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  • Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft
  • Timothy Ruppert
Rajan, Tilottama . Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 282 pp.$65.00.

One of the most compelling points that Tilottama Rajan makes in introducing her Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft concerns how the rise of cultural studies in today's academy affects our understanding of British Romanticism and, by extension, of nineteenth-century British literature, for, as she claims, "a redistribution of power" (xiv) has created a milieu in which "the Victorian Novel assume[s] the preeminence once accorded to Romantic 'poetry' during the heyday of deconstruction" (xv). The danger, then, involves "a unigeneric reduction of narrative to the (Victorian) Novel" (xii) by which the distinctiveness of Romantic fictions, whether rendered in prose or in verse, becomes lost when assimilated into "the disciplinary apparatus of the Novel, where the word Novel, with a capital N, signifies a sociopolitical institution that developed through the nineteenth century" and performed a "normalizing role" (xii) during the Victorian moment and of course beyond. Over the six chapters comprising Romantic Narrative, Rajan posits the idea of Romantic narrativity as a counterexample to the Novel while placing special emphasis on Romanticism's "poetics of narrative" (xiii), a phrase she uses to capture an important part of what "remains the horizon of Romanticism as prose: that of poetry's legacy to prose" (8). In this way, Rajan questions accepted categorizations of genre and period and so invites her reader to consider not simply the four radical authors on whom Romantic Narrative focuses but also "the epistemologies at stake in poetry and prose from Shelley and Peacock to our own Victorianism" (xvi).

Interestingly, Rajan begins Romantic Narrative with two chapters devoted to Percy Bysshe Shelley, a writer seldom studied for his narrative work (surprisingly, Mary Shelley receives little attention in this book save as her late husband's redactor). The first chapter, entitled "The Trauma of Lyric: Shelley's Missed Encounter with Poetry in Alastor," plays out Rajan's Romantic narrativity theory by examining the tensions and conflicts between linear storytelling and the fragmentary, impressionistic, disrupted (and thus disruptive) aspects of the poet's 1816 piece. For Rajan, Alastor shows "that narrative is a potentially endless process: not a closed structure, but a proliferating web of speculation" (36) because the poem represents a contact point between conventional fiction's sequential, progressive nature and the Romantic lyric's "suppression of temporality" (12) and so coalesces prose and verse traits uniquely, in a manner that resists what Rajan depicts as the Victorian Novel paradigm. The second chapter, entitled "Shelley's Promethean Narratives: Gothic Anamorphoses in Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, and Prometheus Unbound," argues that, in essence, Shelley saw prose as "an unsettled, heterogeneous genre open to poetry," a perspective that makes his novels incompatible with "the normalizing apparatus of modernity and the Novel" (81). In this light, his youthful Gothic performances represent bricolages or pastiches that subvert customary methods of reading and interpretation because "pastiche, rather [End Page 517] than creating organic unities, breaks down its materials into a patchwork of phrases and ideas" and then "disintegrates them, making them available as junk for recycling" (55-56). Rajan amplifies this thesis to account for some of the more perplexing features of Shelley's later work, particularly Prometheus Unbound and The Triumph of Life. In "Unbinding the Personal: Autonarration, Epistolarity, and Genotext in Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney," Rajan presents both an insightful reading of Hays's 1797 work and an intriguing sketch of how the Memoirs further complicates genre classifications through its status as an autonarration, a literary form independent of fiction and autobiography alike (96). She writes that Hays's Memoirs renders salient "the affect of the author's life" because "autonarration formalizes a larger tendency of Romanticism, in which writers bring details from their personal lives into their texts, speaking in a voice that is recognizably their own or through a persona linked to the biographical author" (93). Rajan also identifies autonarratorial elements in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's conversation poems (93) and, provocatively, hints that Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre may carry forward the techniques of Romantic autonarration...

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