Short Reviews

With this January 2021 issue, Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions introduces new form of collective and conjunctural book review. Inspired by the spirit of conversation and exchange that animates all of our work, and that lurks secretly behind each review, we are asking scholars to reflect collaboratively on recent publications in Romanticism. These reviews are new in another sense as well. Expanding beyond the constraints of periodization, these reviews seek to create conceptual and/or historical resonances between work in Romanticism and work situated elsewhere. In particular, these reviews are meant to spark a deeper engagement between monographs in Romanticism and Black studies, Gender & Sexuality studies, Indigenous studies, and work that is situated in a contemporary context. Perhaps most significantly, these reviews aim to make academic publications that are grounded in Romanticism more useful to us today, in both academic and non-academic contexts alike. Upcoming reviews will take up Matthew Sandler’s The Black Romantic Revolution (Verso, 2020) and Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe Burning Hot (UC Press, 2019), Ryan Hanley’s Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing 1770-1830 and Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, and Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation and Alexis Boyan, et al. Furious Feminisms: Alternative Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road.

If you would like to propose a collaborative review, please contact us at: lh117@nyu.edu

Anthony Howe. Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool UP, 2013). 205 pp., (Hdbk., $ 99.95; ISBN 978-1846319716).

Anthony Howe - Byron and the Forms of Thought. Reviewed by Chris Washington

Chris Washington
Francis Marion University

Like any good study of Byron does, Anthony Howe takes his subject seriously as both a writer and thinker, but unlike other studies Howe’s book features a methodology perfectly in line with Byron’s own compositional practices. Howe intentionally plays with the scholarly book form in order to demonstrate how form evinces its own complicated thought process, just as, the book argues, the forms of Byron’s poems do. Howe’s book adopts an essayistic approach, as does Byron on Howe’s reading, even in Byron’s most seemingly non-essayistic works like Don Juan (1819-1824). Positioning himself against the idea that Byron was an important literary and cultural historical figure but not an important writer as famously encapsulated by Goethe and Arnold’s opinions, both of who labeled him an anti-intellectual, Howe seeks to reclaim Byron from this critical judgment, which Byron has never fully shaken off.

The larger context...

D. B. Ruderman, The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form (Routledge, 2016). 273 pp., 5 b&w illus. (Hdbk., $112.00; ISBN 9781138191853).

D. B. Ruderman - The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form. Reviewed by Diana Edelman

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...

Matthew Wickman. Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 304 pp., 7 illus. (Hdbk., $69.95; ISBN 9780812247954; Ebook; $69.95; ISBN 9780812292534)

Matthew Wickman - Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment. Reviewed by Aaron Ottinger

Aaron Ottinger
University of Washington

Matthew Wickman’s Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (2016) is an investigation of the history of figures of history, as mediated through literary forms. The study asks: What is the shape of history in relationship to the shape of geometrical figures? And how has the development of geometrical figures impacted our image of history?

Instead of a straight (time)line, Wickman’s geometric figure of history resembles the line of Thomas Reid’s “geometry of visibles,” according to which space is spherical, and thus the course of history curves back upon itself. In a curved image of history, Modernism germinates in the 1700s, and Enlightenment “undead” encroach on the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries (24, 129). The claim is surprising because Wickman posits that this figure of history emerges in the Scottish Enlightenment and is far more complicated than Futurist...

Susan Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 198 pp., 10 b&w illus. (Hdbck., $52.00, ISBN: 9780521513418; pbk. $19.99, ISBN: 9780521732796; ebook $16.00, ISBN: 9781316308059.)

Susan Wolfson - Reading John Keats. Reviewed by Brian Rejack

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...

Bonaparte, Felicia, The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2015). 336 pp. (Hdbk., $49.50; ISBN 9780813937328)

Felicia Bonaparte - The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Reviewed by James Lello

James Lello

St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

What is meant by the conspicuous proximity of the twin desiderata announced in the title of the book under review: “Poetics” and “Poesis”? How might they relate to nineteenth-century English fiction?

Bonaparte argues that to see the nineteenth-century novel as continuing the tradition of realism is erroneous: “The view that the nineteenth-century novel was and wished to be ‘realistic’ has less to do with the form of that fiction and far more with our own assumptions.” Because of the apparent crisis in religion during the nineteenth century, writers instead had to “make the world anew,” either through a practice of mythic symbolism or George Eliot’s advocacy of “the idealistic in the real.” Names, etymologies, genres: all these become ways of “embodying” ideas in narrative and developing a practice of “symbolic signification.” “Poesis,” taken etymologically here, refers to “making” in just...

Paulin, Roger, The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel: Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016), 662 pp. (Pbk. £29.95; ISBN 978-1-909254-95-4; PDF version free at www.openbookpublishers.com//download/book/452)

Roger Paulin - The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel: Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry. Reviewed by Nicholas Halmi

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...

Akel, Emily, Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher, and the Representative (Liverpool University Press, 2016). xiv + 206 pp. (Hdbk., £85.00).

Regina Akel - Benjamin Disraeli and John Murray: The Politician, the Publisher, and the Representative. Reviewed by Robert O'Kell

Robert O’Kell

University of Manitoba

The subject of this book, the publisher John Murray’s attempt in 1825–26 to start a newspaper that would rival The Times, is a fascinating story of great ambitions, plots and counterplots, mysteries, betrayals, calamitous failure, and slanderous disclosures. No wonder that it has been taken up many times. Samuel Smiles in A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir of John Murray (1891), Andrew Lang in The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (1897), and W. F. Monypenny in Volume I of The Life of Benjamin Disraeli (6 vols., with George Earle Buckle, 1910–20) all discussed the attempt to found The Representative at some length. And more recently, Disraeli’s other biographers—B. R. Jerman (1960), Robert Blake (1966), Sarah Bradford (1982), Stanley Weintraub (1993), Jane Ridley (1995), and Robert O’Kell (2013)—have all provided succinct analyses of the matter.

Regina Akel’s account is...

Laura Mandell, Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). 240 pp., 4 b&w and 14 color illus. (Hdbk., $90.00; ISBN 9781118274552).

Laura Mandell - Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age. Reviewed by Lauren Schachter

Lauren Schachter

University of Chicago

I read a digital edition of Laura Mandell’s 2015 Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age, so her advertisement’s request that any reviews of it be “sew[n] or staple[d] . . . into the cover” gave me pause, not only because it would be difficult for me to comply, but also because this difficulty illustrates the transitional medial environment that interests Mandell (xiii). Each chapter of her self-described manifesto examines “something one can do with a book” (writing, reading, critiquing) through the lens of “the change from coterie to mass-print to digital culture” (xiii). Moving skilfully across historical periods and topics from language philosophy to psychoanalysis to pedagogy, Breaking the Book advocates for a self-critical examination of book culture with the goal of carrying the best of the print humanities forward into “a brave new digital world” (xii). Since we have too often been blind...

Rohrbach, Emily, Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (Fordham University Press, 2015). xi +185 pp. (Hdbk., $85.00; ISBN: 978-0823267965; Paperback, $9.99; ISBN: 978-0823267972).

Emily Rohrbach - Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. Reviewed by Lauren Neefe

Lauren Neefe

Georgia Institute of Technology

“We are in a mist,” Keats writes in the letter of 1818 to J. H. Reynolds, giving Emily Rohrbach the primary point of reference for the title of her first monograph, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (2015). Keats claims that “We are now in that state—We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’” (qtd. in Rohrbach 1). This encumbered state is, Rohrbach observes, precisely not the condition of imaginative insight Wordsworth describes in Book XIII of The Prelude (1805) when, during the ascent of Mount Snowden, he finds himself suddenly above the mist, “which meek and silent, rested at my feet” (qtd. in Rohrbach 4). The mist, in which Keats finds himself and Reynolds, resonates in the uncertainty of mystery, the condition of negative capability. It resounds as well in a play on “missed.” The elusive, Rohrbach reminds us, predicates the modern...

Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, eds. Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 264, £90 (Hdbk., 978113880550700).

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco, eds. - Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature. Review by Bysshe Inigo Coffey

Bysshe Inigo Coffey
PhD Student at University of Exeter

It is not only ideas that have their histories with phalanxes of detractors and champions, but, as Ewan James Jones has recently put it, “verse form too contains a complex history of allegiance and contestation.” Consider the eighteenth century’s riotous debates on rhyme with the Reformation still in the air, or William Keach’s contention that the so-called Cockney school’s return to the (not-so-closed) couplet was necessary after Wordsworth became just too synonymous with blank verse for a renovated liberalism to use it. The political, religious, and historical assertions of poetic form are often obvious, but might not poetry offer its own kind of thinking too?

The editors of Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco, explain that the book is predominately concerned with what Simon Jarvis calls “verse-thinking”—namely...

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A refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture