Review by Choice Review
Writers and artists of the 18th century became fascinated with immortality and the ability of a poem or work of art to survive the artist. Bennett (Univ. of Bristol, UK) examines how the Romantic period's culture of posterity fostered a tradition of writing in which poets wrote to establish their identity for an audience of the future. For the first time, poetry is understood as not only recording the life of the poet, but actually constructing identity. Posterity validates the poet, the necessary condition of the act of writing itself. In part 1 Bennett establishes the importance of posterity during the Romantic period by looking at Romantic and Renaissance concerns with immortality and 18th-century aesthetics. He concludes this part with a chapter on the relationship between Romantic posterity and feminine poetics. In part 2, the author looks at the five canonical poets of the Romantic period: Wordsworth's posterity involves a sense of familial survival; Coleridge's conversation; Keats's his reception as a figure of neglect and posthumous life; and Shelley's his fear of the spectral. Byron deconstructs the culture of posterity by questioning posthumous fame, thus inscribing the logic within rejection. Bennett concludes that Romanticism endures because of this culture of posterity. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. M. S. Johnston; Minnesota State University, Mankato
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
