282 BOOK REVIEWS attention. Questions about the relationships between “heritage” discourse and the state, on the one hand, and local community memory, on the other, fall outside the frame ofWestover’s analysis, but this means the con cluding brieffor the value ofpresent-day “heritage business” stays too gen eral to be fully convincing. Despite these gaps, however, readers will find in Necroromanticism a thoughtful and valuable work of scholarship, absorb ing as well as informative. Eric Eisner George Mason University Rowan Boyson. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 254. $95. Could it really be that Wordsworth (not Rochester, not Byron, not Swin burne, or Stevens) is “the defining literary figure for a philosophically ori ented study of pleasure” (186)? Rowan Boyson’s formidable book seeks to persuade us that, as a philosopher of pleasure, Wordsworth can stand and trade with the heavyweights. In the poet’s work, Boyson argues, we can recover “an almost-forgotten idea about how pleasure might register a col lective dependence and interaction, and might be generated from a feeling ofcommunity” (1). Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea ofPleasure mounts a challenging, capacious, conceptually rich assertion of these counter intuitive claims. Boyson’s subject, it must be said, feels very large. Informing Words worth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure are wide-ranging discussions of Shaftsbury, Kant, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and a host of twentieth-century theorists besides, as their writings bear upon classical, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment conceptions of pleasure, joy, selfinterest , self-love, Epicureanism, hedonism, happiness, utility and utilitari anism, contentment, complacency, bliss, comfort, and delight. Her chapter headings introduce a further layer of concepts: aesthetics, power, poetics, economics, and politics. The discussion is divided into halves, one that sets up a philosophical background, and one exploring pleasure and its cognates in a selection of Wordsworth’s prose and poetry. The first chapter examines the aesthetics of pleasure in Shaftsbury and Kant. Its central question could be described as how a priori judgments of shared pleasure are possible. Boyson’s answer centers on what she identifies as the ancient idea of a sensus communis, a faculty that both comes before and brings together the other senses, making common apprehension and collective human experience possible—what one thinks of as common SiR, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 283 sense. In Shaftsbury and Kant the sensus communis occasions “an idea of the self as rooted in interactive sociability” (36—37). The clear though unstated context of the discussion of Shaftsbury is Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or the tradition of thinking about self-interest and public good that Smith’s metaphor encapsulates. For Shaftsbury, self-love and the pursuit ofpleasure it entails is “inherently sociable and ultimately benevolent—not because it tends towards the greater good in spite of selfishness, but because individual and communal ends cannot be separated” (32). At a fundamental level, then, preservation of the self includes desire for preservation of the kind. Boyson’s reading of Kant, who “defines the pleasure of community cau tiously and as bearing a complex relation to cognition,” identifies several of the contours of pleasure that she traces throughout the rest of the book: pleasure “as still, calm and closed, or in terms of movement, liveliness or openness” (184). Boyson’s second chapter takes up pleasure’s relationship to power: namely, does one person’s experience of pleasure necessarily require the domination of someone else? Can pleasure exist without competition and the zero sum game it implies? To what extent can pleasure serve the pur poses of self-liberation and how historically has it been proscribed? Sup posing the book’s argument is, as it claims to be, that pleasure can be socia ble, shared, “generated from a feeling of community,” then Boyson might naturally want to persuade us of the “utopian” possibilities for pleasure in her chosen texts: Rousseau’sJulie, Emile, and Reveries, and Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Much to her credit, how ever, she allows her local interpretations to cut against the grain of the book’s larger premise. True, we can find in Julie and the Reveries Rous seau’s representations...
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