Review by Choice Review
The editor of Prose of the British Romantic Movement (1974)-probably the best anthology ever published in the field-and the author of numerous related articles, John Nabholtz (Loyola of Chicago) here distills decades of thought into a valuable, concentrated study. He provides in abundance what rarely appeared during the long hegemony of the New Criticism: detailed analyses of isolated prose passages, analyses, moreover, that look out from the text toward the crucial presence of the reader. More interested in the dynamics of prose than the aesthetics of style, Nabholtz succeeds in looking with fresh eyes even at long-familiar passages. Separate chapters focus on Lamb, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, but the analytical procedures involved will aid in the sensitive reading of all prose. The one-page index is unnecessarily bare, and the five-page bibliography would have been more useful had it been limited to works directly relevant to rhetorical issues. Gracefully written, with some important, previously unpublished manuscript material of Coleridge, this work will be useful to upper-division undergraduates and graduate students.-N. Fruman, University of Minnesota
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
