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HUMANITIES 195 East German culture. But where is the Romanticism that Oscar Wilde declared (1889) was always ahead of the times? In fact, questions nag. Canada has a great tradition of Romantic studies. Why are the two outstanding essays (out of eight) reprints from elsewhere? Can we afford lost opportunities? What actually is new in Romantic studies? And why is there so little that is really new here? (MERVYN NICHOLSON) Steven Bruhm. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction University of Pennsylvania Press. xxii, 181. $29.95 cloth Gothic Bodies not only makes an important contribution to current thinking about the body in pain but also argues that such thinking played an important role at a particular moment in British culture around the tum of the nineteenth century, when the debates concerning sympathy in eighteenth-century moral philosophy became more complex and politically urgent after certain representations of the violence of the French Revolution gained popular currency. Examining texts from various genres, including Gothic fiction and drama and Romantic poetry, moving easily between literary texts and various juridical and medical discourses, Steven Bruhm demonstrates that they participated in a sophisticated debate on the problem of one's sympathy with another's pain, whether real or imagined, spectacular or immediately present. In the process, he constructs a refreshingly original approach to the literature of the period and goes far in breaking down the artificial barriers which still divide the study of 'Gothic' and 'Romantic' writing. Bruhm shows that for the authors of this period, one's response to pain can never be simple or consistent. For example, one's sympathy with another's pain can, through its very success, force one to suspend sympathy to escape the experience of pain and preserve oneself. The desire to display the violence of tyranny can numb spectators to that violence. Thus these authors assume that one response will transform into another; philosophical consistency dissolves into a series of stances each of which is designed to articulate this unpredictable discourse in a socially and politically stable way. To his credit, Bruhm insists on the political implications of each stance, designing a spectrum through which he can arrange his authors. On the one hand are those who, like Burke, wish to keep violence off-stage (thereby risking the domination of a secretive power) or who, like Radcliffe and Wordsworth, construct a wholly imaginary or invisible pained body (and thus subordinate it to the needs or satisfactions of the individual self); on the other are those who, like Paine, wish to make the sight of violence democratically visible to all, or who, like Byron, '[ask] us to feel pain so that we can critique the 196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 political structures that inflict it.' But Bruhm is attentive to the many contradictions and problems with each stance, never reducing a text to any settled position. This book deserves praise for the subtlety of its analyses, the rigour of its political insights (not least regarding the politics of class), the convincing way in which it links problems in law and medicine to the obsessions of literary texts, and the importance of its readings of several Gothic texts which often have not been served well by other critics. But one frequently notices the absence of attention to gender, not only in the reading of Radcliffe's work (where Bruhm himself notes its absence) but also - to take only two examples - of Godwin's Fleetwood, in which the protagonist constructs and tortures an artificial version of his wife, and of Shelley'S Cenci, whose Beatrice is the most devastating example in the book of a I character destroyed and unwritten by pain.' These texts variously display the specifically gendered body, whether to link sadism and a particular form of masculine anxiety (Godwin) or to confront the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of articulating the female body's experience of rape (Shelley). Similarly, Bruhm does well to place the Gothic within the history of representations of subjectivity and individuality in Britain, but he fails to make serious use of current psychoanalytic theories about the subject as it is constituted through relations to other subjects. Such failures make the book...

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