The Politics and Aesthetics of Extraction: Cultural Interventions in Blackwood’s and the Imperial

This chapter contrasts how two late-Romantic periodicals, Blackwood’s and the evangelical Imperial Magazine, extracted and repurposed material from other sources. It focuses first on J. H. Merivale’s 1819 Blackwood’s articles that translates strategic excerpts from Giuseppe Ballardini’s 1608 Italian miscellany, Prato fiorito. These translations suggest that superstition and religious enthusiasm are fundamental components of European Catholicism. o the Catholic cultures of the Continent. In so doing, they illustrate how a discourse composed of extracts can be simultaneously fragmentary and coherent and how extraction can be a practice of both assemblage and disarticulation. Soon thereafter, the Imperial would follow suit, intermixing extracts from older devotional works with contemporary missionary narratives. Because the focus of the travel writing is often the newest worlds of Australia and New Zealand, the Imperial specifically locates evangelicalism within a project of Tory imperialism.