Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kliest by Carol Jacobs (review)

260Rocky Mountain Review climates influence our perceptions of artistic works. We see this quality in Francis Higman's contribution, which credits Calvin, rather than Descartes, with originating the chiefcharacteristics ofFrench style: simplicity, sobriety, definition, and clarity. In a different light, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur shows how the crisis in the printing industry necessitated the serialization of books in periodicals and thus informed the structure ofthe nineteenth-century novel. Authors had to accommodate the tastes of a less sophisticated audience as they learned to highlight suspense and drama at moments where the story could be cut and continued in a subsequent installment. Several entries allow the general readership to penetrate the mysteries of highly technical literary forms. Stephen G. Nichols shows us how the appeal ofthe old provençal lyric is grounded in the tension between invention (trobar) and performance (chantar), and between speaking subject and society, embodied in the beloved woman. François Rigolot approaches the art of the grands rhétoriqueurs from the standpoint ofthe poet's desire to escape the constraints of poetry set to music. These poets wanted poetry to compete with music on its own terms. They appealed to the ear by exploiting repetition and the natural sonorities of language, just as they sought to arrest the reader's gaze by the use of visual patterns and acrostics. Throughout this rich and varied work, the contributors never lose sight of the expressed goal of the enterprise—the writing of literary history. They see it as both a performative and self-reflexive activity. The introduction, "On Writing Literary History," traces diverse approaches to the process of generating literary history through the ages, and the final chapter is devoted to Apostrophes, Bernard Pivot's celebrated televised interviews with authors of the latest and most engaging literary works. Apostrophes, after all, represents the most recent attempt to take stock of literary production—an unending outpouring which never stops challenging the evaluative skills of literary historians. DEBORAH N. LOSSE Arizona State University CAROL JACOBS. Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Bronté, Kliest. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 233 p. From the onset, Jacobs offers an immensely fruitful metaphor for conceptualizing the Romantic enterprise through the notion of uncontainability. As with Cynthia Chase's Decomposing Figures or Albert Cook's Thresholds: Studies in the Romantic Experience, Jacobs employs a figure which immediately takes root in the mind of the reader familiar with Romanticism, for the ideology ofboundlessness clearly exists within even the most dissimilar works associated with this period. Blake's contention that "The bounded is loathed by its possessor" could well serve as a motto for Romantic literature which undeniably projects the enactment of textual evasiveness. Jacobs explains her choice for the controlling metaphor of this study by asserting that "what takes place in these pieces [by Percy Shelley, Emily Book Reviews261 Brontë, and Heinrich von Kleist] is an uncontrollable moving beyond all those parameters seemingly fixed within the texts, because of the insistence in each text that it stage its own critical performance" (ix). Through a telling selection of paradigms, Jacobs explores this angle adeptly, fleshing out the occasions of slippery structuration through radical displacements of conventional readings. Her subtitle may mislead readers expecting relatively equal—in terms of quantity—consideration ofthese writers because Kleist is covered much more thoroughly than Brontë and (to a lesser extent) Shelley, yet this disparity by no means produces a lopsided effect. Rather, the unevenness only sharpens the critical edge of Jacobs' analyses by resisting the seductive—and perhaps unnecessary—conventional calls of balance and unity. Shelley, for instance, is approached through his primarily descriptive poem, "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery," and Prometheus Unbound. The "Medusa" poem challenges the reader, Jacobs argues, through its ruse of apparent simplicity which has prompted critics to pass over it in preference ofother texts that display a potentially more engaging complexity. Jacobs asks: "what kind of light can one hope to shed on a poem that seems simply to reproduce the lineaments of the well-known painting it describes?" Her response, substantially developed in the course ofher opening chapter, is that the poem, in fact, "raises a tangle of questions that are as predictable...