Romantic Drama (review)

THE COMPAnATIST Uyich's deathbed revelation is the work ofjust such a deus ex machina. Numbering his paragraphs playfully to 82, the total ofTolstoy's years, Siebers strongly implies that the novelist himselfhad tried and failed to live out a coherent story. Into this modem Western bemusement steps Chinua Achebe, a highly literate intellectual but armed with centuries oftraditional wisdom. Siebers's enthusiasm for the proverbial in Achebe's novels is reminiscent ofhis sympathy for the clearly boundaried Homeric world. In both, the new must never taste so new that it cannot be digested and assimilated beside the old. Students of oral tradition will find nothing provocative here. More striking is Siebers's observation that modem-style tyrants in Achebe do not like proverbs. One would imagine that a despot might welcome the legitimation ofthe accepted wisdom. Indeed, propaganda always abounds in clichés—but despots can only mold tradition so far before it begins to mold them. Besides, the proverb (like the categorical imperative) is an invitation to tell stories, to think creatively about ethics; and what tyrant wants an oppressed people in that state of mind? Counting, fitting, collecting, recollecting, working... With these words Siebers summarizes his project. They express diligence, thoughtfulness, and love—qualities oddly rare, in conjunction or alone, in the humorless world ofpolitically correct orthodoxy. Equally rare is the optimism imparted by this workmanly method: the idea that, while the moral can never capture the story nor the story ever blazon one plain moral, the two in concert, working back and forth like a saw, will indefinitely refine each other. Morals andStories makes life seem a little more worth living, and (even more remarkably) literary criticism a little more worth practicing. John R. Harris Union University GERALD GILLESPIE, ed. Romantic Drama (A Comparative History of Literature in European Languages, Volume 9). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994. xvi + 516 pp. Ifone can claim, as Gerald Gillespie does quite appropriately, that the last two centuries have not exhausted the seduction of Romanticism, one can make such a claim more boldly after 1994. Kenneth Branaugh and Gary Oldman re-animated major Romantic protagonists in this year whose last two digits resonate with the great convulsions ofthe French Revolution. As an ideal epitome ofthis moment of complex continuity and nostalgia, the city of London itselfhas hosted a cultural festival that existentially asserts the hold of Romanticism: "Deutsche Romantik: 1790-1990." There is an international appreciation of the theatricality, aesthetic richness, and ideological subversion ofthe age ofthe French Revolution, an appreciation that is marked as much on the haute couture runways ofParis and Milan, as it is in the atmosphere of the post-punk Gothic night clubs of Los Angeles, London, and Berlin; the literary experiments ofKathy Acker and Martin Amis; and the pastoral and fantastic cyberlandscapes ofMist. This always compelling age is now again very much at stake, in this twilight ofEuropa's empires, both aesthetic and political, whose dawn the Romantics beheld. Vol. 20 (1996): 187 REVIEWS It is both flattering and daunting to review a book which contains the work of three dozen major scholars in a field as energetic and as varied as comparative European Romantic drama is today. Nevertheless, when the volume is so synoptic and so richly diverse as Gerald Gillespie's invaluable new collection ofessays, it becomes necessary to find ajunior scholarwhose name does not appear in that table ofcontents to review it. This project, from its inception at the ICLA conference at the University ofAlberta in 1978, was an endeavor ofscholarly collaboration. The essays, all by major scholars working in more than a dozen languages, range across the eastern and western European dramatic tradition, and even extend to the theatrical legacy imparted to the new worlds by this perhaps uniquely energetic cultural moment. Gillespie offers yet more breadth by including an great range ofcritical and methodological approaches to the drama ofthis period, the study ofdrama in general, and the study ofthe interactions between theatre and cultural history. The fourfold nature of the project is revealed in the sections into which the volume is divided: "Renewal and Innovation"; "Themes, Styles, Structures"; "Affinity, Dissemination, Reception"; and "The Romantic Legacy." Each group of essays...