John Rieder, Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s. Newark: University of Delaware Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1997. ISBN: 0-87413-610-5. Price: US$41.50.

Wordsworth's 'Counterrevolutionary Turn' is The Prelude's story of a 'turn away from the grand stage of historical events' to a small 'community of recognition' (Dorothy, Coleridge) somehow connected with 'Nature'. John Rieder's book is basically concerned with the question whether 'such an account coincides with the evidence provided by Wordsworth's writings during the 1790s' (p. 19). Although at no point very explicit, he seems on the whole to affirm the substantial accuracy of The Prelude's version of events, while analysing Wordsworth's changing sense of community with critical tools derived, on one hand, from Marjorie Levinson and Alan Liu, and on the other from Jonathan Arac and Don Biolotosky. That is, he combines the former critics' interest in the social relationships enacted in Wordsworth's 1790s work with the latter critics' interest in the seminal notion of 'Literature' developed by Wordsworth. Wordsworthian 'sympathy', we learn, was class-bound, therefore essentially distanced from its ostensible objects (roughly the labouring classes), which it 'read' in the manner of a 'text'. However Wordsworth's visionary and (purportedly) exemplary reading of that 'text' implicitly and seductively incorporates his reader into a 'literary form of community' which then 'virtually' supplants the explicitly represented 'real' community (p. 20). The former, although paradoxically a 'community' of solitaries, is more 'authentic' and 'sincere' than 'real' communities because such qualities are the very criteria for inclusion. Evoking the question what should come 'After Romantic Ideology' (the title of a recent special issue of RoN), Rieder suggests that critical enquiry should move on from an account of Wordsworth's displacements and repressions ('New Historicism') to consider his construction of 'a particular kind of social body' (p. 25). Although such a movement would come to emphasise 'pleasure' (closely aligned with sympathy) rather than 'power' (p. 224), Rieder otherwise supports the 'New Historicist' project of interrogating contemporary reading practices with reference to both social relationships mediated in the poetry and the modern institutional context. In short, Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn is a commendably self-reflective piece of criticism which contributes usefully to our understanding of the relationship between Wordsworth's politics and his poetry. Chapter One introduces and establishes the main terms of Rieder's project. Chapters Two and Three take broad economic perspectives on changes in Wordsworth's thinking between the early 1790s and the early 1800s. Chapters Four to Seven examine the Salisbury Plain poems, The Borderers, The Ruined Cottage and 'Tintern Abbey' respectively, demonstrating how Wordsworth's understanding of community developed in and through these works. The book ends with a brief conclusion, largely a theoretical meditation on what has gone before. Overall one experiences a want of coherence in both design and execution, quite possibly a result of the book being written over a long period, against a background of accelerated change in Wordsworth studies. Or it may simply be that the main thesis was conceived in response to contemporary criticism and prior to much of the detailed scholarly work, so that instead of encountering a principal argument, constantly developed and refined, one finds an interpretive model applied with varying degrees of ingenuity and success to a chronologically-arranged series of texts. If the weaknesses of Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn reside in this lack of forward momentum (unfortunately likely to prove costly in terms of readership), with the attendant absence of clear summing up and connecting points, its strengths lie in its impressive command of historical and cultural context, and astute questioning of the poetry reviewed. From what has been said above, it should be obvious that The Ruined Cottage best illustrates Rieder's thesis: 'no other poem attests so well ... to the problem at the core …