Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson, eds., At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0-253-0853-X (paperback) Price: £12.99.

Summarily I could say that instead of climbing Parnassus (and then falling off, as one essay is titled) it felt more like I was crossing the Sahara... Overall, the essays are very readable from a non-semantic point of view. The length of the essays is very reader-friendly and the editing has certainly been done with great care. The main issue discussed in the critical essays under scrutiny seems a very sensible one: There certainly is a need for a more amalgamated approach to using the tools that literary research offers. But the question remains whether At the Limits of Romanticism is this side or beyond these limitations. After reading the collection of essays by John Rieder, Peter T. Murphy, Mary A. Favret, Anne Janowitz, Kurt Heinzelman, Sonia Hofkosh, Lucinda Cole and Richard G. Swartz, Nanora Sweet, Nicola J. Watson, Mark L. Schoenfield, Andrea Henderson, Jan B. Gordon, and Marjorie Levinson, I was left with a sense of fortified frontiers that the approaches applied to Romantic issues and texts had not transgressed. On the contrary, I had a feeling of issues being reiterated beyond their usefulness. One of the more striking shortcomings is the general tendency not to be intending to bridge the gap between American and British research. Unlike Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780 - 1832 , ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), At the Limits of Romanticism (mark the ironically similar titles) insists on an American critical school: Today, when boundaries within a literary period are revealing themselves to be more than weakened (see for example above, romanticism versus Romantic period) it seems counterproductive to insist on American vs. British critical school, when one has been exported to the other and then returned, slightly altered, and when progress is halted by unnecessarily nationalistic insistence. (Marilyn Butler is British, Paul de Man Belgian, Michel Foucault French, Jerome McGann American and so on and so forth.) Despite its tour de force introductory sentence the collection of essays in At the Limits of Romanticism remains true to the pessimistic forecast in its title: Indeed, what these limits may be is unclear. After reading the introduction, one is not left with a feeling of optimism but rather with a feeling of despair, as for example after reading 'A Home for Art' by Mary Favret. One might also ask what is the point of writing an essay if the author himself concludes: This is not to spurn its generally high style of writing and the meticulous and interesting research that went into some of the essays, as for example into Kurt Heinzelman's 'The Uneducated Imagination: Romantic Representations of Labor,' a seductively convincing illustration of a Poet Laureate's (Southey's, also Wordsworth's) mind on matters of labour. Still, and fortunately so, it raises points of contention, and not only about matters of scholarly detail, but about the Romantic period itself. Heinzelman expands on the concept of what he describes as artisanal writing, based on Southey's essay Lives of Uneducated Poets (1836). A detailed consideration of the Latin text Southey takes issue from (the Georgics ) illustrates the case in romanticism and contrasts it somewhat with the Roman period. (One minor detail which may lead to further discussion: the Romans only considered themselves or anybody else as a civitas if they possessed slaves, their term cultura receives its main meaning precisely from the colonus, arator and agricola. etc.) The main point of contention throughout all the essays is a tendency towards a biased, non-factual interpretation of the texts discussed. Without specifying the authors of the respective …