English Romanticism and the Celtic World by Gerard Carruthers , Alan Rawes (review)

Abstract

798 Reviews The Age ofBronze and The Island which consider these works as examples of couplet satire and situate them as 'digressive off-shoots from each other' (p. 196). Stabler's book is consistently attentive to the local, the contingent, and the par? ticular and she makes a good case that this kind of approach mirrors Byron's own preoccupations. So too her method of proceeding by association is seen as faithful to the spirit of Byronic digression. (An illustrative example is the way in which a reading of Don Juan opens up a new direction in one chapter's argument: 'What the reader is given [in Canto xn. 5-6] is a compound scene of (cancelled) classical agony, amputated limbs at Waterloo, the burial of Napoleon, a soiree at Verona and, in place of fortune, the fickleness of women. This matrix leads us to a consideration of the woman's place within Byron's mode of digressive allusion' (p. 147)). Increasingly, and especially in her consideration of Don Juan, Stabler's book proceeds then by suggestive and intelligent readings, matched by references to Byron's own allegiance to the particular and the contingent, the speculative and the surprising. Cheeke's method of the illustrative example, or what I have called synecdochic reading, is quite different in its aims from Stabler's local attention to detail. However, his study suggests that theorizing about Byron need not necessarily mean that considerations of form are forgotten: it is faithful to the original format in which much of Byron's poetry was published, particularly in its attention to the accompanying notes, and the section on cultural translation discusses the digressive freedom which the models of Berni and Pulci gave to Byron in translating himself into an almost-Italian. Despite, or perhaps because of, the differences between Cheeke's and Stabler's studies, both offeroriginal, persuasive accounts of Byron's writing and provide im? pressive new voices to debates about Byron's writing. Both books, therefore,are highly recommended in suggesting, in the spirit of Stabler's overall argument, that we have not yet?and never will have?read Byron completely. Queen's University Belfast Moyra Haslett English Romanticism and the Celtic World. Ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xii + 265pp. ?40; $60. ISBN0-521-81085-X. Not that long ago, the title of Marilyn Gaull's English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York and London: Norton, 1988) provoked little comment; a gener? ally helpful guide to Romanticism, it covered literatures from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales under the umbrella of 'English'. Such was the state of Romantic studies, one that is only beginning to shift. Throughout the decade that followed, 'British' began to replace 'English' as a modifier of 'Romanticism', but this presented another set of problems, replacing as it did one monolithic construction with another. English Romanticism and the Celtic World expands a debate that only recently has found its voices: the interrelationship of four 'British' literatures within the contexts of the eighteenth century's 'ferment of new nation building' (p. 2). Building on ter? ritoryexplored in the 1990s by Howard D. Weinbrot, Robert Crawford, Colin Kidd, Murray Pittock, and Linda Colley, this volume concerns itself with 'those dialogues between all the four nations of Britain that powerfully informed, and that were, in their turn, powerfully informed by, English Romantic writing'; it finds that 'at both the sites of Romanticism and Celticism we see negotiated dialogues where compli? cated questions of aesthetics, cultural politics and nation are asked, and answered in equally complex fashion'. The book contributes to 'the mapping out' of these multiple 'cultural territories and international dialogues' (p. 19). Acknowledging a debt to Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British MLR, 100.3, 2??5 799 Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), the editors rightly claim that their book moves constructively beyond Trumpener, particularly in that it broadens the enquiry into Welsh Celticism, an area previously neglected in Romantic studies. Certainly, a strength of English Romanticism and the Celtic World is its diversity in approach, revealed most interestingly in analyses which converge from various directions on...