MLR, 105.2, 2010 593 Herders, Fichte's, and Schelling's idealist and speculative philosophy. Furthermore, in a generally very well-produced book there are some annoying lapses that com plicate orientation. When, for example, a certain Friedrich Ratzel is introduced in the same breath as Adam Muller, Ritter, and Humboldt as the foremost proponent of the term Lebensraum (p. 247), no date is provided and his cited book, Der Lebensraum (1901), is, likemost material published afteraround 1830, listed under 'Secondary References'. The fact, too, that only headings of themain chapters, but not the sub- and sub-sub-headings, are listed in the table of contents makes using the book unnecessarily difficult. In spite ofmy own misgivings, however, I sincerely hope that the productive avenues opened up by this studywill stimulate further profound reinvestigations of our assumptions regarding the emergence of amodern world-view around 1800. National University of Ireland, Maynooth Florian Krobb Heinrich Hemes 'Buck der Lieder: Differenzen und die Folgen. By Karin Sous a. (Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 131) Tubingen: Niemeyer. 2007. 244 pp. 54. ISBN 978-3-484-32131-1. Karin Sousa's dissertation is, roughly speaking, a Derridean approach to Buck der Lieder, an attempt to view the ironies, ambiguities, shifting roles, and denials of authenticity to be found inHeine's early poetry as an anticipation of notions of decentredness, the non-fixity of the subject, absence', and 'differance' argued out inDerrida and a range ofmore or less related thinkers. To this extent the book is another of the numerous discussions, some more and some less successful, of themodernist or postmodern Heine which have appeared in the last two decades. Sousa's mustering and interlinking ofher theoretical authorities isgenerally sophis ticated and quite well sustained, although the adductions proliferate bewilderingly, and one would sometimes like the sense to be conveyed that they are not unchal lengeable. There is an irony in citing with unquestioning reverence writers whose theme isunstable selfhood and the fluidity ofmeaning. There is also some disproportion between Sousa's theoretical apparatus and the very restricted corpus of texts byHeine that she addresses. These are, in sequence, the poems 'Verrietmein blasses Angesicht', 'Habe mich mit Liebesreden', 'Der Doppelganger', and 'Der sterbende Fechter' (Die Heimkehr, 53, 57, 20, and 44), plus the 'Vorrede zur dritten Auflage' of 1837. Other poems are referred to, but not much. The approach does not concern itself significantly with chronologies and evolutions, with filiations, stylisticvariations, or steps in the poet's intellectual development. The fact that theDiisseldorfer Heine-Ausgabe?volume 1.2ofwhich isby far themost exhaustive compendium ofknown facts and surmises about Buch der Lieder?does not appear in her bibliography signals an orientation. Despite the inclusion of a forty-page discussion 'Zum Stand der Forschung' at the end of Sousa's book, what we have as a whole is a fairly independent and idiosyncratic projection of a salient though not necessarily representative littlegroup of poems 594 Reviews through a personally chosen conceptual prism; and responses to this approach will depend rather on what the reader wants. Personally, I did not feelparticularly enlightened. The lengthydiscussions which the book offers of these few lyrics become oddly fixated on isolated words or phrases?in Heimkehr 44 'unbewufit', 'Scherz', 'ich', inHeimkehr 20 the word 'Graus\ in the 'Vorrede zur dritten Auflage' the superlatives 'jungfraulichst' and 'ehrlichst', inHeimkehr 57 gelogen', inHeimkehr 53 'Mund'?and the method is to ransack these for their associations, with some repetition and to the frus trating exclusion of the text'swider statement, invocations, or rhetorical effects. The meanings that are elicited seem at bottom a little unremarkable?that the 'Vorrede zur dritten Auflage' concerns the loss of authenticity and immediacy, that Heimkehr 44 articulates amodern brokenness of the self, that the 'Doppelganger' poem, Heimkehr 20, presents a multiple revelation of artifice, and so on. These conclusions seem almost interchangeable. I was also made uncomfortable by a striking fondness for conditional formulations ('Aus einer etwas anderen Perspek tive konnte es in [. . .] auch um [. . .] gehen'). But this is in a sense representative of how the book should be responded to.We are told that 'Der Doppelganger declares itselfas the 'Text eines Textes', reveals itsown meaninglessness, opens its reception to an infinitude...