Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception by Brian R. Bates (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 463 “more ‘Romantic’ than most of her verse” (3), meaning that Kairoff’s dis­ avowal ofthe Honora mystery undermines the monograph’s larger literaryhistorical argument. The final two chapters are devoted to Seward’s published critiques of Erasmus Darwin and Samuel Johnson. The familial reading is further ex­ tended here: Seward wishes to exorcize the paternal impositions she has endured as an unmarried woman. “Of all the ‘fathers’ controlling aspects of Seward’s life, however, Johnson was professionally the most important” (262). She reads Boswell’s “ad feminam” (259) attack on Seward as antici­ pating the “sexist” (229) derision that would make the poet disappear from literary history. Gender in these chapters is mainly read though a recupera­ tive feminism that challenges patriarchal depreciation. But one might see the venom that Seward provoked as evidencing the poet’s disquieting ca­ pacity to incarnate “female masculinity,” as Judith (Jack) Halberstanr has termed it. Alongside her patriotic and Honora poems, Seward’s critiques of Johnson suggests that her gender performance was less the normative femi­ ninity of “the typical lady” and more akin to the sentimental masculinity of the “man of feeling.” The paradox at the heart of Kairoff’s study is that she aims to advance Seward as an original while simultaneously situating her as typical of the age. On the one hand, the unconventional aspects of Seward’s life are elided in favor of her representative status as Anglican, genteel, feminine. On the other, her verse is lionized as exceptional, even though it clearly follows the dictates of the 18th-century good taste Kairoff herself admits was “threatened by emergent Romantic values.” Ultimately, this contra­ diction may reflect the coterminous Zeitgeists that determine Seward’s posi­ tion as a poet writing at “the end of the eighteenth century.” Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud University of Tennessee Brian R. Bates. Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. 236. $99. Brian Bates’s book, part of Pickering and Chatto’s “History of the Book” series, contributes to the recent swell ofinterest in Romantic print culture, book studies, and reading audiences. The book tells, as Bates puts it, “two intertwined stories,” of “how Wordsworth used supplementary writings to shape and engage readers in his poetic collections” and “how Words­ worth’s critics and parodists responded to and were connected with the de­ signs of those collections” (1). In so doing, it explores how these forms of SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 464 BOOK REVIEWS paratextual and parodic writing, typically relegated to the margins of liter­ ary scholarship, in fact played a key role in shaping literary production, re­ ception, and culture during the Romantic period, as part ofa “wide-spread struggle between early nineteenth-century authors, reviewers and publish­ ers to negotiate and create the tastes of contemporary readers” (15). Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections is meticulously researched and docu­ mented—its endnotes weigh in at over fifty pages, roughly a third as long as the main text. It is also refreshingly clearly written and free ofjargon, while at the same time critically astute. The book investigates how William Wordsworth used various forms of supplementary writings from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads through the 1820 River Duddon volume, including “prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, headnotes, half-title pages, epigraphs, advertisements and other paratexts” (1), to shape his poetic oeuvre, his literary identity, and his relationship with readers. Bates shows how these paratexts engaged in public contestation and dialogue with the writing of various critics, re­ viewers, and parodists, as “poetry and parody, verse and prose, writers and reviewers, redefine[d] one another” in an ongoing dialectic of framing and reframing (76). One particular delight of the book is its exploration of the symbiotic re­ lationship between Wordsworth and his parodists, whose writings often benefited the poet even as they sought to ridicule him. J. H. Reynolds’s “Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad” (1819), for instance, not only imitated Words­ worth’s repetitive style but literally appropriated and mashed together his titles, yet ended up swelling sales ofWordsworth’s own Peter Bell by thrust­ ing it into public attention. Reynolds, like other parodists, mocks Words­ worth’s repetition of words, obsessive cross...