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Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism and Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action

November 18th, 2011 JackCragwall No comments

Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 430 pp. (Hdbk., $ 97.95; Pbk., $ 29.95; ISBN-10: 0-8047-6105-1; ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-6105-5). Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 381 pp. (Hdbk., $ 70; Pbk., $ 29.95; ISBN-10: 0-8018-9474-3; ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-9474-9).

Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

Although published six years apart, these two volumes belong in the same multifaceted critical mosaic. Both studies address the distinctive concerns which have been central to Susan Wolfson’s critical practice since the 1980s—her preoccupation with gender, her focus on literary form, and her indefatigable search for an increasingly detailed, as well as historically attuned, approach to the stylistic materiality of literary works. As with her previous works, these books require us to read intensively into texts, and we cannot escape this demand as we gradually explore their largely shared literary terrain: Hemans and Byron, mostly, but also Wollstonecraft, the Wordsworths and Keats. Wollstonecraft, in particular, plays a major role in Wolfson’s presentation of her argument in the earlier Borderlines, and its discussion of the continuities and discontinuities within Romantic-period gender debates between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Both books perform a series of distinctive critical gestures to which the author has accustomed us over the years. They stand on solid, clearly laid out theoretical and methodological foundations, which Wolfson constantly tests, revises and updates. One of the mainstays in these volumes is, of course, the neo-formalist agenda that Wolfson has been promoting through such contributions as Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997) and “Reading for Form” (MLQ, 2007). Both books present repeated instances of what may be defined as an invigorating form of wrestling with different intersecting textual layers. In addition, these books convey a general impatience with established, conventional “Eng Lit” stylistic registers and lexicon. This translates into a penchant for neologisms which never allows us to sit back into the lull of ready-made phrases. In fact, some of these neologisms may not be to everyone’s liking, but they undoubtedly contribute to Wolfson’s corrective critical approach.

These volumes also share common structural features. Borderlines is divided into an introductory chapter; a section on women (Felicia Hemans; the “Masculine Woman”; Maria Jane Jewsbury); one on men (Byron and Keats); and a final coda on sex in souls. Romantic Interactions presents an introductory chapter; a section on women and poetry (Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith); one on the “two Wordsworths,” that is, on William’s and Dorothy’s “interactions”; and a third on Byron and those interactions in which he took part directly (in his own life and works), and those through which he influenced the lives and works of other (especially female) authors.

Wolfson locates both volumes within the narrative of her own development and growth as a critic. And more explicitly so in the preface to Borderlines, where she places herself and her book within the critical trajectory that gradually led to the renovation of Romantic-period scholarship in the US and Britain from the early 1980s on. This volume, in particular, makes plain Wolfson’s intention to take stock of this itinerary and reflect on its origins, current status, and further evolutions. Taking up the cumbersome inheritance of Romantic-period gender criticism in order to set it on a new course, Borderlines paints a panorama of interrelations between “he-texts” and “she-texts”. It delineates a map of shifting gender categories in order to cast new light on their textual manifestations and cultural significance. Wolfson’s aim is to capture the formally specific coordinates of these categories—their being-in-the-text—that enable us to perceive their presence and agency in their times, yet also to verify their continuing activity in our own. In this respect, Wollstonecraft stands at the beginning of a tradition of debate that her works continued to enrich well after the waning of 1790s radicalism. And Wolfson’s reconstruction and discussion of later reprises of Wollstonecraft is undoubtedly one of the most striking and valuable offerings in this book. Readers will be particularly delighted to find a chapter on the brilliant and combative Maria Jane Jewsbury, one of the most fascinating of Wollstonecraft’s disciples, as well as one of the most unjustly sidelined writers and intellectuals in the later Romantic period.
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Ian Dennis, Lord Byron and the History of Desire

November 18th, 2011 JackCragwall No comments

Ian Dennis, Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). 266pp. (Hdbk., $55.00; ISBN-13: 978 0 87413 066 9.)

Reviewed by
Colin Carman
Colorado Mountain College

Desire, by definition, is mediated, imitative, and mimetic. At the core of identity and indeed of being itself lie the dual demands to be recognized and to be imitated. These are just some of the premises of Eric Gans and René Girard, and the insightful literary study these two thinkers have inspired, Lord Byron and the History of Desire. Byron is a provocative choice: while the “Byronic hero” is usually typified by defiant autonomy, even solipsistic self-adulation, Ian Dennis reveals just how important the roles of mediation, interplay, and the desires of—and for—others are in Byron’s oeuvre.

Since Gans and Girard form the book’s conceptual apparatus, a heavily theoretical introduction to the book’s eight chapters helps to adumbrate the pair’s contributions to the history of desire. That history emerges from certain “imitative processes,” in which “models” act and “subjects” perceive (14). Other key terms include “external mediation,” used to denote the influence of models that exist apart from interpersonal rivalry and, by contrast, “internal mediation,” whereby a more accessible influence can be imitated, even rivaled to the point of violence (17).

From there, Dennis plunges into works as diverse as the closet tragedy Cain and Don Juan, perhaps Byron’s most personal work, begun in 1818. If the first canto of Don Juan concludes with an appeal to the public in the form of an advertisement, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, argues Dennis, are even earlier efforts to promote the reader’s dependence on an authorial model. As Jerome McGann has noted, the geographical place being described in Byron’s travelogue pales in comparison to how the poem’s speaker experiences that locale for himself. What the two cantos gave to the marketplace at the time of their publication in 1812 was more than the suffering and melancholia characteristic of the Byronic hero. Instead, Dennis asserts that the cantos are a “remarkable innovation in internal mediation,” as they market Byron’s unique impression of those far-off places, places where no English traveler had gone before (48). From this internality, Chapter 2 turns to the externality of Byron’s reverence for nature. Because Nature cannot be rivaled, the best a Byronic ego can do is model himself upon nature through partnership. In the parlance of Girard, Nature remains an external mediator because it is indifferent to human desire.

“Partnership” shades into darker dependency in Chapter 3, where Dennis argues that Byron’s popular Eastern tales are powered by the author’s fantasies of victimization. In The Giaour, Dennis finds that desire “takes a beating,” as the poem’s hero suffers the loss of his Leila and dies pathetically in a monastery (65). The Corsair, meanwhile, dramatizes an equally destructive love triangle in which heroes pursue women already taken, and wind up massacred as a result. In brief, lovers need rivals—though Dennis stops short of deploying Sedgwickian triangulation as another theoretical tool. He does, however, pay close attention to characters like Alp in The Siege of Corinth, and Hugo in Parisina, forced as they are into symmetrical relations leading to self-immolation. Moreover, these men implicate their audience in the spectacle of their sufferings. Such appeals to readerly desire also hold Dennis’ critical eye in the brief Chapter 4, which couples Byron’s “Prometheus” with “The Prisoner of Chillon” (both composed in 1816). Again, Dennis pursues the rhetoric of victimhood in these works, specifically the way in which Byron subjects his readers to his own projections. Prometheus, that familiar Romantic symbol, is portrayed by Byron as God’s enviable rival who, alongside the Prisoner, models sublime forms of altruism.
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