Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Diego Saglia
University of Parma, Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Rieder
University of Hawaii at Manoa

One of the repeated claims in Mark Schoenfield’s reading of “law, labor, and the poet’s contract” is that aesthetic issues in William Wordsworth’s day were inevitably political issues as well. While the claim itself has become something of a literary-critical commonplace in the 1990s, Schoenfield evokes its pertinence to Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s milieu with considerable skill and precision. The primary context for Schoenfield’s historicizing interpretation is not contemporary politics but rather the growth of the free market and the rise of the modern professions. The entanglement of aesthetics with social issues arises from a tension between value and judgment, or between consumption and criticism, that inevitably accompanied the published work’s dual status as commodity and work of art. Schoenfield’s counter-figure for the Wordsworthian poetic imagination is therefore not Napoleon or empire but rather a composite character, the lawyer as critical reviewer. Many reviewers were, like Francis Jeffrey, also lawyers, and Schoenfield begins his book by noting that in classical Athens kritikos meant both critic and judge. One of the main merits of The Professional Wordsworth is that it develops this general overlapping of legal and critical domains into a supple tool for the study of Wordsworth’s poetry.

The thematic emphases of Schoenfield’s readings are hardly new. The book’s subtitle will no doubt remind Wordsworthians immediately that the poet raises the issue of a contract between poet and reader in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. An extensive critical literature exists concerning the way Wordsworth’s poems and poetics treat law, justice, property, and the relation of contractual agreements to the bonds of community and to economies both of wealth and of social interaction. Schoenfield’s study is distinctive and original in at least two ways, however. The first lies in his knowledge of legal history and the specificity with which he brings it to bear on Wordsworth’s poetry. No other critic has written in comparable detail about the relevance of English common law, Blackstone’s commentaries, and contemporary legal developments to the treatment of property and rights in the Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion. The second has to do with Schoenfield’s emphasis on Wordsworth’s sense of professionalism. The turn Schoenfield gives to Wordsworth’s contention in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the poet speaks “not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer or a natural philosopher, but as a Man” is away from the formula’s essentialism or humanism to its struggle to wrest priority over a certain kind of authority from the poet’s professional rivals, and especially from the lawyer who heads up the list. Schoenfield is interested in Wordsworth’s self-conception as a professional producer, owner, and distributor of words, a self-conception he links to Wordsworth’s penchant for laborious revision, his attention to the publication and republication of his work, and above all to an ongoing confrontation between legal and poetic conceptions of authority in his poetry.

Poetry’s confrontation with legal authority often evokes some variation of the “unacknowledged legislator” of Johnson’s Rasselas or Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, and Schoenfield’s analysis includes such a moment. For Wordsworth, he says, “[Poetic discourse] is not so much beyond law as a lawmaker, or more precisely, a trace of the totemic moment which, as Freud speculates, preceded law as an institution” (89–90). This sounds as if Schoenfield is placing Wordsworth’s poetics within a theory of social contract in such a way that poetic authority precedes and makes possible the break between the state of nature and political order. Thus Schoenfield writes of “the transformational power of [Wordsworth's] poetry not as a violation of custom or law but as the recuperation of the aesthetic roots of the former and a legitimate critique of the latter” (108). But the paradoxical resonance of calling poetry a “legitimate critique” of law catches more accurately the prevailing tone of Schoenfield’s work. The poet’s efforts to assert his priority over legal discourse always seem to end up repeating the legal figures and procedures they try to overcome. For example, Wordsworth’s transformation of an oral tale into written poetry in “Michael” is said to “reenact within literature the legal empowerment that is the object of his social critique” (38). This simultaneous resistance to and containment by legal discourse is the overriding burden of Schoenfield’s analysis.

The prevalence of the resistance-containment paradigm also attests to the enveloping presence and determining power accorded to market forces. The market forces at stake here are those driving late eighteenth-century English law away from the common law monumentally elucidated in Blackstone and towards statutory law. Schoenfield’s reading of “Michael” turns on the contemporary transformation of the notion of a legal contract from its common law status, the representation of an obligation that needed to be rooted in prior conditions, to the more financially responsive concept of a written instrument that itself performs the agreement. The explicit and implied contracts Schoenfield carefully unpacks reveal that an abiding tension between local and national economies involves Michael and his property in a web of “dependencies which mean and affect more than Michael can understand and contain” (39). A similar set of legal and economic tensions informs Schoenfield’s interpretation of “Goody Blake and Harry Gill.” The poem’s narrative of “a crime, a trial, and a punishment . . . overlays features of medieval law onto modern law to demonstrate the deficiency of the latter, and structures the trial as between two theories of property” (103).
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Reviewed by

Mark S. Lussier

Arizona State University

The use of Zen thought and art as a method for reading Wordsworthian poetic production is, to my mind, long overdue, especially since Wordsworth’s mode of spiritual meditation remains embedded in a “discourse of the Other,” whether anchored in the “capaciousness of natural process” or dispersed into the “isolation” of the Leech-Gatherer. John Rudy’s small book certainly achieves its twofold purpose: “It seeks to provide a Zen context for understanding the spirituality of the English poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and attempts to enrich the East-West dialogue” emerging with considerable force in the West during the latter half of the twentieth century (xi). As a result, Wordsworth and the Zen Mind will undoubtedly, though not unproblematically, become a foundational text as this critical concern flows into other eddies within Romantic criticism. Indeed, in reviewing my marginal annotations for this assessment, I found continual intersection with other Romantic poets generally and William Blake particularly, suggesting the need for even wider application of the strategies embodied in Rudy’s thoughtful book.

While many Romanticists continue to embrace the judgment of the second generation that the Wordsworthian process itself defines the “egotistical sublime”—a position not compatible with the practice of self-emptying at the spiritual core of most Buddhist vehicles of enlightenment—Rudy’s thorough application of Zen thought and practice points to another Wordsworth, one engaged (whether consciously or unconsciously) in the eradication of “dualistic idiom[s]” buried in Western epistemology in order to perceive that “the entire phenomenal world, all that exists, is tied together in a gigantic, interrelated, interanimative web of moving aggregates” (11, 14). Viewed in this light, it is easy to see why Wordsworth was the first Romantic poet to receive ecocritical scrutiny since such a view anticipates James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, but simply seeing Wordsworth’s commitments in “green” political terms fails to confront the degree to which, as Barbara Schapiro argues, “imagination and Nature, or mind and the material world, are mutually reflecting realms for Wordsworth” (qtd. in Rudy, 10). This aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic practice lurks on the margins of Rudy’s text, which positions itself at the point where mental and material processes coalesce.

The tripartite structure through which Rudy organizes his discussion begins with the “characterless immensity” of capaciousness in inner and outer experience (27), expands into a comparison of the resonant “paths” explored by Wordsworth and Zen (“Each thing is a revealing of and a resting place for the infinite” [65]), and ends with specific consideration of discrete Zen “moods” (sabi/isolation, wabi/poverty, aware/impermanence, and yugen/mystery) manifest in several of Wordsworth’s best-known works. The primary link between Wordsworthian and Zen modes remains the recognition of what quantum physicist David Bohm describes as the implicate state of mind/matter relations, the enfolding of one within the other. Rudy discusses this point through the representations of the Alpine crossing in the sixth book of The Prelude, where the collapse of poetic “intention” and “acceptance” of experiential flow provide the dynamic for visionary connection: “All is an endless swirl of forces, objects, and events folding inward on each other to form the pulsatory eternity of the present moment, a totality that is always with us, that is for all practical purposes the coming forth of each thing in its own right” (80).

To his credit, Rudy does not attempt to transmute Wordsworth into a Buddhist without nominal designation since “there is no evidence to suggest that he was formally influenced by the philosophy” (218); rather, Rudy’s argument confronts the problem of Wordsworth’s occasional inability to accommodate the implications of his own spiritual insights. Again focusing on the Alpine episode, Rudy argues that additional complexities arise “because Wordsworth himself had only the dimmest understanding of such experiences and resorted on many occasions to the very dualistic perspective” (84) that hinders post-nineteenth-century critical understanding of the poet’s perception that mind and matter form an implicate order. Thus, while the application of Zen to Wordsworth (and vice versa) remains the textual steady state, the author never loses perspective on the limitations of those applications. As a result, within such complex framing, a new perspective of the poet becomes possible:

Indeed, throughout the Wordsworth canon, one senses that the many references to freedom and solitude, whether direct or implicit, celebrate not a resistance to the conditions of experience nor a transcendence to a higher state beyond the vicissitudes of life but an abiding acceptance so complete in itself that all moods, all states of being, are in some way positive and contributive. (107)

In its best modes (and “moods”), Wordsworth’s poetry operates through dynamic exchange where “mind and nature, like the roaring of the one voice of the waters, are so conjoined as to be indistinguishable . . . a oneness in which all distinctions between the human soul and the soul of nature, the human imagination and the ‘imagination of the whole,’ fall inward on each other” (201).

Often those positive “states of being” reside in Wordsworth’s poetical characters, rather than the node of poetic consciousness associated with the poetic eye: the Leech-Gatherer, rather than the speaking “I” of the poem, achieves emptiness, solitude, freedom (102–6); the child, rather than the father, cuts through spiritual materialism in “Anecdote for Fathers” (118–21), and the Cumberland Beggar, although “the very image of poverty” (125), underwrites communal charity by enabling “the villagers to forget the self and partake of a deeper goodness than mere utilitarian and religious institutional strategies can reach” (128). Through such characterizations, Wordsworth continually brings into view—to use Nishitani’s phrase—”a `horizon of nihility at the ground of life’” (122), establishing a position from which to “move within ourselves to the bottomless depths of the individual” and allowing the discovery of “the true absolute, which is, paradoxically, forever negating itself through us in a self-emptying matrix of eternal creativity” (179). In a sense, one might say, Wordsworth’s best poetry encourages self-erasure (or what Blake terms “self-annihilation”) even when the poetic eye fails to enter such an annihilated subjective space.

Finally, readers should be aware of the limitations of the book, which Rudy states quite clearly in his preface: “On the few occasions when I have undertaken to comment on studies of Wordsworth, I have endeavored to avoid a critique of Western literary scholarship and the philosophical principles on which it is based, preferring instead to adumbrate lines of demarcation that provide opportunities for alternative rather than contending interpretive visions” (xii). Readers looking for a systematic analysis of Eastern thinking in a Western academic mode (a synthesis of the secondary) would need look elsewhere, but readers interested in the considerable confluence residing within Eastern and Western poetics as meditative practice will find this book extremely satisfying.