Paul E. Kerry and Marylu Hill, eds. Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle’s Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780838642238. US $67.50

Thomas Carlyle is hard to pin down. The conventional wisdom about his work has oscillated from reverence to indifference to vilification. From a low point after World War II, Carlyle’s reputation began to make a comeback in the 1960s with the publication of several important books examining his writing style: G.B. Tennyson’s Sartor Called Resartus (1965), Albert J. LaValley’s Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern (1968), John Holloway’s The Victorian Sage (1953), and George Levine’s The Boundaries of Fiction (1968). This renewed interest in Carlyle as prose stylist led to a closer look at his political positions from a modern perspective and, under this lens, the sage did not appear to advantage. Beginning in the 1970s he was increasingly pigeonholed as both racist and proto-fascist. His authoritarian and racist politics, the difficulties his style presents for modern readers, and the idiosyncratic paradoxes inherent in his views have all caused his works to show up less and less frequently on class reading lists. Yet despite this trend, there has remained a thread of continuing interest in Carlyle’s works and a desire to explore their complexities. The ambitious new collection of essays Thomas Carlyle Resartus aims to keep that interest alive and to springboard Carlyle studies into the future. In their Introduction, editors Paul E. Kerry and Marylu Hill describe how this volume grew from an international Carlyle studies conference held at Villanova University in 2007. The event aimed to reevaluate Carlyle as a philosopher of politics and history and the essays in this collection continue that work. They succeed in retailoring Carlyle by making new connections between his texts and other nineteenth-century writing about the period’s concerns as well as by proposing alternative frameworks for evaluating his questionable views on race and governance. Several authors in the collection suit up Carlyle anew as a man of his times. In a well-developed reading of Past and Present (1843), Chris R. Vanden Bossche gives a nuanced account of Carlyle’s ideas on reform, arguing that Carlyle redefines agency as primarily social rather than individual. Ralph Jessop proposes that Carlyle’s skepticism be read in the context of Enlightenment philosophy; in particular, the David Hume versus Thomas Reid debate about skepticism. Moving forward from this period context, Jessop then proposes that Carlyle’s ideas are relevant to modern debates about agency, relativism, and nihilism, as seen in the well-known exchange between Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. Marylu Hill looks at the relationship between Edmund Burke and Carlyle’s theories of traditional social hierarchy, arguing that while both writers advocate a hierarchical society linked by bonds of affection and deference, Carlyle more emphatically requires that governors possess merit and a sense of social obligation to the governed. The reception of Carlyle’s writing in Britain, the United States, and Germany has been fairly well examined; Catherine Heyrendt looks into the less-explored area of Carlyle’s reception in France. Ian Campbell documents Carlyle’s influence on a range of nineteenth-century ideas about education, making connections between Carlyle’s thought and that of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and others. Carlyle’s ideas about history are explored by Kerry, Lowell T. Frye, and Laura Judd, while Tom Toremans and Hans Mattingly look carefully at the politics of reading the peculiar style of Sartor Resartus (1833-34). The collection concludes with two essays on Jane Welsh Carlyle (by Aileen Christianson and Kathy Chamberlain) that humanize the too-often caricatured portrait of Carlyle’s gifted, long-suffering partner. All of these essays offer provocative readings of Carlyle’s work, but the most striking refashioning of it occurs in the selections on Carlyle’s racism and alleged proto-fascism. The Jessop essay, for example, follows its …