Time and Terrain in British Romantic Writing / Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland

Reviewed by: The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday by William H. Galperin Magdalena Ostas (bio) William H. Galperin. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. 181. $55. The demand for a theoretical articulation of our relationship to “the everyday” has always been fraught with genuinely interesting difficulties. Insofar as the category captures a sense of what is pervasive in experience (Blanchot, as William Galperin notes in this study, describes the everyday as “what we are first of all, and most often”), we might ask what kinds of theoretical perspectives allow us to touch this idea of life as it is actually lived. Many of the philosophers, social theorists, and literary critics in the long history of interest in the everyday—the shapes of daily lives, the invisibility of mundane events, the look of objects of apparent insignificance, the feelings that attend repetition, the emergence of unreflective attitudes, the habits of ordinary speech—surrender the ambition to define the category, and they often turn, instead, to reflecting on our orientation or attitude toward this dimension of experience. Accordingly, it has been said that the everyday harbors real critical and creative potential as often as it has been asserted that it is the realm of deadening predictability and inauthenticity. In The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday, William Galperin registers the contemporary interest in the everyday with some skepticism. In contrast to the picture of the everyday as what is familiar, the everyday in Galperin’s study of Romanticism surfaces as a form of relation with the past and not with present-tense experience. In the sequence of wide-ranging and insightful readings he offers across Romantic-era visual arts (the panorama), lyric and narrative poetry (Wordsworth and Byron), novels (Austen), and epistolary correspondence (the Byron controversy), Galperin argues that the everyday is not open—paradoxically—to observation and that it becomes perceptible, instead, through forms of recollection or retrospection. Galperin derives his theoretical framework from a cluster of figures whose convergence is approximately familiar but whose collective relation to the idea of the everyday might be less apparent: Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Stanley Cavell, and Paul de Man. In the opening chapter Galperin writes thus: [End Page 325] The everyday’s emergence and early conceptualization as a history of what was missed, as something appreciable in retrospect but not in real time, is more than just analogous to what a Marxist like Lefebvre also finds missing and lacking; it is at cross-purposes—and significantly so—with the very developments of which romantic-period discourse, in its subscriptions to interiority and individualism, remains a signal manifestation. (33) What we might think of as the everyday’s historiographic deep structure turns out over the course of Galperin’s readings to contend with the import of presentness in Romanticism’s understanding of selfhood. The important contribution of Galperin’s study thus lies in the way he conceptualizes the elusiveness of the everyday in temporal rather than perceptual terms: Romantic writers’ sense that the everyday often escapes or appears hidden stems from their recognition that it can only be encountered after it has passed and projected a “counter-actual history” (6) and not from the everyday’s permeating present-tense invisibility that renders it too ubiquitous to manifest or impress itself. The Romantic texts at the center of Galperin’s chapters exhibit a structure of retrospection whereby “the missed, the unappreciated, [and] the overlooked” come into consciousness with sudden and unexpected proximity (27). These recovered moments, what Galperin throughout calls “a history of missed opportunities,” are a revelation of things as they are re-seen and come into view through backward glances cast in the “prevailing afterwardness ” (18) or aftermath of experience. The chapter that engages the double-takes of Wordsworth’s poetry across moments in The Prelude, Lyrical Ballads, and the “Immortality Ode,” accordingly, concentrates on the conflict between the poet’s retrospective connection with nature and the Wordsworthian faith in the imagination as an agency working in the present. Wordsworth for Galperin instantiates an order...

Emily Rohrbach. Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 182. $85. What does it mean to conceive of history as shaped less by the elusiveness of the past than by the elusiveness of the future? And what exactly does the future's elusiveness imply about the and the very presentness of the in which one's own history unfolds? In Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation, Emily Rohrbach argues for a Romantic historiographic imagination profoundly informed by these questions. In the wake of work such as James Chandler's England in 1819, Modernity's Mist revisits Romantic historicism by considering Romantic writers' relation to historiography--to the theoretical and formal problems posed by the writing of history--as it is informed both by their changing understanding of temporal experience and by the events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The book shows how shifts in historical understanding already underway in the eighteenth century come to the fore in the wake of Waterloo in freshly poetic and inventive modes. Rohrbach's argument articulates both historical/intellectual contexts and existential/temporal horizons in a distinctive series of readings that underline the role of aesthetic form in responding to and reshaping Romanticism's historical along with its attendant ethical and political possibilities. Drawing on the historiographical investigations of Koselleck and, to a lesser extent, Fdabermas, Modernity's Mist situates its argument in relation to what has been considered a sea-change in European writers' relation to futurity during the Romantic period. The French Revolution, along with the rise and defeat of Napoleon, seemed to crystallize an increasing sense of history spinning out of control--with the future revealed as fundamentally unpredictable and the correspondingly inchoate. For the literary figures that Rohrbach considers, the realization that the future was potentially discontinuous with the or, at any rate, continuous in ways that remained obscure to them, meant not only that the past ceased to offer clear models or exempla for ethical and political action, but that the itself had to be thought of as an array of multiple possibilities whose meaning and implications remained subject to revision at every moment. These are writers for whom the meaning and history of the can never be fixed. To give one example: Rohrbach specifically takes issue with readers of Austen's Persuasion who argue that the novel's happy ending is inscribed as a foregone conclusion (122) from its beginning; she shows how, on the contrary, Austen's text repeatedly signals its awareness (and its heroine's awareness) of other stories that might just have easily unfolded from that same beginning. One lives in the shadow of what will have been, but what will have been is, in turn, an endlessly revisable category. Therefore, the stakes are not so much claims concerning the future, which may or may not be realized, as how those claims have the capacity to disturb and transform the lived present. As the example of Austen suggests, when Rohrbach invokes futurity, she is not concerned with the prophetic, eschatological, visionary Romanticism associated with Blake and Shelley, but with the earthly, grounded, quasi-realist Romanticism associated not only with Austen but at times with poets such as Byron and Keats--the point being that even these writers find themselves unmoored from temporal norms that once served as an historical anchor. Literary and poetic agency in the texts Rohrbach considers hinges on a realization of radical incompleteness in one's ordinary, everyday life and, thus, too, on a realization of the multiplicity of alternatives raised by every present experience. A non-linear temporality comes to inform all experience, even the most banal; or, if one prefers, non-linear modes of narrative become necessary to capture the history of the that these writers explore. …

<i>British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason</i>. Timothy Michael. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. viii+283.

BOOK REVIEWS 625 helped to plan. Ross was the leader of one of these voyages, but turned back when he thought he saw a range of mountains blocking the passage. Barrow was convinced that Ross invented the mountains as an excuse for his own cowardice, and so began a twenty-year feud between the two men. This material will be unfamiliar to most literary scholars of Romanti­ cism, and it reminds us that the periodicals contained much other material besides their reviews of poetry and novels. In his articles, Barrow is caught between his contempt for John Ross and his almost fanatical conviction that the North-West Passage exists and that a British ship will discover it. But Wheatley shows how Barrow’s discourse also constructs and interro­ gates an “Arctic sublime.” “John Barrow does not seek transcendence whether as thematic preoccupation or rhetorical effect,” she concludes, “but it finds him” (173). Kim Wheatley begins her chapter on the Watt Tyler controversy with the words “The story has often been told, though usually as background rather than foreground” (21). Romantic Feuds joins several recent studies that restore periodical writing to the foreground and argue for its constitu­ tive role in the emergence of Romanticism as an intellectual formation, as well as its historical importance in the print culture ofthe period. Carefully researched from many sources, and well informed about existing criticism, it deserves to be read not only by scholars specializing in periodicals, but by Romanticists more widely. Tom Mole University of Edinburgh, UK Edward T. Duffy. Secular Mysteries: Stanley Caved and English Romanticism. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Pp. 304. $120. In Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism, Edward T. Duffy connects three romantic writers, each of whom, he writes, argues for the importance of attention to ordinary words and common experience. All three, according to Duffy, suggest that an account of the good life requires this attention because it allows intimacy with the world. Two of these ro­ mantics are William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but the one discussed first is the contemporary philosopher of language Stanley Cavell, whom Duffy reframes relative to the English romantic tradition. Over the past fifty years, Cavell has written about Shakespeare’s trage­ dies, golden-age Hollywood comedies, fiction by Henry James, im­ provisational jazz, Continental philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, and, perhaps most famously, the essays of SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 626 BOOK REVIEWS Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Cavell fo­ cuses on the specifically American, he touches on British Romanticism, including important readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and William Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode in 1994’s In Quest of the Ordinary, and Duffy’s book grows out of this brief contact. Duffy argues that Cavell’s work is transatlantically romantic, and in Secular Mysteries, he shows how it shares concerns, goals, and techniques with the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley. Once Duffy draws this connection, it seems strange that Cavell, one of the most important thinkers writing out of ordinary language philosophy, has not written more about the poets who sought to distinguish their project as the “language really spoken by men.” Duffy’s book is an important expedition connecting these figurative and literal continents. (William Desmond’s essay, “A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” in Stanley Cavell, a 2003 collection of essays edited by Richard Eldridge, is another. Surprisingly, Duffy does not mention it.) Duffy’s book divides into three sections: the first several chapters argue for Cavell’s relevance to British Romanticism, the next two chapters discuss Wordsworth, and the final three chapters are on Shelley. Only the first third of Secular Mysteries focuses on Cavell, but the con­ ceptual framing for the book as a whole comes from his philosophy. Cavell began his career as a student and critic of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the basis of much of his thought is the argument that at­ tention to our ordinary language contains the remedy for the trenchant philosophical problem of skepticism. Analytic philosophers from David Hume to G. E. Moore have argued that we cannot know the mind of...

What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about “progress” and “perfection”? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive political associations in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement—increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury—they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But Romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley’s plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith’s motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The “majestic edifices” of Wordsworth’s imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are “republican or pious,” not to mention the recalcitrant “enthusiast” who is the poet himself.

The question of how far the Middle English metrical romances and their continental prototypes went in portraying realistically the life and times in which they were written and how much of the detail in them is merely literary convention has long been a moot one. W. P. Ker wrote: “The longer romances are really modern novels—studies of contemporary life, characters and emotions, mixed up with adventures more or less surprising,” but added in another place, “the romance writers of the twelfth century did much to make romance into a mechanic art, … reduced the game to a system and left the different romantic combinations and conventions within the reach of almost any 'prentice hand. …” M. L. Clédat wrote: “Les peintures de mœurs chevaleresques, les descriptions de fêtes, de tournois et de combats, nous plaisent encore par elles mêmes lorsqu'elles sont vives et légères, mais elles valent surtout par les renseignements précieux qu'elles nous fournissent sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.” There is obviously some vagueness here, and it becomes desirable to separate the realistic from the conventional material in the Middle English metrical romances in order to determine where the art of the romance writers was merely “mechanic” and where they were actually attempting to give “renseignements précieux … sur la vie réelle et sur l'idéal du monde chevaleresque.”

Alan Richardson‟s 2001 study, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, recently drew attention to the importance of early neurological science for the study of Romanticism, but the philosophical medicine of Erasmus Darwin remains understudied by literary scholars, despite its importance within this context. This is despite the fact that Darwin‟s interest in the properties of nerves, 1 and his appreciation of the active role played by the nervous system in the process of perception, 2 show that he is a thinker whom it is not anachronistic to describe as having neuroscientific preoccupations. The popularity of Darwin‟s writings, moreover, made them a familiar reference among Romantic writers and their public. For these reasons, Darwin represents a key figure in the case for the neural account of Romanticism proposed by Richardson. In what follows, I will both endorse and qualify Richardson‟s argument for the importance of Romantic neuroscience by examining the nature of Wordsworth‟s relationship to Darwin‟s medical thought. As Neil Vickers argues in his essay, „Coleridge and the Idea of “Psychological” Criticism‟, also included in this special issue, Richardson‟s emphasis on the neurological dimension of Romanticism represents a „materialist straitjacket‟ when referred to the context of present-day scientific orthodoxy. Crucially, however, late eighteenth-century medicine was fully prepared to accept that mental states could have real, physical effects on the functioning of the body, 3 and in this context the therapeutic aims of the Wordsworthian poetic can be seen to reflect an immaterialist philosophical orientation, despite making extensive use of proto-neurological concepts from Darwin‟s Zoonomia.

Such recent works as Frederick Burwick’s Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Jennifer Ford’s Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination, David Vallins’s Coleridge and the Psychology of Romanticism: Feeling and Thought, John Beer’s Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley, and Joel Faflak’s Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery document well Romantic-era writers’ fascination with psychology and madness. Other recent studies on Romanticism and psychology, such as Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind and Neil Vickers’s Coleridge and the Doctors, demonstrate the Romantics’ familiarity with such topics as neuroscience, nerve theory, hypochondria, the psychology of dreams, Hartleyan associationism, and Kantian psychology, and link these topics to the Romantics’ philosophical researches into the workings of society, the construction of language, and other weighty matters. Yet, Romantic-era psychologist John Ferriar’s influential psychological works—with which the young S. T. Coleridge was familiar, as Neil Vickers has shown (“Beddoes” 74), and with which, I will suggest, James Hogg may also have been conversant—demonstrate that Romantic writers also valued psychological knowledge for its entertaining qualities.

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily BrontA« engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

This book examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. It argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory. British Romanticism absorbed the metaphors and questions of this new discourse of individualism. Elements of social contract theory have subsequently reverberated backwards to shape the reception of Romanticism in contemporary literary studies and culture, leading Romanticism to be perceived as an individualistic literary movement. But Romantic writers were actually astute commentators on a crisis in concepts of community that had developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory. By looking at the intersection of social contract theory, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, German Idealism, canonical works of Romanticism, and the political culture of the 1790s, the book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism over the last century. It offers a fresh understanding of canonical works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Mary Shelley and Carlyle who all transposed a pervasive difficulty weaving diverse individuals into a greater social whole, which they found in the works of Hobbes, Smith, and especially Rousseau, into their own highly influential account of a modern experience of alienation.

As suburbs and strip malls continue to devour large tracts of the American heartland, it seems strange that the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary material culture are not more widely questioned. Yet even among the most sympathetic historians of ecological ideas, the validity of an utterly materialistic worldview remains unchallenged. Karl Kroeber, to take a recent example, suggests that “the Romantic era is especially interesting because in it are discernible beginnings of ideas developed by modern scientists.”1 But Kroeber regards the Romantic writers as merely “proto-ecological,” not fully ecological in their thinking, because they lacked an adequate Darwinian concept of evolution. According to Kroeber, Darwinian evolution “regards all life forms in themselves (along with their progenitors and descendants) as evanescent and as shaped by ever-changing environmental processes operating materialistically to no definable end (either naturalistic or transcendental)” (167). Kroeber’s account of the prevailing contemporary understanding of biological evolution is quite accurate, and he is certainly correct that the English Romantics and their American progeny did not see the world in such a reductively materialistic way. But that does not mean that the modern view of “environmental processes operating materialistically” is the only possible view, or that it provides a completely adequate framework for understanding how the world works.

BOOK REVIEWS 293 feminist theory. While Robinson’s literary catalogue of women’s writing certainly works to revise women’s literary reputations, one can’t help but wonder what kind of future-looking ecriture feminine Robinson’s unique post-Della Cruscan style might sketch. Cross importantly explores how Robinson’s tactics of gendered author­ ship could be expressed as a more full-blown theory of Romantic gender. Robinson’s loquacious dialogues bridge gender with voices that play and intertwine regardless of or underneath bodily difference, even while they implicate the socio-political and economic structures that instantiate gender normativity. What is more, we might extend the implications of this model—obviating gender difference while valorizing its role in instigating poetic acts—to suggest that gender becomes an essential motor of Roman­ ticism. As a theory of poetics, Robinson’s tropic play throws authorial dif­ ference into relief even as it retroactively alters the very grounds ofpoesis for all Romantic poets. Kate Singer Mount Holyoke College Timothy Michael. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. 283. $54.95. In British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, Timothy Michael argues that crises of political knowledge are not aberrations in modernity but, instead, one of its foundations. After the bloody turn taken by the French Revolution, writers and artists from across Europe had to cope with widespread failure of Enlightenment ideals—rationalism, secular gov­ ernance, and the rhetoric of liberation—to live up to their utopian prom­ ises. One name for this coping strategy was Romanticism, the aesthetic and political movement whose figures, Michael says, had to undertake “an as­ sessment of what [could] be rescued from Enlightenment models of ratio­ nality and an evaluation of how what remains of them might be deployed in postrevolutionary political contexts” (3). According to Michael, the models of knowledge that Romantic writers rescued after the breakdown of Enlightenment politics were numerous. They included the preservation of reason (now tempered by sensation and pleasure), a conservation of the idea of the “autonomous” poet by placing her in the messy cultural condi­ tions in which she lived, and a recommitment to a style of inwardness that accommodated history and institutions (instead ofavoiding them) (5). If all of this sounds very Burkean, then the governing thesis of British Romanti­ cism is more radical. Michael argues that, at root, questions of political knowledge inevitably become in the Romantic imagination questions of SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 294 BOOK REVIEWS freedom (5). The critique of existing models of understanding—be it a hard-nosed English empiricism or “the dream of pure reason”—could still be in the service of liberation (38). Michael’s book participates in a long tradition in Romantic studies that sees Romanticism as a negotiation—and not an outright repudiation—of Enlightenment rationalism and secularization. It includes texts such as James Engell’s The Creative Imagination, Frances Ferguson’s essays and book on Romantic-era utilitarianism, and Colin Jager’s work on religious thought and institutions after the disenchantment brought on by a secular age. However, if British Romanticism reframes the epistemology of political thought in this transitional period, it’s also an unusually old school book: Michael constructs a traditional intellectual history that avoids the cultural materialist methodologies that we’ve come to expect in most first mono­ graphs written under the rubric of the New Historicism. Instead, Michael concentrates on ideas themselves, as well as the fertile connections between them. While reading, I regularly thought about historians ofRomantic ide­ ology from the early to mid-twentieth-century, such as A. O. Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, by whom Michael admits to being influenced (19). But Mi­ chael’s analyses are less linear and more dialectical than Lovejoy’s or Berlin’s. He is not telling a story about the evolution ofideas, but building a network out of their recurrence and reappraisal. Indeed, Michael’s em­ phasis on pure concepts—his “commitment to the history of philosophy, especially philosophies of mind and knowledge”—seems to echo the re­ constructed idealism of the authors whose work he analyzes (24). In other words, the intellectual history of the late-eighteenth and early...

In this important study, Anthony Harding examines ways in which mythology was received and reinterpreted by most prominent English Romantic poets. Although there have been studies that examined a particular author's interest in various traditions, none has addressed wider question of contemporary reception of myth: what sources Romantics turned to, what influential schools of mythography were, and what roles individual writers gave to mythology or to particular myths in their work. In The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism, Harding deals with those questions by examining how Romantic writers understood and received myth and what they understood the mythic to be. He shows how Romantics' own mythmaking drew its meaning from contemporary political scene and contemporary ideological conflicts, rather than from a concept of myth as a timeless, unchanging source of value. Harding analyzes uses of myth in selected texts of period, covering work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, among others. Including a valuable bibliography of primary and secondary sources, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism fills a major void in Romantic studies. This book will be of great benefit to specialists in English Romanticism and to anyone with a serious interest in mythology.

ROBESPIERRE. What! did th'assassin's dagger aim its point Vain, as a dream of murder, at my bosom?--Coleridge & Southey, The Fall of Robespierre i.ii.6-7 (1794) THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A LARGER STUDY OF THE RAPID AND TURBULENT metamorphosis of dramatic imagination during period of French Revolution.* Within that study, this work explores one crucial moment in that transformation: immediate impact of Revolution upon dramatic imagination of British romanticism. Much very useful work has been done to understand that impact. Through work of George Steiner, Ronald Paulson, Mary Jacobus, Jeffrey Cox, Julie Carlson, Terence Alan Hoagwood, Reeve Parker, Marjean Purinton, and William Jewett, for example, we have gained a much clearer sense of broad trajectory and characteristic tenor of British romantics' reactions to Revolutionary experience: their initial enthusiasm for its cause; their sympathetic identification with its participants and their close imaginary participation in its events; their recoiling horror at Revolution's subsequent violence, and manner in which that psychological trauma prompted romantics' characteristic abstraction and historical displacement of Revolutionary themes and concerns. (1) These reactions are expressed, both directly and indirectly, throughout romantic drama: however, they are most powerfully expressed, without doubt, in tragedy, that genre most closely associated with both political ideals and violence of radical Revolution. Indeed, for central years of 1790's, tragedy was inextricably set within implicatory context of Jacobin rhetoric and ideology--and bound up, moreover (as Jacobus has made strikingly clear), with regicide. In consequence, and in a manner matched by no other literary form, tragedy was, for romantics, a genre bound inextricably to revolutionary experience, to degree that romantic writers' post-Revolutionary challenge was no longer to write--like young Schiller--a revolutionary tragedy, but to compose a tragedy that might move beyond, and perhaps redeem, form's own grim, complicit history, liberating it from political violence with which it had been so intimately associated. It is for this reason that we find, in tragedy, most sustained and attenuated expression of that peculiarly romantic displacement of history remarked upon by Jerome McGann: revolutionary experience, as an implicatory context, permeates romantic tragedy, dominating its action and concern to a degree unmatched in other genres, but French Revolutionary experience, in its historical particularity and local immediacy, appears nowhere. In fact, such pressurized displacement is so pronounced in romantic tragedy that it has been described by Terence Hoagwood as the central fact about romantic drama. (2) However, in its investigation of romanticism's engagement with Revolution, modern scholarship has tended to reiterate that act of displacement: for while it has reminded us of locality and contingency of romantics' imaginative responses to Revolution, it has continued, until quite recently, to elide locality and materiality of their Revolutionary experience. Indeed, this tendency was precisely that faulted by David Jordan in his review of Ronald Paulson's otherwise immensely useful Representations of Revolution: although Paulson offers a highly useful description of contemporary aesthetic responses to revolution, he treats revolution itself, Jordan points out, as some vast, abstract, and amorphous upheaval, not a series of discrete events but a phantasmagoria, an undifferentiated nightmare calling forth primal images of sex and generation and death and cruelty. (3) The problem is less pronounced, but no less evident, in more recent work of Jacobus, Cox, Carlson, Hoagwood, and Jewett. There, local negotiation of romantics' responses to Revolution, complexities of those responses' imaginative and textual articulation, and their change and development within Revolution have been more amply explored. …

Previous articleNext article FreeAndrew Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English Romanticism and the Rise of English. Andrew Elfenbein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. viii+278.Grant F. ScottGrant F. ScottMuhlenberg College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreElfenbein is a resurrection man, and his corpse is philology. He sneaks into the cemetery of our profession, exhumes the body, reanimates it in clear prose, and presents it to the world—a little wobbly but ready for a comeback. The book examines the philological effects of the standardization of English on literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, surveying a cast of characters from Hugh Blair to Gertrude Stein. Admirable for its breadth, the book dwells mainly on the canonical Romantic writers but also spends time with composition manuals, grammar books, dictionaries, and guides to pronunciation. It offers a set of heroes and villains but often (and wisely) blurs them, resisting the deafening blow of the academic thesis. There is certainly an argument here, but it is more a meta-argument about the critical neglect of philology in literary criticism and the vital influence of contentious debates about the English language during the eighteenth century. How Romantic writers responded to these debates is the focal point of most of this study. For those skeptical about the originality of the argument, the author’s is not your grandfather’s philology, but a “new” version informed by an awareness of history and historicity. It is this self-consciousness along with a compelling tension in the book itself between the formal demands of academic criticism and the less thesis-driven syntactic description or gloss, what Elfenbein calls the “pile-up of evidence” (5), that makes this a valuable hybrid study.One of the central questions of the book concerns agency. From whence does it derive, especially for Romantic writers? Recent critics have vested authority in a variety of sources, among them the author, genre, or gender, and political, cultural, and institutional history. But few scholars have turned to the English language itself as a persuasive force in understanding works of the creative imagination. “The demands of English as code, as institutionalized by eighteenth-century prescriptivism,” Elfenbein argues, “have as good a claim…to agency in a historical account” of literary texts as the demands of these other pressures (10). In a move sure to rattle the Romantic scholarly establishment, Elfenbein releases nineteenth-century authors from the contextual stranglehold of life and career and resituates them within “the history of English” (14). Hemans and Keats, for example, are wrestling as much with semantic and syntactic problems as emotional and psychological ones.The set of questions these and other Romantic authors address arises from the linguistic ferment of the second half of the eighteenth century, which was spurred on by a legion of philologists, grammarians, orthoepists, and lexicographers who changed the way English was conceived at almost every level. The period saw the rise of prescriptivism, the rise of books on usage, on how to speak English and speak it correctly. Elfenbein calls those responsible for this movement the “English experts” who capitalized on the ascendancy and uniformity of print to consolidate their influence. These experts “worked hard to link pure English to Britishness” (22) and managed to attain an ideal of commonality that Protestantism could not achieve even as it celebrated the vernacular. A standardized form of English contributed to national unity and, for the English experts, looked forward to imperial greatness. To use bad English became tantamount to political treason, a point nicely illustrated by references to passages in Belinda and Pride and Prejudice (24). By contrast, to use “Pure English” often served as a ticket of admission to literate Britain for working-class or immigrant authors like Ann Yearsley or Olaudah Equiano. Of course, “Pure English” also had a dark side, tyrannically prescribing forms of usage and excluding those writers who refused to conform to its rules.To demonstrate how complex and varied is the Romantic response to prescriptivism, Elfenbein focuses on two representative case studies: double negatives in “Tintern Abbey” and the will/shall distinction in a number of other canonical works from the period. In the former case, as the author contends, “the poem’s English skates on the brink of linguistic impropriety, coming close to a perilous edge without actually being incorrect” (50). Thus, Wordsworth’s use of partial double negatives and litotes complicates the prescriptions of the English experts, challenging their belief in clarity and contributing to the poet’s own “distinctive obscurity” (55). Led by Bishop Wallis and Lindley Murray, the eighteenth-century grammarians were all but unanimous in the distinction they drew between the modal auxiliaries “will” and “shall.” The first predicted; the second promised a future action. In the “corpus analysis” he performs (61), Elfenbein finds a surprising number of Romantics who follow the rules. In spite of flouting the conventional use of grammar and punctuation, for instance, Blake’s “Little Black Boy” gets the will/shall distinction exactly right and thus subtly evokes the characters’ Britishness. However, many Romantics ignored the English experts by preserving archaic forms such as those linking the use of “shall” with prophecy in the King James Bible. The second generation of Romantics, moreover, began to erode the distinction between these two words sometimes in an attempt simply to vary sound, as in Frankenstein (66). From this kind of philological description, Elfenbein turns to a brief literary analysis in his brilliant reading of the will/shall shift in a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (67–68). What is typically invisible—the effects of English usage—he not only makes apparent but also uses as critical evidence in constructing a persuasive reading of Prometheus’s radically altered view of Jupiter.The middle chapters take up the issues of pronunciation, dialect, versions of nonstandard English, elocution, and voice. The theater emerged as an arbiter of good pronunciation, and playwrights often created “an in-group of characters who used correct English and an out-group who did not” (76). Elfenbein investigates the representation of slave and Jewish dialect in popular plays, looking at the association between mispronunciation and resistance to authority. It is interesting to note that many of these representations were sympathetic and may have helped pave the way for “the abolition of the slave trade and, decades later, the removal of Jewish ‘disabilities’” (83). The subsequent analyses of the “philological moment” in Blake’s “The clod & the pebble,” Keats’s “Ode to Psyche,” and Hemans’s “Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School” are extraordinarily revealing and show just how useful the focus on stylistic, syntactic, and aural codes can be. We learn that “Blake contests the dialect masterplot of purification because his poem moves from older to newer forms of the verb [“seeketh” and “hath” to “gives” and “builds”], but…the change asserts not progress but indifference” (91); that for grammarian Murray’s insistence on clearness, unity, and strength in the sentence, Keats substitutes “lush sensuality…a pile-up of choice phrases” and “a post-orgasmic laxity” (99); and that Hemans, “rather than deforming words in accordance with a perception of ethnic or regional usage…made poetry a sanctuary for certain kinds of highly emotional prosody that were being exiled from respectable prose” (105). Likewise, it was Hemans who recognized the importance of elocution in her dramatic monologues, borrowing the elocutionary voice from the genre of the novel while omitting its expository narrator (127). By contrast, as Elfenbein argues, most other Romantic poetry silenced elocution and gave voice to exposition (130). Writers tended to move to “a peculiar unheard voice available only in print” (135), a quality that often made specific words and names in their verse difficult to pronounce.English experts like Blair and Murray were obsessed with the sentence as an isolated unit and devised exercises that helped correct bad ones. Elfenbein moves on to trace the relationship between the sentence and the maxim, the way sentences turned into sententiae. The problem was the implicit tension that emerged between the microcosm of the well-formed sentence and the larger macrostructure of the text. We see this contradiction in Radcliffe’s The Italian and in the way Jane Austen exploits it to reveal character in Pride and Prejudice. We also see evidence of how ill suited was the well-formed sentence for Walter Scott’s fluid narrative style: “The whole point of his flow was that nothing about the language was to be remembered, only the situation” (167). In Richard Lanham’s terms, we are encouraged to look “through” rather than “at” the language. Elfenbein goes on to discuss “the rise of the excerpt” (169) in the period and the way some authors, like P. B. Shelley, actively resisted such extraction of their work while some, like Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” embraced if not parodied it, as in the famous final motto, itself a detachable, brightly polished quotation designed to be quoted. The chapter titled “Sentencing Romanticism” concludes with a superb analysis that counterpoints Macaulay as a model of prose style and his “dark twin,” Thomas Carlyle, whose sentences spiral madly away from the prescriptivists (182).In the final chapter and afterword, Elfenbein brings the issues discussed in the book to our own time, singling out the work of late-nineteenth-century teacher and philologist John Wesley Hales as a notable model. In his textbook and anthology, Hales makes the detailed study of the English language “inseparable from the analysis of English poetry in general and Romantic poems in particular” (187). Refreshingly, Hales’s glosses shy away from the prescriptive, and his exercises sometimes have no right answer. Elfenbein calls this method “experimental philology” (190), admiring the way his explanations chart the shifting nature of the language and mix dialect with standard English, classicism with the vernacular. Elfenbein laments the way Hales’s “quirky…glosses” (193) gave way to New Criticism and the close reading of thematic unities. The art of recitation—inspired by J. Clifford Turner, who in 1929 made sound recordings of Romantic poems—likewise succumbed to the New Critical bogeyman, which “killed off the academic respectability of such oral recitation” (201). As Elfenbein notes, recitation all but disappeared because it was unable to meet the professional demands of the new English discipline that valorized printed prose. It could not compete with the rise of credentialism that was fueled by the uniformity of textbooks, monographs, and critical essays. Despite indulging toward the end in a bit of op-ed prescriptivism himself, Elfenbein succeeds in making what might seem a musty and highly specialized topic relevant to contemporary literary criticism and the classroom teaching of English and composition. Indeed, the book offers a “renovated understanding of philology” (215) that is genuinely compelling and deserves a wider audience than Romantic studies. 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