Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, eds., Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0521581923. Price: £40 (US$64.95).

Genre, particularly in the realm of feminist criticism, has been a hot topic in Romantic studies for some time. We have become accustomed to thinking about genres in terms of their political implications and consequences even as we have stepped away from formalism as a mode of critique (but see Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges [Stanford, 1997]). We have not, perhaps, looked closely enough at genres as flexible, constantly shifting signifiers of literary change with definitions that emerge not from some Platonic and predetermined dimension, but rather from particular and contingent contexts. Context-dependent redefinitions of 'genre' preoccupy the recent collection of essays titled Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, which began as a collaboration between several contributors to the inaugural conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in 1993. Editors Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright use the introductory essay to present their understanding of the central generic concerns of Romantic critics. First is 'the question of whether it is not only genres themselves, but also the way we systematize them, that is profoundly historical' (p. 3); the categorization of genre as well as its definition therefore become contingent. Second, Romantic theory searches for 'alternative vocabularies to the purely literary category of genre' (p. 3). Finally, Rajan and Wright note the importance of mood and mode in any historical consideration of genre, arguing both that mode can generate genre 'as a transposition into literature of changes occurring at the level of social life [i.e. the epistolary novel]' and that 'mood [therefore] exerts a reciprocal pressure on the conservatism of genre' (pp. 4,5). The overall intent of the introductory essay is therefore not only to open up the definition of genre by adding considerations of mood, mode, and historical-political-social context, but also to 'unstick' criticism from its tendency to pair historical eras with genres or modes. Rajan and Wright here note Romantic criticism's tendency to identify lyric with Romantic and then to reject the attendant 'Romantic ideology.' The statement rings a bit hollow, in that Romantic criticism has gone overwhelmingly beyond lyric for two decades at least; at the same time, however, books like Wolfson's Formal Charges do focus overwhelmingly on the lyric as they formulate generic theories of the period. In the process of rejecting the identification of historical periods with particular genres or moods, the editors' opening out of the definition of 'genre' also opens the way for the volume's essays, which 'start from a sense that many Romantic writers are between cultures and ideologies, and thus between genres' (pp. 5-6). The first group of essays, subtitled 'Genre, History, and the Public Sphere,' examines 'genre as a form of cultural intervention' in that they argue that the mode of seeing and interpreting the past constitutes active intervention in contemporary social and political processes (p. 10). Jon Klancher's contribution on 'Godwin and the genre reformers' reminds us that Godwin's essay on narrative genre reform, 'Of History and Romance,' 'may appear today as the first of those British Romantic critical programs that promoted literary genre-reform as a means to induce greater ideological or social change in history' (p. 22). Godwin rejected 'universal history,' argues Klancher, because of its inherent limitations on that of which 'social man is capable' (p. 29). Yet neither does he elevate fictional narrative or contingent historiography; rather, Godwin 'turns both the empirical historian and the romance-writer into competitors in the now highly destabilized universe of modern narrative genres' (p. 33). Klancher's sense of genres as 'historical materials' rather than determinate formulae serves as a highly useful entrée into the book as a …