Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (review)

Leon Chai’s Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era is a new and adventurous book that also looks backwards, returning scholarly inquiry to issues in the study of Romanticism that provoked sophisticated theoretical debate from the 1960s to the 1980s. Geoffrey Hartman’s identification of “self-consciousness” as the subject of Wordsworth’s poetry—and indeed perhaps of all Romantic poetry—is, in Chai’s book, subjected to new and modified attention.¹ If deconstruction’s main contribution was to make this issue of consciousness into a problem of language, and if historicism largely emphasized how that problem heightened the importance of context (deconstruction and historicism essentially agreed with each other insofar as they claimed that poetry isn’t about intention but about reception), Chai is particularly effective at showing how the proper context in which to view Romantic writing is within the rise to prominence of attempts to conceptualize nature and human experience in autonomous, unversalizing, abstract constructions of the mind: that is, in “theory.”

Even though Chai’s book marks a return to fundamental questions about Romantic self-reflexivity, it charts this course in an appealingly unconventional way. The author’s omnivorous reading draws on sources as unexpected as ancient Roman sculpture, vitalist debates, and Galois’ field theory. But this is not simply an enviable and intriguing display of learning; instead, by providing striking vantage points from which to view the material and discussions at hand, Romantic Theory aims to provide a broad sense of transnational interconnected cultural activity sharing a commitment to theoretical generalization.

Chai actually begins on familiar enough turf in chapter 1 with Rousseau and Shelley, arguing that the problem of excessive and uncontrolled emotion in Rousseau receives a response in Shelley’s The Triumph of Life with the poet’s search for “light” as a kind of theoretical perspective—a removal from the problem of emotion itself—at the same time that the infinite regress of that light in successive visions points to the poem’s interest in holding that theoretical vantage point itself up for examination and inquiry (18). Taking Shelley as a starting point, Romantic Theory continues to argue that a range of texts demonstrates a Romantic triumph of theory. Chapter 2, for instance, traces the nostalgic appreciation for Homer in order to contrast levels of theoretical awareness of what generates that appreciation. For F.A. Wolf, Homer is preserved and appreciated because of a particularly talented and tasteful critical intelligence embodied in Aristarchus (35); for Schlegel, nostalgia can only be explained with reference to an ideal—the way that Greek art represents the fulfillment of peculiar subjectivity as unversality and thus as objectivity (46). The shift from Wolf to Schlegel, like the shift from Rousseau to Shelley, is a shift that signals an increasing emphasis on theory: in Schlegel’s case, for the need to reflect on the “activity” of subjectivity (49). Thus, the return to Greek art for Schlegel—the return to an ideal never to be repeated—is a return motivated by the need or wish for theory itself.

At moments like those that appear in chapter 3, in Chai’s description of Napoleon’s attack on the flanks of his enemies, the book’s method will occasionally remind readers of the scholarship of the finest of historicist critics—like Alan Liu, for instance, whose dazzling work in Wordsworth: the Sense of History also draws on battle plans to explain the Napoleonic valence of The Prelude.² But Chai’s work is also quite clearly not a work of cultural studies in the way that Liu’s is. Objects of study, seemingly marginal to Romantic literature, are not (as in Liu’s account) used as the material context out of which literature is said to arise; Chai instead uses the instance of Napoleon to point to the commitment to a “theory” of warfare that approximates a “physics” (59). While Liu’s argument makes “Napoleon” stand for “history,” Chai makes Napoleon...