Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 by Gavin Budge

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 575 Thoroughly informed and conceptually sophisticated, Literary Advertising and the Shaping ofBritish Romanticism has unusual clarity, economy, and lev­ ity. As does Lee Erickson in his more abstract account of the economics of literature, The Economy of Literary Form, Mason enjoins us to take less for granted in our reading of periodical literature. Of course the suspicion Mason counsels cannot be easily contained. Like the “universal acid” ofold science fiction, it eats through whatever it touches. Reviews emerge within a system in which critics carry out a dual role, as cultural arbiter and commercial middleman. Ifperiodical criticism is bound up with advertising and “advertising logic,” it cannot rise above the charge of being a testimo­ nial. One might well expect Mason’s account to end in either the disgust of Adorno at yet another betrayal among the intelligentsia or the uncritical celebration of neo-liberal economists at yet another triumph of the invisi­ ble hand. But the scrutiny he recommends has positive value as well. Ma­ son regards Romantic era reviews as “some of the best and most woefully neglected writing of the age” (142). Reviews, like the magazines in which they appear, deserve the same critical rigor that we apply to poems and novels. In sorting out the complex strands of the “common genealogy” of literature and advertising, Mason wisely reminds us that we must know more about this strange relation before we say what it might mean. Mark Parker James Madison University Gavin Budge. Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural: Transcend­ ent Vision and Bodily Spectres, i~Sg-i8s2. London: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. viii+295. $110. The body has been making inroads into Romantic studies for over a dec­ ade now, with scholars from perspectives as varied as affect theory, the his­ tory ofmedicine, and cognitive literary studies exploring the complexity of Romantic writers’ concern with their own embodiment. While Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural shares this con­ cern, it is more interested in the relationship between embodiment and idealism, a perspective registered by the title’s double reference to the “Natural Supernaturalism” of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and M. H. Abrams’s magisterial 1971 study ofthe same name. Budge’s book examines the “Ro­ mantic invocation ofa dual epistemological perspective, in which visionary intuitions are not reducible to the body but neither can the embodied character of perception be ignored” (8). He argues that Romantic and post-Romantic writers seeking such visions drew not on German Idealism, SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 576 BOOK REVIEWS a key element in Abrams’s study, but on the Scottish Common Sense school of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Their epistemology of a “transcendent language of perceptual signs” (7) offered writers a middle way between empiricism and idealism, in which embodied perception could, ifrightly understood, provide access to a transcendent real. Unfortu­ nately, as Budge argues, the dominant theories ofnineteenth-century med­ icine made authenticating such access difficult. Seemingly genuine mo­ ments of perceptual transcendence might instead be the fraudulent “bodily spectres” ofirritated nerves or an upset stomach. As a result, health—which Budge interprets as a body regulated so as not to mistake hallucinations for authentic visions—became a concern for any artist with an idealist bent. His book tracks this concern through the work of six such artists, begin­ ning in the eighteenth century with Ann Radcliffe and concluding in the mid-nineteenth with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Budge has recently edited a collection on the Common Sense tradition’s Romantic reception (Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Com­ mon Sense, 1780—1830 [Bucknell, 2007]), and his continued investment in recognizing this lineage shows in the current study. Indeed the book seems less concerned with revising our understanding of Romanticism’s relation­ ship to medicine than it does with reframing certain medically-inflected readings—such as the influence of Erasmus Darwin’s treatise Zoonomia on Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—within the philosophical context of the Common Sense school. (Walter Jackson Bate’s absence from this study— his 1946 From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, not even listed in the bibliography—is puzzling, given that his landmark work...