The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 5: Romanticism (review)

Brown, Marshall, ed. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 5: Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Pp. 490. ISBN 0-521-30010-X

Cambridge knows how to do this series, and this latest volume is no exception. Under the editorship of Marshall Brown, the distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature who has published important and influential studies of international Romanticism, this volume offers seventeen authoritative essays by major scholars, all of them addressing various aspects of (primarily) European literary criticism during the Romantic period (c. 1780 - 1830). Given that among their authors only three are non-North American academics, and one of these is British, the Anglo-Germanic emphasis in the literary and critical/theoretical writings discussed is not surprising. While the essays are international and comparative in nature, and designed to be both representative and synoptic within their subject areas, both their texts and the extensive primary and secondary bibliographies that accompany them illustrate the dominance of English and German criticism and theory during the period.

The essays are "introductory" in nature, each one intended to assess its subject from a historical, yet modern, perspective. This is in many ways the most difficult sort of essay to write: the audience is assumed to be specialized and "advanced," but heterogeneous; each author's challenge is to sample and represent a broad array of Romantic-era writers and thinkers without unduly privileging any of them while at the same time accounting for influences that flow unrestricted across national and cultural boundaries. Indeed, Brown's authors display a breadth of comparative cultural and intellectual knowledge and sophistication that is often lacking in studies of individual national romanticisms whose authors seem curiously inattentive to the fact that Romantic Europe was very much a community in which artists and theorists were well aware of one another's works.

A list of this collection's chapters indicates their range, from the obvious choices to others that suggest that intellectual and cultural connections that remain insuf-ficiently examined even today:

1) "Classical standards in the period;" 2) "Innovation and modernity;" 3) "The French Revolution;" 4) "Transcendental philosophy and Romantic criticism;" 5) "Nature;" 6) "Scientific models;" 7) "Religion and Literature;" 8) "Language theory and the art of understanding;" 9) "The transformation of rhetoric;" 10) "Romantic irony;" 11) "Theories of Genre;" 12) "Theory of the Novel;" 13) "The Impact of Shakespeare;" 14) "The vocation of criticism and the crisis of the republic;" 15) "Women, gender and literary criticism;" 16) "Literary history and historicism;" 17) "Literature and the other arts."

Among these, several essays are particularly compelling, in part because revisionist scholarship of the past decade and a half has made so evident the need for a wholesale remapping of the Romantic literary and cultural landscape. This is no less true for the area of Romantic literary criticism and theory than for that of primary imaginative literature.

David Simpson's meditation on the French Revolution's impact on Romantic criticism is one such case. Simpson inevitably says some of the predictable things about how the revolution interrupted and even displaced France's longstanding presence in literature and culture, and about how "it exacerbated the already anxious relation between popular and elite culture" (70). But he also entertains other, more intriguing possibilities, especially relating to gender: that it tended, for instance, to reify the place of women in a literary culture that (especially in England) venerated "the holiness of the heart's relations" (71), or that it reinforced a feminized model of bourgeois literary culture that was emerging in response to scientific, utilitarian, and professional advances.

Likewise, Jon Klancher's analysis of the rise of the professional critic traces the shift away from the dominant model before 1800, in which criticism concerned itself almost exclusively with "polite literature" (and therefore with an elitist taste and aesthetic) which it discussed in measured and largely civil terms, and toward the more "modern" paradigm...