938 Reviews of the accounts of the operation of censorship are intriguing. Cumberland's Richard theSecond (1792), a dramatization ofthe Tyler/Straw tax revolt, was (unsurprisingly) rejected by the censor, despite its law-and-order, pro-monarchical conclusion. The revised version, TheArmourer, was allowed, although the plot turns upon the attempt of the Earl of Suffolk to rape a blacksmith's daughter (which provokes a riot). This is a nice and, arguably, intelligentdiscrimination. However, the contingent argument has to yield to an approach by alienation and metaphor because the London stage 'bore little relation to the realities of the age' (p. 206). Yet this is symptomatic of 'cultural alienation' (p. 206), and the contempo? rary signification can be reconstituted by metaphorical interpretation. Thus: Scene, a dungeon in Ruritania. Bianco, the good brother, is in chains. Enter Nerone, the bad brother, sword in hand who desires to kill Bianco for his estate. Castizia, Bianco's wife, interposes herself and cries, 'Kill me, but save my husband!' Nerone repents; the brothers are reconciled; everyone lives happily ever after.Accordingly, in Castizia we may perceive the displaced presence of Wollstonecraftian feminism; Nerone represents the confusing image of the villain/hero Napoleon; Bianco's chains referboth to the Bastilles of the ancien regime and to the fate of the emigres. The sword thrust towards Castizia is the metaphoric correlative of bourgeois, patriarchal marriage as a form of rape. This is an invented (and absurdly concentrated) example, but parallels Taylor's use, in extended analysis, ofthe Malfiesque horrors of Lewis's The Captive as a 'realistic' image of woman's 'oppression' (p. 115); or Master Betty's ideological functions as a 'metaphorical critique' of Napoleon (p. 155), and, in general, the interpretation of the Gothic dungeon, which 'could reflect both the instinctive fear of the conservative and the dashed hopes of the radical' (p. 199). In this way the ephemera of culture become the means of explication of the hidden ideological struc? tures of society. Yet there is surely a substantive difference between an examination of the alterations made to a text by censorship (historical scholarship) and a meta? phorical process which rejects evidence either of authorial intention or of audience interpretation (if this exists) and substitutes contingent associationism. Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization. By Joshua Wilner. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. xvi+ 154 pp. ?27. 'Readings', in the subtitle of Feeding on Infinity, aptly describes the book, for two reasons. First, it consists of separate essays unified not so much by a central thesis as by a common focus, on a broad concept called 'internalization'. Second, the method used is close explication of short passages, from works by a variety of authors, that are intended to bring out the points of the respective chapters. 'Internalization' is to be understood in a variety of ways, literal (as in the ingestion of food, alcohol, and drugs) or more figurative. Wilner brings to bear the notion of internalization on such matters as authorial confessional writing, in several historical periods; the way in which a guilty conscience is created; the significance of the mutation of religious frames of mind into secular ones; gender issues as reflected in the prestige of verse compared with prose or of the lyric poem compared with the novel; the nature of poetic inspiration; and the relevance to such inspiration of various forms of actual or metaphorical inebriation. Unsurprisingly, Wilner argues that Romanticism had a uniquely important historical role in evolving the various meanings and strategies of internalization (a conventional enough view). Freud's ideas, and, less often, those of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Melanie Klein, are often invoked for their supposed explanatory power. MLR, 97.4, 2002 939 The authors through whom these issues are explored include Montaigne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Byron, and (testifying to the persistence today of Romantic motifs of internalization) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Wilner's concrete explication of these authors' works?especially of Wordsworth's Prelude, Excursion, and 'Nutting' and of Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris? are usually perspicacious, convincing, and often genuinely exciting. On the other hand, the context...
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Sep 1, 2006
A (Agneta) Schreurs 
Open Access