Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). viii+316 pp (Softcover; ISBN: 0-226-31480-4).

Reviewed by
Colin Jager
Rutgers University

In a 2003 review on this site, Mary Favret identified a new paradigm for romantic historicism: “A might-have-been, could-have-been, evermore-about-to-be historiography is … emerging as the Romanticism of our own turn of the century,” she wrote. Favret was reviewing William Galperin’s The Historical Austen; she grouped that book with Jerome Christensen’s Romanticism at the End of History and James Chandler’s England in 1819. What all of these books shared, according to Favret, was an abiding interest in the political possibilities that adhere to a history of lost chances, foreclosed opportunities, and near misses—those moments, in other words, when romantic texts seem to gesture toward alternative kinds of social organization that never quite come into focus. Now we can add Paul Hamilton’s Metaromanticism to Favret’s list.

The book itself gathers together much of Hamilton’s writing over the past ten years; about a third of it is entirely new material, but that new material provides the rationale for the whole. At the center of the book are subtle and detailed readings of British romantic writers, most of them already published in various forms: Coleridge and Godwin, Keats, Scott, the Shelleys, Austen, and romantic republicanism. These chapters make up the middle section of the book, headed “Literature.” They are preceded by a section on “Aesthetics,” consisting of a chapter each on Schiller and Rousseau, and followed by four chapters, dominated by Friedrich Schlegel and Habermas, entitled “Theory.” The first and the third sections, where much of the new material is located, thus place the local readings within a wider theoretical context; taken together, they constitute a compelling apologia for romanticism itself and make an audacious claim for its relevance to contemporary theoretical concerns.

What, first of all, is metaromanticism? It’s complicated. At its most basic, metaromanticism describes “the specific ways in which major writers in the romantic period generalize their practices” (1). But complications immediately ensue: “meta,” for Hamilton, does not mean “above,” so we are not dealing with a discourse that claims to evaluate romanticism from a perspective outside of it. Rather, metaromanticism is a product of romantic discourse itself; in a phrase that recurs frequently in this book, metaromanticism is “another way for romanticism to be what it already is.” Then, there’s a second complication. The immanence of metaromanticism is immediately open to the criticism (offered for instance by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology) that its self-critique is not real critique, but rather a way to perpetuate itself while appearing to engage in critical activity. Hamilton accepts this objection—an objection that now goes by the shorthand “romantic ideology”—but turns it on its head: metaromanticism is not itself romantic ideology but rather the recognition of romanticism’s susceptibility to romantic ideology. Metaromanticism, it emerges, is marked by a basic discontent with its own habit of self-reflection. It knows its own bad faith and struggles against it.

So understood, Metaromanticism positions itself between two major trends within romantic historicism. The first of these can conveniently be linked to Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology and the work that followed in its wake throughout the 1980s. It is this tradition, and specifically McGann’s use of The German Ideology, that stands behind Hamilton’s acknowledgement that metaromanticism is not “critique” in the materialist sense of the word—it is not, that is, critique from some other perspective outside the aesthetic. The second trend within romantic historicism is what ties together the various books that Favret cited in her review, and it may be described as a reaction to the first trend. This reaction is impatient with critiques of the romantic ideology precisely because such critiques gain their traction elsewhere. Romanticism, from this perspective, seems to be unfairly indicted according to terms originating outside of it, and this accounts, I would say, for the renewed affection for immanent critique, whether that critique goes under the name of “possibility” (Galperin), “anachronism” (Christensen), or “the case” (Chandler).

Although he doesn’t say it in so many words, Hamilton aims to thread his way between these two historicist trends. He does this by, in effect, splitting metaromanticism itself in two. Here I would like to introduce a distinction that is not Hamilton’s own. What we might call “weak metaromanticism” remains committed to immanent critique and hence to critical agency; what we might call “strong metaromanticism,” meanwhile, turns that agency over to the aesthetic object itself, but with the codicil that the aesthetic becomes a model or anticipation of something extra-aesthetic. Certain names accrue to each of these terms: on the weak side, Kant, Schiller, and Adorno; on the strong side, Schlegel, Benjamin, and Habermas. Many of Hamilton’s readings of literary texts in the middle section of the book begin with the weak variant and then seek to show how weak turns into strong—or might have turned into strong, given the right conditions. Thus near the beginning of the Keats chapter, Hamilton writes that “to work within the scheme of romantic idealism in relation to Keats is not, then, to forgo critique. It is, rather, to explore from within a frustrated and inhibited critique…” (90). A formula like this accepts the accusation of romantic ideology but resists its normative dimension; it insists, instead, that metaromantic discontent becomes available, in Adornian fashion, for critical recovery. In contrast to this weak metaromanticism, strong metaromanticism does not wait around for such critical agency. Thus “Keatsian critique begins to go on the offensive,” writes Hamilton, as soon as it draws its audience into its own discontent. This is the point at which Schlegel becomes crucial for Hamilton, for it is Schlegel’s idea that art “fashion[s] critical alternatives to and historical departures from its original generic performance” (11). Strong metaromanticism, thus, breaks out of the aesthetic altogether into something else.

The Schlegelian or strong metaromantic argument indicates that Hamilton is not simply looking over his shoulder at the debates about historicism. He has his sights set on the future—or at any rate, on the array of possible futures that strong metaromanticism makes theoretically possible. This dimension of the argument comes into prominence in the final section of the book, under the guidance of Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

I confess that I greeted this turn in Hamilton’s argument with some skepticism. In a general way (and I think I am not alone here), I associate Habermas with a broad philosophical tradition stretching from Locke to Kant to Rawls, a tradition that is in the main proud of its Enlightenment heritage and that seeks to extend it. Even with its canon under perpetual revision, romanticism seems to sit athwart this enlightenment tradition. Moreover, Hamilton’s own interest in German post-Kantian philosophy, especially that of Schlegel, would seem to commit him to a reading of romanticism that at the least revises enlightenment dialectically; again, therefore, the affection for Habermas seems counterintuitive. Hamilton’s case for Habermas, nevertheless, is persuasive. Historically, it depends upon the claim that both romanticism and Habermas are traversing the same post-Kantian philosophical terrain. Conceptually, it depends upon the claim that both share a “logical constraint.” Recall that what I have labeled strong metaromanticism encourages translation out of the aesthetic and into another medium by modeling a “hypothetical state in which the better life is logically obliged to exist, for the moment” (13). That tendency finds an elective affinity with “the aspirational character of all language toward full communication” (13). This is the logical constraint that communicative action and metaromanticism share: on the one hand, a theory of language that sets aside the privilege of prescription in favor of a facilitating role that models a future of complete communication, and, on the other, a theory of literature that sets aside the privilege of aesthetic autonomy in favor of an “openness to unprescribed possibilities” (13). What you think of this connection will largely determine whether you find the overall argument of the book itself congenial (though many of the individual chapters stand nicely on their own).

Hamilton’s positioning regarding two other trends within the field is equally well-considered. First, this is a book invested in the idea of a romantic canon—albeit a greatly expanded one. Hamilton finds metaromanticism operating in a range of British texts that cut across old and new canons. He has little interest in critiquing the old canon from the perspective of the new by, for example, playing female writers off against male writers. Rather, what interests Hamilton about romanticism is to be found not at its margins but at its very center—a center, it turns out, that “canonical” and “non-canonical” texts can in principle share. What they share is metaromanticism itself: not a set of determining influences nor a terminology but rather a habit of generalizing their discursive practices and a consequent discontent with those practices. Second, Hamilton has less interest in the more empirically-oriented historicism that in some respects has dominated romantic criticism in the last decade; his concern, rather, is the relation of German post-Kantian philosophy to British romantic literature. In some ways, perhaps, this is an old-fashioned interest, though the link to Habermas updates it for the contemporary moment. Indeed, these two aspects of Hamilton’s argument are reflexively linked in a manner characteristic of this book, and which depending on one’s perspective may seem either deliciously subtle or unpalatably elusive. The link is this: if the metaromanticism that ties romantic texts together is to be found not in a series of external relations but rather through bonds that link texts together internally, through a shared discontent with their own particular practices, then romanticism itself becomes an image or model of exactly the kind of multicultural republic that Hamilton extracts from his readings of Schlegel and Habermas. If this link holds, the result would be spectacular: the aesthetic, banished from discussions of the ideal republic, returns to ground those discussions as both enabling condition and exemplar.

My description so far should give some idea of this book’s range and complexity; it might also begin to indicate potential sources of frustration. This is a dense and complicated and immensely rewarding book; it is also, in various places, inconclusive at just those spots where one hopes for a couple of clear, declarative sentences. Some readers will doubtless find this off-putting; my own impulse, though, is to link this tendency to something that Hamilton himself analyzes in the book under the name of “reserve.” Reserve is an awareness of untapped potential; for Hamilton, what writers do with reserve determines their relationship to metaromanticism itself. Reserve, as Hamilton understands it, can be preserved for its own sake, or for the sake of the “epistemic suspense that it incurs” (9); alternatively, one can try to make something of it. What might this “something” be? Here we encounter Hamilton’s own reserve, though the general outlines are clear enough: that “something” is the multicultural republic extracted once again from Hamilton’s interpretation of Schlegel and Habermas. This shift into the political realm represents the strongest form of strong metaromanticism. Or again: “reserve” is the Kantian aesthetic itself: it implies direction and intent but refuses to name directions and intents; it is self-contained; it demands respect but doesn’t give it back. Making something of reserve, on the other hand, is the Schlegelian revision of Kant, and it means among other things exchanging aesthetic self-sufficiency for a range of possible, non-aesthetic, futures. In a final twist, though, that exchange doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on reserve, for reserve itself models the sort of ethical respect for difference that characterizes the multicultural republic.

Reserve is a concept with rich cognates for romantic-era texts, and Hamilton locates a number of them: sensuousness (in the Keats chapter); dissent (in the Coleridge and Godwin chapter); wavering (in the chapter on Scott’s Waverly); and flirting (in the Austen chapter). These various instances of reserve are held together by an awareness of their fictionality: “The area where we make ourselves up,” writes Hamilton in the chapter on Austen, “is polemical and rhetorical rather than self-evident” (173). In Hamilton’s sophisticated contribution to the never-ending debate about Austen’s politics, it is Austen’s metaromantic awareness of the rhetorical nature of her conservatism that distinguishes her from more doctrinaire versions. It is worth pondering the results of such a move: it departs decisively from a simple conservative-liberal or Whig-Tory distinction; it does so by dispensing with the question of what “Jane Austen” thought about politics and attends instead to what her narrator’s aesthetic strategies necessarily reveal about politics at a particular historical moment; and it consequently renders moot a whole series of historicist discussions that revolve around terms such as denial or displacement. For Hamilton (and the chapter on Scott makes this particularly clear), the aesthetic is the place not of denial and displacement but of revelation and (yes) history—history, that is to say, understood as knowledge of what can and cannot be said, can and cannot be thought, at particular moments in time.

Metaromanticism itself, as I noted above, employs its own forms of discursive reserve. A review is not really the place for reserve, though, so let me end by saying that I like almost everything about this book: its verve and originality, its great ambition, and—not least—its attempt to bring romantic-era literature together with philosophy. By and large this last is something from which romanticists have turned away in the past decade, and the results, while invariably interesting, have not always been inspiring. Paul Hamilton’s book, by contrast, will remind some of us why we wanted to study romanticism in the first place: because, somehow, it seemed to matter.

John Thelwall’s ‘The Peripatetic’. Ed. Judith Thompson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 447pp. $39.95 (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-8143-28882-2).

Reviewed by
Michael Scrivener
Wayne State University

Since the original 1793 edition, Thelwall’s Peripatetic had been reissued twice before Judith Thompson’s new edition, in the facsimile edition that was a part of the 1978 Garland “Romantic Context” series edited by Donald H. Reiman, and in a 1984 microfilm facsimile reprint (The Eighteenth Century series, reel 923). Recognized as a correspondent with Coleridge in the 1790s and as a poetic influence on Wordsworth, Thelwall is finally receiving the attention he deserves after long neglect thanks in part to E. P. Thompson’s work on his politics, Nicholas Roe’s work on his connection with Coleridge and Wordsworth, and especially Gregory Claeys’s edition of Thelwall’s political writing, and also in part to the reconfiguration of Romantic studies that has been going on for several decades. Thelwall’s extraordinary Peripatetic is worthy of a modern edition for which Judith Thompson (no relation to E. P.) has written a thoroughly lucid introduction of some fifty pages and has provided valuable explanatory notes, appendices, and an index.

There are no problematic textual issues with The Peripatetic, which had only one edition, and no manuscript materials seem to have survived. (A large cache of Thelwall manuscripts was last in the hands of Charles Cestre, the author of a 1906 study of Thelwall, but diligent efforts by several scholars, including E. P. Thompson, have failed to yield the location of these papers.) There is some loss but mostly gain with the passage from facsimile to reset pages: we gain a readable, single-volume, teachable text with contextualizing introduction and notes (and an extraordinarily useful index); we lose of course the connection with an authentic historical document that bears its own unique meanings. The most valiant efforts of the editor cannot avoid producing at least a few typos (and I noticed only a few). The seventeen corrections that Thompson made of obvious misspellings and typographical errors in the 1793 text are all listed and identified (56), but otherwise she has scrupulously reproduced the original, retaining “even [Thelwall’s] inconsistent eighteenth-century spelling and punctuation” (55).

The problematic issues are with the text itself. What importance does The Peripatetic have in terms of literary history? What is its genre, with its mixing of poetry and prose? There is the matter of the writing itself, something addressed by William Hazlitt in one of the most memorable put-downs in literary criticism. While praising Thelwall’s skills as an orator, he characterized Thelwall as “the flattest writer I have ever read . . . tame and trite and tedious . . . a mere drab-coloured suit in the person of the prose writer” (quoted by Thompson, 41-42). While disputing Hazlitt’s judgment, Thompson concedes that at times Thelwall’s writing falls short, describing for example one long poem on the War of the Roses as “turgid and overwrought” (404-05 n. 217). Thelwall the writer has not received the same kind of admiration as Thelwall the politician, and the put-downs—by Hazlitt, Jeffrey, and others—have endured more effectively than the praise.

Judith Thompson defends studying Thelwall’s writing closely not on the grounds of taste but on the basis of The Peripatetic’s literary innovations, the formal and generic qualities. A place to begin the discussion is the full title: The Peripatetic; or, Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society; In a Series of Politico-Sentimental Journals, In Verse and Prose of the Eccentric Excursions of Sylvanus Theophrastus, Supposed to Be Written by Himself. The narrator, Sylvanus Theophrastus—evoking the Sylvanus Urban of the Gentleman’s Magazine—speaks and takes pedestrian excursions in and near London with characters who have similarly stylized names (Ambulator, Arisor, Belmour, Wentworth). Each chapter, usually brief, contains a prose sketch of an encounter with people, landscape, ruins, and so on, as well as a poem related to the theme of the “sketch.” The focus on character sketches is Theophrastian, the sentimental journey Sternean, and the masking of characters is satirically Swiftian. Indeed, as Thompson claims, The Peripatetic is not really a novel but a satire, a Menippean satire (38) sharing the same semiotic energies as Blake’s own engagement with the genre, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794) (27-28). The apparent “carelessness” of Menippean satire conceals a “complex yet coherent intellectual pattern in which certain key ideas” provide the organizational structure (38).

Thompson illustrates that these “key ideas” are developed throughout the text during the three major journeys, each one occupying a volume of the text: a journey through the southern suburbs, then to Rochester, and finally to St. Albans, following the Thames and the old Roman road to Dover, evoking Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims (22, 34). Moving in and out of the three journeys is the story of Belmour and Sophia, a sentimental tale of love frustrated by paternal authority, but the tale is parodic and one of many examples of irony applied to the excesses of sensibility. Sensibility must answer to the “peripatetic philosophy” that puts amending the heart and expanding the mind through experience, dialogue, conversation, and travel above intensity of feeling (34, 39). A good example of what Thompson calls the “intergeneric conversation” and dialogic form of The Peripatetic is the discussion of charity (84-90). One sketch has an aggressive professional beggar who seems to be an exemplum for Hobbesian cynicism, but another sketch of an unemployed laborer becomes a point of departure for the systematic analysis of economic inequality. Thelwall therefore uses the conflict of sentimental and anti-sentimental types dialectically, moving the discourse on charity to another and higher level (40-41). An episode, then, that might seem merely sentimental “becomes, when it is read as part of an intergeneric conversation, a complex critique of sentimental literature” (41).

Although The Peripatetic has examples of poetry and prose that are anti-literary and anticipate Wordsworth’s critique of poetic diction—the blank verse poems are the most successful in this vein (78-80, for example)—much of the poetry uses poetic diction and the prose, while hardly Johnsonian, is rarely governed by plebeian speech. Thelwall, however, does not unthinkingly use literary language but ironizes it. As Thompson explains:

Thelwall revolutionizes literature not by escaping convention but by highlighting it, forcing his reader to see language as a tissue of conventions and to interrogate them through ironic contrast, rather than by appealing to an ideal of transparent or natural language and pure idea. (43)

The Peripatetic’s “collage of commonplaces” therefore “works by juxtaposition” (43). Thelwall’s text creates a “carnivalesque extravaganza of multiple ironies and violent contradictions” as well as “shifting tones and mingling voices, in which metaphysics and materialism, the literal and the metaphorical, collide and fracture” (45). These Bakhtinian ironies involve the reader in complex synthetic and dialectical activities that are similar to the labors Blake’s implied reader performs in his ironic texts.

I have an obvious investment in Thelwall’s writing, having published a book (Seditious Allegories, 2001) and numerous essays on his work, but a strong argument can be made that one does not understand Romanticism in sufficient depth if one has not engaged seriously the oeuvre of Thelwall, whose most important early work is The Peripatetic. Specialists in Wordsworth who work their way carefully through The Peripatetic will be struck by anticipations of familiar Wordsworthian qualities, such as childhood memories in conversational blank verse that describes the acquisition of the poetic identity. The commentary on Dryden, Charlotte Smith, Milton, and Pope is a valuable and little discussed early Romantic reflection on kinds of poetry and canon-formation—as valuable and little discussed as Thelwall’s numerous representations of the sublime, picturesque, and beautiful. The Peripatetic’s political meanings are both subtle and explicit, as Reeves’s loyalist association is a prominent antagonist. A distinctive aspect of Thelwall’s text is the clarity of class oppression, perhaps best represented in the sketch entitled “The Old Peasant” (346-47), which is played against another sketch of a laborer who is a real scoundrel (“The Informer” [342-46]).

Let me conclude the review with praise for Thompson’s “Editor’s Notes” (383-406) that are remarkably useful but also restrained and not at all pedantic. A true sign of the genuine scholar is knowing what needs to be explained and what does not. In addition to providing essential biographical and historical information, Thompson points out concisely Wordsworthian parallels, identifies unattributed quotations, and locates literary sources. I especially enjoy the topographical notes that take the reader up to the present, so that we learn that the late eighteenth-century superstitions about the Bourn-Thurlby woods survive into the present, as she reports that some of the local residents “assured me that motorway accidents were caused by mysterious forces emanating from the woods” (397 n. 148).

The literary criticism Thompson deploys in the introduction—which will remain the fullest and most adequate discussion of The Peripatetic for the foreseeable future—is inventive, true to the unique features of the text, and valuable for forming a base for other readers to make further discoveries. The scholarship is thorough, careful, and exhaustive. This is a splendid edition of an important Romantic text that should no longer be neglected.

Anthony Jarrells, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ix + 229 pp. $80.00 (Hdbk; 1-4039-4107-6).

Reviewed by
C. Durning Carroll

Anthony S. Jarrells’s book, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature, argues that the Glorious Revolution served for the British of the eighteenth century as a model for how to prevent the sort of bloody revolution that was to happen a century later in France. For Jarrells, it was the peculiar ability of writing (and the way writing was ultimately shaped into “literature” during Britain’s long eighteenth century) to configure the wishes and hopes of ordinary people that kept England from France’s passionate zealotry. Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions suggests a dialog between non-fictional writing—more ideological because it aimed explicitly to persuade—and the imaginative genres of poetry, fiction and drama, whose political and ideological aims were absent, or at least were rendered covert through fictionalization. This conversation between imaginative and persuasive writing, and the way both worked together to meet the needs of the people, regulated Britain’s revolutionary impulses. Jarrells explains that during the eighteenth century “not only was the literary narrowed to exclude, in large part, moral philosophy, historiography, and political economy, but this narrowed focus also helped to narrow the range of opinion in the larger world beyond letters” (98). Jarrells’s central thesis is that the narrowed focus of literature brought about by non-fictional writing helped depoliticize literature and refocus it on the individual.

The introduction and first chapter provide much of the historical background for Jarrells’s argument. These pages give a good overview of the literary mood of the late eighteenth century, providing a clear sense of the important debates of the period, especially between the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin forces in British literature. The rhetorical sparring between Paine and Burke is particularly relevant here, for as Jarrells cleverly argues, Paine’s in absentia treason trial for publishing The Rights of Man was a sign that the British government (and thus to some extent the British people) had already accepted Paine as the personal representative of a populist movement. Burke’s own role as an MP and his later canonization as the patron saint of conservatism also demonstrated this process of linking political to written representation. As Jarrells explains, during this period “writing became a kind of extra-institutional voice of the people, ‘the people’ themselves being defined in the eighteenth century by their exclusion from governing institutions” (30). Jarrells’s narrative shows how a generalized “people’s voice” was formed into genres as a response to this exclusion from power. These chapters also set up one of Jarrells’s most perceptive insights—that one of the key differences between British and continental thinkers was British opposition to the idea of the “system,” the continental preference for principles of law and politics derived from abstractions and axioms instead of from custom and concrete events. Jarrells compellingly links Britain’s anti-systematic tendencies to the rise of imaginative literature and to its uncanny ability to channel human passions.

Chapter Two reads Wordsworth’s poems in light of Jacobin writings of the era. Jarrells argues that Wordsworth’s commitment to the use of ordinary language in poetry helped depoliticize writing, while alienating it from the systematic thinking associated in the English mind with France and Germany. The focus on individual instead of collective experience in Wordsworth’s poetry, Jarrells explains, was the poet’s attempt to regulate the violent impulses of a nation on edge. Describing the mood of 1790s Britain, Jarrells adds “there is the sense [in the period] that literature—good literature, well-conducted literature—will play a role in aiding or averting a violent outcome” (77). As Jarrells points out, giving literature these attributes meant, in part, nationalizing it—creating a uniquely British literary identity. In his section on Coleridge, Jarrells describes how Coleridge contributed to this process of individualization and national identity by using non-fiction to create a distinctly English literary canon of imaginative works that would stand apart from foreign writing. Jarrells connects this formation of British identity to the growth of genre. The richness of imaginative writing in Britain, Jarrells puts forth, gave that country a rhetorical structure distinct from the continental one.

Chapter Three is a detailed analysis of the works of William Godwin and his connections to radicalism. Despite his radical politics, Godwin became a devotee of individual over systematic thought. His distinction from Wordsworth, however, lay not only in choosing the novel for the expression of his ideas, but also in a certain anti-populist stance that sought to preserve social distinctions even as it worked to dismantle the social and governmental institutions that thwarted individualistic thinking. Godwin attempted to keep the political in the literary even as he also wanted to use the literary to desystematize the political. Jarrells argues, “Godwin’s move towards an individualist, removed literary sphere is a move away from a literature based on publicity—specifically, on the violent tendencies of the public model of letters” (103). Jarrells also links this individualistic strain in literature to women’s writing of the era, (including that of Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft) and their own arguments for equal rights.

Chapters Four and Five, constituting the second part of the book, read the novels of Scott and Austen as key forces in the Romantic reform of literature. Jarrells argues that Scott’s historical novels rewrite history along individualistic lines. Scott’s novels “theorized the modern world [he] wished to enter by displacing the violence that accompanied it into the dark ages of the past” (155). This form of misremembering the recent past gave Scott’s Romantic present a rosy tint undimmed by blood. Austen’s own novels, by avoiding politics altogether, showed the distance individualism and genre had already come. By helping to form and shape the novel, Scott and Austen encouraged the further growth of disciplinarity in literature, turning the focus of imaginative works away from broadly social concerns and towards the analysis of individuals in their microcosmic social relations.

While Jarrells does an outstanding job of delineating the debates between the key thinkers of British Romanticism about how the rights of the people were to be constructed in the light of 1688, his argument might have been helped at moments by taking a longer view of British history. English history is distinct in the way it has continually allied writing with political liberation. As early as 1100, for example, King Henry I issued his Charter of Liberties delineating the reciprocal obligations he and his barons would hence-forth respect. Henry’s Charter of Liberties provided the legal precedent for the Magna Carta of 1215. That document, in turn, established a precedent for the Petition of Right, signed by Charles I in 1628, granting powerful rights to Parliament and consequently sharply limiting his royal prerogative. Charles’ own failure to respect those rights he had already granted led to Britain’s rather bloody Civil War. The Glorious Revolution too, produced its own legal document—the 1689 English Bill of Rights. Taken together these documents gave the British people an established set of constitutional rights that existed well before the emergence of Romantic writing and its separation into genres. If writing was a socially-regulative force, it is likely that these legal (and ostensibly non-literary) documents played an important role in that regulation.

Even if the Romantic construction of the Glorious Revolution as bloodless was a fiction, as Jarrells so convincingly shows, that fiction had long been enabled by Britain’s constitutional history. The Glorious Revolution and its later re-interpretation as bloodless may merely have been the logical next step along a long road of expressing individual rights through writing. In trying to understand why the British did not rebel when France did and why imaginative literature rose, this running public rights debate may well have had an important role to play. Acknowledging and referring to this history might have helped the reader better understand how the movement from public writing to the inward turn of literature and of a distinctively British literary canon, actually occurred.

Andrew Bennett, Wordsworth Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 249pp; illus. $101.00 (Hdbk; ISBN-10: 052187419X; ISBN-13: 978-0521874199)

Reviewed by
Brian Bates
University of Denver

In Wordsworth Writing, Andrew Bennett challenges several pervasive myths about Wordsworth, revisits the most significant cruxes of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism, and sheds fresh light on Wordsworth’s poetic practice. Bennett carries out this three-pronged revision by questioning the assumption behind many studies of Wordsworth’s life and poetry: that Wordsworth composed poetry without actually writing. Wordsworth has long been considered a poet who composed aloud while walking outdoors, but Bennett contends that this view of Wordsworth as a spontaneous poet of nature misrepresents how he wrote the majority of his poetry. Instead, Bennett demonstrates that Wordsworth’s concern with the process of writing—from thinking about writing, to inscribing words on the page, false starts, writing blocks, and re-writing—defined his poetic identity, choice of subject matter, and passion for poetry.

Although Bennett’s argument cuts across the grain of much Wordsworth criticism, it also explores why so many critics have upheld the notion that for this Lake poet writing and, more particularly, written words were worthless. From the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800) to the Fenwick Notes (1843), Wordsworth often publicized his written poetry as a kind of speech and fashioned himself as a poet who composed extemporaneously because he immersed himself in natural and inspiring surroundings. In chapter one, Bennett traces how this branding of Wordsworth occurred in the nineteenth century and then closely examines the evidence that critics, biographers, and painters have drawn upon to interpret Wordsworth’s poetic habits. After demonstrating that this evidence is sparse, ambiguous, and occasionally unreliable, Bennett turns to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals because they offer the closest account of William’s perambulatory compositions. Bennett concludes that Dorothy’s uses of “composing” and description of her brother’s writing process reveal that William most often composed indoors and that when he was outside, he primarily sat down to write while composing. Chapter one reconfigures Wordsworth as a working and often frustrated writer. However, this unmasking of Wordsworth does not recount how many of Wordsworth’s contemporary critics and satirists saw through his public attempts to divorce writing from composition. They lambasted him, early and often, for presenting himself as a poet of nature who labors without laboring.

Bennett’s empirical proof of Wordsworth’s writing habits and quibbling about how much Wordsworth composed aloud or wrote with a pen might seem inconsequential. Chapter two, however, quells such doubts by turning to “the most famous example of the Wordsworthian denial of writing,” his poem “Tintern Abbey” (45). Bennett maintains that Wordsworth’s title change in 1815 from “Lines Written” to “Lines Composed” reveals most acutely Wordsworth’s efforts to present himself as a spontaneous poet of nature who disengaged writing from oral composition. Most nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics, including New Historicists, have reified this image of Wordsworth composing the entire poem aloud on his walking tour. Bennett, however, argues that the process of writing the poem in Bristol, at the end of this tour, structures its thematic ideas and form. From its deictics “these,” “here,” and “this,” and tension between present and past composition, to its repetitions, absences, and figurations of the country and city, “Tintern Abbey” lauds speech and natural inspiration but also anxiously records how necessary the city and writing were for its creation and are for its reception.

Chapter three further probes this paradox of speech vs. writing by focusing on Wordsworth’s conception of the epitaph. Bennett argues that Wordsworth’s strained descriptions in his “Essays Upon Epitaphs” of the appropriate language for epitaphs—an emotional balancing of immediacy and particularity (speech) with deliberation and universality (writing)—are “bound up with the recognition that writing is the necessary ground of speech” (72). In the first half of the chapter, Bennett relates the writing theories of Jacques Derrida, David Olsen, and Roy Harris to his argument. Unfortunately, this extended theoretical treatment obfuscates many of Bennett’s claims about Wordsworth’s “Essays Upon Epitaphs.” Chapter four more usefully examines Wordsworth’s writing theory by turning to Wordsworth’s inscription poems and his “bibliographical graffiti” in Coleridge’s 1796 Poems (90). Wordsworth’s inscription poems represent an impossibility because they foreground historical and physical acts of writing from which they are displaced. After all, readers encounter them in a book, not at their original location. Bennett’s point is that such paradoxical acts and places of inscription—even Wordsworth’s first scribbling of Home at Grasmere in and against Coleridge’s Poems—define Wordsworth’s poetics. As the next chapter explains, the secret behind Wordsworth’s poetry, particularly in the “Preface” to and poems of Lyrical Ballads, concerns the break-down of oral communication. Bennett suggests that Wordsworth’s passion disrupts poetic composition (speech) but also makes his (written) brand of poetry possible. Wordsworth’s poetry records and gains its energy from the delays and deferrals that occur when speech falters and writing becomes a necessary supplement.

The next two chapters deal with Wordsworth’s self-composition, his vexed writing of Book I of The Prelude, and the conflict between philosophy and poetry. In chapter six, Bennett takes on a host of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism in his efforts to explain how philosophy “unhinges” Wordsworth’s poetry, particularly The Recluse. However, philosophy also spurs Wordsworth to write poetry, namely The Prelude, which hinges on his failure to think philosophically and on his ability to write through and about this perplexity. Bennett also re-locates debates about what the Ur-text and the biographical or psychological origins of The Prelude might be to examine instead the significance of Wordsworth’s “compositional stutterings” in Book I of his autobiographical poem (155). From Bennett’s perspective, The Prelude is about learning how to write. Writing discomposes Wordsworth, doubles back on itself, and necessitates revision on the page and of the self. Far from the therapeutic model of writing as cure, so often held up by Wordsworth scholars, writing produces disturbances, not resolution—consider the “Spots of Time” in The Prelude—that turn on, and lead to, more writing. In his final chapter, Bennett asks that closer attention be paid to the history of Wordsworth writing, and he points out that too many critics and editors have reproduced the poet’s narrative of originary loss in the “Intimations Ode,” “Tintern Abbey,” and “Elegiac Stanzas.” Wordsworth’s tropes of obscurity and loss cannot be explained away by singling out particular socio-political or psycho-biographical contexts behind the writing of his poems. What scholars continue to overlook is that Wordsworth discovers, experiences, and articulates loss through the process of writing.

Wordsworth Writing signals a new and invigorating direction for Wordsworth studies and studies in Romanticism. Bennett’s argument also suggests that any critical exploration of authorship must historicize and closely investigate particular acts of writing. The strengths of this book lie in Bennett’s careful and insightful returns to canonical poems and cruxes of twentieth-century Wordsworth criticism. However, the weaknesses of Wordsworth Writing arise from what these canonical concerns leave out and appear particularly in chapters where theorizing about writing or rehashing past criticism supersedes closer readings of individual poems. For example, chapter five, “Wordsworth’s Passion,” which centers on failed speech, ends with a few pages that only gloss “Resolution and Independence” instead of providing a new reading of the poem. Bennett also is so focused on the critical reception of individual poems that he does not probe what the process of writing might have meant for Wordsworth as he obsessively collected together and edited his poems into volumes. Fortunately, Bennett’s argument and methodology open the door for exploring this and many other questions about Wordsworth’s poetic practice. Wordsworth Writing should be considered a touchstone for Wordsworth studies in the twenty-first century.

Adam Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 318pp. ISBN-13: 9780521879118 (Hdbk.), $103.99

Reviewed by
Matthew VanWinkle
Ohio University

Adam Potkay’s ambitious study provides a deep background for a word of particular interest to Romantic era writers, a word that since has fallen into relative disfavor. By tracing instances of joy through a range of religious and literary texts, Potkay seeks to establish two constants in its variable history. The first is that joy, as distinct from words or concepts nearly synonymous, bears a close relationship to narrative. The second is that joy is inextricably involved with questions of ethics. Given how rapidly he surveys two and a half millennia of cultural history in the West, Potkay cannot always give each of these claims equal or consistent attention. Even so, he develops these claims persuasively, supporting them with a richness of detail and a clarity that still recognizes complexity. The result is a thoughtful and a bracing book that suggests both the need for and the appeal of further scholarly interest in its subject.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding supplies Potkay’s initial definition of joy: “a delight of the Mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a Good” (4). With this formulation as the foundation for the ethical dimension of joy, Potkay articulates its narrative features in terms of reunion and fulfillment. Its unique relationship to narrative distinguishes joy from the emotions and experiences that it otherwise closely resembles. Unlike happiness, joy cannot be pursued; it is a something given, usually unexpected in its arrival no matter how long it has been anticipated. Unlike ecstasy, joy retains some sense of self, however transformed; it never fully eradicates individual personality. Happiness always tells the same story of virtue, while the radical disruption of ecstasy resists narration altogether. Joy is a resting place, if not entirely a conclusion, the satisfaction of desire rather than the keenest experience of it. This hesitation between expectation and completion means that it has a wider variety of stories to tell.

If its uncertain proximity to conclusion gives joy a narrative vitality, it also complicates its ethical significance. Taking the gospel of John as the point of departure for his first chapter, Potkay emphasizes the ways in which joy locates the tension between self and other in the Christian tradition. The joy of salvation involves either the absorption of the self in a larger good or the participation of a transformed self in this same good. In both cases the self finds its reward as a member of a chosen community, in a belonging that surpasses longing. Yet the unity of this belonging defines itself against a recalcitrant larger world. In its most extreme form, as it sometimes appears in the writings of Augustine, the joyous reunion with God precludes even this belonging; enjoying the company of one’s fellow believers becomes only a means to the greater end. While Aquinas, supplementing the gospel of John with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, reasserts the virtue of finding joy in one’s fellow creatures, the ambiguities of individual and communal salvation remain a concern both for eschatology and for psychology.

A version of this concern becomes even more acute in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, as Potkay argues in his third chapter. As sacramental traditions lose some of their ability to reassure, the need to display the conviction of one’s salvation grows more urgent. Where Augustine might have recognized a serene, introspective sense of fullness as joy, Luther places a new emphasis on joy as the public expression of gladness. At the same time, Luther acknowledges that the expression of joy does not in itself produce the foretaste of reunion with God that it hopes to represent. This disparity provokes unprecedented misgivings over the dangers of joylessness. Potkay expertly explores the significance of these misgivings in the first book of The Faerie Queene, where Redcrosse is unable to fully vanquish—indeed, comes to resemble in subtle ways—the treacherous Sans-Joy. The perils of joylessness also shadow the sermons of John Donne, whose personal religious history (Potkay suggests) would make the story of joy as reunion especially alluring and fraught. On one hand, Donne’s championing of ecclesiastical joy “would seem to allow for an enlightened religious pluralism.” On the other, “its stance of embattled group separatism generates further, intra-group separatism” (87-88). The inner experience of joy is shared by all denominations, eroding their ostensible differences; the increasingly various ways of articulating this experience reinforce these differences.

To this point the eschatological significance of joy frequently obscures its ethical dimension; Bunyan’s pilgrim earns his place in the heavenly choir in part by turning his back on those closest to him. Potkay’s fourth chapter proposes that the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century gives renewed (perhaps unprecedented) attention to joy’s ethical characteristics. Shaftesbury, drawing eclectically and indirectly from the Stoics, attributes joy to the contemplation of benevolent action, usually but not exclusively one’s own. Provocatively, Shaftesbury detaches joy’s delight from any system of posthumous retribution; it is an attendant virtue rather than a primary goal, ratifying moral ends without becoming an end in itself. Evangelicals throughout the eighteenth century objected to this vision of joy, arguing that it proceeded from an overly optimistic vision of fallen human nature. For those drawn to Shaftesbury’s naturalistic morality grounded in emotional experience, however, joy becomes at the same time more various and less urgent than it was for previous ages. Potkay illustrates this new variety with a deft reading of Joseph Andrews. Fielding’s novel presents the earthier joy of Joseph and Fanny reunited alongside Father Adams’s more philosophic delight in contemplating their reunion. This sympathetic response marks a class difference, more immediate in Shaftesbury’s benign aristocratic condescension but still palpable in Fielding. Joy as a primarily emotional response even in the high-minded parson emphasizes the novel’s moral that “justice, fled from the institutions raised in its name, is to be found in the untutored responses of good-hearted country gentlemen” (111). “Untutored” clashes with “gentleman” here; if earthly joys are leveling in some respects, they remain distinct in others.

Wordsworthian joy, the focus of Potkay’s fifth chapter, marks the limit of ethical joy as articulated by Enlightenment writers. At first glance “The Old Cumberland Beggar” offers a rustic and circumspect version of Shaftesbury’s urbane and magnanimous delight in philanthropy. Even as it approves the edifying generosity that the beggar elicits, however, the poem seems to recognize that this is an affective economy on the brink of extinction. Small, familiar charities, the poor extending aid to the absolutely destitute, can only afford to help the neediest few; the wider poverty of urban settings dwarfs this modestly benign impulse. Turning from this limit, Wordsworth finds in “Tintern Abbey” a joy grounded in the recognition of mere being, in a sense of participation in the larger whole of nature. This joy imposes limits of its own, demanding in practice the disengagement from the political sympathies of Wordsworth’s youth. In theory, however, it is more radically leveling than these sympathies, situating human consciousness as a thing among other things in the natural world. We are not only not superior to each other, we are not even superior to the nonhuman in our profound connection to it. This diffusive sense of “we” that arises from Wordsworthian joy, Potkay contends, stands as a chastening influence on the poet’s sublimely egotistical eye. It also locates precisely what the Victorians found so moving about Wordsworth, and not only as consolation for the dust and din of an abrasive existence. The elation of his natural piety reserved a potential for utopian renewal in this life rather than the next.

Where Wordsworthian joy produces a diffuse but palpable sense of participation in a larger whole, joy for Coleridge remains a vicarious consolation to a detached observer. Potkay calls this vision of joy “aesthetic,” the contemplation of feeling mediated through others rather than the immediate experience of passion itself. In poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” and “The Nightingale,” Coleridge strives to imagine the pure rejoicing of another in a purely disinterested way. This joy is rarer than Wordsworth’s, but also, in its attention to others, more genuinely liberating. In support of this view Potkay strikingly but persuasively reads the train of substitutions in the revisions of “Dejection” as not merely evasive or defensive. They speak instead to the joy of others as an experience that transcends individual concerns. In spite of this liberation, however, a liberation that Potkay shrewdly reads as influencing later women poets such as Hemans and Dickinson, joy doesn’t emancipate Coleridge himself. The disadvantage of aesthetic joy is its neediness, its insistence that others model the delight that the spectator cannot achieve himself. In this respect it revives Luther’s anxiety about the gap between the experience of joy and its expression. It also risks rendering the appreciative spectator callous to those who must display the more direct experience of passion that he enjoys. Potkay takes The Picture of Dorian Gray as a cautionary tale about the limits of aesthetic joy as imagined by Coleridge. Wilde’s novel at once “stigmatizes and celebrates the act of seeing others not as ends (or stories) in themselves but as means of spectatorial self-gratification” (161).

Coleridge’s vision of joy remains problematically but palpably Christian. Potkay’s next chapter explores a range of Romantic era writers—Schiller, Blake, Percy Shelley, and Mormon prophet Joseph Smith—that he considers distinctively post-Christian. (It is an unusual constellation, especially considering the omission of the poet whose apprentice work begins “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”) These writers share a commitment to a radical notion of forgiveness that levels mundane hierarchical distinctions even as it exalts the human practice of this virtue to divine status. The right to punish, traditionally reserved for God, descends to humankind only to be honored in a refusal to exercise it. The joy Schiller finds in radical forgiveness appeals to a cosmopolitan fraternity consonant with the early promise of the French Revolution. For Blake, radical forgiveness exposes a cloying, disingenuous selflessness at the heart of Christian ethics and replaces it with joy as erotic bliss, the union and reunion with another’s body. The key adjective for Shelley’s vision of joy is “undivided”; it implies a Wordsworthian immersion in a larger natural world, a sense of individual integrity that borders on the asocial, and a transcendent experience undiluted by the possibility of sorrow. Prometheus Unbound provides the fullest articulation of this complex joy, grounding it in the most radical vision of forgiveness yet. In Joseph Smith’s theology, joy is no less than human possibility graduating into the divine; we are what Jehovah himself once was and may yet be what he is.

These later visions of joy in particular have tendencies we have come to suspect, specifically the privileging of the (erotic) experience and satisfaction of men over the experience and satisfaction of women. Potkay is right to register this, and also right in noticing that these misgivings aren’t wholly absent from those writers who elicit them from us now. Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion privileges a masculine fantasy of free love, but it also anticipates some of its costs. (American Beauty, Potkay’s choice for the late twentieth century’s exemplary work on joy, feels less searching in comparison.) As he traces the career of joy over the twentieth century, Potkay is similarly responsible in charting the appropriation of the term for totalitarian and consumerist purposes. These appropriations either mask or erode the specific experience of joy, and the process may have started earlier than Potkay suggests. His eighth chapter on tragic joy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century already reveals some difficulty in sustaining the distinctions that have guided his attention to joy in earlier ages. This infuses the study with a sense of anticlimax, but the very decrescendo emphasizes the value and interest of this work for scholars of Romantic era writing. The story of joy was uniquely rich and fraught at this moment, and Potkay’s study admirably illuminates its appeal and its tensions.

The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 326 pp. ISBN-10: 0521781477(Hdbk)/0521786770(Ppbk), $90.00/$27.99

Reviewed by
R. Paul Yoder
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Each volume in the Cambridge Companion series provides a sort of snapshot of the state of the art concerning its given subject at the time of its publication, and this is certainly the case with the Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Morris Eaves has put together an excellent collection of overview essays on Blake’s contexts and works. After Eaves’ Introduction, the book is divided unevenly into two parts: “Perspectives” and “Blake’s Works.” All essays in both parts include endnotes and suggestions for further reading. The point of the essays is not so much to make new arguments as to synthesize the body of critical knowledge into a useful companionable form, and in this the volume succeeds quite well. The only glaring omission from the collection is a discussion of Blake and gender, a difficult issue for which a summary essay, if not a true synthesis, would be especially useful.

Eaves’s Introduction establishes the metaphor of a journey of exploration for reading Blake. Eaves readily acknowledges the difficulty of Blake’s work and the strangeness of what passes for “meaning” there: “The basic strategy behind this Cambridge Companion is to respond to the difficulties with a variety of critical and historical explanations from several perspectives which seem to offer the most hope of catching Blake in the act of meaning something we can understand” (1). He juxtaposes the “simplifications” often used to make Blake more accessible to the “complications” that must be recognized to enter more fully into Blake’s world and work. Eaves asserts that Blake was “fundamentally resistant” to the “specialization” that underlies the social routines of “rationalization, scientific thinking, professionalization, industrialization, commercialization, institutionalization, modernization” (7). Perhaps Eaves’s most suggestive comment is that the “underlying problem of recognition is at the heart of Blake’s difficulties then [in his own time] and for us now” (9). That is, Blake’s readers in his own time could not quite determine just what he was about, and in our time, readers may not recognize the social context or traditions of thought in which he worked. Moreover, the problem of recognition is also thematic for Blake, for as Eaves puts it, “Blake’s epic plots depict a complex process of masking and subsequent confusion and misery, followed by equally complex unmasking, the identification of negations posing as metaphors, and the restoration of the true (original) links of identification” (11).

The “Perspectives” section of the collection provides a good introduction to Blake and to Blake studies. Aileen Ward’s “factual narrative” (35) seeks to “disentangl[e] as much as possible” Blake’s life from the legend (19). Nevertheless, she is selective about which facts and which legends. She recounts the illiteracy of Blake’s wife and the story of how Blake’s dead brother, Robert, revealed to him the idea of illuminated printing. She mentions the “unconscious homosexuality” of Blake’s patron William Hayley, but not Hayley’s supposed sexual advances toward Mrs. Blake. Whatever the final status of these gray areas, Ward’s summary of Blake’s life is very good, and her paragraphs on Blake’s ideas concerning the Last Judgment and on his illustrations to Dante, “Blake’s most drastic act of reinterpretation” (33), are excellent.

Joseph Viscomi uses the “Printing House in Hell” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a guide for describing Blake’s printing process. Drawing from his own earlier work, Viscomi debunks, or at least qualifies, many common misconceptions about Blake’s work. For example, whereas it was once a given that each copy of Blake’s illuminated books was a meticulously unique work of art, Viscomi points out, “Making each impression exactly repeatable … was not really possible when working by hand with an assistant. While each copy produced was a unique work of art, most impressions printed and colored at the same time do not differ very much … Making each impression very different would have required more labor and time” (55-6). Viscomi also reminds us that Blake’s illuminated books represent relatively brief and sporadic periods in the artist’s long productive life: the books were “produced as fine ‘limited editions.’ They were not invented to secure financial independence, and they didn’t … [The books] were mostly underwritten by his commercial work” (60).

In “Blake’s Language in Poetic Form” Susan J. Wolfson questions whether Blake’s poetic practice is as “anti-formalistic” (63) as some of his pronouncements suggest. Her answer is that while Blake tends to avoid most poetic forms as such, he does use the material form of the printed page to add layers of meaning to his texts — as in the end-of-line hyphenation of “me-tals” in Urizen or the famous “HEAR” acrostic in stanza 3 of “London.” Wolfson’s overall point is that Blake rejected Milton’s notion of blank verse as the verse of liberty, liberating himself so that he was able to exploit the possibilities of, for example, enjambment, a longer line and various types of rhyme. Oddly, on a somewhat different issue, Wolfson makes a good point that the “truncation” of King Edward the Third is a “formal determination, not a sketch left a ‘fragment’” (76), but elsewhere refers to the apparently complete America A Prophecy as a “fragment” (64) without offering any explanation for that assessment.

In “Blake as a Painter” David Bindman divides Blake’s career into 3 sections, “The young history painter, 1779-88,” “From the great color prints to the Butts Bible, 1795-c. 1810” and “Public failure and private success, c. 1809-c. 1820.” Bindman traces Blake’s ambitions to create “history” paintings, intended “to raise the morality and taste of the public through their exposure to paintings of virtuous and heroic conduct from the great ages of mankind” (86), and his influences both artistic and literary. Instead of oils, Blake painted in watercolor and what he incorrectly called “fresco,” and Bindman offers an excellent appreciation of the weaknesses of the latter and Blake’s mastery of the former. Best of all is Bindman’s discussion of how Blake’s illustrations to the works of other writers (Young, Gray, Milton, Dante) and the Bible reveal a “visual language acutely sensitive to artistic as well as literary traditions” (108). “Blake’s designs,” Bindman says, “constitute an active engagement with each text by an artist who never doubted that he was the peer of any author” (85).

In “The Political Aesthetic of Blake’s Images” Saree Makdisi argues that reading Blake is “really an ongoing re-reading” (112) of a given image, text or portion of a text as the reader moves back and forth within a larger “virtual text” comprising not just a single poem or book, but Blake’s entire corpus and the traditions within which he worked (126). Makdisi shows how Blake recontextualizes each repetition or “iteration” of a phrase, image or even an entire book so that it means differently than in other iterations in other contexts. Finally, he argues that “the very way we have learned to read is precisely what prevents us from reading Blake properly” (111). In other words, the chief impediment to reading Blake’s work is the way we have been taught to read, a literary aesthetic that must have political, philosophical and economic implications.

Jon Mee spends much of “Blake’s Politics of History” distinguishing Blake from other republican writers of the day. Mee notes that while Blake was “always a deeply political writer” and saw himself as a “republican artist,” Blake’s republicanism was committed to community or “brotherhood,” and so “may have been opposed to the abstract individualism of emergent nineteenth-century liberalism” (134). Mee cautions that “radical opposition during [Blake’s] lifetime was a heterogeneous matter” and that “not all republicans were in any simple way disciples of Paine” (134). Mee notes, of course, Blake’s attachment to the radicals associated with Joseph Johnson, but he points out that Blake’s “lifelong enthusiasm for visionary experiences and a correlative skepticism about the power of Reason mark an important difference” between Blake and the Johnson circle (138). Indeed, Blake’s involvement with political movements of his day is complicated by Blake’s tendency to “[treat] contemporary politics in terms of biblical precedents” (138).

In “Blake and Religion” Robert Ryan presents a very good summary of Blake’s position in relation to other religious movements of his day, including millenarianism, Deism and Dissenters, and he examines Blake’s attempts to “demythologize” Christianity by “remythologizing” it “in terms of his own tale of the Zoas” (155). Ryan argues that “In a time of intense political agitation [Blake] came to believe that a radical transformation of the nation’s religious consciousness was the first prerequisite to serious political or economic reform” (150). Despite Blake’s perception of the “total corruption of Christianity by what he sometimes called state religion and sometimes natural religion or Deism” (153), Ryan contends that Blake did not reject Christianity per se, but rather Christianity as it had been appropriated and controlled by the government and certain philosophical perspectives. Indeed, Ryan argues that Blake’s understanding of Jesus “is close enough to orthodox doctrine to be called authentically Christian” (161). The essay’s strongest aspect is Ryan’s discussion of the religious implications of Blake’s mythology, in which he says, “Blake came to understand the history of religion as the story, not only of perpetual antagonism between authoritarian dogmatism [Urizen] and radical iconoclasm [Orc], but of a more complex three-way interaction in which the imaginative, prophetic impulse in humanity arbitrates, even cultivates, a continuing conflict between belief and skepticism” (164).

In “Blake and Romanticism,” David Simpson surveys various attempts to define Romanticism, asking how Blake figures in each attempt. He finds that Blake is marginal to almost any definition of Romanticism, with the exception of that proposed by Harold Bloom in which Blake is central. Most theorists of Romanticism, Simpson suggests, were not very interested in Blake, but nevertheless seemed to find that “he cannot be ignored but cannot be quite integrated: the traditions which we need to know to make some sense of [Blake] are not the traditions that have gone into the favored models of Romanticism” (178). Blake finds a better home among “empirical-historical” critics, including David Erdman, E. P. Thompson and Marilyn Butler, who are less interested in defining something called “Romanticism,” but who, Simpson says, take for granted the importance of Blake’s work “to a tradition of radical dissent and political reference” (180).

Because of the spatial restrictions, the four essays in the section “Blake’s Works” feel a bit cramped. Nelson Hilton’s essay surveys Blake’s work from Poetical Sketches through the Songs of Experience, including Thel, Songs of Innocence, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Tiriel and (very briefly) All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, and The French Revolution. The discussions of Poetical Sketches and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell account for almost half of the essay, Sketches because it anticipates so many of Blake’s later themes, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell because “More than perhaps any other of his works, [it] played a central role in the mid-Victorian re-invention of Blake and has benefited ever since from that positioning” (201). Hilton’s emphasis throughout is on Blake’s engagement with language, describing, for example, Songs of Innocence as a “series of vignettes concerning the psyche’s birth into language and protracted journey toward fuller awareness of the world of signs and sense exemplified and conveyed primarily by language” (198). Like Hilton, Andrew Lincoln surveys several texts (America, Europe, The Song of Los, Urizen, Ahania, The Book of Los and The Four Zoas), dividing the discussion into three parts: “Global revolution,” “Origins” and “Vala or The Four Zoas.” The bulk of the discussion focuses on Urizen and the Zoas as the most important works from this period, and Lincoln traces the development of Blake’s inquiry into the global human condition by examining the relationships among Blake’s mythological characters.

Mary Lynn Johnson’s essay on Milton is the most satisfying of the four in this section. Her confrontation with the intricacies and difficulties of Milton is sharply focused and informative as she situates the poem within “what became [Blake’s] Decade of Milton, 1800-1810” (235). In his essay Robert Essick focuses primarily on Jerusalem, offering a good summary of current thinking about the poem’s problematic structure. He then uses that poem as an entry into Blake’s later works, including The Ghost of Abel, Laocoon, “On Homer,” “On Virgil” and the illustrations for Dante, Virgil’s Pastorals and the book of Job.

Alexander Gourlay’s “Guide to Further Reading” offers a very useful list (with some annotation) of editions, biographies, critical introductions and collections, periodicals, bibliographies, concordances and dictionaries for the study of Blake and his works. He calls S. Foster Damon’s Blake Dictionary “an essential tool for Blake scholars at all levels,” but he cautions that beginners “should use it with care”: “Damon is always illuminating, but doesn’t consistently explain how he arrived at his insights” (291). This is good advice, even more applicable to Gourlay’s own “Glossary” in this volume. Two examples make clear the Glossary’s strengths and weaknesses. “Eternity,” Gourlay writes, “for Blake was not simply an infinite amount of time but rather the absence of the illusion of linear time and its sequentiality” (276); this description and the two sentences that follow it comprise a wonderfully concise explanation of one of the most difficult concepts in Blake’s work. On the other hand, Gourlay’s entry on Golgonooza is all too brief and a bit misleading: “The city of Golgonooza is the human body seen from a visionary perspective” (277). In some sense, Gourlay’s statement may be valid, but what then to make of Blake’s own identification of Golgonooza as “the spiritual four-fold London” (Milton 6:1, 20:40), or the fact that “Golgonooza is namd Art & Manufacture by mortal men” (Milton 24:50)?

Taken as a whole, the essays in the Cambridge Companion to William Blake mesh well together. Viscomi’s insight into the variations among copies provides a counter weight to Makdisi’s discussion of Blake’s effort to avoid factory-like repetition. Mee’s distinguishing of Blake from other republicans on religious grounds opens the way for Ryan’s remarks on Blake’s view of the need for radical religious reform in order to effect political reform, just as Ryan’s essay sets the stage for Lincoln’s discussion of Blake’s developing mythology. The emphasis on verbal language of Wolfson and Hilton is complemented by Bindman’s discussion of Blake’s visual language. An emphasis on Blake’s reinterpretation of earlier writers rings through the essays of Ward, Bindman, Johnson and Essick, while Makdisi, Ryan, Hilton and Lincoln consider Blake’s ongoing reinterpretation of his own earlier works. I tend to agree with Mary Lynn Johnson that the best way to read Blake (not just Milton) is to “set aside guidebooks, including this one, take a deep breath, and follow the hero as he breaks through the surface of the title page” (231). But as guidebooks go, this is a good one, and Eaves has put together a collection of essays that suggests the pleasures and rewards of reading Blake without shying away from the difficulties.

Edoardo Zuccato, Petrarch in Romantic England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Xiv + 241 pp. $80.00 (Hdbk; 0-230-54260-3)

Reviewed by
Mary Anne Myers

With Petrarch in Romantic England, Edoardo Zuccato refines and updates the meaning of “Italian influences” in British literature from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, tilling rich ground for additional study from several critical and cultural perspectives. While Dante’s influence on the “Canonic Six” has long been duly noted, Zuccato’s historical approach demonstrates that Petrarch was actually more popular among the period’s writers, particularly among those women and men who have more recently been included in the field of Romantic studies. Not only does Zuccato’s enterprise dovetail with the expansion of the Romantic canon, it also illustrates how a central question in the period’s debates over Petrarch is keyed to the larger English Romantic movement and its subsequent critical reception. As the author positions the apparent paradox: “Petrarch was recognised simultaneously as one of the masters of love poetry and an extremely skilled rhetorician who exhibited his technical devices with unashamed pride. How could exalted passion and extreme artificiality coexist?” (15). Then as now, disagreements hinged on the issue of sincerity and the connections among feeling, truth, art, and action.

Zuccato, a professor of English Literature at the University of IULM in Milan, evaluates British Romantic responses to fourteenth-century Italian literature from a deep appreciation for both traditions. In asserting that scholarship has heretofore privileged Dante’s influence at Petrarch’s expense, he ascribes causality not only to an earlier focus on an elite group of English poets, but also to the fundamental differences between the two Italian writers’ politics and poetics:

Dante was a major model of the prophet-poet; Petrarch was a model of the scholar-poet and melancholy lover. Dante was a politician and an exile, a man of ideological certainties and unshakable principles; Petrarch was a friend of many princes, a well-to-do scholar who knew how to arrive at a reasonable compromise with political power. It is easy to understand why, after the French Revolution, male Romantics identified with Dante and denigrated Petrarch. On the other hand, it is natural that most women poets preferred Petrarch to a masculine, muscular figure like Dante (ix-x).

In other words, Dante may have been more attractive to the liberal humanist defending the rights of man, while Petrarch appealed to the Burkean conservative favoring revision over revolution. This provocatively clear-cut distinction invites complication. Zuccato is not without his own hypotheses, but the book is perhaps most impressive for its collection of textual evidence that takes Petrarch’s influence beyond the revival of the sonnet form and into the meanings of art, history and morality in the period.

In his first two chapters, Zuccato paints the backdrop for the review of several poets’ treatments of Petrarchan forms and themes by showing how a quick proliferation of presentations, translations and imitations—coupled with varying levels of Italian language proficiency—spawned a wide range of responses to Petrarch and the Laura of the Rime Sparse. He marks the beginning of the eighteenth-century English Petrarchan revival with the 1775 publication of Susanna Dobson’s Life of Petrarch. Collected from Memoires pour la vie de Petrarch, an abridged translation of the three-volume biography by Abbé de Sade published in French in 1764. Dobson’s Life, which went through six editions, portrayed an edited version of Sade’s Petrarch, emphasizing the poet and lover over the scholar and politician. As Zuccato claims, Dobson’s work was received by British readers like a “novel of Sensibility, which told a pathetic love story using prose interspersed with poems” (6).

The Dobson biography evoked reactions from historians Thomas Warton and Edward Gibbons, who elected to focus on Petrarch’s politics. Alexander Fraser Tytler, in a 1784 essay that grew to a book in 1810, argued against Sade for an alternate version of Laura’s identity that removed the taint of immorality from the lovers’ “relationship”, and thereby rationalized an admiration for the poetry. Zuccato describes how Henry Hallam, Pierre Louis Ginguené, Simond de Sismondi, William Hazlitt and Ugo Foscolo all kept the debate about the “real” Petrarch and Laura going through the early 19th century. Zuccato returns to Petrarch’s biographies in the final chapter, mentioning that Thomas Campbell’s version published in 1841 also subordinated the poet to the scholar and politician, but more importantly showed how long British interest in the character of the Italian poet was sustained (134).

In his chapter on available English translations of Petrarch, Zuccato begins by citing a 1976 bibliography (Mouret’s Les traducteurs anglais de Pétrarque 1754-1798) that lists 51 late eighteenth-century British translators producing 398 versions from Petrarch, an indication of interest unmatched in any other country at the time (25). English men of letters earlier in the century had largely excluded Petrarch from their consideration of Italian literature, Zuccato argues, because they deemed him effeminate or trifling in contrast to Dante, or ridiculous in his religious extremes. Among the earliest exceptions well-noted by the author is Thomas Gray, whose poem “On the Death of Mr. Richard West,” written in 1742 and published in 1775, shows influence from Petrarch’s “Zephiro torna, e ‘l bel tempo rimena” (”Zephyrus returns and leads back the fine weather”), a sonnet that became a favorite source for English Romantic Petrarchans (27). From there Zuccato documents the role of several translators, imitators, and anthologists in the vanguard of the later-century interest in Petrarch— including Sir William Jones, Charles Burney, John Nott, William Hayley, William Collier, Thomas Le Mesurier, George Henderson, and Capel Lofft—as he makes the transition from the sonnet revival to a more in-depth review of Petrarch’s place in the work of individual poets.

Zuccato has his favorites—the Petrarchan poetics of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson gain his greenest laurels for well-argued reasons—but his work covers an exceptionally wide field of writers. William Lisle Bowles, Elizabeth Cobbold, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt, Letitia Landon, and William Preston all get considerable attention without the call-outs he gives to Anna Seward, the Della Cruscans, and Charles Lloyd. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the subject of an earlier book by Zuccato, is the only one of the “Canonic Six” to warrant a chapter-heading focus, based on an interest that eventually extended beyond the sonnets in the Canzoniere and recognized the complexity of Petrarch’s whole body of work in Italian and Latin (106). Zuccato pays special attention to Coleridge’s affinity for the Italian poet’s “philosophy of love,” defined as “a Christianised Platonism mixed with courtly elements” (110). Lord Byron and William Wordsworth get linked in an admittedly rare alliance through their effort to “blot out” Petrarch (135), although Wordsworth’s intense interest in the sonnet and his gendered distinction in sonnet themes make his relationship to Petrarch perhaps more intricate than Zuccato allows. Percy Bysshe Shelley gets credit for drawing on Petrarch’s Trionfi, for finding points of intersection between Petrarch and Dante, and for identifying with Petrarch as a “visionary idealist” (137). Zuccato affirms that John Keats was first influenced by Petrarch via Hunt, and that this influence was manifested largely through Keats’s innovative engagement with the sonnet form (138). William Blake gets just two tangential mentions. The book concludes with a bridge to Victorian Petrarchism through brief consideration of the Brownings and the Rossettis.

In Zuccato’s convincing view, the Petrarchan vogue in England around the turn of the nineteenth century looks in some ways similar to the literary trends of the sixteenth century, when notions of self, other, nation, and authority were also undergoing destabilizing change. Early modernists have mined that period’s Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan discourse to find important views on gender, class, race, slavery, religion, economies, nationalism, political ambition, internationalism, translation, self-fashioning, performance, subjectivity, objectification, language, art, love, and marriage. Petrarch in Romantic England provides a comprehensive and consolidated foundation for parallel considerations by Romanticists and other scholars focused on the nineteenth century.

Ron Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008. 236pp. ISBN-10: 0-8387-5700-0 (Hdbk.), $50.00.

Reviewed by
Julia Sandstrom Carlson
University of Cincinnati

Water, earth, sky, and animals? At first glance, one of the four sections into which Technologies of the Picturesque is divided seems unlike the others. We come quickly to recognize, however, that the likeness of “animals” to the other categories lies in its also being an object of picturesque vision: one of the basic “elements of nature” (15) encountered, perceived, and composed in visual art according to the rules of picturesque aesthetics. Water, earth, sky, and animals are the basic vocabulary of the picturesque. Yet, as Ron Broglio shows, Romantic artists were not alone in representing these objects and fitting them to human use; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists and surveyors encountered and inscribed the same elements according to their particular technological, cartographic, agricultural, and immunological agendas. In six tightly focused chapters, the author compares artistic and scientific encounters with nature, their tools and epistemologies, and their respective effects on human subjectivity and sense of space. Crossing disciplinary divides consolidated only after the Romantic period, Broglio brings to light the reliance of poets and artists on the technologies of scientific endeavor and, conversely, the employment by scientists of picturesque principles and tools. Both sorts of optical projects and systems made chaotic nature “legible” to humanity but in doing so enforced a Cartesian divide between human perceiver (eye, mind) and nature (body, matter) that materially distanced human beings and the environment.

Drawing on recent cultural-studies research and contemporary science studies, the book examines inscriptional technologies associated with nationally significant events of measuring the four featured elements of nature. Chapters consider the development of an accurate method for determining longitude at sea, the Ordnance Survey of Britain, the scientific classification of cloud types for weather prediction, and the selective breeding of cattle along with the principal tools these projects employed, including lunar charts, William Harrison’s H4 clock, the triangulation survey and map, the theodolite and measuring chain, cloud nomenclature, and the bodies of cattle and grazier guides. Broglio strikingly pairs these technologies of measurement and representation with the tools and aesthetics of picturesque tourism, prospect poetry, cloud paintings, and cattle portraiture, exposing thereby the analogous and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects of art and technology: both transform nature into culture, render the opaque thing an intelligible object with an economic or aesthetic use value, cultivate a possessional subject position, and abstract the perceiver from the visible scene. But Broglio does not stop here. In movingly persuasive sections throughout the book, he considers Romantic counter-currents to optical hegemony: instances of phenomenological encounters with nature that refigure relations between the human and the environment. Haptic engagements with nature in Wordsworth’s poetry, encounters governed by the sense of touch rather than sight, and durational depictions of nature in Constable’s painting, which prioritize time over figural space, offer radical constructions of subjectivity and space overlooked in other studies of the picturesque. In Wordsworth’s and Constable’s “bending” (20) of the picturesque aesthetic, Broglio locates an alternative syntax that distributes thought and agency across human and environmental entities. With increasing force as the book proceeds from “Water” and “Earth” to “Sky” and “Animals,” Broglio challenges ecocriticism’s assumption of a stable Romantic subject that pre-exists encounters with nature.

“Part I: Water” recounts the mid-eighteenth-century government-sponsored competition over the most accurate means of determining longitude at sea, comparing Nevil Maskelyne’s astronomical to George Harrison’s mechanical methods. Broglio argues that the determining of longitude by means of Harrison’s mechanical clock produces a worldview parallel to that of the picturesque tourist. The late-eighteenth-century navigator who looks to the face of the H4 clock performs an “inward turn” (29) away from the sea and the night sky to human-made instruments; this epistemological orientation toward the face of the mechanical object is reflected by the representation of abstract geometric lines upon globes and charts. Similarly, the picturesque tourist navigates by means of a cluster of inscriptions and tools (Claude mirror, picturesque poems, paintings, and guidebooks) that collectively produces a “syntax”: a set of compositional rules that render the land intelligible (43). While the grammar of picturesque landscape produces a worldview that values human representations of nature more highly than actual surroundings, tool use distributes cognition across “bodies, minds, and machines” (39).

Broglio exposes the epistemological implications of navigation by clock and picturesque tourism by way of Thomas Rowlandson’s The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. Rowlandson humorously exposes the ironies of the aesthetic and the problems raised by its “cognitive ecology” (in Edwin Hutchins’ term, The Call of the Wild) of guidebooks and Claude mirrors. Like the tool-encumbered Dr. Syntax, the user of Harrison’s clock values human representations of nature over unmediated perceptions. Broglio intriguingly links the new prestige of “flat inscriptions” to a diminished ontology: Dr. Syntax’s frail body highlights that “our being in the world and our sense of what it means to be changes with our sense of the environment” (47).

“Part II: Earth” opens with the assertion that the rendering of a particular place—on a map as in a picturesque watercolor—employs a mode of vision and epistemology that produces a subject and a sense of space. Building on the ideas of cultural geographer Stephen Daniels, who shows that maps “‘helped to coordinate Britain, in people’s mind as well as on the ground, as a national network of localities and regions’” (53), Broglio contrasts two Romantic period senses of space: the sensible and the sensate. Picturesque tourism and national cartography construct a disembodied viewing subject that knows itself in rationalized space—in geometric relation to abstractly perceived objects. Wordsworth’s poetry, on the other hand, occasionally challenges the dominance of cartographic and picturesque vision by taking a phenomenological approach to the environment. Wordsworth’s poetic re-mappings of Penrith Beacon and Black Combe shape not a citizen of the nation but an embodied, feeling self immersed in place.

Broglio gives a succinct history of the Ordnance Survey, reaching back to William Roy’s influence in its formation following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Broglio highlights Roy’s survey of Scotland and the later Ordnance Survey of Ireland to show the political uses of the Survey, which as political tool “controls peoples and borders” (56). Drawing on the work of John Barrell and visual theorists Erwin Panofsky, Jonathan Crary, and Martin Jay, Broglio shows how the “metaphysics of vision deployed in cartography and the picturesque serves a politics of nationalism,” producing land as an abstract object and a “tourist-subject” that knows itself as a citizen if a good tourist of the nation (51). Like the surveyor, the “tourist-subject” oversees but has no significant tactile relationship to the geometrically ordered landscape.

Broglio’s interesting discussion of the “Cartesian perspectivalism” (the term is Jay’s) underlying both picturesque painting and the triangulation survey comes at the expense of sharp distinction among the related sign systems of the Ordnance Survey, its topographical maps, and contemporary tourist maps and guides (63). Yet his brief consideration of the manifest overlay between the optics of the survey and James Clarke’s tourist diagrams of views from Penrith Beacon sets up a persuasive reading of the Penrith Beacon spot of time from The Prelude. Disjoined from the tools of cartographic and picturesque vision, figured by the composite tool of the hand-on-horse-rein, the boy Wordsworth leaves the masterful vantage of the beacon (historically both a triangulation station and tourist site), wanders into a “bottom,” and thereby “explores a mapping through his body and a phenomenological encounter with the land” (52). The boy is immersed in a space the surveyor and tourist would have overseen—a thickly textured, Heideggerian encompassment of the flesh of the body and “thingly” matter.

The next chapter develops these concerns by arguing that Wordsworth’s “alternative mapping” (81) of place challenges the suppositions of national cartography and the subject-object division it enforces. Influential humanist readings of the episode (by Geoffrey Hartman, Alan Liu, and Frederick Garber) have obscured the subjective and ecological implications of the encounter with nature in Gondo Gorge. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, which understands the components of the world to be resonating “entities” in a “plane of relation,” and on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of the “assemblage,” which defines things by their connections, Broglio traces in the Gorge passage a radical dissolution of subject and object and a sublime figuring of the interrelatedness of “entities” (91). According to Broglio, the slippage of reference in the poetry maps a “trafficking of forms” (Hartman) or “vector relations” (forces of connectivity immanent in a landscape and set loose by event) (93); in so doing, Wordsworth remakes the poet “as that which connects with various elements in the landscape” (85). The final sections of the chapter read “Resolution and Independence,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” “The Discharged Soldier” and “A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags” as more politically potent re-mappings of human-environment relations. In showing connections between human figures and entities in the landscapes of the poems, Wordsworth re-envisions space as non-exclusionary and opens the possibility of an alternative social reality that doesn’t reject “the wandering poor” (107). By redistributing agency and thought among objects, Wordsworth questions “what it means to be human,” and by linking the human and the object world, the poetry “bears witness to identity as a semi-stable state that may undergo radical change” (117).

Representations of clouds also refigure identity. In “Part III: Sky,” Broglio considers John Constable’s surpassing of the picturesque formula for representing clouds, deftly arguing that Constable’s more dynamic cloud forms were not determined by early-nineteenth-century meteorology. Correcting arguments that Constable figured clouds according to the morphological classifications of meteorologists Luke Howard and Thomas Forster, Broglio holds that Constable depicts clouds in greater specificity than any sign system of clouds could accommodate. The book’s emphasis on inscriptional systems here takes an interesting temporal turn. The scientists and Constable differently record their observations of “changeling clouds” in static media. Howard’s taxonomy privileges distinction of form over inscription of time while permitting cloud forms to index future weather. The sign system’s accommodation of temporality marks a “similarity in thought” between Howard and Constable, who also strives to give his inscriptions a feel of narrative (129); however, the painter’s use of a synchronous medium tells a fuller story about the weather’s unfolding in time: “Unlike meteorological nomenclature, Constable’s patterns are singular rhythms of clouds filling space over time, creating within each painting a particular rendering of spatiotemporal duration” (149). The spatiotemporal specificity of Constable’s clouds exceeds the taxonomies of the scientists while suggesting a form of time “outside of human control” (151) and a human subjectivity constituted by its relatedness to the environment. Invoking Michel Serres’ notion of temps (time and weather) and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world (“the spatial relation between objects”), Broglio reflects on the capacity of Constable’s clouds to figure ecological agency and to reveal “the possibility and latency of the felt space of interrelation” (152). In a final insightful turn, Broglio liberates Constable’s cloud forms from conventional readings of the picturesque by asserting the non-nationalism of their agentive temporality.

In “Part IV: Animals,” Broglio significantly revises our view of cattle and of the humans who breed, paint, eat, and absorb their fluids. Through the agricultural innovations of Robert Bakewell, Broglio introduces the communicative function of picturesque aesthetics in the agricultural revolution. In selective breeding, “cattle are both the technological tool for changing the breed and the object that is worked upon” (162). Still, Broglio explains, the “improvement” and marketing of a breed required a further “ecology of tools” that included grazier guides, cattle portraits, and engravings (176). Broglio impressively evidences these historical practices and inscriptional technologies—making us familiar with the form and fame of Bakewell’s longhorn Shakespeare (“the ideal of British beef” [169]), Robert and Charles Colling’s shorthorn Lincolnshire Ox (painted by George Stubbs), and their hefty Durham Ox, who provided the most famous cattle image of the nineteenth century (174). Portraits, prints, and verbal descriptions in the grazier guides acted as publicity that increased studding fees and the value of beef. Broglio’s consideration of the suitability of picturesque composition to the “points”-system for assessing individual cattle demonstrates the resonant richness of this book. Picturesque landscape convention induces a straying of the eye over lines and surfaces so as to enable the portrait’s visual argument about the worth of the cattle body. Essentially, the side of the animal “substitutes for the whole of the landscape” while “the viewer occupies the position of the graziers, judges, and agricultural writers who with great detail and enthusiasm describe the scoops, curves, lines, and bulges of cattle” (179).

But we are not to marvel at this intersection of aesthetics and agricultural technology. A fact the author brings forth—that the average weight of a cattle carcass almost doubled between 1710 and 1795—gives heft to his polemic (180): cattle breeding and its “ecology of tools” control the animal in profound and self-serving ways. Broglio convincingly argues that picturesque portraiture was effective not only in fashioning the animal for human use but also in connecting beef to Britishness. That eighteenth-century British painting had linked cattle to rural England helped prepare for the Romantic-era verbal and visual encoding of beef-eating as patriotic.

The final chapter of the book rehearses Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccination in order to re-interpret human-bovine relations within the picturesque. Here Broglio relies on the research of Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter Kitson, who relate the history of Jenner’s experimental injection of human patients with cowpox in order to immunize them to smallpox. Developing the implications of the anxiety raised by Jenner’s “cross-species cure” (188), Broglio argues that the injection of the human body with animal fluid constitutes a point of contact between the animal and human that makes palpable to the human its animality within. Broglio theorizes the cultural meanings of the breach of the human interior by invoking the writings of Anthony Berger, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, and by examining the visual and verbal rhetoric of popular caricatures that fanned anti-vaccination sentiments. Most interestingly, Broglio explores the limits to human consciousness posed by animal corporeality and the subversive potential of the cattle portrait. In the picturesque painting or print, the “large abstract square mass interrupts linear perspective and offers an area for contact with the real” (195) so as to upset the rational, optical dominance of the human. Broglio teaches us to read the rough swath of cow surface (favored by William Gilpin over the smooth coat of the horse) as that which the human perceiver cannot cognitively master. If the space figured by Constable’s clouds resists national coding, the painted bovine in profile view disrupts the optics of national forms of inscription (the Ordnance Survey and the picturesque landscape painting) and disperses agency throughout the environment.

One of the many virtues of Broglio’s enjoyable book is its systematic demonstration, case by case, of the interrelationship between picturesque aesthetics and technological developments in scientific mensuration. The emphasis, across these cases, on inscriptional technology and epistemology ultimately produces a coherent argument about Romantic subjectivity and space that poses a significant philosophical challenge to Green Romanticism’s assumption of the independence and priority of human identity. While the book may not revolutionize our reading of the central texts of canonical literary Romanticism, that is not its goal; working at the intersections of Romantic poetry, art, and science, Broglio offers impressive readings of Wordsworth’s phenomenological mapping of place, Constable’s temporalization of the sky, and the projection of animal corporeality within the picturesque while also revealing the conceptual and theoretical relations of these seemingly disparate topics. The book makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship in visual culture, the technologization of vision, Romantic cartography, and ecocriticism. While the work is highly informative throughout, Broglio is most poetically fluent and persuasive when opening our eyes to the picturesque surfaces impenetrable to human thought, and when sensitizing us to Romanticism’s points of palpable connection between human and ecological agents.

Publisher’s Information: <http://www.bucknell.edu/script/upress/book.asp?f=s&id=329

Sara Coleridge, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Swaab. London: Fyfield Books / Carcanet, 2007. 256 pp. £14.95 (Pbk; ISBN 978 1 857548 95 2).

Reviewed by
Dennis Low

When Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge: Collected Poems appeared in 2007, the media leapt upon it with gusto.

“POEMS BY DAUGHTER OF LAKES BARD DISCOVERED IN AMERICA,” ran the headline of the North-West Evening Mail: “The poems, by Sara Coleridge, had lain undiscovered for 150 years and have now been published in a collection for the first time.” “Dr Peter Swaab,” reported the Bridgwater Mercury, “stumbled across an anonymous poem by chance when he was researching for a book on William Wordsworth at the University of Texas.” The national broadsheets were similarly impressed. “A British academic has discovered 120 unknown poems by Sara Coleridge” said The Telegraph; “Now,” said The Guardian, “with the publication of 185 of her poems, two-thirds of which have only recently been discovered, the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been revealed as a talented and versatile poet in her own right.”

Conjuring up, as it does, romantic images of inky scrawls, yellowing papers and dust, this story of archival discovery was sure to entertain readers. What none of the reporters from any of these papers knew, however, was that the very same manuscripts they were declaring to be new finds had, over the last century, been read by generations of Coleridge scholars.

My interest in Sara Coleridge began by chance almost fifteen years ago when, as a teenager, I happened to come across her in Virginia Woolf’s Death of a Moth. That interest continued, undiminished, into my undergraduate days; by 1997, pre-Google search engines were bringing up a document entitled “Manuscript Holdings of Selected Nineteenth-Century Women Writers,” compiled in 1992 by Wendy Bowerstock and Jennifer B. Patterson for the Harry Ransom Humanities Resource Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The document, still one of the first entries that modern-day Google comes up with when running a search for “Sara Coleridge”, mentions the notebooks of poems that make up the bulk of the present edition. The existence of these notebooks very much intrigued me, and I was eager to see them for myself. The Center’s website soon provided me with address details of Mrs. Joan Coleridge who was then head of the Coleridge Estate. In 1998, I wrote to Mrs. Coleridge, asking for her permission to have the notebooks and several other documents photocopied and sent to me – this she duly gave.

Over the next few years as I went on to research Sara Coleridge’s life and work for my book on The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (2006), I was pleased to have enjoyed a warm correspondence as well as several telephone conversations with Mrs Coleridge. Invariably, our conversations often tended towards the Coleridge papers and, on one occasion, she talked about how the collection had once resided in her family home and how scholars in the past had visited the collection there, where they were often provided with food and accommodation. Curious, I asked which scholars had been there and the answer was a veritable who’s who of literary scholars, from Earl Leslie Griggs (“a dreadfully slow eater, dreadfully slow”) and Ernest de Selincourt (“talked for hours; wouldn’t go to bed”), to other, more contemporary scholars who’d been less than polite and were, therefore, “not to be mentioned.”

At some point during the 1970s, creative accountancy at the Harry Ransom Humanities Resource Center enabled the purchasing of literary manuscripts to be mapped onto the University of Texas’s considerably larger capital acquisitions budget (primarily earmarked for large-scale building projects). The Center’s already substantial holdings were transformed into one of America’s finest manuscript collections, and the Coleridge archive soon became incorporated into that collection. Since then, it’s continued to have its fair share of readers, including Bradford Keyes Mudge for his book Sara Coleridge: a Victorian Daughter (1989); Cherry Durrant for her unpublished but, for a time, much publicized PhD on The Lives and Works of Hartley, Derwent and Sara Coleridge (1994); and Kathleen Jones for her group biography, A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets (1997).

All of this begs the question: if the poems aren’t, as the Bridgwater Mercury originally reported, newly unearthed discoveries after all, but rather, carefully catalogued items in one of America’s largest and best maintained collections of literary manuscripts, details of which have been freely available and highly visible on the internet for more than a decade, why haven’t they attracted more attention?

Part of the answer lies in all the other things, besides a poet, that Sara Coleridge was. She was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter; she was Robert Southey’s niece; she was an accomplished translator who was proficient in six languages and who published her first translation (a three-volume treatise, from the Latin, about equestrian tribes in Paraguay) when she was just eighteen; she was a nineteenth-century mother who suffered from bouts of anxiety, post-natal depression and, finally, breast cancer; she was a writer of children’s books, a theologian, an editor of her father’s works; she was an artist’s model, first for William Collins’ painting in oils of her as Wordsworth’s Highland Girl in 1818 and then for a watercolour by Edward Nash in 1820. Invariably, all these other facets of Coleridge’s life and work jostle with her poetry for scholarly attention. Faced with the difficult task of selecting a particular angle or approach, no one to date who has made the decision to write about Sara Coleridge has chosen to make her poetry a prime focus of study. And the reason for this, I think, is because Coleridge’s poetry is markedly different from the kind of poetry we’re more used to reading.

When it came to writing poetry, Sara Coleridge stuck closely to the advice Robert Southey later gave a young Charlotte Brontë. She was content to “write poetry for its own sake; not in a spirit of emulation, and not with a view to celebrity.” She was, in the best sense of the word, an amateur who pursued poetry-writing for the same reasons that anyone pursues any recreational hobby: “Just as I would have any one learn music who has an opportunity, though few can be composers, or even performers of great merit,” she explained, “I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime-accomplishment.” If this sounds a little too much like a resurrection of the image of the nineteenth-century “poetess” that feminist literary criticism has spent much time dismantling, it’s worth remembering that there’s nothing intrinsically gendered about Coleridge’s attitude towards poetry. Indeed, Coleridge actively encouraged a similar attitude in her own son, Herbert. One of Herbert’s first letters to his mother, written while he was a schoolboy at Eton, reads:

Please, dear Mamma, may I have one of those large Album books, bound in leather, to write all my verses in […] and such things as that? You promised in the Pretty Lessons […] you would grant me such things as that […] If you will kindly say “Yes” I shall be much obliged.

We spend so much time reading a certain kind of published poetry that it’s easy to forget how large a part poetry – that was never intended for publication – played in the fabric of everyday life for some nineteenth-century households, particularly in households with literary pedigree such as Sara Coleridge’s. Like Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, with her collection of riddles neatly copied in “a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper … ornamented with ciphers and trophies,” or the real-life young girls whose albums were consciously mimicked by the popular gift annuals of the 1820s and 30s, Sara Coleridge wrote poems, all of the time. She wrote poems and appended them to letters; she made purses, stuffed them with verses and gave them as gifts; she wrote new lyrics to popular songs that she perhaps then played on the piano; she wrote love-poems to her cousin and future husband, Henry; she wrote poems for the little leather-bound notebooks she had, illustrated with sketches of flowers and intricate sylvan scenes cut from black paper; and she wrote poems for friends like Dora Wordsworth, to be included in the albums they maintained.

It’s these kinds of poems that make up “Early Poems 1815-1829,” the first of three sections in Swaab’s chronologically ordered edition. Sadly, these aren’t the kinds of poem that get much attention these days, regardless of who’s written them: we might take the time, for example, to read the original version of S. T. Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” because it affords us insight into the depersonalized, published, more complex and therefore more readily analyzable version; but, when such poems go into print without this literary “upgrading” process, as in the case of Wordsworth’s “Gold and Silver Fishes in a Vase” (a reply to a letter-poem from the essayist Maria Jane Jewsbury) we studiously ignore them. But we should take our time to explore Coleridge’s early poems, because they are fresh, witty and charming:

Green and Gold and Violet,
Fair and well-commingled hues,
E’en as in a rainbow met,
Such the colours that I choose
In the silken purse to weave,
Gift that Susan will receive.

Green and Violet and Gold –
Such the colours that appear
On Mount Skiddaw’s bosom bold,
When the air is fresh and clear,
By the glowing light of day,
In the merry month of May! (52)

The second section, “Poems 1829-1843,” is by far the largest section of Swaab’s edition, consisting as it does mostly of poems that were published in Coleridge’s volume of verse for children, entitled Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some lessons in Latin (1834), poems that weren’t included in the final selection for Pretty Lessons, and poems that have been extracted from Coleridge’s anonymously published long fairytale, Phantasmion (1837). Phantasmion, a dizzying multithreaded narrative that simultaneously spans three generations, five countries and three planes of existence is, for all its faults, one of my most favourite books of all time. But I’m not sure the poems work when they’re divorced from the 400-page story they were originally embedded in. Take this poem from Chapter 20 for instance:

In this day’s light what flowers ill bloom,
What insects quit the self-made womb!
But ere the bud its leaves unfold,
The gorgeous fly his plumes of gold,
On fairer wings we too may glide,
Where youth and joy no ills betide. (127)

On its own, this is a pleasant enough stanza but it loses much in being taken out of its original prose: if you know that the song is sung by the crippled boy-prince Albinet who is being held captive in a tower and that, unbeknownst to him, Phantasmion is listening in, ready to fly up to the window and save him with his water-beetle wings, newly granted to him by Potentilla, Queen of the Insect Realm, the ideas of freedom, flight and movement expressed in the poem take on an entirely new significance.

The poems that made it – or didn’t – into Pretty Lessons are far more accessible, because they’re more self-contained. Some, like “Poppies” with its eerie shadow of opium addiction, are unsettling and therefore tantalizing, but a majority of them are of a straightforward mnemonic nature and relatively innocuous. Like letter-poems, we’ve become unreceptive to this sort of poetry too. What follows isn’t a poem many Romantic scholars are familiar with but, in 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a curious little poem called “Metrical Feet – Lesson for a Boy.” It was a mnemonic designed to help Sara’s elder brother, Derwent, learn about scansion in classical literature:

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yea ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;–
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng …

Together, S. T. Coleridge and his circle dashed off countless similar poems (now all but lost) for the purpose of home-schooling their children. Fascinatingly, it’s this hidden, distinctly private, hitherto unpublished literary tradition that finds its most forceful expression in Sara Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons (none of which were ever written with a view to publication). “The Months” is probably the most outstanding example of its type in the collection and has deservedly enjoyed sustained popularity since its original publication:

January brings the snow,
Makes our feet and fingers glow.

February brings the rain,
Thaw the frozen lake again.

March brings breezes loud and shrill,
Stirs the dancing daffodil.

April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daisies at our feet.

May brings flocks of pretty lambs,
Skipping by their fleecy dams.

June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children’s hands with posies.

Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers.

August brings the sheaves of corn,
Then the harvest home is borne.

Warm September brings the fruit,
Sportsmen then begin to shoot.

Fresh October brings the pheasant,
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.

Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast.

Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire, and Christmas treat. (65)

Ultimately, those coming to Sara Coleridge’s poems with expectations gleaned from newspaper clippings may be disappointed by what they find. Readers of The Telegraph, for example, which excitedly reported that “Coleridge’s daughter hid her poetic passions” and “kept her light under a bush” might reasonably expect, in Swaab’s intelligent and well-presented edition, the drama of a subtle but scathing critique of high Romanticism, or a feisty swipe at an illustrious father. The truth, though, is that Coleridge never pits herself in direct competition with either her father or, by extension, any of his contemporaries. It’s something that she herself touches on in a poem from the final section of the edition (“Poems 1847-1852”) entitled “For my Father on his lines called ‘Work Without Hope’”:

Father, no amaranths e’er shall wreathe my bow, -
Enough that round thy grave they flourish now:-
But Love ’mid my young locks his roses braided,
And what cared I for flow’rs of deeper bloom? (156)

What Swaab presents, in the final analysis, is not a collection of new poems that have never been read by anyone at all but, instead, a collection of poems belonging to an array of unfamiliar and private forms of amateur, “pastime-accomplishment” poetry that have hitherto been too quiet, too seemingly tangential to have been explored thoroughly.

So long as we put aside the almost instinctive desire to find in it someone “as good as her father,” so long as we learn to appreciate it on its own terms, Coleridge’s poetry can become a keyhole through which we might gaze into the Romantic parlour, or the Victorian nursery. It’s in such places that much of the poetry we do know well was originally read; and, in understanding these places more, it’s possible that we might come to reformulate our ideas about that better-known poetry, in addition to becoming even more receptive to other voices that we have since overlooked.

Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds., Blake, Nation and Empire. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 256pp. Illus: 8 halftones. ISBN-13: 978-0-3339-9314-9 (Hdbk.), $69.96.

Reviewed by
Julia M. Wright
Dalhousie University

This important collection of twelve essays, arising from a 2000 Blake conference at Tate Britain, offers an array of historical frames through which to recontextualize Blake—from sensibility to eighteenth-century ideas of sexuality, and from the Sierra Leone project to the diverse religious cultures of Blake’s England and debates about art, economy, historiography, and proselytization. “Nation” and “Empire” are capacious categories here, allowed to float freely, as they did in Romantic-era discourse (though there are moments when distinctions between patriotism and modern nationalism, cultural nationalism and ideas of the nation-state, or settler colonies and invaded colonies would have contributed to a clearer picture of “Blake, Nation and Empire”). The aim of this volume is to continue the cultural materialist project of Clark and Worrall’s earlier collections and, hence, to focus on the “minute particulars” of Blake’s time and place—a project richly pursued here. This collection is not divided into parts, but I have organized my discussion below to highlight some continuities, and complementarities, among these diverse chapters beyond their shared historicist orientation.

The first essay, by Saree Makdisi, offers a suggestive exploration of a negative, namely that “Blake was basically the only major poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who categorically refused to dabble in recognizably Oriental themes or motifs” (24). (An expanded version of this essay is included in Makdisi’s important William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, as he notes [36].) Such assertions might seem to invite quibbles: what about Robert Burns? Does the occasional Orientalist flourish by Anna Letitia Barbauld put her much closer to Blake than to Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey? But that would miss the larger importance of this essay as an innovative examination of both the determined (and contrary) inclusiveness through which Blake, in his early work, “emphasize[s] the common nature of all human cultures” (29) and, more broadly, the centrality of Orientalism to many of the Romantic poets we have collectively designated “major”—begging the question of whether the fault is not in our poets but in ourselves or, at least, our canon. While Makdisi focuses on Blake’s early texts and “infinite heterogeneity” (36), Andrew Lincoln argues for a shift in Blake’s thought in the years around 1800 from a “kind of universal myth . . . towards a narrative that identifies itself explicitly with British and Biblical tradition” (153), while yet “reach[ing] across doctrinal differences” (163). This change, Lincoln suggests, not only arises from Blake’s personal renewal of faith, but also from a more broadly perceived imperative “to restore Britain to Christianity” (153) in the wake of the counter-revolutionary rhetoric of the period. Here, that complex counter-revolutionary milieu is concisely sketched with a specific focus on religious debate and Watson’s Apology in order to locate Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem “in the religious fears and aspirations of early nineteenth-century Britain” (159). Steve Clark further extends this discussion of Blake and difference and does so on deftly nuanced terms attentive to philosophical and theological disputes, as well as historical contexts. While Lincoln argues for Milton’s efforts “to re-integrate the divided legacy of British Christendom” (163), Clark locates Blake’s Jerusalem in the heated debate over Catholic Emancipation and the transformation of “a virulent anti-Catholic iconography . . . into imperial gothic” (168). Clark argues compellingly for Blake’s poem “as anti-papal propaganda” that, despite moments “more sympathetic” to Catholic traditions, “is of an abrasive brand of Protestant nationalism formed in opposition to France and Catholicism projecting an imagined community of empire” (171).

The cluster of essays I group above—those by Makdisi, Lincoln, and Clark—covers the full sweep of Blake’s career and invites further consideration of Blake’s changing stance on cultural and religious differences. Jason Whittaker’s essay is usefully considered in this context as well. Focusing on Blake’s “critical dialogue with Milton” (197), especially Milton’s History of Britain, Whittaker traces the ways in which Blake works through his nationalist politics via Milton as “the obvious candidate for the role of Albion’s prophet” (186). Suggestively, Whittaker contends that Blake recuperates for their “explanatory” value the national origin myths dismissed by Milton while still being “hostile to Milton’s militant Protestantism” (193-194). This essay is arguably at the nexus of the volume’s myriad tracings of Blake’s engagement with questions of national identity in relation to religion and sexuality, and, like Lincoln, Whittaker locates Milton within a transformative period in the development of Blake’s views on those questions.

The topic of sexuality is more central to essays by David Worrall, Susan Matthews, and Christopher Z. Hobson. Both Matthews’s and Worrall’s essays explore the centrality of sex to the common nationalist narrative of the nation’s founding, whether the settler colony of Sierra Leone (Worrall) or the founding of Rome (Matthews)—an issue also relevant to Whittaker (see 195-197). In his essay, Worrall offers a detailed account of the Sierra Leone project in relation to English Swedenborgians. The Book of Thel, suggests Worrall, can be read as “specifically interested in presenting a problematization of the gender issues implicit in founding a colony on the principle of Swedenborgian conjugal love” (55). Matthews’s essay offers a provocative perspective on the problem of rape in Blake’s early texts and the instability of the term in eighteenth-century discourse. Together, these essays serve to stress both the complexity of Blake’s challenge to normative notions of sexuality and the difficulty of pinning down what those notions might be in a time when they were being publicly debated in a range of contexts (medical, legal, imperial, theological, and so forth). Christopher Hobson’s contribution serves explicitly to “build . . . on earlier work” in his 2000 book Blake and Homosexuality in order to return to the question of Blake’s shifting position on homosexuality in relation to what Hobson terms a “cooperative commonwealth” (137). Much of the material here is addressed more extensively in Hobson’s valuable book, including the Vere-Street Trials and Milton (138-142), with an emphasis on “Moral Law” and changes between copies of Milton, and Jerusalem’s “synthesis of his ideas about economic and political justice, religious and sexual freedom, gender, and the means of change and renewal” (142), virtually the first sentence of Hobson’s chapter on Jerusalem in Blake and Homosexuality. While readers might be well-advised to read Hobson’s book instead, the essay does offer new material, and its inclusion is essential to the volume’s presentation of a wide array of approaches to sexual activity in relation to the thorny problem of Blake’s attitudes towards gender.

The third and fifth essays are also complementary, both drawing on contemporary discourses of economy related to sensibility: Jon Mee explores Brunonian medicine’s ideas of circulation, stimulation, excess, and so forth, to recontextualize the depiction of the body in The Book of Urizen, while James Chandler addresses the economy of sentiment in relation to commercial values to suggest that “Blake’s emphasis on the madeness of sentiment” is part of a “reframing [of] the national project in terms of building, rather than exchanging” (114-115). Chandler’s essay provides a useful lead-in to Morris Eaves’s contribution, which details the ways in which Blake’s private printing was also a public intervention in the print marketplace, particularly in three “public” statements across his career (132). “Blake’s shop,” suggests Eaves, “is not the merchant-middleman’s but the producer’s own, and the vision is of commercial independence freed from elaborate encumbrances” (125-126), “follow[ing] Boydell and the gallery merchants in gambling on a strategy of consolidation, ‘both Letter-press and Engraving’” (126). Blake’s simultaneous simplification of the track from producer to consumer and complication of the modes of production, Eaves contends, undergirds the difficulty of Blake for modern readers—a “modern multicapable artist looking for a multitasking audience” (131).

The final essays in the volume, by Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, take a later perspective to consider Blake’s reception after his own time. Essick’s essay offers an instructive account of historicism in Blake studies from Erdman forward. Essick argues instead for a broader cultural reading, “an ideological approach . . . that may begin with historical reference but must move in two directions—outward toward events and other texts and inward toward poetic forms” (206). Essick’s chapter, thus, contributes to one of the recurring, if not defining, problems of literary studies in recent decades, namely the bridging of historicism and formalism (or, in more Blakean language, the “minute particulars” of material history and the “giant forms” of cultural tradition), from Hayden White in the 1970s through to New Historicism and its current reframing in Cultural Studies and Historical Formalism. Essick then brings his integrative approach to bear on Blake’s oblique references to Ireland in Jerusalem, specifically in the context of the long history of fraught attempts to define Ireland in relation to England as either province or nation, rendering Blake’s Erin a conceptual conundrum rather than a simple allegorical figure for an historical Ireland. Viscomi’s invaluable essay puts Blake not into the familiar nineteenth-century literary history of his recovery and canonization but into a nineteenth-century art history—the remembering, recovery and republication of his visual work by his Victorian successors, particularly among the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle and in the central example of the illustrations selected for Gilchrist’s Life of Blake.

This volume, thus, traces a wide range of key historical and theoretical contexts for Blake’s works. This diverse array of papers not only lays out some of the details of Blake’s milieu, but also contributes to a nuanced picture of the 1790s and early 1800s on terms that will be valuable to Romanticists outside of Blake studies.