Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & the Possibility of Politics by Emily Sun (review)

150 BOOK REVIEWS deeper and more intuitive connection with nature. Yet Multiplying Worlds suggests that, far from challenging a hegemonic discourse of the “tyranny of the eye,” Wordsworth was participating in a broader intellectual shift in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, encompassing popular en­ tertainment as well as literature and philosophy that rejected the epistemic authority of the senses and drew explicit attention to the ways in which the self creates the world that it perceives. By reading Wordsworth’s spots of time through the lens of virtuality as an unstructured creative force, Otto presents a Wordsworth intellectually and spiritually more akin to secondgeneration Romantic poets such as Keats and Shelley than to the figure of the “egotistical sublime” against which they are often understood to have reacted. Otto’s concept of virtuality provides a fresh intervention into the welltraveled ground of the relationship between the self and mind in British Romanticism, and gives us new and intriguing readings of several key ca­ nonical works. Just as importantly, he provides a fuller sense of the ways in which those works manifest affinities with contemporary mass entertain­ ments. While the phenomenon of “virtuality” that Otto describes encom­ passed popular entertainment, architecture, and the plastic arts, Romantic literature both intensified and helped to shape that sense of the virtual by foregrounding and problematizing the role of the perceiving subject in constructing the world around her. With keen attention to this dimension of Romantic writing, Otto provides a persuasive case that the late eight­ eenth and nineteenth century saw a decisive shift toward a self-critical mo­ dernity shaped fundamentally by how virtuality was understood, narrated, and practiced. Multiplying Worlds will be valuable not only to digital hu­ manists and others interested in the genealogy of our increasingly virtual lives, but also to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of the Romantic period. Michael Verderame University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Emily Sun. Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & the Possibility ofPoli­ tics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. 180. $50. Critics have long obsessed over whether Wordsworth’s poetry may best be understood through the idiom of division or addition, loss or gain. And while the idea of poetry as an additive (a tonic or other form of recom­ pense that reconstitutes wholeness) persists in haunting the question, it is division (from self, other, and world) that has defined the value of the SiR, 52 (Spring 2013) BOOK REVIEWS 151 poet’s life and works in the aesthetic, political, and ethical registers over the past several decades. The notable contribution of Emily Sun’s Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, & the Possibility of Politics is that it implicitly argues for the figure of addition as the definitive Wordsworthian topos while simultaneously making rich use of and indeed contributing to the critical legacy that would seem to have foreclosed this line of thought. The twin peaks ofWordsworth’s poetic inheritance, Shakespeare and Milton , are themselves powerfully associated with the topos of division, and Sun’s book puts Wordsworth’s writing into active dialogue with Shake­ speare’s King Lear (“Know that we have divided in three / Our kingdom”). Nevertheless, Sun’s book prioritizes addition. The central term of this study is succession, which Sun defines against the grain of its own etymol­ ogy, and persuasively so, as a literary and political practice that puts sover­ eign power into a state of indefinite crisis. Sun’s concept of succeeding is both additive and transformative, working against the idea that succession automatically serves the fundamental conservatism of traditional sovereign power, in which there is a continuous transmission of power that in turn serves to maintain it. Sun reinforces the idea of a successive politics of transformation in the very structure of her book. After a short introduction, Part I offers one very long chapter on Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which Sun establishes the play as paradigmatic in its representation ofsovereignty as a politics of expo­ sure. Part 2 consists of two short chapters on Wordsworth, one devoted to the concept of autobiography and a reading of The Borderers and the other to the concept of indifference and a reading of “The Discharged Soldier...