The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism by Anthony John Harding

Abstract

toward private, subjective desire. The familiar vacillations of Macbeth in I.vii. are placed against the earlier model of split awareness in Tarquin and are compared to the design of sonnet 129. Each of the chapters lucidly examines the historical, theoretical and prac­ tical implications of the definitions of the central issues: conventions, voice, worldbuilding, and character. While postmodern theoretical approaches speak of the text rather than Shakespeare and are unwilling to fall into the intentional fallacy, Wilson easily marvels at Shakespeare’s “imaginative plurality” (147), which deliberately opens up rather than minimalizes inter­ pretative possibilities. The last chapter, “Boundaries,” is a bold attempt to study the problems of his own methodology, the paradoxes and dilemmas inherent in narrative theory, through the lens of Hamlet. Contemporary narrative theory, Wilson claims, has finally supplied the tools to study, or at least more completely articulate, Shakespeare’s complex use of narrative, and reveal (again) how “problem-filled Shakespeare’s texts actually are” (217). At the end of the chapter, he argues that theory is best regarded as a “question-quest” or as “hyperplay” : a mode of exploration which “follows paths rather than seeks destinations as such” (218), a kind of theoretical negative capability. This is an appropriate ending to a chapter that raises many questions about the limitations of narrative theory, especially the difficult issue of mapping interactive and overlapping semiotic domains and boundaries. Although it scants performance theory’s claims (with many of which I am deeply sympathetic) and presents one side of Shakespeare— as master storyteller not as dramatist — Wilson’s return to Shakespeare’s narrative is very persuasive in positing one possible explanation for Shakespeare’s richness, his continuing popularity, and his comprehensibility to a wide range of readers, both general and professional. “Narrative seduces the vision” (19), Wilson confesses early on in his insightful book, and it makes us see the plays differently. He’s right. ire n a R. m a k a r y k / University of Ottawa Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995). xvi, 289. $39.95 cloth. The réanimation of traditional mythological elements in Romantic poetry has always been recognized as an enlistment of their fertile figurative pos­ sibilities in the service of certain new cultural and literary ideologies. Far from picturesque or sentimental paganism, or facile redeification of nature, 362 the Romantic appropriation of myth was a strategy perfectly suited to dra­ matic representations of imaginative epistemology in a changing intellectual and political climate. Or so we have felt able to say in hindsight. And now Anthony Harding provides strong historical confirmation that Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did understand their reconstructions of fa­ miliar mythology as strategic interventions in that struggle. More generally, Harding urges in his Introduction a revival of myth crit­ icism, grounded in the complex reception or process theory developed most fully by Hans Blumenberg in Work on Myth. Lamenting our languished ap­ preciation of the literary uses of myth, Harding acknowledges that they have been “obscured” and rendered “moribund” by a reductive modernist univer­ salizing archetypalism and “escape from history” he especially associates with the influence of Frye. The means of recovery is presumably a much subtler, harder, and more dynamically historicized Blumenbergian myth criticism that affirms the metaphoricity, the contingency, and the alwaysalready -opportunistic secondariness of any supposed invocation of (“working on” ) traditional belief systems. Harding’s first chapter, for example, identifies in the calculated weird­ ness of themes, language, atmosphere, and endless self-interpreting in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a specific and subversive engagement with tendencies in late-Enlightenment comparative mythography. At issue in this background of controversy were the rival claims of natural and revealed religion, and syncretic theory about “primitive” belief, shamanic vision, and other traditions. Dovetailing as these debates did with Coleridge’s own curiosity about unusual mental states of possession or inspiration and the authenticity or credibility of the poetic imagination, and with his own theological sympathies, they become the basis for what Harding calls “a rad­ ically indeterminate poem about the very nature of myth” (56). Harding’s later chapter on the polysemous “Christabel” turns by...