II30 Reviews published, in I834, a translation ofGoethe's Faust which won praise fromCarlyle. His horizons were Scottish with a strong sympathy for mainland Europe rather than England (his hostility toOxford and Cambridge was legendary,despite frequent visits there), and Germany and Greece were particularly important tohim. Though unusu ally non-sectarian foraVictorian Scottish Calvinist, he regarded Roman Catholicism as backward, as a result ofwhich he was not especially interested in the 'AuldAl liance', preferring the idea of a new one with Germany. Yet he was also an unorthodox Calvinist who almost lost theAberdeen chair because of an equivocating declaration thathemade afterhe had signed theConfession of Faith. Blackie's achievements cover a vast span of nineteenth-century Scottish life.He became a champion of Gaelic, a defender of the crofters, and a Home Ruler (while also supporting theBritish Empire). He almost single-handedly raised themoney to set up the firstChair of Celtic in Scotland, at Edinburgh University in I882, even securing a ?200 donation fromQueen Victoria. He was an educational reformerwho called for less political patronage in the appointment of professors as well as more Scottish scholarly self-reliance, forexample on the question of pronouncing Greek. He wrote on Christianity, beauty, atheism, German war songs, and 'TheWise Men ofGreece'. He was a biographer ofBurns, wrote poetry of his own, and published in i866 a four-volume translation of the Iliad. His 'gospel of hard work and fresh air' (p. 232), entitled On Self-Culture (I874), remained popular inBritain and theUSA until the igios, long afterhis death in 1895. Till now students have had to rely for information on a rather uncritical i895 biography by one of his students,Anna M. Stoddart, which was based on theunpub lished manuscript of an autobiography, and on his diaries and letters published by a nephew in I90I and I9I0. Wallace has sourced awealth ofmaterial to reconstruct some of theminutiae of Blackie's lifewhile never losing sight of the bigger issues inwhich he played a significant part. He succeeds in conveying to the reader a keen understanding of these issues and debates and of Blackie's role in them. For all his obvious sympathywith theprofessor,Wallace also retains a very necessary degree of critical distance from his subject. Blackie was an essentially cosmopolitan figure in a society riven by parochialism and sectarian infighting.This is an extremely well researched and written biography of one of themost important and, till now, most neglected figures innineteenth-century Scottish life. UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER P6L 0 DOCHARTAIGH The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In theWake ofKlein. By MARY JACOBUS. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. xii+303 pp. C58. ISBN 978-o-ig-924636-6. This excellent study ofBritish object-relations theoryhas definitive chapters on Ella Freeman Sharpe, Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein, Susan Isaacs, Marion Milner, D. W. Winnicott, andWilfred Bion, which constitute variations on themes thatMary Ja cobus circles round again and again. For example, with Ella Sharpe the issue is the relationship ofmetaphor tobodily experience (a point returned to, forexample with Susan Isaacs on eating, where words are thought of as 'devoured' (p. I02)). There is also a reading of Sharpe's work on Hamlet, bringing out Lacan's relationship to it. Jacobus gives an analysis of Joan Riviere's 1936 paper on 'negative therapeutic reaction', discussing sadism as at the root of a disabling reaction to the 'unmasking' effects of psychoanalysis: 'the loved ones within, by whom the patient fears to be abandoned, are at the same time revealed tobe theobjects of her undying hatred and cruelty' (p. 39). And cruelty is at the heart of this book; Jacobus twice (pp. 87, I47) quotes Derrida (inWithout Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), MLR, I02.4, 2007 113I P. 28o), saying 'cruelty therewill have been, before any personal figure,before "cruel" will have become an attribute, still less anyone's fault'. That quotation, depersonal izing cruelty,making it an aspect of language itself,comes first in the conclusion of a chapter on Klein's Envy and Gratitude, and on her reading of theOresteia, with its discussion of the 'need' tomurder the mother-all suggestivematerial, and linked to discussion ofHannah Arendt, and her comments on forgiveness (mediated through JuliaKristeva, who...
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Nov 21, 2019
Mahmut Akar 
