Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture by Samuel Baker

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 543 the project of which TIE is a part asks us to think about using media to be more collaborative across greater distances. As Renaissance Humanism and the Enlightenment demonstrated, humanities scholarship has always been inherently a collective and collaborative activity, dependent as much upon the mastery of available media as upon ideas. The current ways in which we go about the business ofliterary and cultural study, via conferences and through the single-authored monographs, articles, and reviews, does not take full advantage of the new forms of organizing knowledge currently available to us. Whether or not this review forum is successful, like This is Enlightenment, it seeks to point toward a future of humanities scholarship that may be very different from the one that we currently inhabit. The two most important research fields ofthe past two decades—history ofthe book and digital humanities—have shown ways in which thinking about media profoundly changes how we think about knowledge. Although the ulti­ mate horizon ofthis activity may not be clearly visible, the fact that future scholarship will change in radical ways as we adapt to new technologies of communicating knowledge is not in question. Alan Bewell Jon Klancher University of Toronto Carnegie MellonUniversity Christina Lupton Ted Underwood University of Michigan University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Samuel Baker. Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 344. $49.50. In our contemporary age ofjet travel and bullet trains—to say nothing of email and Skype—it is easy to forget that, less than two centuries ago, when Britons wanted to travel beyond their country’s borders, voyage by sea was inevitable. Fortunately, we now have Samuel Baker’s Written on the Water to remind us. With its strong (but not exclusive) focus on the poetry and prose of the Lake Poets, Baker’s dense but readable study brilliantly re­ constructs the central roles of maritime and nautical cultures in Romanticera British literature. In the process, Baker not only puts forward new ideas about the relations between genre, mode, and politics in the period, but also points toward a new critical paradigm for understanding British Ro­ manticism that should nuance and complicate, if not entirely displace, the influential “Romantic imperialism” thesis popularized in the late 1990s. As Written on the Water persuasively demonstrates, the sea plays a variety SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) 544 BOOK REVIEWS ofroles in Romantic poetry and culture. One of its greatest strengths is the way it repeatedly manages to schematize large patterns of thought without oversimplifying them. Early in the book, for example, Baker establishes that “the sea” operated for the Romantics in at least two spheres simulta­ neously: the worldly (the domain of commerce and imperial expansion) and the allegorical (the domain of life and death, fate, and uncertainty). Thus, the sea was alternately “the avenue ofBritish geopolitical power, the ultimate arena ofcommerce and war and thus ofmodern social transforma­ tion, and the medium of any possible universal society” (41). The final phrase of this last clause, moreover, is important: as opposed to the para­ digm of “universal empire” (and here I refer of course to the subtitle of Saree Makdisi’s now-classic 1998 study), which polemically claimed that most outward-looking Romantic-era literature tacitly or explicitly sup­ ported Britain’s imperial ambitions in the period, Baker’s phrase “universal society” stakes a new—and, to my mind, ultimately more persuasive— claim: what the Romantics were truly interested in establishing was an em­ pire, neither of territory nor of peoples, but of culture. To this end, and drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s terminology in The Literary Absolute, Baker posits a catachrestical duality that alternately inspired and vexed the Lake Poets and their contemporaries: absolute cul­ ture (“culture intellectualized as a complete hierarchy of kinds of human life”) and the cultural absolute (“culture experienced ... as a nonhierarchical multiplicity ofincommensurate kinds”) (72). In other words, for every attempt to establish or discover a uniquely British “culture”—especially one based on Britain’s geopolitical situation as an island nation embodying an ideal combination of trade, liberty, and Protestantism—that could...