That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics by Joseph E. Riehl Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide by Michael O'Neill (review)

Abstract

TES,31, 200 TES,31, 200 The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's on MacNeice's Autumn Sequeloriginal; Hugh Haughton's on (late) Beckett pleasantly surprising.The picture the three together offer of Dante's afterlife in Modernism, oscillating as it does between quotation, form, and existential perspective,suggeststhereis stilla lot of workto be done on the subject. Part vi opens with Nick Havely's agile and perceptive study of Gloria Naylor's novel, Linden Hills, which is examined in the context of other Dante-inspiredAfroAmerican works such as Ellison's Invisible Man and LeRoi Jones's TheSystemof Dante'sHell(aswell as the Nigerian Wole Soyinka'spoem, 'Purgatory').In a sense, Havely's essay gives a poignant direction to the entire collection, but the two concluding articles on Walcott and Heaney, by Mark Balfour and Bernard O'Donoghue, open up truly new vistas. The former'sreading of Dante's lesson in Walcott'snarrativepoetrywould get my prize. 'In the middle of thejourney through my life', proclaims 'Prelude' ( 948), the firstpiece in Walcott's Collected Poems.His latestcollection, TheBounty (1997), opens with an allusionto Paradiso, xxxiiI. UNIVERSITY OF ROME, 'LA SAPIENZA' PIERO BOITANI ThatDangerous Figure.Charles LambandtheCritics. ByJOSEPH E. RIEHL. (Literary Criticismin Perspective)Columbia, SC: Camden House. 1998. xi + 208 pp. ?45;$55 Literature of theRomantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Ed. by MICHAEL O'NEILL. Oxford:Clarendon Press. I998. viii + 4 Opp. 1I6.99. Not so long ago Jacques Derrida was asked why he had not written on Samuel Beckett.Derrida'sanswerwas characteristicallysuggestive(somemight sayevasive): whilst the idea of working on Beckett was attractive- here after all was a writer who seemed to share so many of the critic'spreoccupations - one would have to admit that the texts themselves were so elegantly deconstructive that additional deconstructiveworkwould seem unnecessary,not to say banal.Joseph E. Riehl, in his timely survey of critical readings of Charles Lamb runs the risk of drawing a similar conclusion. Dismissed for many years as 'trivial', 'sentimental', and 'regressive', everything that academic criticism with its dedication to the high modernistvalues of seriousness,austerityand moral rigouropposed, Lamb and his enthusiastswere all but silenced. It took a new generation of critics, interested in probing beneath the surface,to discoverthat Lamb was, afterall, a 'deeply serious' writerand thereforeworthyof consideration.Now of course,we have 'Post-Modern Lamb' and attention has turned towards what Lamb once called 'that dangerous figure -irony'. Yet with the exception of Seamus Perry in his excellent article The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's...