James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. The University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-226-10108-8 (hardback). Price: US$35 (£22.50).

James Chandler's England in 1819 begins with an identifiable, albeit perhaps unconscious, irony. Asserting that "Romanticism has been granted an amplitude of materials and references far out of proportion to its nominal duration" (p. 3), he adds to the pile another volume of five hundred and fifty-four pages. As Chandler makes clear, it is the notion of "case" that is of fundamental significance to his critique. Devoting considerable time to the grammatical and legal nuances of "case," his subject texts from the period are representative of those "that seek to state the case of the nation" (p. 6). The genesis of his book is located in a graduate course in the early 1980s that he describes as "a teaching experiment" (p. 7), Chandler acknowledges that his "experiment" was "not exactly earthshaking" (p. 8), a confession that, if not forgotten, threatens to de-stabilize his case's justification. Definitely not to be forgotten though are the text's numerous typographical and grammatical errors. The first occurs within ten lines of the preface's opening. Were this a sole error in the concluding chapter, one might defend it on the grounds of wilting editorial stamina. It is inexcusable on the initial page of an academic text, published by The University of Chicago Press. Chandler's book comprises two parts, the first primarily concerned with historicism of the Romantic period in which Chandler rehearses much established critical positions, and the second concentrating on texts which are representative of 1819. Combined, these two sections contain ten chapters, culminating in a dissection of P. B. Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. Beginning part one, Chandler asserts, "Not even the briefest account of the way literary studies have been conducted in recent years, at least in England and America, could avoid coming to terms with the historicization of methods and objects of enquiry in the field" (p. 51). His subsequent review of historicism involves a detailed summary of Fredric Jameson's argument in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Chandler sees in Jameson's critique of the term "new historicism" an attack on what is only a nominal methodology, "a category term for 'a shared writing practice' masquerading as a critical movement" (p. 54). From here, Chandler considers the pedagogical implications of new historicism, deducing that Jameson causes us to see that "in its teaching about the past" (p. 55), new historicism makes suspect the nominal classifications it defines. Chandler's purpose here is "to open up a perspective on the question of the conceptual and intellectual-historical status of 'specificity' in recent discussions of history and literature" (p. 59). Thus, he examines specificity with reference to Paul Veyne's Comment on écrit l'histoire when he contrasts the French writer's position to Jameson's. This leads to a contrast of Sartre and Levi-Strauss's positions as Chandler continues to lay out the theoretical ground on which the relevance of historical specificity may be discussed. He argues that "the return to history in textual studies ought to take account not only of the general role of homology in reading the text(s) of culture but also of the particular issues involved in reading the text(s) of a dated culture" (p. 67). It is a position that causes Chandler to identify "[t]he problematic of the date" (p. 67) as he puts it, and this he does with a lengthy review of "Levi-Strauss's critique of Sartre's historical method" (p. 67). While the first chapter both critiques and establishes the relevance of certain nominalisms, Chandler's purpose in the second chapter is to analyze "both the duality of time and the duality of culture—and doing so in relation to the …