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of certain poetic, artistic, cultural practices to a recentralisation on theory, in the course

of which its claims to an avant-gardist supplanting of authority have been undermined by
the establishment of an alternative hierarchy (Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Ricoeur, Baudrillard,
Foucault, Kristeva, Barthes), marking a re-suppression that ensures that the artist, the
writer will always arrive belatedly on her/his own scene. She speaks also with convincing
if paradoxical authority of the new identity politics, of the way in which a process that
begins as an urgent matter of political repositioning (her example is Chicano/a poetry)
turns into a straitjacket whereby it is impossible for anybody from a certain cultural back-
ground to practise without a ‘new’ alternative label, a pre-assigned role in a new world
order.
This circularity, however, is also revealing because it takes us in this final essay almost
completely outside the ambit of romanticism; and thus I think that, valuable as this book
is, there is nonetheless a sense in which it has to be seen as acting out its own supersession.
For postmodernism is surely retreating from us down the spiral, we are moving impercept-
ibly towards a new sector of the disc, its own novelty necessarily circumscribed (written
around) by its uncanny familiarity. It has taken this book some years to get into print (the
conference on which it is partly based took place in 1992, and seven years – eight or nine
by the time this review is printed – is a long time in virtual reality) and, without wishing
to enter yet further into the increasingly ghastly series of cultural puns on the post, it is
nevertheless impossible not to feel that what is to ‘come after’ has already arrived, we are
speaking already of an aftermath; and this is what we have always been speaking of – what,
of course, the romantics themselves necessarily spoke of, for there is nothing else of which
to speak, Mary Shelley’s ‘last man’ as the emblem of an anxiety, not perhaps of influence,
but of never knowing where the influence lies – or whether, in fact, the notion of influence
is a lie in itself; the father of lies, the lie of the father.
David Punter
University of Bristol

Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp.

xiv + 549. £75.00 hardback, £16.99 paperback. 0 631 19852 0 (hardback), 0 631 21877 7
(paperback).

The recent reprinting of this volume in paperback certainly makes it better value for the
individual purchaser, particularly in view of its mediocre production values, such as the
indifferent layout and typography and a complete absence of illustrations (‘Romanticism’
here is a purely literary phenomenon, and an almost exclusively British one). But just how
useful will it be as a volume ready to hand, rather than slumbering in the library? Unlike
its companion Companion, A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, this work does
not offer an orderly range of surveys designed to provide at least an attempt at com-
prehensive coverage. Instead it contains some fifty-two articles, produced by forty-five
scholars, and organized in a rather arcane classification of ‘Context and Perspectives’,
‘Readings’, ‘Genres and Modes’ and ‘Issues and Debates’. But it is not an encyclopaedic
work of reference either, and the offerings of the contributors have left odd gaps. The first
section has some glaring omissions: nothing on economic developments, for example, or
advances in the sciences (though there is an essay by Ian Wylie on ‘Romantic Responses
to Science’ in Part IV, which manages to tell us virtually nothing about the specific scien-
tific advances and speculations of the period). The same could be said of Part III, which,
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Book Reviews 227

amazingly, contains virtually nothing on the poetry. The patchiness of coverage is less seri-
ous in Part IV, where one would hope to find, and does indeed find, the most exciting and
stimulating contributions. There does seem to be some confusion as to whether this part
deals with modern approaches to Romanticism or with Romantic themes, not entirely
resolved by contributors taking the line that such-and-such a modern concern is both an
essential way to approach Romanticism and a central theme of Romantic writing. The
‘Readings’ of individual works raise more questions about omissions and inclusions: Burke
and the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin get a chapter each but Paine, Wollstonecraft and Godwin
don’t; Charlotte Smith gets two chapters (one for a poem and one for a novel), but Radcliffe
and Edgeworth get nothing.
It is evidently in vain to look for a guiding policy here; Duncan Wu seems to have oper-
ated on the generous but risky policy of soliciting contributions on whatever interested the
contributors (they were ‘given titles’ but left ‘free to pursue their own preoccupations’, he
tells us [p. x]), and this has certainly had the advantage of eliciting some fine chapters. But
the attempt ‘to juxtapose varying approaches and to reflect the catholicity of opinion and
preoccupation in the field’ (p. xi) is a recipe for a curate’s egg, and has led to the kind
of gaps mentioned above as well as some redundancies. After Susan J. Wolfson’s lucid,
comprehensive and succinct account of ‘Romanticism and Gender’ (pp. 385–96), for
example, it is difficult to see the point of including Elizabeth Pay’s short and lightweight
treatment of ‘Romanticism and Feminism’ (pp. 397–401). No doubt it is hard to reject
a contribution once the contract is signed. I would not envy Wu’s task in trying to co-
ordinate such a number of contributors, and he has certainly not erred by excessive regi-
mentation of his little army. In some cases they have been allowed to get away with the
academic equivalent of, if not murder, then aggravated assault. The worst offender is the
chapter in Part IV on ‘The Romantic Imagination’ by Jonathan Wordsworth, whose title is
calculated to attract the student reader seeking guidance on a central aspect of the liter-
ature of the period. What they will find is rather misguidance, in the form of a mystificatory
account based on the dubious premise that ‘Essentially, the Romantic imagination is the
wish of a number of creative geniuses (living at a certain period, but never a group) to “lose,
and find, all self in God”’ (p. 493). In the spirit of this vague religiosity Wordsworth flatly
discounts Shelley’s professions of atheism and irresponsibly identifies Pantheism and
Platonism (and this in the context of a discussion of Coleridge!). He has no coherent expla-
nation of what is, on his account, the rather striking coincidence that these poets ‘living at
a certain time’ should think the same on this topic, but then few Romantic scholars today,
even Coleridgeans, would agree that they did share the view he ascribes to them. His
list of references runs to three works (two by himself ), one on Wordsworth and two on
Coleridge and none more recent than 1985. Frankly I think this is a shoddy performance
and I consider that Wu failed in his editorial responsibilities in allowing its inclusion as it
stands. The diligent reader who goes on to the next essay, Rosemary Ashton’s ‘England and
Germany’, will be rewarded by reliable and useful information on the Romantic imagin-
ation, but under a title which is hardly a magnet to the occasional reader.
Where the topic is less central the deficiencies of individual essays matter less. Most of
them are short, the reader who finds them unhelpful can look elsewhere, and something
may be better than nothing. And in many cases the chapters are a good deal better. Rather
than distributing further brickbats it is more pleasant to hand out some bouquets and
direct the interested reader to essays that are likely to be of real value (leaving aside the
‘Readings’). Seamus Perry’s ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’ is a sensible
and informative discussion, focusing on the uses of the concept rather than chasing an
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228 R OMANTICISM

essentialist mirage, while his account of ‘Romantic Literary Criticism’ is perceptive and
persuasive about ‘the contradictory imaginative impulses which dominate Romantic criti-
cism’ (p. 381), though rather favouring the contributions of Coleridge and Hazlitt to the
detriment of, particularly, Shelley. David Duff’s ‘From Revolution to Romanticism: The
Historical Context to 1800’ offers an assured and illuminating discussion of the effect of
the French Revolution and its relevance to Romantic literature, while Philip Shaw’s ‘Britain
at War; The Historical Context’ provides an informative account of the background with
apt and sensitive accounts of the literature (but only first-generation poetry) and a persua-
sive reading of the war as ‘a Romantic war’, along with a substantial list of further reading.
Nicola Trott’s ‘The Picturesque, the Beautiful and the Sublime’ is a detailed and helpful
account, studded with explanatory and illustrative footnotes and well-freighted with
supplementary reading, on the refreshing assumption that readers want to understand the
topic rather than gleaning a few commonplaces. Stephen C. Behrendt’s ‘The Romantic
Reader’ offers a succinct survey of the developments in reading habits and practices, not
confined to the consumption of ‘high’ literature. In ‘The Romantic Drama’ Frederick
Burwick provides a dense account, mainly of the public stage, with a brief consideration
of the contributions of the major poets. The development is rendered rather staccato by
the need to provide thumbnail summaries of largely unknown works, but there is a useful
list of further reading. John Sutherland’s ‘The Novel’ is an adroit mapping of the main
fictional genres of the period, packed with savoury details, which both illuminates what is
already well-known (particularly the work of Austen and Scott) and encourages the reader
to venture into unfamiliar areas. David S. Miall’s ‘Gothic Fiction’ is a thoughtful and sugges-
tive account, which points out interesting lines of development for the reader without
doing all the work for them (and, in the concluding suggestion of an economic reading of
Gothic, leaving it to the reader to make almost all the running). Graeme Stones’ lively post-
structuralist provocation on ‘Parody and Imitation’ might perhaps have been more inform-
ative about a wider range of actual parodies in the period. James A. Butler’s ‘Travel Writing’
is an informative and illuminating treatment, both of the travel writing and of the reasons
for modern critical interest in it. David Simpson in ‘New Historicism’ offers an enlighten-
ing discussion, though the key term could be defined more explicitly and less narrowly;
the attempt to distinguish recent work in Romantic studies from the New Historicism
‘proper’ leads to a neglect of work like Jerome Christensen’s on Byron. Tony Pinkney’s
‘Romantic Ecology’ is a good introductory account of the topic, though rather too con-
cerned with (and uncritical of ) Bate’s book on Wordsworth. Anne Janowitz, in ‘The
Romantic Fragment’, offers a succinct and magisterial discussion of the importance of the
fragment to Romantic poetics and the Romantic consciousness generally, with an illumi-
nating exposition of the views of the Jena School, relatively unfamiliar to English readers.
Alan Richardson’s treatment of ‘Slavery and Romantic Writing’ is a densely informative and
balanced account, alert to ideological contradictions and complexities without overstating
its positions. Morton D. Paley’s ‘Apocalypse and Millennium’ is a remarkably full and
detailed account of the theme in canonical High Romanticism, though divorced from more
populist versions and those in other media; the focus on the literary and the canonical
seems a little dated. But this essay does show how essential an intimate knowledge of bibli-
cal texts is to a full understanding of the literature of this period. Nicola Trott, in ‘Milton
and the Romantics’, offers a packed and fertile account of the imaginative responses of
the Romantics to Milton, if rather bizarrely cast in the present tense, which can usefully be
contrasted to Frederick Burwick’s ‘Shakespeare and the Romantics’, which is informative
about the editing of Shakespeare, the views of Romantic critics and the responses of the
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Book Reviews 229

Boydell artists, but completely silent about Shakespeare’s place in the imagination of
Romantic writers.
That is not a bad harvest, all in all. I have not discussed the individual ‘Readings’, where
the reader is sure to gain some useful information about specific works. The reader who is
willing to follow the work of enthusiastic scholars who want to elucidate without over-
simplifying, and able to exercise discrimination about what they read, will often find much
in this volume worth their consultation. But it remains a book of parts, good, bad, and
indifferent, rather than a whole. The student seeking a starting-point for an essay or the
harrassed lecturer mugging up for a tutorial on an unfamiliar work or topic will often find
something to their purposes, and they must take the wheat and let the chaff be still. But
the announced aim of incorporating the multitude of different approaches into what the
jacket blurb calls ‘a major introductory survey’ could only be fulfilled for the reader who
reads it cover to cover, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that. In practice, readers will
encounter whatever approaches happen to apply in the parts they think it worth reading.
The production of a unified ‘survey’ would have had to be the outcome of either a fully
collaborative project, which it is clear that this work was never intended to be, or more
stringent editorial control than Wu thought fit to impose. No doubt it would be possible
to raise objections to a work unified by either procedure (done by a committee, or the work
of a control-freak), but in their absence we have a volume that ‘reflects’ the variety of
contemporary approaches to Romanticism as a broken mirror might reflect its object. The
generous reader might concede that such an imperfect reflective medium is appropriate to
its subject.
P.M.S. Dawson
University of Manchester

Terence Allan Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins (eds), British Romantic Drama: Historical
and Critical Essays (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 235. £35.00 hard-
back. 0 838 63743 4.

As publishers have become increasingly reluctant to publish collections of essays, I like

the form more and more. That said, I do encounter some difficulty in understanding why
this clutch of essays has assumed this form. Since versions of most of the pieces here have
already appeared together in a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle (1992), and two
of these recycled essays were in turn derived from a special issue of Nineteenth-Century
Contexts (1991), this latest avatar, although attended by its own distinguishing differences
in the form of welcome additions, contains some redundancy. The explanation might be,
of course, that collections get reviewed, whereas special issues do not. If that was the calcu-
lation, it has paid off in the case of this review, which must, in the main, be appreciative.
Notwithstanding the sheer range of genres and issues treated by the essays here,
Hoagwood and Watkins’s Introduction posits two common factors which are said to
characterize the field of Romantic drama, as well as preoccupying these pieces: there is the
propensity to represent history and historical change, and there is the specific deployment
of historically removed scenes as a displacement of these plays’ profoundly contemporary
political critiques. Hoagwood’s contribution to the volume then develops the latter theme
by arguing that this dramatic use of the past to articulate the present is ‘a sign of the times’
(p. 46). In doing so, he neatly anticipates James Chandler’s large case for a Romantic