Lateness and Modern European Literature by Ben Hutchinson (review)

Scholarly interest in the concept of lateness has experienced a surge in the last couple of years, especially in the European context, following Edward Said's On Late Style (2006). In August 2015, the New German Critique published a special issue entitled Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture, and Ben Hutchinson's Lateness and Modern Europe represents the culmination of years of his own research in the field. "Lateness" as a heuristic for cultural and literary studies encompasses several subcategories, including lateness as maturity or old age, as tardiness, as epigonality, and as proximity to death. These subcategories are part of the European focus and do not broach the topic of "belated modernity," a phrase used to express the status of cultures that are technologically, politically, or culturally "late" to modernity (e.g., as represented in studies by Gregory Jusdanis and Suna Ertuğrul et al.). The present book under review will appeal primarily to comparatists of modern French, English, and German literature, as well as to cultural theorists of modernity.

Lateness and Modernity is an ambitious work with a grand scope. Hutchinson confidently leads his readers with an erudite historical introduction to the concept of lateness, from the seventeenth-century querelle des Anciens et des Modernes to Nietzsche, to Bloom's backward glancing anxiety of influence, and the eschatological sense of lateness as precursor to finality as decline and fulfilment. The book's range of topics, texts, and time periods bear witness to "lateness" as one of the influential matrices in which modern European culture finds its means of expression. Hutchinson is aware of the vastness of the undertaking and presents his book as the beginning of what could be a multivolume history (21). Although it is not strictly a beginning (other articles have treated the subject), it is one of the first long studies of its kind.

The book is organized chronologically. Each main section focuses on a different literary period from Late Romanticism to Modernism (eschewing Realism and Naturalism). These epochs are in turn divided chronologically and nationally. Hutchinson considers both canonical and lesser-known texts, revealing the almost pervasive presence of "lateness" as a consideration in literatures of the modern era. In an early chapter, for example, Hutchinson illustrates what it means to come after the French Revolution (for Hutchinson, the first great marker for "lateness" in Modern Europe) by looking to the lesser-known Christian Dietrich Grabbe. Grabbe's oeuvre is representative for generational epigonality (as distinguished from the individual's anxiety of influence): "Grabbe thus defines his generation as double epigones, condemned merely to repeat and to contemplate the past" (40). Hutchinson rather ingeniously interprets one of Grabbe's images of lateness: "the world of 1830 is like a book its readers have recently finished. Exiled from its pages, they can only meditate mournfully on a lost world. […] Epistemologically exiled from authenticity, lateness by definition questions its own legitimacy: the outcast readers of 1830 are in fact condemned to repeat not the past, but the representation (the book) of the past" (40).

The book, however, does not sustain this level of commentary with consistency. The downside to its scope—which Hutchinson manages to mitigate by giving the book a strong prologue and clear organization—is that the overwhelming number of texts leads to occasionally too cursory readings. For example, in the chapter "Late Romanticism and 'Lastness'" (43–61), the reader is presented with a list of English texts that feature a "last man" figure. There are simply too many to treat: in most of the chapter, a few paragraphs are devoted to discussing a text, giving ample evidence to Hutchinson's claim, but occasionally references seem tacked on rather than fully integrated into the argument (e.g., the reference to Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel on page 46). This chapter is also the point at which the otherwise clean organizational structure of the book does not quite do justice to the ideas treated. A...