Robert Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789-1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997. ISBN: 0 521 57008 5. Price: £35 (US$59.95)

Robert Ryan's new book is a refreshing contribution to recent Romantic studies. Whatever one thinks about its general account of the phenomenon or its conclusions about particular texts and authors, the renewed emphasis it gives to the absolutely central role of religion in British society of the Romantic period is incontestable. Lending themselves to linear narratives of historical "progress", too many literary studies have taken secularisation to be an already-achieved state in the period. M. H. Abrams, for instance, assumed that the Romantic poets could be unproblematically understood as rewriting prophecy in terms of purely secular concerns as if religious experience was universally regarded as an outmoded form of knowledge. A great deal of liberal-left scholarship, too, has been habitually hostile to religion, as Ryan points out, although his strictures perhaps underestimate the work of scholars such as J. F. C. Harrison and E. P. Thompson. This hostility has meant scholars interested in popular culture and working-class consciousness, among whom I count myself, have often ignored a form of knowledge that remained central to popular experience across the political spectrum. Generally speaking religion remained at the very centre of public and literary debates in the period. Indeed, as Ryan points out, in many ways the period was an age of religious revivals. Although its general argument about the role of religion in the Romantic period seems incontestable, I felt that The Romantic Reformation suffered on two fronts from presenting an overly totalised picture. First, it bites off rather more than it can chew in trying to cover the writing of six major Romantic figures. The most obvious candidate for a place in the book, Coleridge, is omitted on the grounds that he warrants a separate study on his own, but I think much the same could be said about Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Percy and Mary Shelley. The second general problem with The Romantic Reformation seems to be a product of trying to digest such a big bite, that is, the historical complications of religious controversies in the period tended to be smoothed over in pursuit of the thesis that Romanticism as a movement can be defined in terms of its desire to complete the work of the Reformation. The term Romanticism always makes me nervous, even though one can never entirely abandon it, but here I think it tends to obscure many of the author's own most interesting local insights and flatten out the historical terrain. The idea that the "big" writers had as a central concern the "reformation of the national church" silences a host of key contemporary debates and arguments over religion, such as, for instance, the whole question of whether there should be such an institution as a national church, an idea, I think, that Blake and the kind of dissenting tradition with which he was associated would never have accepted. Logically enough, Ryan's first chapter deals with Blake, who, he claims, took it as his primary poetic mission to combat the corruptions of Christianity in his day and offer a more authentic, radically reformed version of the religion of Jesus. The paradox of Blake, Ryan argues, is that he wanted to return to orthodoxy, whereas he tends to be read now as a heretic. While I agree with Ryan that too much Blake criticism tends to bleach the poet's enthusiasm, reproducing him in the image of the liberal-bourgeois critic, I am not convinced either that this enthusiasm can totally be made sense of in terms of purifying Christianity of its corruptions or by emphasizing Blake's sense of "the need for the intervention of Jesus …