BOOK REVIEWS 93 magazine full of gunpowder. Wolfson is particularly good on the history and impact of Byron’s portraits and the contradictory currents of his influence on female writers following his death, especially Laetitia Landon and Felicia Hemans. Even those among his female epigones who felt com pelled to condemn his behavior toward Lady Byron, not to mention women in general, could not resist the power of his poetic example. After casting aside Moore’s Life ofByron in disgust, Hemans’s subsequent poetry showed that she still “couldn’t separate from Lord Byron,” but “kept true to her textual marriage” (269). Romantic Interactions is a worthy successor to Borderlines and can be read with profit selectively or serially. Like all ofWolfson’s work, its value lies as much in its example as in its content. If anyone still clings to the idea that close reading blinds us to history, ideology, or difference, let him or her read ten consecutive pages of this book, chosen at random. For Wolfson, read ing closely means observing every point of connection between the text and all its relevant contexts: literary history as well as material history; ety mology as well orthography; bibliography, biography, and autobiography; reaction and reception; revisions and transmissions; culture and its con structs; and, of course, the relationship of every relevant detail of a text to its place and function within the work as a whole. Exemplary as well is Wolfson’s prose: precise but not fussy, sophisticated without strain, and mixing the colloquial with the formal in a combination that De Quincey, whose description ofhis mother’s writing Wolfson cites with admiration in Borderlines (24), would call “racy and fresh with idiomatic graces.” “Racy” may sound incongruent with the motto, “Not so fast,” but in slowing your pace to Wolfson’s, you’ll be surprised at how time flies. Charles J. Rzepka Boston University Alexander Schlutz. Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivityfrom Descartes to Romanticism. Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 2009. Pp. 332. $60.00 cloth/$30.oo paper. Arguably one of the most significant, if largely unintended, consequences of the theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s was a narrowing of the historical framework within which literary scholars situated and understood “Ro manticism.” Whereas the generations of Wellek, Lovejoy, Abrams, and Bloom tended to understand Romanticism as a transnational movement (or movements) situated between the Enlightenment and Modernism, deconstructive approaches to Romantic texts tended to ignore such narraSiR , 51 (Spring 2012) 94 BOOK REVIEWS tives in favor of much less historically specific reflections on the metaphys ics of language, while new historical approaches to Romanticism focused on more local and geographically specific historical sites. Thus, though deconstruction and new historicism enriched and deepened our understand ing of the complex nature of Romantic engagements with language and our awareness of the various ways in which Romantic-era authors wove elements of their swiftly changing historical milieux into their literary works, these virtues often generated an understanding ofRomanticism able to speak only to a relatively small professional community ofscholars. In an era of apparently interminable university budget cuts in the humanities, such a development was worrying partly for crassly professional reasons. Yet such a narrowing offocus was also worrying because it did not seem to build upon that sense, shared widely by scholars of the Romantic era, that Romanticism is much more than an abstract reflection on language or a lo cally and temporally bounded phenomenon, and that the multiple logics of Romanticism are of fundamental importance to the wider field of literary criticism. Happily, then, we now seem to be at least a decade into a solid detente between warring schools of interpretation, and we are beginning to see Romanticism once again emplotted within more extended historical narra tives. Recent eco-historical narratives, for example, are intrinsically trans national, emphasizing a very long duree and positioning Romanticism not simply as one field among others but as a key theoretical resource for ecocritical thinking itself. (Jonathan Bate and Timothy Morton provide two quite divergent examples of this eco-critical tendency.) Recent interest in “secularization” by scholars such as Hans Blumenberg, Charles Taylor, and William Connelly has also focused attention on broader...