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Reviewed by:
  • Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity
  • Timothy Ruppert
Milnes, Tim and Kerry Sinanan, EDS. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 268 pp. $80.00

In their new volume Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan have collected eleven essays that explore how ideas (or ideals) of truthfulness affected both the creation and the reception of literary texts during the British Romantic era (fairly liberally represented as the period between the 1760s and the early 1840s). Notably, the editors show great flexibility in selecting work that demonstrates their shared theories of truthfulness and mendacity, or reality and unreality, in Romantic England: we here find studies of Chatterton and Macpherson, Spence and More, Carlyle and Tennyson; both poets and prose writers receive attention, and the contributors' interpretations of sincerity and authenticity often vary significantly. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, to Milnes and Sinanan's [End Page 380] credit, accommodates the scope of its contributors' efforts without undermining its own announced focus. Milnes and Sinanan assert provocatively that "it is in Romantic literature and thought that 'sincerity' and 'authenticity' are fused—and thereby transformed—for the first time" (2), later clarifying this claim by stating that "authenticity is a state, sincerity a practice" (4). As these brief quotations suggest, the book's conceptual framework has sufficient intricacy both to generate and to sustain several approaches to the subject at hand. For this reason, the volume should appeal both to professional Romanticists and to readers who are broadly interested in England's literary milieu as it existed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Milnes and Sinanan have organized the volume into four sections, and the first of these, entitled "Forging Authenticity," begins with Margaret Russett's intriguing and well-researched "Genuity or Ingenuity? Invented Tradition and the Scottish Talent," in which Russett (who in this essay focuses on poetry) argues that British Romanticism bifurcated in the sense that "an 'English' school...that identified authenticity with origins" coexisted with "a 'Scottish' school that emphasized the poem's popularity as evidence of its authentically national character" (41). Given current scholarly interest in Scottish and Irish Romanticisms, her contribution provides important new insights rendered clearly and cogently. This section also includes Dafydd Moore's "'A Blank Made': Ossian, Sincerity and the Possibilities of Forgery" and Daniel Cook's excellent "Authenticity among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton's 'Memoirs of a Sad Dog' and Magazine Culture"; while Moore enhances our knowledge of Romantic-era literary critical values, Cook casts light on the shadowy publishing culture emblematized by periodicals such as Town and Country Magazine, to which Chatterton contributed "Sad Dog" in 1770 (the year of Chatterton's premature death).

"Acts of Sincerity," the book's second section, features four essays that I believe will prove useful to readers interested in canonical Romantic and early Victorian poets. For example, in "The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon," Angela Esterhammer explores how "Byron and Landon develop a paradoxical notion of performative sincerity that is at least latent in Wordsworth" and so "shape the context in which the later Wordsworth enters the early Victorian public sphere" (105). The Lake Poet receives additional consideration in Milnes's sophisticated theoretical study, "Making Sense of Sincerity in The Prelude" before Sinanan, in what I deem to be the volume's most impressive essay, discusses an important woman Romantic in "Too Good to be True? Hannah More, Authenticity, Sincerity and Evangelical Abolitionism." Sinanan asserts that More, best known today for her anti-slavery verse and her religious ardor, wrote from a sense of "sincere sympathy, based on a moral source" (157); the very truthfulness of such sympathy, for More, could spark cultural renovation or, to put the matter differently, "transform the world" (159). Jane Wright also makes a notable contribution to the book in her "Sincerity's Repetition: Carlyle, Tennyson and Other Repetitive Victorians," an essay that investigates the notion of sincerity's influence on the style of Victorian prose writers (Carlyle, John Ruskin) as well as poets (Tennyson, Coventry Patmore).

"Marketing the Genuine," the work's third part, comprises two erudite and gracefully written chapters. In "By Its Own Hand: Periodicals and the Paradox of Romantic Authenticity," Sara Lodge looks at...

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