Romantic Rapports: New Essays on Romanticism across the Disciplines ed. by Larry H. Peer and Christopher R. Clason (review)

Responding to profound changes, social, political, cultural, and scientific, Romanticism represents and remains a fertile area for scholarly cultivation. Prefaced by Larry H. Peer's fine summary of the major statements on the nature of Romanticism, Peer and Christopher R. Clason bring together nine stimulating essays by active scholars, both rising and established. With the exception of the essays by Lloyd Davies and Ellis Dye, none have been published before. Crossing fields, languages, and disciplines, the essays are broadly arranged into three groups: Romantic rapports between literatures; Romanticism in music and the visual arts; and Romanticism within science, technology, and philosophy. That said, a number of the essays would be comfortable under several headings. Together these contributions seek both to expand and challenge conventional views, opening new perspectives and situating Romanticism within the current trends of literary and cultural studies.

In the section on literature, Lloyd Davies examines the quest for selfhood and the construction of subjectivity in Goethe's Werther and Byron's Harold, playing off of Rousseau's St. Preux. Davies argues that in each the subjectivity emerges more from a dialectical relationship with culture rather than nature. Stacy Hahn sees in the fiction of Balzac a transmutation of Romanticism that shows its affiliation with nineteenth-century realism. Taking this a step further, she then identifies resonances with French New Wave Cinema, especially Truffaut and Rivette and their plays on Balzac. In an analogous vein, Hollie Markland Harder offers an insightful exploration of Proust's relation to Romanticism, seeing in the figures of the cook Françoise and the writer Bloch two alternative versions of French Romanticism, and two alternative paths for the artistic vocation.

The liminal plays an important role in a number of the essays. Looking at the porous boundaries between humans and animals, Clason discusses the "family" affinities in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Kater Murr. Hoffmann's feline hero shows a number of behaviors that echo those of his master Johannes Kreisler, the two constructing a family structure that compensates for their earlier losses. In the section on science, Marjean D. Purinton also looks at the affinities and rapport between human and animal in British Romantic melodramas, where live animals were used on stage. The effect was to show the links between the human and other forms of life, rather than radical discontinuity. The transgression of the liminal is also important in the contribution by Jennifer Law-Sullivan and Asheley Shams, who deploy the theories of anthropologists Victor Turner and Arnold van Gennep to examine the theme of vampires in Théophile Gautier's ballets Giselle and La morte amoureuse.

In an essay on the visual arts, Sarah Lippert looks at the Romantic transformation of religious iconography, focusing on the French painter Girodet, a disciple of David. In paintings such as his Endymion, Girodet seeks to negotiate between the mystical escape found in the subject of religious paintings and the antireligious spirit of the French Revolution. The luminous body of Endymion represents the beau idéal between the spiritual and the material, affirming a vision of order even amid revolutionary chaos.

In addition to Purinton's essay on animal and human relations mentioned above, the section on Romanticism, science, technology, and philosophy includes two additional pieces. Deploying Bruno Latour's concepts of interconnectedness and "hybrid networks," Kaitlin Gowen Southerly argues for continuity between the figures of the Romantic natural philosopher and the modern scientist (the term coined in 1833 by William Whewell). Briefly mentioning Goethe as a poet with real interest in science, she focuses on Percy Shelley's Alastor and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to examine the relationship between artist/creator and scientist/narrator.

Romantic Rapports concludes with an essay by the late Ellis Dye, interrogating the Romantic concept of the individual, especially in Goethe's formulation, "Individuum est ineffabile." The individual as distinct from the particular by its very uniqueness...