Christopher Rovee. Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8047-5124-2. US$58.

Interdisciplinary scholarship always holds special potential; the best studies typically shed new and unexpected light on their subjects from both (or all) the disciplines that their authors bring to bear. And while the worst tend to be obvious in the contrived and often merely figurative nature of their arguments, these are also relatively few in number. But so are the best, paradoxically, for successful interdisciplinary scholarship is never a matter of merely pairing up perspectives and methodologies from one discipline and then another and hoping that something illuminating will emerge. Good readers can of course find something, but that is to the reader’s credit and only minimally to the author’s. Bridging the very different disciplines of the word-based and the visual arts is always a tricky business, however, in part because so few scholars are trained in both disciplines and because scholarship in each tends typically to involve much that is exclusive to one discipline or the other – right down to the terminology, which is itself often revealing. Scholarship on William Blake, for example, where an interdisciplinary approach should be natural, if not inevitable, most often still divides along disciplinary lines, privileging one at the expense of the other. Blake’s greatest editor, for example, David V. Erdman, regularly referred to illuminated poems like the Songs of Innocence and of Experience in terms of “the texts” and “the pictures,” a hierarchical privileging that reflected Erdman’s own grounding in literary scholarship. Really effective interdisciplinary scholarship results from a genuinely inclusive mindset on the author’s part, an ability not so much to see subjects from one or another or a third standpoint but rather to see them from a single perspective in which the characteristics and methodologies of the several disciplines are in productive conversation with one another. Such a perspective views the subject matter through a lens that incorporates all these disciplinary perspectives at once and by design in a fashion that yields ways of seeing (and understanding) that may well be inconvenient, difficult, or even impossible from within the familiar intellectual and aesthetic territory of any single discipline. This is the sort of ground staked out by Christopher Rovee in Imagining the Gallery, a study that melds literary history and art history under a broad umbrella of social and cultural analysis to produce a suggestive analysis of how later eighteenth-century and early to mid nineteenth century visual art and literature reshaped the image of the British body politic in terms that had become familiar as part of the evolution of formal portraiture. Rovee’s central premise, that changing attitudes toward portraiture among the British public during the seminal period of the Romantic era reflects a remarkable reimagining of the national social body, informs an investigation that ranges widely and lucidly across figures as seemingly diverse as Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, John and Josiah Boydell, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, and William Wordsworth, whose long life and cultural centrality makes him the inevitable touchstone in any such study. Rovee proposes that what happened in the arts – and especially in the gallery culture – during the Romantic era reflected an emerging division in aesthetics between a “populist, Hograthian, representational” paradigm and an alternative “elite, Shaftesburian, idealizing” one (p. 4), a division that can be traced in the growth and popularity of public exhibitions like those mounted by John and Josiah Boydell during the late 1780s and the 1790s celebrating Shakespeare and British history. These exhibitions made available to a “general” public a broad and increasingly accessible variety of subject matter and artistic styles that had historically been the province of the wealthy …