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MLN 116.5 (2001) 1091-1095



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Book Review

Romanticism and the Human Sciences:
Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species


Maureen N. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. x + 282 pages.

In her analysis of Romantic poetry and canonical literary texts of the Romantic period, Maureen N. McLane examines how the category of poetry was reformulated in relation to early nineteenth-century theorizations of human being and the rise of the humanities. McLane draws upon a variety of literary materials ranging from poems, prefaces, and manifestos to fiction and treatises on anthropology, political theory, and moral philosophy to map poetry's new, fraught, and self-conscious status as what Wordsworth famously called "the very language of man." Moving with considerable sophistication and ease among different disciplinary registers, from a discussion of Enlightenment anthropology's reliance on conjectural history to posit "a logic of man" to a detailed analysis of Wordsworth's "We are Seven," McLane demonstrates that in the wake of the French Revolution, discourses of poetry and anthropology explored the conditions and boundaries of human language, imaginative powers, and history en route to establishing new epistemologies of being human. Throughout the prefaces and polemics of the English Romantic poets she studies, McLane tracks poetry's new understanding of itself as "a universal knowledge, a synthetic knowledge" of humanity, and she contends that "[t]his demand for and by poetry marks a break in the history of poetry thinking about itself" (25).

McLane begins by outlining the emergence of what she calls "a literary anthropology--a conscious conjunction of the literary and the human"(10) in England circa 1800. The period was distinguished by a proliferation of competing conceptions of the individual, including man as an economic, rational, sympathetic, or reproductive being. McLane argues that the new discourse of poetry sought to articulate poetry's aims and uses in response to these new valuations of humanity and offered the poet as the typical yet exemplary individual, one who was like others and yet endowed par excellence with the capacity of imagination, sensibility, and language. While McLane's observations here are not new, they lay crucial groundwork for her assessment of the discursive interplay among concepts of poetry, imagination, human being, and history during the period. She argues that by aligning poetry with the imagination, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley in particular [End Page 1091] sought to reformulate poetry's relationship to history: first, the alignment of poetry with the imagination disengaged poetry from the strictures of periodization; and second, the faculty of the imagination enabled the poet to construct a version of conjectural history of the human species, or anthropology, by depicting rustic, savage, or primitive beings. These "savage exempla" (34) represented beings that were simultaneously akin to the poet and yet culturally and socially distanced from him, and as such they functioned as poetic "analogues" (34) to the primitive figures of Enlightenment anthropology. In McLane's Romantic literary anthropology, this distance between the poet and "his rude forebears, his savage contemporaries, or his own children" was bridged through the work of the imagination, and the poet found himself "aligned and allied with such figures through what we might call the species-logic of the imagination" (35).

McLane is alert to the potential hazards of a critical project that mobilizes universal categories like human being, imagination, and sensibility, and she approaches her subject matter with a sensitivity made manifest through scholarly rigor rather by way of apology. The chapter entitled "Do Rustics Think?"--which builds upon Alan Bewell's account of Wordsworth's relationship to an eighteenth-century anthropological tradition in Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry--discusses several early Wordsworth poems in Lyrical Ballads as representations of "ethnographic encounters" between two figures who misunderstand one another. McLane frames her discussion of these poems with an analysis of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's disagreement over poetic language in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads and in Biographia Literaria. Their...

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