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.
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JackCragwall Uncategorized Adam Potkay, Joy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, William Wordsworth

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.
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JackCragwall Uncategorized Charlotte Smith, Edoardo Zuccato, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt, Mary Ann Myers, Mary Robinson, Petrarch, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reviewed by
Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Texas A&M University

Daniel P. Watkins’s study of works by three major Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—examines the place of sexual roles and gendered struggles for power within a social and political landscape marked by profound economic change. Specifically, Watkins investigates the shift from an aristocratic, feudal economy to an emerging capitalism, and he points to gendered subjectivity as the primary experiential space through which anxieties over that shift were mediated. Posing the model of “sadeian logic” as the template for making sense of both social and interpersonal relations, Watkins reads a number of well-known Romantic works through the lenses of gender, class, and power finally to conclude that while the idealistic tendency of Romanticism remains compromised by the masculinist biases of its day, a feminist materialist investigation of the history and historicity of that dilemma—the very sort of project in which Watkins’ study participates—offers Romanticism its only way out of the convoluted patriarchalism that structured social, economic, and interpersonal relationships in the early nineteenth century.

Throughout his book, Watkins argues that “during the romantic period there are close relations between visionary idealism, patriarchy, and sadism” (60), and he demonstrates how “[the] three admittedly nonparallel categories of society, philosophy, and sexuality seem . . . to be crucial in the attempt to locate and explain, in historical terms, the romantic imagination and romantic textuality” (xvi). Anticipating skepticism about his subject and approach in the brief “Introduction” that opens the book, Watkins remarks that a central “problem” of Romanticism—in particular, how that movement’s ” . . . entanglement in the turbulent conditions of both feudalism and capitalism [and] its involvement with the declining energy of the Enlightenment project . . . [shapes] the romantic understanding and portrayal of gender” (xv)—”can be considered most usefully when gender is cast in its strongest possible form and then set in relation to other prominent, or constitutive, features of romanticism” (xvi). Indeed, for Watkins, the hallmarks of Romanticism—”[f]ragmentation, alienation, and reification”—are never overcome but, instead, are “pushed further down into the inner recesses of social life until they are almost hidden away in one of the most basic relations of human existence-sexuality” (120). Watkins offers the strongest support for his subject and methodology near the end of his chapter on Keats where he justifies the turn to sadeian logic by underscoring a phenomenological link between the almost simultaneous and, Watkins suggests, the contingent emergence of the works of Sade and the development of the Romantic attitude. Of the particular gender bias for which Romanticism has long been attacked, Watkins writes that “[i]t is important to call the logic of this masculinist poetic strategy sadeian because the word both suggests the severity of the poem’s portrayal of gender and helps to link various social and cultural energies of the age within a single historical and cultural framework” (123). Watkins concludes his study by pointing to the three ways in which such a project—which, he maintains, might seem to invalidate any reading of Romantic poetry as anything other than oppressive, particularly at the level of gender—remains useful to larger questions about Romanticism and its cultural moment. Specifically, Watkins argues that “feminism must explain the enabling logic and shaping conditions of violence if it is to be defused and its energies positively redirected”; that his project “calls attention to the historical field where oppression takes place and, therefore, where goal-oriented materialist feminism must always begin”; and that “feminist intervention . . . enables romanticism to be brought forward as history rather than as ideology or nostalgia, serving not only as a poetic expression of hope but also as a historical register of the real conditions of that hope” (129).

This reviewer’s lengthy focus on Watkins’ subject and methodology underscores the anxiety the author himself voices throughout Sexual Power and British Romantic Poetry; indeed, Watkins admits that his decision to focus on exclusively a few well-known works by canonical writers results from the fact that while he believes his model to hold true for the larger Romantic movement, these familiar and easily accessible texts function as test cases in which his theory may be satisfactorily investigated. Watkins begins with Wordsworth, whose own attitude about political revolution and whose plan for poetic revolution mark him as an important figure to consider in terms of the shifting climates that shaped the early portion of the Romantic age. Focusing on “Tintern Abbey,” “Nutting,” and the “stolen boat episode” from The Prelude, Watkins argues that Wordsworth’s meditations on the self and its place both in the narrow register of individual imagination and in the larger scheme of social relations demonstrate an obsession with emerging subjectivity, which Watkins ties to a cultural and economic shift from feudalism to capitalism. As a member of a developing capitalist society, Watkins argues, Wordsworth struggles to find a place for himself in an increasingly self-made world.
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admin No. 2, Vol. 1 capitalism, Daniel Watkins, gender, John Keats, patriarchy, power, Samuel Lyndon Gladden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sexuality, subjectivity, _Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry_

Reviewed by
Morton D. Paley
University of California, Berkeley

This erudite and valuable study should really have been called Coleridge and Italy, for it does not attempt to re-chronicle Coleridge’s time south of the Alps but instead breaks new ground in studying Coleridge’s intellectual relation to Italian poetry, art, philology, and philosophy. Contesting the view that among foreign cultures Germany alone was significant for Coleridge, Zuccato shows that Italy ran a surprisingly strong second when all the aspects of its importance to him are considered. He argues that while Byron and Shelley reversed the values of the British view of Italy, they did so within the traditional binary system, with the “pagan” South now positively valorized. Coleridge’s Italy, in contrast, was “Christian, Platonic, sublime.” The subject matter itself is divided into “internal” and “external” history, referring to “the influence Italian culture exerted in Coleridge’s intellectual life” and “Coleridge’s place in the history of Anglo-Italian literary relationships.”

With respect to poetry, the influence of Petrarch, Christian and Platonist, is rightly emphasized. Regarding Dante, it was thanks to Coleridge that H. F. Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy, through which generations of Anglophone readers were to know the work, was rescued from obscurity and republished by Taylor and Hessey. Coleridge appreciated Dante’s Rime, then little known in England, as well, and he was also remarkable for preferring Boccaccio’s romances to his Decameron and Ariosto’s minor works to his Orlando Furioso. Tasso did not interest him, and he was immune to Pulci’s irony. On the whole, however, his other Italian poetical interests were remarkably catholic, embracing Giambattista Marino, Pietro Metastasio, Gabriella Chiabrera, Battista Guarini, and Givan Battista Strozzi, among others. (The different tastes of different times are indeed striking: the author remarks that in the anthology of Italian poetry complied in 1784 by Agostino Isola, best known to us as Wordsworth’s Italian tutor, there are 26 poems by Metastasio and none by Dante!) Coleridge did not, of course, merely read—he translated, imitated, and reworked. Taken together, his writings after as well as about these poets show his very high degree of insight into their work.

It is also shown how the fine arts contributed significantly to Coleridge’s theory of imagination. The modern in both painting and poetry, according to Coleridge, preferred the part to the whole, while the poets of the Renaissance used general imagery and traditional themes. However, this view needs to be qualified by Coleridge’s lack of detailed knowledge of the art of his own time, despite his association with Washington Allston. Coleridge’s greatest degree of response was to the Renaissance, beginning with the Camposanto frescoes at Pisa and especially The Triumph of Death, which in its engraved form also stimulated Keats. (It must be said that St. Martin’s Press has done a disservice to the author and his readers with its muddy reproductions of details from this fresco). Although Coleridge could take pleasure in earlier Italian art, he described the contribution of Giotto in terms of the liberation of figures from their imprisonment in two-dimensionality. Coleridge’s appreciation of the high Renaissance is spirited but conventional: he elevates the Roman and Florentine schools above the Venetian (a view so widely held that it was shared by Reynolds and Blake), and he identifies Michelangelo with the sublime, Raphael with the beautiful. Coleridge appears to have been less responsive to sculpture than to painting—he called Bernini’s works an “unhappy attempt at picture petrifactions,” and he thought Michelangelo’s only great statue was his Moses. Zuccato is fair in describing Coleridge’s limitations as a writer about art:

His comments on painting often seem to disembody the image, to atomize it into its components: he considers colour, or form, or drawing, but seldom the relations between them. Moreover, he tended to discuss these aspects in non-pictorial terms. (75)

Zuccato’s consideration of Coleridge and Italy extends beyond the vulgar language to Latin writings, and beyond literature and the arts to philosophy and political history. Coleridge proves to have had a good knowledge of Italian poetry in Latin, admiring especially Petrarch’s metric epistles. Among Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno was particularly important to Coleridge from 1801 on, at a time when Bruno was known in Germany but not in England. Bruno’s philosophy of nature was for a time very appealing to Coleridge, and Zuccato accepts at least part of Coleridge’s defense against charges of plagiarism from Schelling on the ground that “most basic concepts of Naturphilosophie appear in Bruno, who was popular in Romantic Germany” (129). Zuccato concurs with Thomas McFarland’s view that Coleridge concluded that Bruno’s views were incompatible with his own on the grounds of pantheism. Much later, in 1825, Coleridge was introduced to the work of Giambattista Vico. However, according to Zuccato, “his notes on the New Science show that he paid less attention to Vico’s principles than their applications” (141). And though at first Coleridge accepted the periodization of history that was the basis of the Viconian cycles, in the end he rejected time’s cycle for time’s arrow. Regarding the history of Italy, and particularly of Florence, Coleridge’s view was opposed to that of Sismondi, who emphasized the role of communes. “Florence was for Coleridge a sort of modern version of Plato’s republic, a republic of the learned” (150). Here as elsewhere, Zuccato’s distinctions are judiciously grounded in the culture of Coleridge’s Europe.

A few incidental mistakes should be corrected. The Act of Union with Ireland took place in 1800, not 1802 (8). Percy Bysshe Shelley was upper-class, not “bourgeois” (12). In the context of a discussion of Italian art, the reference to “the Viennese school” (65) is almost certainly a typo for “the Siennese school.” It is puzzling to read that John Constable’s patron Sir George Beaumont “had little enthusiasm for Constable” (77). However one might characterize Coleridge’s feeling for Sara Hutchinson, “a moment of emotional bewilderment” is inadequate (21). A criticism of the “Select Bibliography” is also in order: although the endnote documentation of Coleridge in Italy is scrupulous and even massive, the nine subdivisions of the bibliography, with entries alphabetized according to author within each, make it hard at times to find individual items. Some seem to have fallen between the cracks. Where, for example, is Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, mentioned several times in the text? Where is Benedetto Stay, whose Fable of the Madning Rain is cited in Coleridge’s opinion as “one of the finest satires ever written” (114)? More importantly, where are the printed sources for Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself? These are of course secondary problems, having nothing to do with this book’s main subject or lines of argument.

We are privileged to have in Edoardo Zuccato as a guide someone so learned in Italian culture and having a command of Italian literature that few if any other Coleridge scholars possess. Coleridge in Italy is a welcome study of an important subject that has at last received the attention that it deserves.

admin No. 1, Vol. 1 Edoardo Zuccato, Italy, Morton D. Paley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge