David Sigler
University of Calgary

Ashley Cross’s new monograph, Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism, works in two directions at once: it scrutinizes the oeuvre of a single author, but it also presents Romantic-era writing as a network, something thoroughly collaborative, competitive, and communitarian. Cross, in presenting a study of Mary Robinson’s literary writings as she responded to her contemporaries and inspired her successors, gives us a model for understanding “authorial identity grounded in dialogic exchange” (3), and for apprehending Robinson’s writing across genres. Thus it offers a different vision of Robinson than has emerged in previous studies, such as Daniel Robinson’s The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (2011) and Paula Byrne’s more biographical Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (2004), both of which stress the unusualness of Robinson’s celebrity instead of her more typical struggle to be accepted, as a woman...

Diana Edelman
University of North Georgia, Gainesville

What do sleeping babies, dead babies, and lyric poetry have in common? D. B. Ruderman explains in The Idea of Infancy that contemplating sleeping and dead babies literally affects poetic form, which, in turn, creates new conceptions of identity on the part of the reader. Although childhood and the imagination have long been constitutive of Romanticism, Ruderman carves out a new understanding of infancy in the period by reading it through the lens of poststructuralist discourses and psychoanalytic theory.

Ruderman attempts to recover the “more disturbing and philosophically fraught notion of infanthood” that he pits against the “sentimental view of childhood,” which, he rightly argues, tends to be the dominant narrative in the history of Romantic criticism (2). This newer, darker view of infancy challenges linear narratives of development in which infancy is perceived as one stage in a progressive...

Brian Rejack
Illinois State University

For guidance on the path of reading John Keats, it’d be difficult to find a better Virgil for your journey than Susan Wolfson. As readers of her ample body of scholarship should expect, Wolfson is here a consummate close reader, attending always to the minute formal, sonic, structural (and otherwise) details that make Keats’s poems the beguiling texts that they are. I found myself again and again coming across “ah-ha” moments which pointed toward my own inadequacy as a reader (e.g. “Of course! Why did I never before realize that Hyperion begins with a bunch of lines featuring initial spondaic feet?? I’m such a fool…”). But in addition to that immensely satisfying micro approach and the brilliant insights about Keats’s poetry it reveals, Wolfson’s book also offers an overarching poetic biography, tracking the broad scope of Keats’s development as a poet. Though a short book, Reading John Keats nonetheless manages...

Nicholas Halmi

University of Oxford

August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) has long languished in the shadow of his younger brother Friedrich, whose essays and aphorisms of 1797–1800 helped defined the literary program of early German Romanticism. Though in his lifetime August Wilhelm was the better known and more celebrated of the two brothers—he boasted justly that his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature were read from “Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St. Petersburg”—his reputation never recovered from the devastating caricature of him by his former student Heinrich Heine in The Romantic School (1835). This is not the only reason, however, that no comprehensive biography of Schlegel has appeared in any language till now: his interests were remarkably varied (e.g., classical philology, medieval German philology, classical and German prosody, contemporary German literature, Shakespeare, Calderón, the history of drama, Provençal poetry, Italian...