J. Douglas Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0773518045. Price: US$49.95 / Liverpool University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0853235449. Price: £27.

In Romantic Aversions, J. Douglas Kneale argues with an engaging combination of learning and rhetorical pyrotechnics that 'there is a deep strain of classicism in . . . the very origins of Romanticism itself.' For Kneale, 'aftermaths' of the classical tradition are traceable not only in such work as Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' or in the Romantic Hellenism of second-generation poets, but in a pervasive 'textual attitude toward classicism and neoclassicism'—and especially toward the classical rhetorical tradition—that 'at once incorporates repetition and difference, occupation and aversion, in a mutually assured contestation.' Romantic turnings away from classical rhetoric are read here as 'double gestures' in which the essential characteristic of repression (in Freud's terms, a 'turning something away' that also 'keeps' the thing at a distance) is figured rhetorically in an aversio (or apostrophe), a 'turning from' that is also an occupatio, or a dwelling upon. Classical rhetoric is the 'other' that 'Romanticism at once turns to and away from,' an 'other' that hangs around in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge in what Kneale wittily calls 'haunted figures.' Kneale's method of flushing these haunted figures from their hiding places is deeply indebted to Geoffrey Hartman, as is acknowledged early and late in the book. The preface says that, if the book has a genius loci, it is Hartman. The last chapter is a reprint of Kneale's 1996 homage, 'Gentle Hearts and Hands: Reading Wordsworth after Geoffrey Hartman' (published in Studies in Romanticism). In that essay, an exhilarating reading of Wordsworth's 'Nutting,' Kneale gives an exemplary performance of what he calls his 'quest-romance' style of interpretation. 'Close readers,' he writes, 'know the "lucky words" in a text, the ones that, when the critical imagination double-clicks on them, open an interpretive window or"'magic casement" onto literary history.' Tracking 'intertextual nodes from poem to poem,' along a 'tantalizing but tenuous' pathway through Milton, Spenser, Dante, Virgil, and Ariosto, Kneale's prose crackles with the thrill of the chase, as when he pauses to wonder whether his interpretation threatens to 'make more ado about "Nutting''' than has been made before. For Kneale, the key questions are not 'what is this text about?' or 'what does this text do?' but 'what else is this poem like? What is that a repetition-with-a-difference of?' In the remaining seven chapters of the book, three of which have previously been published, Kneale's questioning quest leads him into some fascinating places. Two essays reconsider Wordsworth's use of key figures. In Chapter One—'Apostrophe Reconsidered' (published in ELH 1991)—Kneale combines an historically informed corrective to Jonathan Culler's confusion about the nature of apostrophe—it is not simply address, but movement or shift of address that constitutes apostrophe—with a brilliant reading of Wordsworth's 'There Was a Boy.' The essay gives new rhetorical legs to Hartman's well-known statement that 'the life of Wordsworth's lines is often uneasy as if somewhere else.' Kneale shows how—and how frequently—Wordsworth's voice travels by apostrophe, arguing convincingly that 'voice in Wordsworth cannot be . . . halted in one place for long; it is always on the move.' In Chapter 3, a reconsideration of Wordsworth's supposed rejection of prosopopoeia, the focus is Book 2 of the Prelude and Wordsworth's humanizing of nature in compensation for the early loss of his mother. Reading these passages as 'pitched against an eighteenth-century literary fashion,' Kneale sees Wordsworth reclaiming prosopopoeia by giving 'a human shape to a rhetoric, and not just an abstraction, that had become mechanical'. Three more chapters also focus on Wordsworth. Chapter 5, 'Transport and Persuasion in Longinus and Wordsworth,' like Chapter 1, is valuable for its clarification …