breakdown of the social order, through modes of incompleteness and ambiguity, emphasizing the fragmented and divided state of the cultural landscape of post-Union Britain” (13). In six chapters, Jung offers persuasive evidence for the generic significance and importance of the fragmentary mode. Chapters on the Pindaric ode, the English long poem, literary fragments and