Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Tristanne Connolly
St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo

The prospect of reading Nature as the Book of God in and around the Romantic period immediately calls up both the precise, “rational religion” of the eighteenth century (how much can be known of the true God without Revelation?) and the vague, evocative pantheism that has traditionally defined high Romanticism. Colin Jager navigates a way between the two, and the topic of design, seemingly only one small detail in the larger relations of theology, philosophy and literature, reveals itself as influentially everywhere, much like the hand of God. Design becomes a deft little needle to embroider the broad fabric to which Jager sets himself, a repatterning of the relation between Romanticism and modern secularism. The project points suggestively toward multiple significances of the concept of design, and ways to rethink Nature and Reason in early and late Romanticism, and in modernity. More explicitly, the book considers how to read religion in Romantic literature where it might seem most elusive, critiques Romantic criticism through its own investments in a certain narrative of modernity, and extrapolates that critique into a revisionary theory of secularization that accounts for the persistence of divine design and human faith.

A strength of the book is its combination of expected and unexpected texts for its subject matter. Its revivification of William Paley as a worthy object of scholarship is exciting, and the book’s standout chapter on Mansfield Park builds insightful and thorough arguments about design on a brief conversation about chapel fittings, moving out more broadly to a religious triangulation of Edmund, Fanny and Mary perceptively informed by British religious history.

Jager begins by taking on the secularization thesis as endorsed, for instance, in M.H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism, and suggests instead a process of differentiation in which religion becomes one sphere among many rather than infused in all aspects of life. He argues for adoption of Charles Taylor’s concept of multiple modernities to enrich the idea that differentiation may mean a shift but need not imply a decline in the public role of religion. However, Jager seems to assert at once that there has not been a decline in religion, and that there is a current resurgence. He considers Western Europe to be the world exception in actually having “experienced secularization as both differentiation and religious decline and transformation”, and considers the objection, “why would it matter for interpreting British romanticism that secularization as commonly understood is not universally applicable, and that the global South, for instance, is currently experiencing a massive surge in religious activity?” (32-3). In answer, Jager emphasizes the interests of later interpreters who appeal to secularization, which is fair enough, but still the question remains open, as earlier he had argued “the most reliable data show that religious participation in England rose between 1800 and 1850 (the period of most intense modernization and industrialization) and then held steady or rose gradually until 1900; the period between 1890 and 1914 was probably the key turning point” (27). Was there or wasn’t there religious decline in Britain in the Romantic period? The amorphousness of the figures adds further uncertainty: religious participation is a lump undifferentiated by sect. The understanding of “religion” is problematic in the book, as overall it clearly concentrates on Christianity, yet appeals to wider examples to demonstrate resurgence—for instance, Saba Mahmood’s study of the Egyptian mosque movement—though surely a modern and feminine desire to uphold religious norms will be interestingly different between Christian and Muslim, English and Egyptian experience. (The “bodily postures” involved are treated in a broad, abstract, barely physical mode by Jager, one hint of how the transfer is inadequate.) The introduction is most solid and interesting in its initial explanations of points that will be crucial throughout, such as the rhetorical nature of design arguments, compactly demonstrated in Raphael’s advice to Adam that he must “reck’n right”: “we try to figure out something about God based on what we can see around us … But … we need to be reminded … to begin not with what we can observe but with what we know about God” (9). Design arguments, Jager insists, convince those already inclined to believe them. Also insightful is the understanding of analogy (on which design arguments rest) as “itself… a figure for secularization as differentiation” (31) because of its paradoxical ability at once to distinguish and hold together two different realms, such as nature and divinity, or science and religion.

Chapter One, “The Argument Against Design from Deism to Blake”, is somewhat confusingly titled, as deism is concluded not to be really “against” design; it is just like design without the orthodoxy. Jager turns to Godwin, using Caleb Williams’ relationship to Falkland, initially seen as a “benevolent divinity” (53), as a “rereading of the optimism of the deists … The subject can no longer believe, but that loss entails paranoia and a crippling reflexivity rather than a compensatory liberation” (54). Again this is conceived more as an extension than an opposition (almost like the relationship between modernism and postmodernism). Indeed, Jager draws an affinity between Caleb and Paul de Man, for whom, he argues, “secularization is melancholy, obsessive, and secretive” (54); both realize knowledge does not set them free. One might ask whether this is the inevitable result, though: in Caleb’s case, remembering that this reading is metaphorical, figuring his relation to God on his belief in a fellow human as divine (which is idolatry, of a kind very convenient to arbitrary earthly power), it may be that he is too socially brainwashed to get over the revelation that a (mere) class superior is not so superior.
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Reviewed by
Celestine Woo
SUNY Empire State College

Robert Miles’s Romantic Misfits is an erudite, far-ranging reconsideration of Romanticism that cleverly fuses both old and new conceptualizations of the period. Miles recuperates a more conservative (in more than one sense) reading of Romanticism, returning to older sites of scholarly interest in order to defamiliarize them with recent work on theatre, science, and hitherto unrecognized writers and genres. Miles writes for an advanced audience familiar with major theorists, scholars, and arguments within Romantic studies. Even graduate students may find portions of Romantic Misfits difficult to parse without aid, especially the discussion of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and its political context (which arrives with minimal explanation), or the ongoing presumption that the reader has internalized the thought of Jürgen Habermas as fully as Miles. This is not to say, however, that Romantic Misfits is an abstruse, arcane book—at its best, the prose is lucid, even lyrical.

A few years ago, I taught a course entitled “The Romantic Outsider,” in which I used the trope of the outsider to interrogate both canonical and non-canonical romanticisms, beginning with the Wordsworthian poet of Nature as figural outsider, then proceeding to the “outsiders” of genre (especially theatre) and gender. What Miles has done in his excellent monograph is analogous to these experiments, though Romantic Misfits develops its arguments far more thoroughly. Its opening sentence cuts to the core of the paradox of the canonically noncanonical: “Although all Romantics are misfits some misfits did not fit” (1). Miles delineates his project as a critique of institutionalized Romanticism, beginning with an examination of the Victorian reception (and creation) of the Romantic, as the “original moment of canon formation—of Romantic misfitting—in order to [… analyze] what was excluded in the process” (5). In answer to Jerome McGann’s “Romantic Ideology”, Miles proposes to re-read Romanticism not as an institution of shared themes or commitments, but rather as a period characterized by the emergence of two formations in dialectical opposition: a radical Enlightenment and its reactionary counter, the latter ultimately privileged by the Victorians (8).

Romantic Misfits is well grounded in historicist scholarship, particularly the work done by Jon Klancher, Kevin Gilmartin and Iain McCalman. Supplementing these historicisms with the theoretical work of Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, Miles situates the “normative ideal” of Romanticism in the trope of the misfit, selecting indicative case studies as exemplary targets. The first chapter analyzes the famous “Shakespearian” forgeries of William Henry Ireland, contending that Shakespeare constituted a central normative ideal within Romantic discourse, and thus, a fitting lens through which to view misfitted notions. Miles reads Ireland’s Confessions in light of the Habermasian public sphere, in order to reveal a privileged moment for the construction of romantic forms of subjectivity, illusion, and national sentiment, as the debate over Ireland’s forgeries merged the political and literary, casting the figure of the injured Bard as a metonym for the nation. Following Linda Colley, Miles punningly analogizes the outrage over Ireland’s temerity at forging Shakespeare with the nation’s growing concern with forging English nationalism. The analysis is innovative, and usefully synthesizing—regrettably missing, though, is any engagement with the substantial work of Jeffrey Kahan, who has published two monographs on Ireland and forgery, as well as a collection of Ireland’s poetry.¹

In his second chapter, Miles effects a revaluation of the Gothic, drawing it from its beleaguered position on the margins, back into the center of Romanticism. Beginning by contesting Wordsworth’s claim in the “Preface” to be rejecting popular Gothic in favor of the internalized lyric, Miles asserts that Adventures on Salisbury Plain and The Borderers are in fact deeply Gothic works. As he keenly puts it, “The second edition of the Lyrical Ballads may be a cornerstone of English Romanticism, but it was set amid Gothic ruins” (62). Miles’s argument excels here at clearly describing how Wordsworth’s ideas—a “position,” in Bourdieu’s terms—fits into the interplay among various familiar and unfamiliar discourses. Relating Wordsworth’s ideas to constructions of ideal presence, the political, and Gothic tropes, Miles smoothly knits together canonical interpretations of Romanticism (Wordsworth as compassionate celebrator of the downtrodden) with newer revisionist notions (the Gothic Wordsworth). An example of Miles’s skill at synthesis appears in his lengthy analysis of “The Thorn”: “If the narrator unknowingly Gothicizes Martha, burying her alive in gossip, the reader certainly ought not to. To read the poem well is thus to enlarge one’s views on the question of otherness … while remaining alert to the complexities of language and power” (82). The chapter includes a sterling presentation of the body and evolution of Romantic criticism, and an astute (though difficult) discussion of critical and reception histories.
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Reviewed by
Evan Gottlieb
Oregon State University

Romantic Migrations represents a welcome addition to what I suspect may be a nascent trend in literary studies of the long eighteenth century: the development of (for lack of a better term) post-postcolonial critical approaches. Few would deny that postcolonialism has yielded tangible results, even modern critical classics: Saree Makdisi’s Romantic Imperialism, Suvir Kaul’s Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, and Srinivas Aravamudan’s Tropicopolitans, for example, seem likely to remain important touchstones for many years. But with the work of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha (to name three of postcolonialism’s most visible practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s) having been thoroughly digested by literary studies for quite some time now, it seems only natural that scholars might begin to wonder what might lie on the far side of a postcolonial approach to Romanticism.

Hence the timeliness of Wiley’s new book. Without forgetting the important lessons of postcolonialism, Wiley manages to think anew about Romantic-era Britons’ complicated and various methods for representing and negotiating in print their ever-increasing contacts with other nations and cultures. Only in the book’s final chapter, on Afro-British literary relations, does Wiley in fact turn to a situation that might even be called truly colonial—and even then (as I will describe below) he does so in a way that mostly avoids conforming to preconceived critical ideas. In his opening Preface, Wiley immediately reminds us that Romantic-era Britain was hardly a monolithic, sealed entity; tracing the evolution of the noun “migration,” Wiley notes that “The new languages and meanings of migration arose as British emigration accelerated: from about 40,000 in the 1770s to about 80,000 in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to about 200,000 in the 1820s. Immigration accelerated as well” (ix). He goes on in his brief Introduction to highlight a facet of the Romantic zeitgeist that, Wiley convincingly demonstrates, has not yet received enough critical attention: the “migratory disposition” of a great many Romantics (2). Indeed, the kind of migrations that Wiley is most interested in are imagined or theoretical as often as they are real; his point is not simply that Romantic-era Britons were on the move to an extraordinary degree, but also that the idea of movement—especially between nations, and in ways that potentially complicated stable national identities—was of significant interest to a great many Romantics.

Chapter One, “The French Immersion: Cross Currents of Selfhood,” pays particular attention to the ways that French emigration during and after the Revolution was represented in British texts of the period. Wiley’s focus here, not surprisingly, is on the writings of Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and William Wordsworth, and his close readings of works by all three effectively tease out the variety of ways they each “examined variations on a potential alternative to nationhood: an international, multilingual, meritocratic community” (9). This is not to say, however, that Wiley finds all three to be equally in favor of such a possibility; whereas Smith’s poem The Emigrants (1793) uses geography to “provid[e] directions toward a non-militaristic, reformist social order” (14) and promotes multilingualism as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding, Burney’s emigration novel The Wanderer (1814) treats “language—spoken, written, unspoken, or unwritten; French or English—[as] uncertain and dangerous” (35). If the novel ultimately warns British readers that any nationalist perspective is inherently limited, Burney seems hard-pressed to articulate a clear alternative, offering “little direction towards [the] transcendental social space” (40) she promotes but cannot concretize. The final section of the chapter limns Wordsworth’s changing views on Anglo-French migration by closely reading a representative pair of the many sonnets he composed over a period of several decades. In “The Banished Negroes” (re-titled “September 1st, 1802” in Poems, in Two Volumes [1807]), Wordsworth, freshly returned from France after visiting Annette Vallon and their young daughter Caroline during the Peace of Amiens, demonstrates great sympathy with the “Negro Woman” who supposedly shared his ferry ride back across the Channel to England. The fact that Wordsworth—either knowingly or accidentally—magnifies the 1802 Napoleonic ordinance that expelled a small group of blacks into a law banishing all blacks from France does not, I think, diminish the moral force of his engagement with what Wiley terms “a historical situation in which French, English, and African subjects were assuming new dispositions, a situation, in other words, in which subjectivities were migrating and national space was inherently unstable” (49). Such engagement is all the more striking, moreover, when compared with Wordsworth’s later treatment of a similar theme in his 1822 sonnet “The Exiled French Clergy.” Here, although Wordsworth’s praise of British hospitality to French exiles remains unchanged, Wiley shrewdly points out that the terms of Wordsworth’s representations of Anglo-French migration have radically altered, such that his previous recognition of the porosity of national borders and identities has been replaced by “a dream of British and French nationhood, a dream in which physical geography is constant, unchanging, stable” (53). In other words, the older, more conservative Wordsworth profoundly rejects the “fluid, unstable, increasingly international world” (53) that the earlier Wordsworth embraced, albeit with some (understandable) trepidation.

In Chapters Two and Three, Wiley turns his attention to the two major continents that most interested—some might even say, obsessed—the Romantics: America and Africa. Especially after the failure of the French Revolution to fulfill its most radical promises, the New World held a fresh appeal for the more idealistic and progressive Romantics: America offered seemingly boundless opportunities for them to imagine new social possibilities, and indeed new lives. Here, Wiley spends much of his time parsing the correspondence and poetic reveries of the would-be Pantisocrats, especially Coleridge and Southey. This move, while perhaps predictable, nevertheless pays fine dividends; thus we learn, for example, that Southey hoped the move to the banks of the Susquehanna would find them “criticis[ing] poetry when hunting a buffalo,” composing “sonnets while following the plough,” and “discuss[ing] metaphysics . . . while sawing down a tree” (quoted 65). Such aspirations, with their near-ludicrous mix of hard labor and intellectual musings, might seem patently ridiculous, but Wiley wisely favors sympathy over condescension when judging the Pantisocrats with the benefit of hindsight, noting, for example, that “the group’s planners were all male, but their community would have given females more authority than they often had in Britain at this time, including them centrally in the philosophical conversations and the cultural work of the group” (66). Moreover, Wiley proceeds to use the eventual failure of the Pantisocratic scheme to elucidate several of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s contributions to Lyrical Ballads (1798). Although (as he freely admits) he is not the first critic to do so, the resulting readings are instructive: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” for instance, becomes newly meaningful as a poem “addressing the spiritual and political psychology of migration” (81), while “The Female Vagrant” takes on new meaning when the ramifications of the loss of the titular character’s family estate can be seen as Wordsworth’s counter-argument to the Pantisocrats’ belief in communitarianism.
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Reviewed by
Mark L. Barr
Saint Mary’s University

Brian Goldberg’s The Lake Poets and Professional Identity is a careful and subtle exploration of the cultural tropes and social forces that William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey invoked and struggled against in attempting to forge their distinct notions of authorial identity. Goldberg’s central thesis is that the Lake School poets, caught between the unsustainable binary conception of the author either as reclusive (and unpaid) genius or as remunerated hack, sought in legal, medical, and clerical professionalism a more palatable model to help reconfigure the authorial relationship to both work and audience. In this intensive and necessarily episodic study, Goldberg manages a fine balance between both obscure and well-read texts and between the Lake Poets and their eighteenth-century forebears to trace the often uncomfortable fit between the notion of “professional gentleman” and an emerging vocational identity arising alongside the economic model gradually replacing the patronage system.

Part I explores definitions of “profession” and professionalism extant in the late eighteenth-century public sphere. Reading Coleridge’s poetic response to Joseph Cottle’s “Monody on the Death of John Henderson,” Goldberg argues that Henderson’s non-traditional vocational example as a researcher into the occult provided Coleridge with a professional model that could potentially avoid the innately conservative aspects of professionalism and allow greater room for creative and even enthusiastic innovation at the heart of his nascent sense of poetic authority (34-45). Goldberg goes on to read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as a vocational text responding to the model of poetic professionalism expressed in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. After proclaiming the efficacy and legitimizing force of his own training, however, Wordsworth expresses concern about the applicability of the professional model to the office of poetry: if Dorothy is a potential apprentice poet, her gender’s inability to access the category of “professional gentleman” suggests a lack of fit between notions of poet and professional (45-59).

Part II delves into the early eighteenth-century social context from which the Lake School’s ideals of poetic professionalism emerge. Goldberg finds in Richard Savage a progressive, revisionary conception of authorial autonomy that is mirrored in the lives of Samuel Johnson, James Beattie and David Hume (65-89). The section goes on to consider at length Beattie’s poem, The Minstrel, reading it as key to establishing the figure of the wanderer as a dominant trope of poetic identity for the Lake School, an identity modelling a progressive professionalism potentially divorced from its customary associations with conservatism and corruption (90-122). Goldberg explores the Lake School’s invocation of the wanderer in Part III, arguing that, in their early experiments with the trope of itinerant work, the Lakers find only the negative of ideal professional autonomy (128). Goldberg reads Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Southey’s Madoc as “test cases” that encourage a turn to The Task and its author William Cowper (a figure combining failed professionalism, itinerancy and religious enthusiasm) as the crucial model of Romantic poetic professionalism, albeit a model against which the Lake School still, in part, struggles.

In the final section of his work, Goldberg considers two self-conscious attempts of the Lake Poets to control and shape the nature of their professional identity: Southey’s debate with Herbert Croft over fraud and profits relating to certain letters of Thomas Chatterton, and the several versions of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. It is here that Goldberg successfully draws together the various historical and sociological strands of argument he has developed in the prior segments, culminating in his most perceptive and nuanced assessment of the extent to which notions of professionalism both helped and hindered the Lake Poets in developing their conceptions of poetic vocation. Goldberg suggests that, in the argument with Croft, Southey showcases the slippage between ideals of “gentleman” and “professional,” finally delineating a collectivist notion of professionalism (206) that locates a sense of public value and authority for the poet in sources of talent and vocation rather than birth (213). Wordsworth, for his part, conceives of poetry as a kind of portable realty, providing a basis for the poet’s social standing and value analogous to that of the landed gentry (215). Through both vocational training and birthright, the poet gains cultural capital and public authority through the production of artefacts that manage to invoke the institutional stability of realty without being vulnerable to the conservatism and corruption associated with traditional, institutionally-based professions.
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Reviewed by
Tobias Menely
Willamette University

Since when has public debate—about the state’s responsibility for the indigent, about foreign wars and homeland security, about the regulation of international commerce—been so thoroughly informed by issues of financial speculation and public debt? Since the eighteenth century, argues Robert Mitchell, when the parasitic greed of speculators and the dangerous expansion of national debt were the subject of plays and poems, pamphlets and speeches. Mitchell describes his ambitious, fascinating, and timely book Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era as an example of a “new economic literary criticism” (206). Literary critics, he maintains, have as much to teach us as economists do about finance capitalism, a phenomenon (as we have recently learned) that reflects the exigencies of social psychology and imaginative speculation no less than the materialities of production and consumption. Mitchell links the development of a theoretical language of sympathetic identification with the crises in state finance that periodically rocked Britain in the century and a half after the establishment of the Bank of England. Elaborating on Thomas Haskell’s seminal work, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility,” Mitchell shows that financial speculation, social sympathy, and humanitarian reform politics share a cognitive style defined by its “open sense of the future” (vii).

Ever since Benedict Anderson identified the eighteenth-century rise of the nation with “homogeneous empty time,” the steady forward movement and social simultaneity of newspaper reading, scholars have been drawing our attention to the period’s other forms of time consciousness. In Mitchell’s account, the eighteenth-century present was bound by promises made and debts accrued in the past just as it was oriented by speculations about what was to come. Finance capitalism relied on “investment instruments that located value in the future” (14), but there was also a parallel sense that communities mediated by imaginative sympathy are themselves lived in the future tense. This open relation to futurity was enabled by a novel conception of “society” as a contingent and variegated “system” of relationships. Britons perceived an increasingly intricate and extensive collective life, in which the economy, the government, and “collective psychology” were growing more inseparable as they grew more complex. Mitchell argues that social systems, and particularly a financial system in which shared opinions establish value, became acutely visible during economic crises. Financial calamity and constraint turned people’s attention to the mediating forms that undergird collective belief, as they sought means of reflecting on and intervening in economic systems (5). Moreover, the writers studied by Mitchell—David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, the antislavery poets of the 1780s, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—drew on the speculative temporality and systemic contingency of finance capitalism in order to reconceive the social order.

Renaissance thinkers, Mitchell reminds us in Chapter One, would have been perplexed by the modern idea of imagination as a form of cognitive projection that produces virtual community by enabling a self to enter another’s situation. Before the eighteenth century, imagination was “a quasi-corporeal faculty that mediated between animal spirits and intellect,” only producing social factions of a dangerously enthusiastic or otherwise aberrant nature (29). It is, Mitchell argues, only with the financial crises of the early eighteenth century, and particularly the South Sea Company stock panic of 1720-1, that imagination came to explain “affective relationships between individuals” (29). This etymological shift is paralleled by a new interest in the relation between the circulation of images through mass media and the collective sentiments that determine stock prices and the availability of public credit. While political economists soon turned away from the problem of imagination, moral philosophers did not, because imaginative speculation offered a way of conceptualizing the formation and maintenance of social systems. In the second half of the chapter, Mitchell argues that David Hume identified the specific imaginative mechanisms of sympathy as a way of explaining how “social stability” is possible without “epistemological certainty” (48). For Hume, sympathy—the self’s capacity to speculate about another’s speculations about itself—produces the intersubjective domain, a kind of affective gift economy in which we come to know ourselves. Mitchell distinguishes Hume from conservatives like Bolingbroke, who attributed social cohesion to the sedimenting influence of past experience. Hume defines two temporalities of social formation, one linked to the closed futurity of “the promise,” which is dependent on the continuity of convention, and one linked to the open futurity of speculative acts that inaugurate “new forms of sociability” and new systems (55).
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Reviewed by
Jonathan Mulrooney
College of the Holy Cross

A concern with “maturity”—psychological, social, poetic—has informed critical discussions of Keats more than those of any other English poet. For much of the twentieth century, the concern was framed biographically: how is it that one so young could have developed so quickly? In 1988, Marjorie Levinson’s shattering Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style turned that question upon itself, claiming that profound cultural dispossession rather than transcendent formal mastery constituted the most radical element of Keats’s poetry. Measuring as it does the psychological (if not the psychoanalytic) valences of the poet’s verses, Levinson’s study continues to serve as a salutary counter to the historicisms that have illuminated Keats studies over the last three decades. As the social and material conditions within which the poems were produced and circulated have been recovered, we have recognized a serious political dimension to Keats’s aesthetic project. Yet Keats’s Life of Allegory reminds us that the formal standards by which we came to value Keats’s lyric form—and the lyric persona they enact—have not, even by virtue of Levinson’s inversion of them, been discarded. In short, Keats’s formal achievement endures in a way that historicism cannot entirely explain. We might reframe my opening question: how is it that an historically informed criticism might attend to matters such as stylistic and psychological “development” without embracing once again an exhausted Romantic ideology?

Scholars such as Robert Kauffman and Jacques Khalip have in different ways responded to this dilemma by exploring how Keats’s formal imaginings represent and enact a “negatively capable” poetics. For Khalip especially, Keats eschews the idea of development—subjective or historical—in favor of a lyric persona posited rhetorically around the rejection of self mastery. By contrast, Richard Marggraf Turley’s provocative and engaging study Keats’s Boyish Imagination extends Levinson’s critique in the other direction, taking development as its central interpretive concept. Rather than imagining a lyricism whose experiential engagements resist the concept of the progressive self, allowing no settled identity to cohere, Turley’s Keats performatively disrupts his maturation at particular points of incompletion. In the book’s five thematically focused chapters, Turley gives us a Keats who employs a “deliberate use of immaturity” (2) as a “potent weapon against conservative ideology” (7). Performed immaturity thus becomes the primary political strategy of Keatsian poetics, the constitutive action of what Keats called “the Poetical character.” Providing fresh and imaginative readings of poems ranging from the little considered Calidore to the canonical “To Autumn,” Turley’s meticulous attention to the poems’ language yields remarkable insight into how the Keatsian lyric responded to the vicissitudes of its historical moment.

At its best, the book argues convincingly for the indispensability of “boyishness” to understanding Keats’s representations of poetic authority. Turley’s cogent introduction makes the case concisely, taking the late Cap and Bells not as a descent from Keats’s mature greatness but rather as the culmination of an “unapologetic involvement in the forms and language of childhood” (7). That involvement registers throughout Keats’s career, as the poet’s anxiety about reception manifests itself through a procession of “unstable signs” which threaten normative representations of physical and social maturity (37). Often these signs are fetishized body parts denoting the qualities Keats most lacks: in Chapter One feet substitute for the absent phallus of manly authority, in Chapter Three the larynx produces the broken voice of adolescent boyhood, in Chapter Five clinically describable but socially unimaginable “c—nts” haunt the poet’s every mention of women. The book’s first chapter, “‘Strange longings’: Keats and feet” illustrates both the strength (suggestive interpretations based on keen close reading) and weakness (a narrowing of critical vision) of this thematic approach. As Turley states explicitly to open the chapter, he is primarily interested in feet “found on the end of legs, not the metrical variety” (11). The argument then develops along conventional Freudian lines: the “phallic anxiety and genital aversion” (20) marked by the poems’ “foot episodes” destabilizes conventional early nineteenth-century notions of sexuality, manliness, and authority—offering instead “a ‘boyish’ erotics that is voyeuristic, fetishistic, and deferred” (13). In Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion, a fascination with feminine feet—Diana’s and Moneta’s, respectively—sublimates the poet’s castration anxieties. Turley’s treatment of Diana’s first descent is exemplary: Keats offers us “her hovering feet, / More bluely vein’d, more soft, more whitely sweet / Than those of sea-born Venus” (Endymion 1.624-6), even as (in Turley’s words) “the Latmian shepherd boy quite literally looks up the skirt of a goddess” (15). Feet, then, stand in for that which Keats most desires and that which he cannot name or possess. In the later epic, Moneta’s status as a “phallic mother” (Turley 24) occasions a similar podiatric veneration: “‘Shade of Memory!’/ Cried I, with an act adorant at her feet” (The Fall of Hyperion 1.282-3). Revealing all too much of herself to the poet as she “casts aside her maternal veils” (Turley 24), Moneta forces the boyish poet to again “retreat into the fetish” (24). For Turley, though, this retreat is not simply a childish flight, but the representation of a “libidinal economy” in which boyishness takes on real poetic currency (20).

As throughout the book, Turley supports his claims about these scenes with detailed attention to the poems’ language. He seizes cannily, for example, on Keats’s use of the word “sweet” to describe Diana’s feet—vis-à-vis the invocation of Venus’s salty limbs (she having just emerged from the sea)—as an instance of the “preoccupation with orality” accompanying Keats’s sensuality (17). Here we see bodiliness, speech, and poetic craft come together in a vividly Keatsian way. Yet the relentless focus that energizes this kind of reading at times obscures evidence that might complicate the book’s exacting psychoanalytic agenda. Feminine feet and their association with the absent phallus invoke Keats’s authorial anxieties: fair enough. But how, then, can the chapter entirely overlook the poet’s own explicit connection of the metrical with the bodily foot:

Let us find out, if we must be constrain’d,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy -
Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain’d
By ear industrious, and attention meet. (4-9)

There are other omissions, but this is the most glaring: in “If by dull rhymes our english must be chain’d,” Keats not only genders the “Muse” feminine, he represents his crafting of new poetic forms as sandals that will at once bind and free her feet. Surely this association, and the explicit call for aesthetic maturity it suggests, warrants at least a mention in Turley’s discussion?
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Reviewed by
David Sigler
University of Idaho

Some ten years ago, Diane Long Hoeveler suggested in Gothic Feminism that a wave of Foucauldian studies, attuned to the broad discursive and institutional transformations underway at the end of the eighteenth century, might be poised to supplement a tradition of psychoanalytic studies of the Gothic (53). Dale Townshend’s monograph, The Orders of Gothic, courageously takes up this challenge, and, like Hoeveler’s study, it refuses to discard psychoanalytic insights just because Foucauldian ones prove illuminating. The Orders of Gothic offers a compelling combination of Lacanian and Foucauldian approaches, while grappling with an enormous range of Gothic writing to deliver fascinating reinterpretations of signal texts. The study is clearly written and accessible—even, I suspect, for readers mildly allergic to the specialized vocabularies of Lacan and Foucault—and for the most part it maintains the integrity of its diverse theoretical investments. It marks a significant and welcome contribution to the current critical conversation on the Gothic.

The chapters are organized around topics such as incest, vision, torture, and paternity; each considers several Gothic texts under a thematic cover, a strategy enabling Townshend to return to texts discussed in previous chapters armed with insights gained along the way. Still, it is within the earlier chapters that The Orders of Gothic makes its most significant contributions to the field. Over the first three chapters Townshend ushers carefully historicized close readings into a genuinely fresh theoretical paradigm, building the argument adroitly. Admirably, the analysis stems from close and extended engagement with specific texts: I was surprised to find that the close readings, embedding these texts in contested cultural, economic and intellectual contexts, are as much examples of new historicist scholarship as of Lacanian or Foucauldian. Townshend proves to be a responsible and convincing historicist, and, except in an analysis of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, which is psychoanalytic from the start, the Lacanian apparatus is basically superadded. But the addition is compelling and necessary, as the historicized readings illustrate how the Gothic produced the individuated subject of psychoanalysis in a peculiarly Lacanian way. To this, Townshend always appends a Foucauldian layer of meta-explanation, as for him the subjects of psychoanalysis and the Gothic are aligned in a way that Foucault can help us understand: building on the foundation laid by the last chapter of Foucault’s The Order of Things, here the literary emergence of a subject of the unconscious demarcates the very transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus Townshend ultimately reads the Gothic as a symptom of the bourgeois form of liberal modernity emerging at the end of the British eighteenth century. As Townshend is well aware, this is an argument already familiar to readers of Emma Clery, Robert Miles, Jerrold Hogle, and indeed Hoeveler. But Townshend takes a significant next step in claiming that Gothic literary conventions, generating nostalgia for a fading aristocracy within a decidedly modern rubric of disciplinary and supervisory power, were uniquely poised to confer legitimacy, continuity, and lineage on this nascent liberal modernity. The Gothic, in Townshend’s view, did not make readers choose between old discourses (like alliance, bloody punishment, and darkness) and new ones (like sexuality, bloodless discipline, and visibility). Instead, it reaffirmed the continuing presence of these old systems even as it was describing and stabilizing a new discursive regime (88). This argument thus recalls Foucault’s commentary on panopticism, modernity, and Radcliffe in “The Eye of Power,” which Townshend discusses here very productively at several stages of the argument.

Townshend’s main theoretical achievement—a considerable one—is the nesting of Lacanian psychoanalysis into Foucauldian historicism. Lacan and Foucault have been treated as incommensurate in Lacanian books like Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire or James Penny’s The World of Perversion. David Halperin, coming at this issue from the Foucauldian side in Saint Foucault, describes Foucault as the only genuine alternative to psychoanalysis (121). Sharply breaking with these assumptions, The Orders of Gothic reminds us that the psychoanalytic version of subjectivity is the product of the very shift that Foucault narrates, and that psychoanalytic reading is necessary to the extent that it can account for the traumatic remainder of enjoyment that necessarily attends such broad cultural shifts. For Townshend, the relation between Lacan and Foucault cuts both ways: Lacan is a necessary supplement to Foucault because “Historicity thus inscribes in man the trace of the Other to which he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to be reconciled,” even while “Foucault’s genealogy of vision shows Lacan’s gaze of the Other to be, at once, both highly historical and deeply enmeshed in the disciplinary power structures of modernity” (39, 304). The Gothic is a privileged site of this collision, since for Townshend it “deals in the remainder” (14). This assumption proves convincing over the course of the study, even if it tends to give Foucault the upper hand over the Gothic and Lacan: in most cases, the latter two terms are shown to be compatible with Foucault’s genealogies and archaeologies of power and knowledge.
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Reviewed by
David M. Baulch
University of West Florida

A book entitled Erotic Mary Robinson or Erotic Byron would not be all that surprising. By contrast, Anya Taylor’s Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce is immediately unsettling—and interesting—precisely because tradition has constructed Samuel Taylor Coleridge as one of the least erotic beings imaginable. Canonizing Coleridge alongside “Dry Bob” Southey, Byron’s Don Juan set the terms for reception, contrasting the success of Coleridge’s metaphysical interests with the failure of young Juan’s attempts to sublimate erotic attachments through abstruse contemplations. Slightly less than two centuries of subsequent critical treatment have done little to challenge the orthodoxy of Byron’s irreverence. While Anthony John Harding’s Coleridge and the Idea of Love: Aspects of Relationship in Coleridge’s Thought and Writing (1974) accords a centrality to love in its broadest possible sense as a moral/relational metaphysic, and Raimonda Modiano’s Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (1985) recognizes love as an important element in Coleridge’s complex and shifting engagements with aesthetic theory, Anya Taylor’s remarkable book asserts that Coleridge, throughout his life, was positively sexy and charmingly flirtatious. In short, Erotic Coleridge argues that the vicissitudes of Coleridge’s life, the complexities of his thought, and the protean character of his literary achievement need to be seen alongside his consistent interest in women.

While in its arrangement Erotic Coleridge is a chronological survey of Coleridge’s erotic attachments, it would not be accurate to call the book simply a biography of Coleridge’s love life. Erotic Coleridge makes significant strides in the reassessment of Coleridge’s accomplishment as a poet in the light of J.C.C. Mays’s discovery of numerous unknown Coleridge poems now available in the multipart Poetical Works (six books which collectively constitute volume 16 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge). For Erotic Coleridge, the significance of Coleridge’s suddenly expanded twenty-first century canon is that “[t]he large array of poems to and about women crowd out the famous manly poems like ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Fears in Solitude,’ and change the focus and reassess the meaning of well-known poems toward womanly themes” (3). So not only does Taylor find the twenty-first century Coleridge turned into a poet who produced more work focused on women than had previously been known to exist, she argues that his most well-known productions must be reassessed in light of these new discoveries.

Chapter 2 presents the pre-1794 Coleridge as an energetically flirtatious writer of verses to and about women. The period immediately before his ill-fated marriage is fertile ground for Erotic Coleridge, which presents some of the first critical readings of poems which have only recently come to light. Coleridge’s poems to Fanny Nesbitt in 1793 are characterized by their witty and frankly physical representations of the female body such as the line: “No lovelier maid e’er heav’d the bosom’s snow.” Coleridge’s engagement to Sara Fricker in 1794 did not monopolize his poetic celebrations of the female body: in that same year Coleridge also produced flirtatious verses for the singers/actresses Ann and Eliza Brunton from Bristol (among others). Most significantly, in late 1794 Coleridge experienced an emerging love with Mary Evans. Taylor argues that the 1798 poem “Lewti; or The Circassian Love-Chant” was initially inspired by his love for Mary Evans four years earlier, an argument which develops into an exploration of the epistolary exchange in which Evans implored Coleridge to give up his preparations for the pantisocracy experiment. Although Coleridge ultimately lost Mary Evans to a West Indian slaver, she became paradigmatic of “the intellectual and ethical agreement … that Coleridge would look for in future relationships” (18).

Moving away from the standard narratives that see Coleridge’s potential for greatness marred by habitual weaknesses for alcohol, opium, and plagiarism, Erotic Coleridge finds a man whose defining moment of weakness was in submitting to Robert Southey’s pressure to marry Sara Fricker. Far from trading one constitutional weakness for another, Erotic Coleridge sees Coleridge’s marriage to Sara Fricker as a compensatory sacrifice engineered by Robert Southey. Southey’s initial interest in Sara suddenly gave way to a quick marriage to Sara’s less spirited sister Edith, while the “obligations and guilt” Southey felt at abandoning Sara were assuaged by his substitution of Coleridge as Sara’s matrimonial partner. Contending that “[b]y persistent pressure Southey made Coleridge feel that he was obligated to Sara Fricker,” Taylor argues that Southey “was passing on his own obligations and guilt to the bewildered and reluctant Coleridge” (22). Insofar as Southey “was the man whom Sara Fricker admired and hoped to marry,” Sara’s subsequent and often justifiable disappointments with Coleridge were only compounded by having Southey in her presence at Greta Hall (31). Through Southey’s bullying, Coleridge’s hasty marriage was “nearly the death of Coleridge’s Soul” (23). For Taylor, Coleridge’s unfortunate marriage and its lifelong consequences constitute the central issue that shaped his poetry and the variety of odd domestic situations that marked his daily life. Not some footnote to a sudden need to find a wife for the quickly abandoned pantisocracy project, Coleridge’s marriage is the defining moment through which Erotic Coleridge effectively reads his subsequent views on women, love, divorce laws, and poetry.
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Reviewed by
Susan J. Wolfson
Princeton University

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That may be, as Keats’s ironizing odist insists, all we know on earth, and all we need to know, but the tautology is as enigmatic as it is alluring. And so the dust jacket of Stanley Plumly’s extraordinary biography reads, in small print at the top, a personal biography, then, more largely declared, Posthumous Keats. But the title page within inverts the order: Posthumous Keats, a personal biography. Which came first, the personalizing of a biography that, by generic agreement, is supposed to be about the other person, the biographized? Or Posthumous Keats, an epithet that feels like a personal biography, even though the poet-biographer outlives poet-Keats, who dies not even a third of the way into his twenty-sixth year, by decades–more than twice and half Keats’s mortal span?

What is “personal” about this? Is it the persona of “Keats”—the mask for thinking as Keats in camelion sympathy? Is it “personal” in the sense of relating to or being affected as a Plumly-private individual, in the persona of a public biographer? Is it a reciprocal relationship, a personal interviewing? Is it an intense engagement in one’s person, belonging to oneself, and self-directed? A personal biography plays in all these registers, with a Keatsian flexibility of imagination. To reverse Michael Corleone, writing Posthumous Keats was not business, it was personal, so Plumly-personal that the impulse seems simultaneous with wanting to think hard about what it was to be Keats, who in his mortal body of less than 10,000 days on earth had a lifetime of mortal experience: the death of both parents, a beloved brother, the loss of another brother to America; the heartbreak of a romance that was everything and nothing, all absorbing and fated to go nowhere; the heartbreak of an adored friend whose limitations couldn’t help but betray Keats in his last half year of life, abandoning him to a foreign clime and a bewildered acquaintance.

Just a month into his twenty-sixth year, on 30 November 1820, with less than three months left of life, Keats writes to this fugitive friend, Charles Brown:

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence. God knows how it would have been–but it appears to me– however, I will not speak of that subject.¹

This letter, the muse of Plumly’s project, is a formation in striking syntax, its “having past” tensing the expected “passed” into a pained epitaphic sigh (what Plumly terms a “posthumous tense” [294]), in relay with the persistent, even insistent, present tense “I am leading” and that “I have an habitual feeling”–as if always on the pulse, and all sensations summed in that present absence, absent presence of the stunning oxymoron, “posthumous existence.” It’s a diminishing existence instead of a life, at once agonized by a prospect, now only hypothetical, of “how it would have been,” and pained into a tenacious sensation of presence–“it appears to me”–a relay into this life turned a ghost of itself, then an insistent speaking of what the will says it won’t do: “I will not speak of that subject.” Like patience, to prevent that murmur, “posthumous Keats” is oxymoron turned into expressive syntax–Keats’s own poetic forte of unheard melodies and cold pastoral. Keats writes in both a refusal to pain himself and Brown, and a refusal to decline to speak the refusal. Pain is never done. And so he ends his letter, wrenchingly:

Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister–who walks about my imagination like a ghost–she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
God bless you!
JOHN KEATS

George, Tom, sister (Fanny), Brown: all were, in effect, ghosts by this point of existence, and so the posthumous past tense in the antonym of eulogy: “I always made an awkward bow”–what Christopher Ricks has termed the least awkward bow ever made. Even the tense is curious. Rollins gives it as this past-reflective (Keats Circle 2: 86), and so does Milnes (2: 84), but one reader of the manuscript thinks the verb is still present, and not posthumous: “I always make an awkward bow” (KC 2: 86n). The ambiguity is the perfect oxymoron, hovering, as Coleridge would say, between possibilities, between, even, plausibilities. Keats performs to an audience that is only imagination, in a formality that feels like a gracious haunting, a leave-taking of something already left, and slightly, poignantly self-parodic, another Keatsian performative forté.
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Reviewed by
Michelle Levy
Simon Fraser University

In the last decade, historians of the book have held forth the possibility that material culture might provide us with a compelling account of the historical uniqueness and special tenor of Romantic-era literary culture. By examining the dramatic rise in print publication that began in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the Romantic period may be more easily distinguished both from what came before (the more stable rate of print production that prevailed through most of the eighteenth century) and what came after (the even larger rise in print production and emergence of a truly mass reading public in the Victorian era, enabled by new forms of mechanical reproduction—iron presses powered by steam, industrial paper-making, stereotyping, and lithography). The four books under review demonstrate the potentially transformative effect of a rigorous empiricism on literary studies, as it seeks to supplement and even supersede the more anecdotal and impressionistic material histories that preceded them.

In studies of the Romantic period, the bibliographical projects of Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schowerling (The English Novel 1770-1829, 2000) and J.R. de J. Jackson (Annals of English Verse, 1770-1835: A preliminary survey of the volumes published, 1985 and Romantic Poetry by Women, A Bibliography, 1770-1835, 2003) first ushered in a new era of quantitative analysis. William St. Clair’s monumental The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, released in 2004 and reissued in paperback in 2007, for the first time provided scholars of the period with an unparalleled and nearly exhaustive “quantified factual foundation of costs, prices, print runs, textual controls and intellectual property” (16). The data St. Clair collects are reprinted in over 300 pages of appendices, which summarize and organize years of archival research in the records of literally hundreds of publishers, booksellers, printers, circulating libraries, book clubs, and private collections. The matters they cover range from government policy and copyright regimes to lengthy schedules of print runs, editions, prices, costs, from lending institutions to piracies—from Shakespeare through the Victorian period. These data have already been mined by countless scholars working in the field, and are the subject of rigorous analysis by St. Clair himself over the course of twenty-two chapters, which survey a panoply of topics in print history: from the manufacturing process to the international book market, from the piratical and monopolistic practices of booksellers to the reception of influential individual literary works. In The Reading Nation, St. Clair at once provides a provocative revision of the Romantic period as a history of the book and an indispensable reference guide to the entire print era.

The comprehensive nature of the project is one of the reasons it has garnered accolades from scholars working in a wide range of period and national literatures; but its appeal also lies in its narrative force, as St. Clair tells an altogether poignant story of the enduring and evolving struggle to obtain access to books. Reflecting a ruling class distrustful of a reading nation, the state colluded for years in the British publishing industry’s operation as a “perfect private monopoly,” which in turn “rested upon the perfect monopoly of intellectual property” (101). The turning point for St. Clair comes in 1774, with the shattering of the de facto system of perpetual copyright by the House of Lords in Donaldson v. Becket, constituting “the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before” (109). By limiting the period of copyright protection to the term established by the Statute of Anne in 1701—fourteen years, with an additional fourteen if the author was still living at the expiration of the first period—Donaldson initiated what was in fact the shortest copyright period in English history.
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