Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft by Tilottama Rajan

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 323 claims that the brothers “felt vaguely estranged” (316) during this visit, and imagines Fanny Brawne taking on a more vital presence in Keats’s mind: “to the degree that John had opened his heart to Fanny Brawne ... he had closed it proportionally (though no doubt unintentionally) to George” (31$). Indeed, ofthis visit George later wrote, “when I returned in 1820 he was not the same being” (315). Gigante’s willingness to reconstruct the thoughts and emotions ofjohn and George here and throughout the biog­ raphy makes this a compelling read, and, I believe, makes explicit the strong acts of imagination on the part of the biographer that enable every biography. Gigante is self-conscious about her role in reimagining the lives of these brothers—apostrophizing in the introduction, for example: “to follow George and John Keats on their bifurcated paths in life, you, dear reader, must prepare for adventure” (3)—even as she allows herselfto write a straightforward page-turner, one which wears its impressive scholarly ap­ paratus lightly. The framework for this adventure story, however, is an am­ bitious reconception ofRomanticism; as Gigante asserts: “the Cockney Pi­ oneer deserves a place next to the Cockney Poet in the visionary company ofRomanticism. While the medium oftheir dreams may have differed, the two eldest Keats brothers—‘Man of Genius’ and ‘Man of Power’—embod­ ied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism” (7). Her ex­ ploration of these “sibling forms”—sublimity and sociability, imagination and enterprise, Old World and New World, presence and absence—as well as her persistent attention to their necessary interdependence, makes this a landmark book for scholars of Keats and Romanticism more generally. Ann Wierda Rowland University of Kansas Tilottama Rajan. Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, IVollstonecrajt. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. 282. $65. Romantic Narrative explores how narrative works produced by members of the Shelley circle do not fit easily into literary histories that describe the long nineteenth century as a progressive development “from Romantic prematurity to Victorian sobriety” (xv). Resisting the view that Victorian prose ultimately disciplined the youthful effusions ofRomantic lyric, Rajan argues instead that the underlying dynamic between poetry and prose must be reconsidered so as to make possible a theory of narrative that views the novel as something other than a disciplinary apparatus. In the work of Percy Shelley, Mary Hays, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, Rajan locates a counterpoint to the nation-building of Walter Scott’s hisSiR , 52 (Summer 2013) 324 BOOK REVIEWS torical novels and the domestic discipline forged in Jane Austen’s novels of manners. Romantic narrative is different because at its heart is a poetry, or poiesis, that “dissolves, diffuses and dissipates” forms in order to “re-create” them (xvi). Rather than working to bind readers into a public with a shared common sense, these narratives are often radically open-ended, and thus Rajan argues that by focusing on the poiesis of Romantic narrative we can not only obtain insight into the formal “structuring and destructuring pro­ cesses at work in textual production,” but also expose the “radically chaotic moment” that is at the fantastic heart ofevery cultural discourse (xvi). Each chapter proceeds through a deconstructive reading of narrative form in or­ der to expose an anarchic “potential space” within each text that enables readers to speculate upon things as they are and how they might be made different. These moments of anarchic possibility are generated when an au­ thor “plays with the social text by projecting, abjecting, and ex-terminating characters and plot positions” within a literary work in such a way that the fictional both refers to and attempts to revise the real (xxi). Invoking Shel­ ley, Rajan argues that this is how “narrative ‘createfs] afresh’ the ‘associa­ tions’ that have become ‘disorganized’ in the process of what Godwin calls ‘institution’” (xxi). In addition to this emphasis on the workings of cultural investiture, there is also a psychoanalytic bent to the argument as exempli­ fied by what Rajan terms “autonarration,” or the “double textualization of both life and fiction” (xx). As in the transferential relationship between analysand and analyst, in Romantic narrative meaning does not “unfold at the level...