David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht, eds., New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-8020-2890-X. Price: US$55.

The essays in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice ( by Tilottama Rajan, Shelley Wall, Alan Bewell, Donald C. Goellnicht, J. Douglas Kneale, David L. Clark, Ian Balfour, Jean Wilson, with an afterward by Asha Varadharajan) address primarily canonical writers, yet, as editors Clark and Goellnicht state, in order to read them against the grain or 'otherwise.' In New Romanticisms Romanticism is used as a mirror within which to view darkly the 'unfolding interpretive drama' (p. 6) of the past century, during which literary studies waged often fierce contests over the cultural capital of 'Romanticism.' This drama moves from Lovejoy's salvaging of Romanticism from critical obscurity, to New Criticism, to poststructuralism's deconstruction of the formalist and organicist imperative of New Criticism, to a post-organicist concern with constructions of history and culture which, as the Introduction suggests, ironically returns us to a version of Lovejoy's Romanticism as a plurality of 'quite distinct thought-complexes' (p. 3). Read as a series of further episodes within this drama, the volume thus comprises a rich and often self- contesting narration of a Romantic (critical) subject always at odds with herself/himself/itself. The Introduction situates the multiple perspectives of this telling within the critical milieu of what is referred to as 'post-poststructuralism' (p. 7), which resists the end of the subject purportedly announced by deconstruction. Yet the post-deconstructive 'return' of the subject, first in New Historicism and then as part of a broader critical practice that has 'sought to develop the connections between deconstruction and cultural criticism in a far more explicitly materialist fashion' (p. 6), has been rather overtly concerned with the subject as a social construction, a subject always more hollowed out than complexly interiorizing. As if in response to this flattening, more often than not the essays in New Romanticisms put forth what could be called, after Tilottama Rajan's work in Romantic studies, a deconstructive phenomenology of the subject. The viability of this approach lies in its demonstration that if there is a vanishing subject on the post- Heideggerian horizon, there at least is a subject who vanishes, certainly insofar as criticism is always articulated through the matrix of psychosomatic forces constituting the critic himself. As Scully says to Mulder, who is reluctant to accept another apparently pointless assignment because he cannot at first discern a living 'case' in the deadness of the crime, 'There's a body, isn't there?' So permit this subject to say that the essays in New Romanticisms are essential, at times brilliant readings of Romanticism and its texts and should be studied by anyone who remains a student of Romanticism. They make it difficult for one not to privilege the idea of Romanticism's periodization, primarily and paradoxically because the heterodoxy of Romanticism frequently mounts such a compelling case for the continuing debate about its own de-periodization. As a subject, that is, Romanticism demands a subject, if only to be contested in that subject's hearing of it; it leaves us as perpetual students by 'teaching' us the extent to which it cannot be taught in any coherent or systematic manner. To otherwise 'teach' Romanticism, or to use this volume as a way of teaching, i.e. of mastering, Romanticism, would be the greatest folly. Guarding against this folly by instead teaching Romanticism 'otherwise,' as always the other to our own prescriptions of it, is precisely the volume's point, to which this review addresses itself, albeit sometimes, and with apologies, at the expense of a more detailed analysis of its parts. Instead, I want to confess the sense of critical luxury that comes with reviewing a work published …