BOOK REVIEWS 633 authors are far too brief and unclearly justified to stand in for an entire “tradition.” Hess identifies some of the “practical forms” (234) that a new “ecology of community” (233) or “ecology of everyday life” (234) is starting to take in the “Epilogue”: “local foods, home gardening, walkable cities, and neighborhood environmental justice alliances.” This list is, perhaps, inten tionally underwhelming, as Hess has throughout emphasized the need for a turn from the Romantically sublime to the mundane as necessary for a sus tainable future. Whatever forms that future might take, Hess’s more im portant work in this book is a clearing of “space for new and unanticipated ecologies” (235), ecologies that will require us to move beyond the frame of a surprisingly resilient Wordsworthian vision of “nature.” Daniel Hannah Lakehead University Jon Klancher. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Insti tutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 322. $95. What if we set aside the periods organizing the labors of literary scholars, and instead of focusing on authors and works within these periods, we fo cused on institutions instead? Jon Klancher’s Transfiguring the Arts and Sci ences begins by defamiliarizing the leading features of a literary “Romantic age” and illuminating instead an “age of institutions.” The turn of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of a new kind of sociable associa tion devoted to a broad range of “arts and sciences,” called by contempo raries Institutions: the Royal Institution (1800), the British Institution (1805), the London Institution (1806), the Metropolitan Institution (1823) and so on across Britain’s largest cities. These institutions were different from the earlier academies (like the Royal Academy of Art) and societies (like the Royal Society), the former being state-funded, authoritarian, and more exclusive, the latter more diffuse, than the new entity ofInstitution. Beginning with a fascinating genealogy of the Royal Institution’s estab lishment (led by Joseph Banks, Count Rumford, and Thomas Bernard), Part One of Klancher’s book focuses on “Questions of the Arts and Sci ences.” In five chapters and a groundbreaking Introduction, Klancher delves into the public, political, social, and intellectual dimensions of these popular institutions’ diverse programs for improving and progressing modern knowledge, and why these institutions conceived of the arts as forms of knowledge. Part Two focuses on “Questions of the Literary,” inSiR , 53 (Winter 2014) 634 BOOK REVIEWS eluding the emergence of literature as a distinctive category and the sever ance of arts as a whole from the categories of useful knowledge. Here as in Part One, familiar figures and features of Romantic historicist scholarship, from Coleridge and his lecturing career to Hazlitt and his art historical writings, appear transformed in this new institutional landscape in which “literature” emerged. One of Klancher’s driving questions is, “Why, from the late 1790s to the late 1820s, did the ‘arts’ in all senses of the term recede decisively further from what was now counting as knowledge in the scheme ‘arts and sciences’?” (148). In order to answer this question, Klancher uncovers the critical and largely neglected work that these multidisciplinary institutions pursued, drawing together current scholarship in history ofscience and art history in order to resituate imaginative writing within this “age of institutions.” Chapter 1 traces a fascinating transition across the eighteenth century, “from the age of projects to the age of institutions.” Klancher turns to De foe’s An Essay Upon Projects (1697), finding along Defoe’s continuum of predatory speculative schemes, the modern outlines of how sociability and connectivity could be channeled more optimistically into new “institu tions” for the public good. While in the early eighteenth century, projects for public improvement were variously explored by Defoe, Leibnitz (in “Precepts for Advancing the Sciences and Arts” [1680]), and Enlight enment thinkers, Klancher shows that this earlier passion for social im provement through diffusing knowledge publicly flourished well into “the age of institutions.” When arts and societies institutions did emerge around 1800, this followed the transformation ofthe word “institution” itself: from its early modern usage as a participle ofaction (i.e., the institution, or foun dation, of a nation), to its more familiar current usage as a...
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Apr 9, 2023
Breeda Comyns + 2
Open Access
