(Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France ed. by Maike Oergel (review)

Abstract

Maike Oergel, ed., (Re-)Writing Radical: Enlightenment, and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. 272 pp.This collection examines a range of discursive responses to shock of French in long decade of 1790s-a brief period lengthened by scale and consequences of a reading and writing public's efforts to make sense of a changed world. Specifically, essays in this look at effects of radical transformation were received and processed across national boundaries. Referring in her introduction to distinct ways in which notion of universal reason came under new scrutiny in late eighteenth-century Germany, Britain, and France, Maike Oergel notes that[t]hese developments contributed to bringing about unusually fertile international intersecting of different discourses-aesthetic, intellectual, and political-which characterizes 'revolutionary' decade and which is subject of this volume (1). The thorough-going critique of Enlightenment that unfolded during this period involved a questioning and revision of these values that was already internal to dialectic of Enlightenment itself (2) but whose contours-thus claim of this project-will emerge clearly only when scholars adopt a comparative approach that cuts across national boundaries. The volume's aim, Oergel argues, is to do what other scholarship has so far neglected to do consistently: to investigate Revolution's intellectual and aesthetic impact and influence on different countries in conjunction, to focus on reciprocity of cultural and political transfers (3).The contributors to this discussion-both volume's authors and sources they cite-provide lively and often fascinating examples of such transfer. Among essays that most explicitly apply themselves to topic identified in volume's title and introduction, several show reception of foreign texts enables both translation and importation of ideas and new possibilities of engaging with homegrown concerns. Susanne Kord finds in English Werther-literature of 1790s ideal test cases to examine Mary Wollstonecraft's argument-expressed in same decade-that sentimental novels encouraged women readers to adopt and internalize gender roles that exacerbated their exclusion from public political discourse (28). As she argues, English adaptations of story recurrently stripped of any kind of social or political content (33) and, in so doing, reframed to highlight women's sentimentality in particular as a matter of individual failure (42) without consequence for social world. If these adaptations domesticated and depoliticized Goethe's novel, Barry Murnane's essay shows German Gothic writings were invested, in England, with politically tinged horrors that marked German culture itself as the radical Other to British reason and order (45): it was relatively easy to bundle these works together to create an image of a'German School'of horror reveling in violence of French Revolution (48). As Murnane also argues through an analysis of 1797 mock-German play The Rovers published in Anti-Jacobin Review, German culture came to serve as a field onto which internal British conflicts can be projected (55). More generally, what inspired fascination and dread were signs of modernization itself: consumerism, mass-readership, cosmopolitanism (53). Commenting on a similar logic whereby British anti-Jacobins labeled as absurd or unnatural German literary themes and texts deemed to be subversive, Imke Heuer examines Harriet and Sophia Lee's 1801 novella Kruitzner, or The German's Tale to show how women writers used historical fiction to comment on current events and participate in contemporary debates (24).Nowhere were concerns raised by a rapidly changing world more explicitly reflected than in growth, circulation, thematic choices, and market successes (and failures) of periodicals-the one medium that, according to Johann Adam Bergk (who is cited in this by Renata Schellenberg), most clearly revealed at very end of eighteenth century das Streben und die Meinungen of his contemporaries (89). …