Textual Intersections: Literature, History and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe ed. by Rachael Langford (review)

The essays collected in Textual Intersections were first presented in an international conference hosted by the School of European Studies at Cardiff University in July 2001. As Rachael Langford, editor of the volume, states in her introduction to the collection, the initiative for both the conference and the book arose from the new political context created by the expansion of the European Union. This recent political development, in particular its new identity politics that focuses on collaboration and the construction of shared cultural experience instead of dwelling on the confrontations of recent and past conflicts, are at the base of the literary and cultural issues discussed in the conference and collected in the book: “We are encouraged,” says Langford, “to think of both our own century, and of the twentieth century, as the ages of European cultural exchange” (9). The transnational construction of the European Union not only affects the present and future of Europe; it also encourages the reconsideration of European history. Textual Intersections is part of this effort to rethink Europe’s past by focusing on shared cultural experiences: “It is therefore instructive to look again at the nineteenth century in Europe and to note how complex the transnational and transcultural links were in the period 1789–1914” (9).

The contributions to the volume respond also to a common critical interest, that of intermediality, which is “the ways in which textual material in nineteenth-century European cultures mediate and meditate on non-literary cultural artifacts and concepts” (9). “Intermediality”—a critical term proposed as an alternative to “intertextuality”—is conceived as a reconsideration of the mediation and meditation between literature, the arts and certain forms of culture—as the result of either an explicit or unconscious authorial intent—from the perspective of Bakhtin’s dialogism and Kristeva’s intertexuality. As a consequence, the essays included in Textual Intersections seek “to foreground the notion of textual ‘intersections’ rather than that of intertextuality strictu sensu” (10). The new critical concept of intersection or intermediality is centered on flow and passage rather than on the traditional text-to-text relationship of intertextuality. As Rachael Langford reminds us, intermediality evolved from the new digital technologies, but that fact does not, in her opinion, preclude its validity in the analysis of nineteenth-century cultural production. According to her, the notion of intermediality helps to bridge smoothly the disparity between modern and postmodern media conditions. The adjustment—only a little one is needed—produces what she calls “indirect and covert intermediality”: “In the majority of the works studied in this volume … it is indirect and covert intermediality that dominates, where exchanges with another expressive form are made through a different, dominant, form which dictates and structures the overall interpretative framework” (11).

The essays in Textual Intersections discuss a wide variety of issues. Eduardo Ralickas’s article “Figuring the Artistic Subject: A Genealogy of Nineteenth-Century Dandyism” examines the fashionable pose of the dandy as “a parasitic practice” (17), “a performative art of the self… that thrives beyond the bounds of canonical art history” (27). Sarah Hibberd’s “Monsters and the Mob: Depictions of the Grotesque on the Parisian Stage, 1826–1836” analyzes the prominence of the grotesque in the romantic drama and opera of the 1830s “as it transferred from the popular to the royal stages,” and “identifies the transition from the depiction of the physical monster… to more generalised fears of the uncontrollable mob” (29). Birgit Hass’s “Staging Colours: Edward Gordon Craig and Wassily Kandinsky” examines the contributions made by both Craig and Kandinsky to the early twentieth-century theater, in particular, their “attempt to create a synaesthetic stage” (41). Gustav Frank’s “Symptoms of Epistemological Change: Intersections with Music and the Visual Arts in the German Novel of the Long Nineteenth Century” scrutinizes a group of German novels and texts written from the 1830s to 1912 from “the semiotic perspective” of both visual...