Thomas Pfau. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. ISBN 0–8018–8197–8. Price: US$65.

In English there are two words spelled mood. One, from Old English, means a “temporary state of mind or feelings of a person or group” (OED); the other, originating as a variant of mode (from the Latin modus), has applications in logic and grammar. The grammatical meaning is “any of the forms in the conjugation of a verb which indicate whether the action of the verb is represented as fact or in some other manner, as a possibility, command, wish, etc.” (OED). So the first is concerned with feeling, the second with representation. The special sense in which Thomas Pfau uses mood in his long, learned, and sometimes formidably difficult study relates to both homonyms. According to the qualified Kantian argument that the author develops in his introduction and chapter 1, emotion is foundational for cognition and thus “can never become an object for individual consciousness” (10, 31). The perplexity with which such Enlightenment philosophers as Hume and Adam Smith acknowledged the essentially social condition of the ostensibly individual, private experience of feelings suggests why emotion is better understood not in terms of affective states—that is, as passion, “a conspicuous type of expression whose degree of sincerity or performativity remains . . . unverifiable” (6)—but rather in terms of aesthetically mediated form. Such mediation is what Pfau means by mood. A somewhat bizarre but perhaps usefully elucidatory analogy to moods would be tectonic plates, which are not directly visible but can be identified from their geological manifestations on the earth’s surface (faults, earthquakes, volcanoes). Unlike tectonic plates, however, moods are related to one another temporally rather than spatially. They are not subjective, Pfau stresses, but intersubjective. To be manifested formally is to be subject to historical contingency: mood speaks in the rhetoric not of all times but of a particular time. (Otherwise the adjective in Pfau’s title could not be taken as an historical designation.) To the extent, then, that it can be elicited from a temporally and culturally delimited body of writing—and Pfau is concerned here primarily with writing, despite a suggestive paragraph on political films (82–83) and a brief examination of political cartoons of the 1790s (160–61, 176–84)—mood offers historical insight: “in its rhetorical and formal-aesthetic sedimentation, mood speaks . . . to the deep-structured situatedness of individuals within history as something never actually intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form” (7). In the Heideggerian language to which Pfau himself adverts (9–11, 316–17), mood reveals to us the historicity of Dasein. The methodological implication of this conception of mood is that history must be approached through aesthetic form. In thus affirming the value of formal analysis precisely for the sake of historical understanding, Pfau has broad affinities with such critics as Forest Pyle and Marshall Brown, who have also navigated skilfully between the Scylla of an historically blind formalism and the Charybdis of a literarily tone-deaf historicism. It is the latter of these, however, from which the author dissociates himself most explicitly (22), and his critique of recent “political” readings of Keats’s poetry in particular is blunt: “However ennobling and edifying to preponderantly liberal academic practitioners and readers today, historicism is largely mired in a merely topical and occasional model of politics and . . . conceives of aesthetic and literary form in strictly instrumental terms” (340). Equally blunt is Pfau’s denunciation of the parochialism—“premised,” he maintains, “on a typically unexamined concept of nationhood and on equally dubious notions of canonical tradition and curricular order” (25)—by which Romantic studies are habitually confined in practice to British …