Romanticism and form /

In the wake of poststructuralist and new-historicist thought, Rawes (Univ. of Manchester, UK) has put together a collection that renegotiates formal and contextual criticism. Rather than rehearsing exhausted polarities, the contributors demonstrate the richness of theoretical multiplicity and in so doing offer a refreshing look at the importance of form to the study of literature of the Romantic period. The essays explore the ways that close readings and formal details continue to enrich and complicate current understandings of Romantic indirection, verse forms, fragments, invocations, text-image combinations, doubleness, seduction, illegitimacy, and irony. Robert Southey thrives in this landscape, Lord Byron appears ubiquitously relevant (even to an empirical study of reader responses), and some unique associations (between Jane Austen and Lord Byron, Srren Kierkegaard and John Keats, Friedrich Nietzsche and Percy Shelley, and Ann Batten Cristall and Charlotte Smith) are proposed. Although somewhat exclusive in its overall coverage, this volume, featuring work by both established and new scholars, resists organic unity as much as its contributors resist backward glances to restrictive new-critical paradigms. As a result, the volume's own playful irregularity embodies the mechanical energies that it locates in its Romantic subjects. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. J. A. Saklofske Acadia University