Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise: Themes of Cosmic Strife in Romantic Tragedy by Erika Gottlieb (review)

420 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 brought fresh air into stuffy Augustan places, although Rawson, in his writing about Swift, does so by insisting on some of those elements of the mind and art that many contemporary critics have tried to banish into nineteenth-century shades. Rawson thinks, for example, that the alarming exuberance of the Tale ought to be heard as the author's, not as the discontinuity of the Hack. Currently interested in the literature of violence, in itself and as it can illuminate the eighteenth century, Rawson is thus not constrained to seek out form and norm; indeed he finds part of the excitementin the energiesgenerated by distressed rhetoric and image. The titles of four of England's five chapters, '''Wild Excursions",' 'The Subversive Image,' 'Enumerations, MisceJlanies, and the Irreducible Particular,' and 'The Design under Stress' (the last perhaps meant to echo the subtitle of Rawson's book on Fielding) suggest his sense of what he caJls in one place a certain 'radical unruliness' in Swift's work. Even in the penultimate chapter, 'The Ordering Design,' we hear ofdramatizations of scenes that ask for a 'fuJI rendering of the chaotic multiplicity of detail.' While SteJla may make it possible for Swift to 'make it seem that the structural harmony of the poemin a sense derives from the harmony ofher nature,' this poem and a few others like it look to be exceptions to the overaJl rule. (For me, at least, they are less interesting than the unrulies. We could use an essay on the Stella poems that would address itself precisely to some of the flatness in these lines, perhaps the effect of the harmony.) The chapters which document fragmentation and distraction in image and in shape surround the discussion of the ordering design. They speak to the 'energy' componentin England's title, whose verbal balance is more apparent than real. Although I think that his concern with the wildness, the particular, and the stress is rightly framed, his tone fails to capture these qualities on his page, perhaps because he seems finally to be not so imaginatively convinced as Rawson is of Swiftian disorder. He often describes the procedures of individual poems (like the odes) in a way that makes Swift a conscious creator of an uncreating rhetoric. This consciousness circumscribes and contains the devastating effect. His studies of the poems are sensible readings rather than radical revaluations - perhaps no bad thing. He listens attentively, to Swift and to other readers, whose views are cited with attractive respect. (PATRICIA BROCKMANN) Erika Gottlieb. Lost Angels ofa Ruined Paradise: Themes of Cosmic Strife in Romnntic Tragedy Sono Nis Press 1981. 183. $10.00 I looked forward to reading Erika Gottlieb's book on Romantic tragedy because the idea of such a book intrigued me. It is an attempt to treat as a HUMANITIES 421 group five plays that have either been neglected (The Borderers, Remorse, Otho the Great) or been treated mostly in the context of other work by the same authors (The Cenci, Manfred). Unfortunately, however, Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise has so many weaknesses that it would hardly persuade a sceptical reader to take much interest in Romantic tragedy. Readers already interested in the subject will be sorry that it has not been treated better. First of all, the author is badly served by her publisher: some problems might have been alleviated by careful editing, and this book would have been produced much more carefully by an academic press. It is often awkwardly written, with weak paragraphing and careless punctuation. The form of footnote references is sometimes inconsistent; no one has decided whether 'Romantic' deserves a capital letter or not; there is some typographical error or stylistic infelicity on almost every page, especially an irritating tendency to use a comma at one end of a clause or phrase and not at the other. The thesis-style bibliography, mostly of standard works, is unnecessary. Reading this book is too much like marking a rather careless essay: it is hard to pay attention to what the writer is saying because of her difficulty in saying it well. Related to this is a tendency to vagueness. In the introduction...