Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Penn State University

Matthew S. Buckley’s Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama is “an effort to render explicit, and thus pull into the active present, modern drama’s connection—it’s ‘secret link’—not only to the drama of the French Revolution but also, and through it, to the dramas of the pre-Revolutionary past” (152). The author uncovers the modern drama’s “secret link” to the past through an interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of the French Revolution as played out both in the streets and on the stages of Paris, as well as London. Although the title of the book suggests an historical approach to developments in the drama from the late-eighteenth century to the early-twentieth century, Buckley instead offers a history of the dramatic character of the French Revolution, its relationship to the dramas staged in the decades immediately before and after, its influence on English political and literary authors, and finally “the Revolution’s relationship to the formal development of modern drama between 1780 and 1840″ (1). The aims of the book are many, but in its multi-national (France, England, and Germany) coverage of the theatricality of politics during this period, its focus is fixed on the permanent effects of the French Revolution on European cultural production.

Buckley begins on the streets of Paris, giving us a tour of the city in the two decades leading up to the storming of the Bastille. He explains that unlike London, whose urban development was determined primarily by commerce, Paris “was a royal city, governed directly by the monarchy’s centralized administration” (11). What follows is Foucauldian analysis of the city’s landscape, one that was organized in order to maximize the surveillance of citizens through lighting, police, and informants. The reading is central to Buckley’s understanding of the Revolution (and other acts of mass rebellion) as performance. In several incidents of pre-Revolutionary public disobedience and crimes committed in plain view, Buckley sees the beginnings of what he calls “Revolutionary theatricality.” He elaborates:

Rather than simply imagining the monarchy’s loss of power, these acts staged that loss, asserting in the most visceral manner both the hollowness of absolutism’s monumental vision of society and the local, contestatory failure of its authority over public action, demonstrating—in a highly theatrical performance—the manner in which its symbolic and political regime could be blinded, stripped of its sight and thus of its rule. (23)

Mob violence and public demonstrations in Paris before the Revolution proved that the crowd was an effective way to overturn sovereign surveillance. The theatricality of these events was, according to the author, fundamental in determining the tone of revolutionary performances both on and off the stage in the years that followed.

The second chapter moves us from the streets of Paris into the city’s theaters and back to the streets again. The main argument here is that the genres staged during the Revolutionary period coincided with the general tone of the Revolution, while at the same time politics became more theatrical. Buckley provides interesting insight into the theatricality of politics in Paris during the Revolution, specifically the way speeches made by representatives of the National Assembly “began consciously to adopt the ways of the theater” by playing to the galleries. Speakers made transcripts of their speeches available, and even took lessons with professional actors in order to hone the effectiveness of their oral delivery and physical gestures (50). This portion of the argument is fascinating, and could be developed on its own. However, the chapter focuses more on the dramatic tone of the Revolution, linking it to traditional dramatic genres. For example, Buckley argues that during the “reconciliation” period between October 1789 and the summer of 1791, the dominant genre (both on stage and in public discourse) was comedy, as “reconciliation was the overwhelming impulse of the day” (52). The rise and fall of Robespierre, on the other hand, is characterized by tragedy. After the dust settles, melodrama is born in order to suppress a Revolutionary history that had run its course after the Terror. Buckley goes back and forth between the unfolding of history as drama and the plays staged in the Paris theaters, arguing for a dialectical understanding of the theatricality of the Revolution itself and the theater of the Revolutionary period. The argument is conceptually interesting, but the materialist analysis articulated in the previous chapter is missing here. It returns to some degree in the next two chapters, as non-fiction prose and periodicals are read for their theatrical representations of the French Revolution.
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Reviewed by
Dana Van Kooy
University of Colorado at Boulder

Just as Mont Blanc has been central to the Shelleyan canon, so too the sublime as an aesthetic discourse has been pivotal to our understanding of Percy Shelley as a poet, a philosopher, and a radical. Cian Duffy’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime challenges the “critical orthodoxy which assumes not only that there is such a thing as a generic ‘romantic sublime’, but also that this ‘sublime’ rehearses the transcendentalist paradigms of [Kant's] Critique of Judgment” (5). Eschewing Burke and Kant, Duffy reorients the Shelleyan sublime through two other texts: C.F. Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (translated into English in the early 1790s) and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-88). Both texts, according to Duffy, embody the eighteenth-century idea of “ruin-sentiment” (38-9), a term which links imperial collapse to moral decadence and, as a discourse of political and social reform, offers to resolve the terrifying prospect of ruin through an appeal to moral restraint. Shelley, Duffy argues, takes this causal formulation a step further; the sublime provides the means of representing the inevitable imperial failure as a natural cultural process that mirrors society’s moral and political corruption. Shelley’s sublime landscapes—significantly, inhabited by volcanoes, avalanches, and other events marking geological catastrophe—signify the natural necessity of revolution. This essentially inverts the traditional theistic discourse of the natural sublime; instead of pointing to God as the organizing principle of life, Shelley’s sublime exposes “the artificiality, the un-naturalness of contemporary social structures” (9). Duffy’s study places a new emphasis on the catastrophic imagery of the natural sublime while it also redefines the Shelleyan sublime as an “aesthetic ideology” in order to be attentive to the figurative power of the natural sublime to change the observer’s conception of what is “natural” or what is “right.”

Organized chronologically, the first two chapters focus on the philosophical and literary influences that shaped Shelley’s early figurations of the natural sublime in the Esdaile poems, Queen Mab, The Assassins, and Alastor. Tracing Shelley’s early “radical, rationalist distrust of the imagination,” and his reactions to the theistic structure of the sublime in works like Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Duffy maps Shelley’s shifting skepticism regarding the sublime and how it might be used in poetry as a discourse of political reform. In the first chapter, Duffy’s main concern is to identify the conflict between Shelley’s “gradualist politics and the revolutionism of his engagement with the discourse on the sublime” (48). He also shows how Shelley uses the sublime in Queen Mab to argue for Necessity and its ability as a natural process to bring about “a political and environmental utopia” (34). With chapter two, Duffy follows Shelley’s growing concern with the politics of the imagination and its relationship to the increasingly politicized notions of the natural sublime. Duffy’s reading of The Assassins is suggestive. Here, Duffy uses Gibbon and Delisle De Sales’ 1799 novel, Le Vieux de la Montagne to explore Shelley’s interest in incorporating the sublime to describe social bodies and their political activities. This transforms the sublime from a merely descriptive language into a means of visualizing political change. As with his work on Laon and Cythna in chapter four, here is a point where Duffy breaks new ground with regard to the texts and the contexts of the Shelleyan sublime. As with his reading of Alastor, he stresses Shelley’s disillusionment with Rousseau and with the post-Excursion Wordsworth, especially their politics of what Keats referred to as “egotistical sublime.”

Chapter three follows the traditional pairing of Mont Blanc with the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. This familiar ground—inhabited mostly by Byron, Coleridge, Rousseau, and Wordsworth—reveals Shelley’s growing awareness of the ideological power wielded by the sublime in travelogues, poetry, and in the works on natural history. Duffy also provides us with a view of how this super-saturated landscape was disfigured by the consumerism of tourists and by the imperial demands for natural resources such as rock (taken from ancient ruins and from the local landscape) to build roads. Responding to these unwieldy forces, Shelley, Duffy argues, pursues the need to develop a praxis for the “cultivated imagination.” A term introduced in chapter two, the cultivated imagination amounts to a means of using the sublime to reform an individual’s ideas about social and political questions. This is a central premise in Duffy’s narrative regarding Shelley’s evolving deployment of the sublime. Duffy invokes Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in order to define intellectual beauty not as a platonic idea but rather as “a product, and a defining characteristic” of the cultivated imagination (99). This pragmatic view of intellectual beauty takes it out of the idealistic realm too often associated with Shelley and makes clear the transformative power of the Shelleyan sublime as an experience and as a discourse.
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Reviewed by
Anthony Jarrells
University of South Carolina

The implicit claim of Kevin Gilmartin’s Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832, is that containment is as apt a metaphor for romantic-period writing as the more widely used explosion. Of course, the effort by conservative writers to counter what was thought by many in the period to be a very real threat of revolution did itself lead to an explosion of print. Indeed, it is precisely this tension that Gilmartin finds at the heart of the “counterrevolutionary” enterprise: how do those who see print as a suspect vehicle of revolution engage in a print-based campaign to counter such a threat? Gilmartin’s first book, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), explored the radical side of the struggle. His new study brings a similar, rigorous approach to the “pervasive rhetorical and literary dilemma” (13) that occupied those writers working to forestall the movement chronicled in Print Politics. The five chapters of Writing Against Revolution trace the myriad forms in which this rhetorical and literary dilemma found expression: from pamphlets and tracts (chapters one and two), periodical reviews (chapter three), and novels (chapter four), to attempts (chronicled in chapter five) by two canonical writers of the period—Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge—to extend counterrevolutionary practices beyond specific moments of crisis and to articulate “a model for a more stable society” (207). Against a scholarly field that tends to associate romantic writing with progressive strains and causes, Gilmartin aims “to demonstrate the enterprising and productive (rather than merely negative and reactive) presence of counterrevolutionary voices in the culture of the romantic period” (9).

Gilmartin’s account of the counterrevolutionary movement begins in the tumultuous early years of the 1790s—although not, as might be expected, with Edmund Burke. Burke occupies a kind of Coleridgean “life-in-death” presence in Gilmartin’s study: while the “nervously imperfect rhetorical organization” (7) of the Reflections (1790) inspires Gilmartin’s interest in the “range and complexity of counterrevolutionary expression” (9), Burke’s ambivalent relationship to British conservatism and utter distrust of “political men of letters” make his a less than vital presence in a campaign set, for better or worse, on waging war on the compromised terrain of print. As the first two chapters of the book demonstrate, Gilmartin’s concern with writers like William Paley and Hannah More is not with “abstract ideological positions” such as those that have come to characterize the Burke / Paine debate, but rather with “the social and cultural circumstances under which political expression and persuasion actually took place” (64). The pamphlets and tracts issued by John Reeves’ Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers and More’s Cheap Repository betray a willingness—however begrudged—to engage Burke’s “swinish multitude” as actual subjects of public discourse. Paley’s Reasons for Contentment; Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1792), for instance, begins in the social space of the theater, acknowledging the laboring class as a public. Although he fairly quickly retreats to the private realm of the home, where social place and duty can be imagined in more purely individual terms, the rhetorical gestures of Paley’s pamphlet perform loyalist anxieties over addressing the populace. As Gilmartin shows, Paley cannot completely seclude his laboring subject indoors. Instead, he places him between the collective space of the theatrum mundi and the individual space of the home—somewhere accessible to public discourse, that is (“at his door,” Gilmartin notes), where he can be reasoned into contentment.

The danger with making laboring class readers participants in public debate, however, is that they become accessible to other arguments as well—arguments geared to provoke “envy and resentment” (37) among the less well-off. But as Gilmartin’s deft analysis of Paley’s pamphlet suggests, the goal of counterrevolutionary writing was not merely to address the reader, but also to manage that reader’s place in the fallen realm of the public. Loyalist associations like Reeves’, which was founded in 1792 and which distributed Paley’s pamphlet, helped to forge the “necessary institutional framework” (37) required to police the participation of laboring-class readers in public discourse.
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