Brad Sullivan, Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge: Refiguring Relationships Among Minds, Worlds, and Words. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. ISBN: 0820448575 (hardback). Price: US$50.95.

Brad Sullivan's thoughtful and closely argued Wordsworth and the Composition of Knowledge attempts to plow new ground in Wordsworth Studies, sowing the seeds of more fruitful understanding in its willingness to take seriously the poet's philosophic concerns. However, rather than being an earth-breaking effort, Sullivan's work actually participates in a broader cross-fertilization occurring within most humanistic inquiry, a trend only partially acknowledged here. As well, the exploration of the role of the sciences in Romantic Studies has grown in critical prominence across the 1990s, a concern again only partially engaged here. Accepting these limitations and taking the book on its own terms, a reader will find much of interest in this multivectored study, and the counter-tradition traced—from Isocrates through Quintillian to Wordsworth—comes into view with clarity and concision. In the work's opening section (constructed of two chapters), Sullivan pursues "Knowing Context," examining respectively his and Wordsworth's "Origins and Assumptions" and the "Enduring Knowledge Traditions" within which they operate. This dialogic structure recurs in the second section, which examines "Wordsworth's Critique of Systematic Knowing" by first analyzing the degree to which Wordsworth's philosophical and poetic commitments express disenchantment with mechanical philosophy to articulate a transactive and interpenetrating model of mental and material processes. The third section, "Wordsworth's Alternative Model of Knowing," explores this counter-model in four nicely interlocking chapters and achieves a finely realized symmetry, providing an intellectual grid within which the model operates. The structure of this book, which provides a systematic movement from broad cultural traditions to specific poetic and philosophic practice, is a strength, providing a framework that allows Sullivan to achieve his primary critical goal: Sullivan succeeds in this "attempt," although my sole complaint here and elsewhere would be the work's failure to engage other critics who have recently grappled with related issues. As well, the characterization of Wordsworth as rhetorically poised against the multi-headed hydra of instrumental reason and its attendant technologies (features that help define enlightenment epistemology) has both a long interpretive history and has also received critical attention in the last decade, although Sullivan's fusion of rhetorical, philosophical, and linguistic analysis does extend this discussion. And so, while this work cannot function as "a starting point for more fruitful discussions of [Wordsworth's] literary theory, his philosophy, his educational ideas, his social and moral purposes, and his poetic and rhetorical strategies" (p. 12), since such issues have long concerned Wordsworthians in the field, it does add much to our understanding of the range of the poet's intellectual and creative commitments to a counter-tradition partially defined by the rhetorical difference between Isocrates and Socrates/Plato. Sullivan does a fine job of establishing Wordsworth's "broad rhetorical approach to knowing," a transactive model "constructed in terms of relationship, interaction, and negotiation" (p. 18), and later the author connects this model to both David Bohm's model of quantum and John Rudy's meditative approach to the poetry, finding that Wordsworth's refiguration of knowledge provides a "powerful synthetic vision of engagement of mind and world meant to complement, not displace or extend, Newtonian science" (p. 23). After considering the degree to which this refiguring occurs relative to the French Revolution, wherein the "Reason-centered epistemology of the Enlightenment" reveals "its absolute failure" (p. 25), Sullivan begins to extend his theoretical model into contemporary physics. Such analysis, as well as that in the succeeding chapter—which interrelates Wordsworth's resistance to "a killing epistemology" (p. 26) and the advent of postmodern physics expressed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein—while indeed synthesizing some prior critical efforts, neglects recent critical investigations along similar lines. Yet the work rightly links the return of participation in contemporary physics, through the "observer" …