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BOOK REVIEWS 271 how text, both in print and in A Slap at Slop, works in tandem with imag­ ery and how the internal and external conflicts “interwove in various ways to forge new discursive and artistic configurations and new possibilities for visual satire and radical propaganda” (122). Chapter 7 concludes with a thorough consideration of the versatility of the satire’s visual language and the ensuing semiotic instability ofprint compositions: “pro-Reform propa­ ganda . . . recycled anti-Jacobin motifs” (141). Haywood begins with Matchless Eloquence (1831) in order to investigate the rise and fall of radical leader and MP Henry “Orator” Hunt during the Reform Bill crisis. Through ridiculing such radical leaders, caricature presented the Reform Act as progress towards more democracy for all British people. This fantasy, according to Haywood, was communicated successfully but not consis­ tently, which is again evidence for caricature’s critical potential. Romanticism and Caricature has 50 illustrations that are immensely impor­ tant to Haywood’s argument. Their quality, however, varies—which means, for example, that in some instances we have to rely on descriptions while following an argument about fascinating dialogues and intervisual re­ lationships. The absence ofcolor is painfully felt in the discussion of Hunt’s “trademark blackening” (146), used for comic effect and to highlight the discrepancy between the world Hunt came from and represented and the world he had entered and tried to change. Still, Romanticism and Caricature is a strong contribution to Romantic Studies and there is no doubt that this brilliant book will spark more close readings of the many prints held in the British Museum. Graphic satire is too powerful a commentary on “Romanticism” to be neglected. Sibylle Erie Bishop Grossteste University, UK David Simpson. Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 288. $31. Stunning in its breadth and bold in its implications, David Simpson’s Ro­ manticism and the Question ofthe Stranger tracks the figure ofthe stranger and the strangeness of figurative language—and of literature more generally— in and beyond British Romanticism. In both the Romantic period and our own, Simpson diagnoses an attitude he calls the “stranger syndrome,” the primary symptom ofwhich is a pervasive ambivalence toward the stranger, foreigner, or intruder. Following the logic of Dernda’s pharmakon—the medicine that may poison, and the poison that may heal—the stranger syn­ drome describes a continuous dialectic in which the stranger is both desired and abjected, loved and feared, welcomed and yet always suspect. It is an SiR, 53 (Summer 2014) 272 BOOK REVIEWS inexhaustible oscillation between hospitality and hostility that reminds us never to “conceive of kindness and cruelty as utterly distinct” (229). Divided into three movements, the book shifts with impressive ease from author-centered chapters to chapters focusing on literary techniques of estrangement and translation, to chapters organized typologically around the figures of the slave and the woman who exemplify the way we abject most the strangers we most need. Even more striking, though, is the bold agility with which Simpson moves between close readings of literary texts from the Romantic period and overt criticism of the political and ethical contradictions' ofour contemporary culture. In the former he finds that war (and its dispersion of both troops and refugees), revolution, the Terror, the abolition movement, and the constitution and reconstitution of nation states put enormous pressure on acts and attitudes of hospitality, causing a “distinct ramping up of the depth and scope of the stranger syndrome” (10). Likewise, he finds our own stranger syndrome everywhere in the U.S. after 9/11, and he is startlingly explicit, without being heavy-handed, about its detrimental effects on our culture. The book is thus a compelling re­ minder ofthe political relevance ofwork in the humanities, as Simpson ex­ plores contemporary attitudes in the U.S. toward immigration and refu­ gees, the legitimacy ofviolence and the state of exception, welfare and the poverty crisis, sexual violence, and the decision to go to war in Iraq (which Simpson approaches through a reading of Donald Rumsfeld’s war­ mongering tongue twister about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns [3]). In Romantic literature, Simpson finds not the source ofour...

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