YES, 31, 2001 YES, 31, 2001 plantation culture;or the fiercelygendered debates over the representationof black bodies in Deborah E. McDowell's incisive analysisof the criticalreception of postI97os blackwomen's fiction. No singleessay can (orshould)be used to sumup such a variedfield, but, forme, perhapsSteven M. Stowe's 'WritingSickness:A Southern Woman's Diary of Cares' comes closest. In these diaryentries, written in I854-55, Mary Henderson, a white plantation-classwoman from North Carolina, compulsively pores over the recent deaths of her young children. Sickness and death turn theirbodies into texts, which she tries, retrospectively,to read through her writing, recalling the smallest symptoms, trying to shape them into significance, to make meaning from the unremarkableand the banal aswell as the unusual. Stowe's essay concludes with the final stages of Mary's struggle:'"Time is passing," she [Mary Henderson] observedin acknowledgmentof how herwritinghad not only given her new understandingbut also had been a kind of healing dream. "I must if possible arouse myself, for the past cannot be recalled and I am wasting precious time"' (p. 277). Without elevating this highly local studyinto allegory, Stowe nevertheless suggests a largerpassage from close scrutinyof textual detail into a wider kind of understanding:a tentative narrativethat seems to lie beneath most of these essays, and which in the end seems to hint at the possibilitiesof culturalrenewal. UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM PAMELA KNIGHTS Jefferson andtheIconography ofRomanticism: Folk,Land,Culture andtheRomantic Nation. By MALCOLMKELSALL. (Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. Gen. eds: MARILYN GAULL and STEPHEN PRICKETT) Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999. ix + 207 pp. /42.50; $55. Jefferson andtheIconography of Romanticism is a curiously wayward book that has a tendency to constantly put the unsuspecting reader on the wrong track. From its author's sly stab in the acknowledgements at his university's research board (thankingthem for having supported him with funds which apparently averaged ?4o a year to workin the Bodleian and the BritishLibrary),to the book'sbold thesis that Jefferson is one of the Founding Fathers, not just of the United States and American identity, but of the very rise of Romantic nationalism in Europe as well, Malcolm Kelsall's study immediately strikes one as being subtly ironic, slightly subversiveand unpredictable,at times almostwilfullyprovocative. Thus, offeringa close reading of the national iconography of Monticello, Jefferson andtheIconography ofRomanticism is to be regarded as the criticalbiography of a villa ratherthan of its builder,despitewhat the title suggests;upon closer examination, however, the book dodges the reader'sexpectationsagain, as it revealsitselfto be essentiallyan analysis of the evolution of European romantic nationalism, rather than of American nationalism.While this may come as a reassuranceto those readerswho expected a volume in Macmillan's impressive 'Romanticism in Perspective' series to be concerned with 'Romanticism as a Europe-wide phenonomenon' (blurb), the averageAmericanist,by contrast,willcome awayfromthebook distinctlyimpressed by Kelsall's eminently readable attempt to underscore the still underestimated transatlanticdynamic of the evolution of Romantic nationalism in general, and of post-RevolutionaryAmerican nationalismin particular.Kelsall's,in otherwords, is one of those quirkybooks that grow on you. Whilst the book as a whole falls somewhat short of being (to borrow the title of the opening chapter) a 'pilgrimageto Monticello', it is obvious that Kelsall is very much at home in the historyof and the culturaldiscoursesurrounding'the villa on the hill'. Rooting Monticello firmly in the English tradition of the Whig country plantation culture;or the fiercelygendered debates over the representationof black bodies in Deborah E. McDowell's incisive analysisof the criticalreception of postI97os blackwomen's fiction. No singleessay can (orshould)be used to sumup such a variedfield, but, forme, perhapsSteven M. Stowe's 'WritingSickness:A Southern Woman's Diary of Cares' comes closest. In these diaryentries, written in I854-55, Mary Henderson, a white plantation-classwoman from North Carolina, compulsively pores over the recent deaths of her young children. Sickness and death turn theirbodies into texts, which she tries, retrospectively,to read through her writing, recalling the smallest symptoms, trying to shape them into significance, to make meaning from the unremarkableand the banal aswell as the unusual. Stowe's essay concludes with the final stages of Mary's struggle:'"Time is passing," she [Mary Henderson...