The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature by Yvonne Bezrucka (review)

The title of Yvonne Bezrucka's monograph suggests the reader will encounter new close readings of the beautiful and the sublime in English literary works, like Thomas Gray's poetry and Thomas Percy's Reliques (1765), set against a backdrop of contemporary philosophies of beauty and artistic merit. Although these works are nodded to in the text, the focus is on eighteenth-century thought, specifically on how the alternately "Celtic," "Gothic," "Saxon"—and sometimes the collective "Northern"—mythology rose to prominence over the course of the eighteenth century, and how these aesthetics were defined, understood, and advocated for by key thinkers as reacting against contemporary neoclassicism. Bezrucka presents this North-South dichotomy in no weak terms, characterizing neoclassical aesthetics as a "cage," "prison," or "yoke" (46) from which the English needed to be freed through acts of authorial rebellion (225). She offers the useful term "Northern aesthetics" as a way of defining what she argues is a distinctly English adoption of the picturesque and sublime as a way to distinguish the cultural, historical, political, and religious identity of the English nation from those of the Continent. However, this project only minimally advances its oft-repeated argument—that English intellectuals sought "to produce the aesthetic emancipation of the English nation" by focusing on "their autochthonous common Celtic identity core, which provided them with the opportunity to highlight their different aesthetic, political and religious stance, i.e. different from the values provided in the previously adopted classic Southern mythology and aesthetics" (176, x)—owing to the occasionally unclear boundaries for the scope of the project, the extensive lists of titles that do not lead into a close engagement with supporting evidence, the lack of thorough copy editing, and the missed opportunity to engage with twenty-first-century scholarship on this topic.

To bolster her argument, the author illustrates the development of regionalism and essentialism pervading British and European thought from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The works of Bernard Mandeville, Joseph Addison, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Germaine de Staël receive considerable attention, but poetry and novels, which are identified in the introduction as key evidence in the argument, are primarily assessed with broad and general strokes. Exceptions are found in close readings of Northern aesthetics in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1595/96) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847)—both notably not from the eighteenth century. Despite the fluidity of Bezrucka's timeline, I could accept the study's general eschewal of almost all imaginative eighteenth-century literatures, were it not for how the title implies a purposeful and narrow focus on English literature. I am bothered in particular by the book's unacknowledged reliance on Scottish authors to supply evidence for a canon of "English" literature, including authors who themselves often sought to create a unified sense of "Britishness" by inventing a shared cultural history throughout the historic kingdoms united in Great Britain.

Throughout the book, the author routinely alternates between the terms "English" and "British" in referring both specifically to England and to Britain's post-1707 multicultural identity. As a scholar who has engaged extensively with what the author has usefully termed "Northern aesthetics" in the long eighteenth century, I actively avoid collapsing the distinction of "English" and "British" in order to pay heed to the complex negotiations of political and cultural power structures. I recognize that in making these choices in my own work, I am perhaps hyperaware of others' opting not to. However, this is not the only example of conflicting terminology. At various places in the text, the author uses the term "Gothic" as a substitute for "Romantic" and vice versa (82, 185–90). Similarly, she periodically equates "Celtic" with "Saxon"—and both of these with "Gothic" (83, 95, 196–97, 204). In its ahistorical collapse of such distinctions, I fear that the prose...