Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0198187106. Price: £35 (US$60).

Lucy Newlyn's important new book exploring the 'competitive-collaborative relationship' between poets and reviewers, critics and readers is both a culmination of and a departure from her work of the last fifteen years. In Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (1986) Newlyn explored what we might call the 'inter-reading' and the mutual allusiveness of two central Romantic poets. In Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (1991), she broadened her scope to explore a range of responses to Milton by Romantic poets, considering ways in which Romantic writing 'reproduces, amplifies, and prolongs the ambiguities of Paradise Lost'. While both books concern questions of interpretation, they necessarily focus on relations between poets—on what Romantic poets make of each other and on what they do with Milton. Newlyn's new book builds on her Bloomian interest in interpretation and influence, in reading and in questions of hermeneutics. But it is concerned more with what readers make of Romantic poets and, more to the point, with what Romantic poets make of and think of their readers (both real and ideal) than with what they do with and to other poets. This is a wide-ranging and intricately structured book in which Newlyn combines psychological with hermeneutic approaches while also paying careful attention to the literary- and cultural-historical contexts of her topic. Newlyn argues that an 'anxiety of reception' is not specific to the Romantic tradition or to early nineteenth-century poetry but that it 'takes on a special colouring' within that tradition and in that period (vii): the emergence of Romanticism, she suggests, can be considered as 'a species of reaction-formation against the new power of reading' (48). In chapter one Newlyn deftly outlines the emergence of this new dispensation, surveying issues of literacy, the growth in the reading public, the ideology of authorship, criticism and the role of the critic, contemporary neglect and posthumous reputation and the 'modern' anxiety of overpopulation in terms of both readers and texts. Three more chapters, taking as case-studies Coleridge, Wordsworth and Barbauld, complete the first part of the book. Coleridge's anxiety, Newlyn suggests, was 'acute' and presented itself as a tension between a certain contempt for the reading public on the one hand and a very high expectation of readerly competence on the other. The tension between the actual and the ideal is resolved in Coleridge's figuration of receptive 'coterie' audiences in the poems themselves. But the ingenuity of Coleridge's construction of audiences, or of Newlyn's reading of that construction, doesn't stop there, since this very construction of an ideal audience—designed as it is to protect the author from inappropriate judgement, from critical attack—itself allows for its own constructive resistance. According to Newlyn, there is a 'troubling oscillation between authoritarian and egalitarian rhetoric' which characterises Coleridge's 'engagement with audience' (87). By figuring the ideal reader in the passive role of mesmerised wedding guest, for example, Coleridge opens up certain possibilities for (non-passive) interpretation in that other ideal, the active reader. It is this kind of self-alarming, and to some extent self-defeating tension that Newlyn means to point to in her use of the term 'anxiety', and that her book is so alert to in all its permutations, all its disguises. In Chapter Three Newlyn suggests that it is the vexed relationship between private and public—and in particular, the danger of a loss of personal identity produced by the poet's 'emergence into the public sphere' (91)—that governs Wordsworth's relationship with his audience. Newlyn suggests that there are, in particular, two ways in which Wordsworth manages to overcome this difficulty: on the one hand he appeals to posterity, to an audience …