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

Ewan Jones, Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 254 pp. (Hbk. £60; ISBN 9781107068445).

Ewan Jones - Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form. Review by Nicholas Halmi

Nicholas Halmi

University of Oxford

Critics of Coleridge have long been divided into two basic camps: one that treats him primarily as a poet and literary critic and the other, rather smaller, that treats him primarily as a philosophical and theological thinker. The former typically regards Coleridge’s philosophical writings, which occupied him for most of his last seventeen years, as at best an irrelevance or at worst an unfortunate distraction from his true calling as a poet. The latter, while not denying Coleridge’s poetic achievement, has always had a more challenging task because it has to contend not only with the traditional suspicion, in the anglophone world, of anything smacking of “German metaphysics,” but equally with the self-undermining tendencies manifested in Coleridge’s plagiarisms and unsystematic treatment of philosophical issues. Can Coleridge be claimed as a philosophical writer without special pleading?

This question can be...

Michael Eberle-Sinatra. Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of his Major Works, 1805-1828. (Routledge Studies in Romanticism, 2013). 175pp., (Hdbk. $184.00, ISBN 978-0-415-31676-7; paperback $48.95, ISBN 978-0-415-86002-4).

Michael Eberle-Sinatra - Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene: A Reception History of his Major Works, 1805-1828. Review by Christine Woody

Christine Woody

University of Pennsylvania

In this meticulously researched book (now available in paperback), Eberle-Sinatra deepens our understanding of Leigh Hunt’s work during the first half of his career. Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene unites the reception history of Hunt’s poems with an examination of his earlier theatrical criticism, extending rather than challenging our growing critical understanding of Hunt. Eberle-Sinatra’s central claim is for Hunt’s positive influence on different genres in the Romantic period. He works assiduously to make and explore connections between Hunt and key Romantic figures, moving us beyond Hunt’s mentorship of Keats to explore the links between Wordsworth’s linguistic project and Hunt’s own and the impact (largely negative) of Hunt’s friendship with Byron on his reception.

The first chapter is devoted to Hunt’s theatre criticism before the Examiner. Eberle-Sinatra argues for the uniqueness of...

John Bugg. Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 264 pgs. (Cloth ISBN: 9780804785105; Digital ISBN: 9780804787307; $60.)

John Bugg - Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism. Review by Lauren Neefe

Lauren Neefe

Georgia Institute of Technology

Just out from Oxford University Press is John Bugg’s edition of radical publisher Joseph Johnson’s correspondence. It’s the first such edition, and it secures Bugg’s status as a major critical voice on the Godwin circle. In this year of remembering Geoffrey Hartman’s modes of reading, however, Bugg’s first monograph calls to mind the late critic’s now-fifty-year-old claim about interpreting form: “There are many ways to transcend formalism, but the worst is not to study forms” (556). Five Long Winters is one of the best.

The allusion to Tintern Abbey in the title sounds like the village mastiff its author’s ambition. That sense of purpose resounds as loudly at the immediate assertion of his primary claim, followed by its consequence, in the first two sentences of the...

Elizabeth A. Bohls, Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-07934-2

Elizabeth A. Bohls - Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833. Review by Peter Hulme

Peter Hulme

Emeritus Professor

University of Essex

The literature of Romanticism ran parallel to the British movements for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself. What Elizabeth Bohls calls “the capacious genre of travel writing” (3) provided several of the key texts that fuelled these debates, most of them centred on the West Indies. These books, by John Gabriel Stedman, William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Edward Long, Bryan Edwards, Marcus Rainsford, Olaudah Equiano, Janet Schaw, Maria Nugent, and Mary Prince, provide the material for Slavery and the Politics of Place. The books are well-known, at least to Caribbeanists, but the fine-grained analyses offered here are welcome additions to the scholarship on Romanticism, slavery, and travel writing.

As always in travel writing, description of place plays an important part, so it’s no surprise to see the language of the picturesque featuring so strongly in all the books...

William Wordsworth in Context, edited by Andrew Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 2015) 360 pp. (Hbk ISBN: 9781107028418)

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, edited by Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson. (Oxford University Press, 2015) 896 pp. (Hbk ISBN: 9780199662128)

Reading and Raiding: On the Case of Wordsworth. Review by G. Kim Blank

Reviews of
Andrew Bennett, William Wordsworth in Context
Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

G. Kim Blank
University of Victoria

William Wordsworth (is there a better name for an English poet?) has not gone away. Not that at least a few of his own contemporaries might have wished that his own words—“the good die first,” from his yawning 1814 Excursion—might be turned upon him. They then might have been left with a less unresolved, lingering figure over whom to brood. Wordsworth, instead, trundled more than a decade into the Victorian era.

Born in 1770, Wordsworth did seem to be (or become) something of a pretentious fuddy-duddy, and he did so before the age of fifty, with more than thirty years still on his clock, and with his best work about a decade behind him. John Keats, ever studious of his great, elder contemporary while he courses his own rapid...

Rachel Schulkins, Keats, Modesty and Masturbation (Ashgate, 2014). 190 pp. (Hdbk., $149.95; ISBN: 9781472418791).

Rachel Schulkins - Keats, Modesty and Masturbation. Review by Brian Rejack

Brian Rejack
Illinois State University

One can’t help but feel slightly immodest when carrying around a book titled Keats, Modesty and Masturbation. While engaged in reading the book in question, this humble reviewer unabashedly displayed it on his coffee table, which resulted in a non-academic friend regarding it—and by extension, its reader—skeptically, perhaps even accusatorily (the response: “yes, of course this is the kind of thing we do in academia!”). But fear not, gentle readers; Rachel Schulkins’s book will not betray your delicate sensibilities. What it will do is educate you on a significant aspect of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period and offer readings of Keats’s romances (and some shorter poems) which challenge and productively expand the scholarship on Keats and gender.

To begin, the term “masturbation” during the Romantic period denotes something not quite as specific as it does today. Instead of referring primarily to “...

Anahid Nersessian, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment (Harvard University Press, 2015). 280 pp. (Hdbk., $39.95; ISBN 9780674434578).

Anahid Nersessian - Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment. Review by Carmen Faye Mathes

Carmen Faye Mathes
University of British Columbia

In the 22 June 2015 podcast in which comedian Mark Maron graciously guided Barack Obama through paces both nimble and hedging, the political legacy that less than a month before had been labeled by Harper’s Magazine as “What Went Wrong” was none-too-subtly recast as progress. “Sometimes,” said Obama, “the task of government is to make incremental improvements, or try to steer the ocean liner two degrees north or south so that ten years from now, suddenly, we’re in a very different place than we were.” This rhetoric of adjustment speaks of a historical moment especially conversant with the arguments contained in Anahid Nersessian’s first book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment. Hopeful without being credulous, Nersessian’s project is to redefine utopia as “limited” and thus to reroute that notion’s...

Adam Roberts, Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2014). 208 pp. (Hdbk., $90.00; ISBN 9780198723271).

Adam Roberts - Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor. Review by Bysshe Inigo Coffey

Bysshe Inigo Coffey

Adam Roberts’s monograph is the first serious attempt to recuperate Walter Savage Landor’s “vanishing reputation” in around fifty years. This is not an easy task. T. S. Eliot described Landor as one of the early nineteenth century’s “very finest poets,” but unfortunately, Eliot’s lavish judgement failed to inspire any serious critical revaluation of Landor. Roberts accepts that Landor is not “a poet of Shelleyan or Keatsian brilliance.” His “prodigious” and uneven output—some of it, as Roberts admits, is undeniably boring—ranges from lyric, epic, drama, to the Imaginary Conversations.

Also there’s the Latin to contend with. For today’s student the centrality of Latin to Landor’s work might seem a rather formidable obstacle, but Roberts’s guidance is light, sound, and inviting. Furthermore, any would-be reader has to deal with what Donald Davie (in a short essay on the short poems) called the “bewildering insecurity of tone” that...

Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 216 pp., 26 b&w illus. (Hdbk., $49.95; ISBN 9781421409986).

Nicholas Mason - Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism. Review by Kellie Donovan-Condron

Kellie Donovan-Condron
Babson College

Advertising that masquerades as news or unbiased opinion is rampant throughout twenty-first-century consumer culture, but it is hardly a new marketing tactic. Although the term “advertorial” is an early twentieth-century American coinage, Nicholas Mason convincingly argues in Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) that the practice originated during the British Romantic Century (1750-1850). In this deeply revisionist project, Mason overturns several pieces of received cultural and literary wisdom, particularly the standard account that advertising developed in Victorian England and flourished in America. Mason’s book is an engaging, interdisciplinary study of the “shared ‘rise’ narratives of advertising and modern literature”(6) that seeks to historicize the “clash between literary idealism and market realism” (5). Born in the economic and cultural turbulence...

Barbara K. Seeber. Jane Austen and Animals (Ashgate, 2013). 162 pp. (Hdbk. and ebook, $99.95; ISBN: 978-1-4094-5604-9).

Barbara K. Seeber - Jane Austen and Animals. Review by Jonas Cope

Jonas Cope
California State University, Sacramento

Jane Austen and Animals is a thoughtful and lucid book. That it never loses sight of its object—tracing connections between the domination of the nonhuman world and the domination of women in the juvenilia, letters and novels of Jane Austen—may be both a merit and a weakness. On the one hand the book is well researched and remarkably consistent. On the other its argument can seem somewhat unadventurous and occasionally formulaic: the “bad” characters in Austen who exploit animals and natural resources usually exploit women; the “good” ones who are sensitive to the environment are also more sexually egalitarian. The point is not that the argument is not convincing—it is—but that even while it makes a solid case the reader longs for a few more intellectual twists and turns along the way.

Seeber’s book marks the “first full-length study of animals in Austen’s writing” (11). Its main goal is to decenter the...

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