Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets by Philip Cox (review)

Book Reviews81 shifting political affections on the uncertain satirical logic of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Richard Hocks contributes perhaps the collection's finest essay, a concise and revealing analysis of the multiple versions of Henry James' celebrated "germ" for The Ambassadors. Other essays, by contrast, testify more to the romantic than to the positivist impulse in genetic inquiry. According to Robert DeMott's essay on Steinbeck, for example, a passage from The Grapes of Wrath comes "from a place far deeper than the intellect . . . from the visceral center of the writer's being" (210). It is unfair to single out DeMott's compelling essay for criticism , for this statement betrays a tendency that is at work in several contributions to Biographies of Books, a tendency to treat genetic inquiry as a romantic quest for "the visceral center of the writer's being." When genetic criticism takes this route, it is difficult to make sense of the editors' wishful linkage between the terms "romantic" and "positivist," and even harder to accept "pragmatism" as a gloss for the ideology of geneticism. Perhaps the most important fact about Biographies ofBooks is that, with its forerunner, the volume testifies to a revival of interest among literary critics in the creative process of individual artists. Differences in the conception and methodology of genetic inquiry constitute a significant challenge to practitioners of the mode, but the same differences suggest the range and variety ofAmerican criticism now being written on compositional history. Barbour and Quirk have performed an important service by collecting some outstanding samples of current genetic criticism, and their efforts should encourage others to reevaluate what now appears to have been the premature news of the death of the author. HENRY B. WONHAM University of Oregon PHILIP COX. Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. 170 p. Although billed as an "introductory textbook," Philip Cox's Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets is an ambitious work which, as the blurb on the back cover informs us, "presents an original exploration of the important relationship between gender issues and genre choice in the works of the canonical male poets of the period." Cox's ambitiousness, however, is not limited to targeting an undergraduate audience in a book which relates the complexities of generic genealogies to issues of gender difference; he also offers up menacing words for the sacred cow of a unified Romanticism, takes issue with some of the canonical assumptions of deconstructionist and feminist critics, and takes up the methodology of the New Historicists. That the "high argument" of Romanticism has not been dissolved by its apparently self-authorizing and hegemonic tendencies is, to Cox, an unsatisfactory state of affairs. 82Rocky Mountain Review Invoking the Derridean formulation that genre is a limiting and exclusionary paradigm, Cox extends the inherent formal restrictiveness of genre to the characteristic of gender difference, and, indeed, to alterity in general. Embedded in any discourse, contends Cox (following Hélène Cixous), are the binary oppositions of all cultural phenomena—particularly the opposition of gender difference, which alternates between imposing hierarchical structures in the differentiation of generic categories and collapsing the very hierarchies to which it originally contributed. Cox sees gender difference as an unresolvable tension of writing itself and conjoins this view with other current modes of inquiry while examining selected texts of Coleridge, Barbauld, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Shelley. While Cox's theoretical eclecticism is stimulating, it is also necessarily elliptical and willfully selective in its presentation and application of post-structuralist theories. Moreover, one has urgent questions about a work in which the center still holds for five of the six high Romantic male poets but deals with issues of gender: for starters, why, in a work which questions traditional assumptions about gender and genre, do we not have a wider treatment of women poets of the Romantic period? Cox's implicit reasons for this exclusiveness are that, first, this is an introductory work for an audience which is relatively inexperienced in both Romanticism and contemporary literary theory and therefore must deal with the traditionally canonical poets; and, second, the conjoined optics of gender and genre provide a valuable...