Edward Larrissy. Blind and Blindness in Literature of Romantic Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Pp. viii+229. $99.99. Concerned with figure of blind man and with representations of blindness in Romantic-period poetry, Edward Larrissy's is intricate and subtle study. For Larrissy, blindness is term open to much inflection. There is the 'ancient' topos of blind seer (3), where quotation marks round serve less to scare than to open our eyes to cultural shaping involved in notion of ancientness. There is Enlightenment's multi-faceted concern to release all blind from dangers of that solipsism which might be encouraged by privation of most useful and informative of senses (24). And there is Romantic-period that blindness is condition that contrives to mirror complexity of contemporary accounts of ... consciousness (32). A dialectical argument half-shapes itself in book, most fully articulated in fine chapter on Wordsworth, and yet is often dismantled before it is fully framed, partly because of Larrissy's commendable reluctance to impose simplifying scheme on his topic or texts. This dialectical argument proposes that of modernity sets itself against, often in ironic and melancholy way, what Larrissy calls the power and confidence of ancient bard's inward vision (2-3). Modernity (that is, Romanticism), for Larrissy, recognizes its historically relativistic situatedness. It is aware that it is engaged in an exchange, involving both gain and loss, of ancient for modern inwardness (3). idea of such exchange surfaces intermittently; it does not dominate or drive book's readings, and yet it is not necessarily adverse criticism to say that book's underlying thesis is not always immediately apparent. Even in first two pages, one is conscious of struggle to define guiding theme: Larrissy defines what his book is not about with half-beleaguered clarity of someone determined not to be misunderstood, even as he amusingly worries lest his collection of associated topics resembles a Cubist collage: This book, then, claims influence of literary representations and philosophical discussions of blind on Romantic-period writing, but does not claim that this is matter of frequent occurrence of image of blind visionary used in straightforward fashion. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate sometimes complex relationship between this topos and other ways of representing blind. (2) Appropriately, Larrissey refuses to settle for straightforwardness since book is and is not study of Romantic debts and resistance to Enlightenment. Drawn to this topic, book remains fascinated by wider penumbra of concerns. It finds its pivot in idea that Romantics possessed a sophisticated sense of historical situatedness and relativity of inner self (2). Larrissey argues that Romantic period is very reverse of ahistorical Nirvana in which dehistoricising lyricism calls shots. Rather, book contends in its treatment of blindness that Romantic period shows itself unable to conceive lyrical impulse in non-historical form (32). Making this emphasis, it joins forces with those critics who have argued that Romantic ideology, to degree that it represents absorption in supposedly false state of consciousness, is belated and itself misleading chimera. McGann's Poetics of Sensibility, it should be noted, makes approving appearance in Chapter 2, The Celtic Bard in Ireland and Britain, where his application of phrase materialized to James Macpherson's Ossian poems wins both praise and further reflection: mentality reasserts itself in Larrissy's reading, which points out that the very fact that readers feel compelled to debate insubstantiality or otherwise of Ossian is in itself significant (46). …