The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading by Helen Regueiro Elam, Frances Ferguson

Abstract

840 Reviews The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and theEcology ofReading. Ed. by HELEN REGUEIRO ELAM and FRANCES FERGUSON. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins UniversityPress. 2005. vii+374pp. ?36.50. ISBN 978-0-80I8-8I87-9. The focus of thisbook, aswell as the explanation for the range of its subject-matter, is the varied work ofGeoffrey Hartman. Although the titleelides this detail, the vo lume is in fact a 'Festschrift inhonor ofGeoffrey H. Hartman' (as the copyright page announces), a collection of 'Essays inhonor ofGeoffrey Hartman' (as the note to a frontispiece photograph of theeminent critic has it).This factaccounts forsomething of theuncertainty-or thecomplexity-of focus of thevolume as awhole, a complex itythat isannounced in its title, which borrows a formulation-'The Wordsworthian Enlightenment'-from Hartman's own contribution to the collection, and adds to it, as a subtitle, the concerns of a number of the essays-reading, Romantic poetry, and a certain thinkingof 'ecology' aswell as ametaphorical 'ecology of reading' (bywhich the editors essentially mean to point to certain ways of approaching literary texts, a certain intertextual register,and certain questions of reading, all ofwhich pay homage toHartman's influence). The volume collects fifteenessays that, in a variety ofways, seek tohonour Hart man's work indifferent fields-particularly with regard tohis long engagement with Romanticism (specificallywithWordsworth's poetry); with regard tohismore recent interest inHolocaust studies and inquestions ofmemory and trauma in the context of his work for theFortunoff Video Archive forHolocaust Testimonies atYale; and with regard to his work in critical theory and his thinking concerning the question of reading. The introduction makes a case for the alignment of different aspects of Hartman's career, and the book also includes an interviewwith Hartman conducted byCathy Caruth in 1994. (Like the interview, six of the chapters, including the intro duction, were firstpublished in a special issue of Studies inRomanticism in I996, and earlier versions of three other chapters have previously been published elsewhere.) The volume includes essays by some of the luminaries of contemporary Romantic studies (such asHartman himself, Frances Ferguson, Paul Fry,Alan Liu, PeterMan ning, Lucy Newlyn), as well as by others (such as Gerald Bruns, Patricia Parker, J. Hillis Miller) whose presence in the collection attests to the reach ofHartman's work in contemporary criticism. And the book can rightlybe described as a testament to the influence ofHartman's voluminous publications over the lasthalf-century; in this regard it is interesting tonote thatHartman's firstbook, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation ofWordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery (New Haven: Yale Univer sityPress, I954), is asmuch in evidence here as his most recentwork on culture, on criticism, and on testimony. The level ofHartman's direct and demonstrable influence on the critics included in the book is, inevitably, somewhat variable, and ranges from J.Douglas Kneale's consideration of the complexity of allusion in 'Nutting', which, in its openness to the play of language and in its sheer learnedness of reference, both alludes to and indeed stylistically emulates Hartman's critical practice, to J. Hillis Miller's attempt to 'pay homage' toHartman by not paying attention to his work or indeed to the subject-matter of his work but instead, after a brief sketch ofHartman's approach, considering a passage fromProust which, in itsbiblical echoes, is said to constitute a 'quiet background forHartman's own work' but nothing more direct (p. 282). In often brilliant and subtle essays, however, thevolume does develop a number of key Hartmanian themes, including wounding and memory, representation, history and ethics, witness, trauma, and theHolocaust, poetic figurations of apocalypse, reading and literaryhistory, literaryhaunting, death and the epitaphic, intertextuality,and influence-and above all thepoetry of William Wordsworth. The quality of the con tributions isconsistently high and thevolume constitutes a fittingtribute to the range, MLR, 102.3, 2007 841 subtlety,and penetration ofHartman's own work, aswell as being in itselfan impor tantcontribution to contemporaryWordsworth criticism and toHolocaust studies. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL ANDREW BENNETT The Victorian Novel. By Louis JAMES. Oxford: Blackwell. 2oo6. xix+249 pp. ?I6.99. ISBN 978-o-63I-22628-4. Louis James's new study ofVictorian fiction,primarily aimed, we are told, at un dergraduates and postgraduates, enters an overcrowded field,and ifit is tocommand such...