Blockchain Papers

Melissa Alexander

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.2 This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.3 If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.4 Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.5 Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.6 Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.7 In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.8 Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.9 Solitude and literature have been deeply wedded in the Western cultural imaginary, as solitude is often considered an essential precondition for creativity, marking a writer’s commitment to their craft. We might, for instance, think of Henry James sententiously advising the aspiring writer to inscribe ‘one word’ ‘upon your banner … that word is Loneliness’.10 James’s self-advertising tone aside, Woolf often subscribes to this idea, remarking that ‘solitude will be good for a new book’ for ‘it is likely that the best [phrases] are made in solitude’.11 Moreover, her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own, contends that, throughout history, too few women have had the privilege of uninterrupted solitude or an income of £500 with which to purchase an escape from the voice of that ‘eternal’ patriarchal ‘pedagogue’ ‘which cannot let women alone’.12 Although Mansfield did not explicitly frame the need for solitude in gendered terms (and, as a perpetual boarder, knew a room of one’s own could be rented for less), she also valued spatial privacy. ‘[T]o be alone’, she notes, was one of ‘2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for … I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it’.13 Woolf and Mansfield’s efforts to reclaim solitude as a space of independence, individuation, and personal growth have been a perennial touchstone for literary, sociological, and philosophical studies that highlight solitude’s positive functions as revitalising social critique and creative resource.14 I find the rapture at being alone hard to understand. Certainly when I am sitting out of sight under a tree I feel I would be content to never return … ‘oh Loneliness of my sad heart is Queen’. It isn’t in the least that. This entry vacillates between rapture and refusal as Katherine riffs on the French expression, ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’, opting for the less exact translation, ‘loneliness’.16 In both authors’ writings about solitude, we find them slipping between cognates and casting about amongst clichés to express the turbulent valences of their own feelings. Indeed, some passages leave the reader with a profound sense of isolation without naming any feeling at all, relying instead on the simultaneously empty but pregnant cry – ‘oh, oh, oh’.17 This tendency to ‘move among’ and even relinquish ‘names’ in search of ‘some more appropriate predicate’ shows that expressions of feeling are, in Charles Altieri’s words, characterised by ‘a continual struggle between a sense of inchoateness and the forms of intelligibility provided by our social grammars’.18 We might venture to say that solitude reveals a unique dimension of this struggle. The difficulty of expressing solitude is not only to do with an inadequate or messy vernacular, but with the fact that a vernacular necessarily originates in a community and solitude seems like an intimation of distance or difference from others that craves its own idiolect. Isolates may find themselves in the same situation as theorists like Brian Massumi, who has sought to develop a language that directs attention to an experiential ‘excess or remainder’ that does not fit into ‘socially recognised lines of actions and reactions’ or confining emotional categories. Hence, Massumi famously distinguishes between ‘the socio-linguistic fixing of [a] quality of an experience’, a naming process whereby feelings become ‘owned and recognized’ as emotions, and ‘asignifying’ intensities he calls ‘affects’.19 Massumi’s distinction may be a little too tidy; as Sianne Ngai observes, ‘the difference between affect and emotion’ may well be ‘a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind’.20 However, it betokens a desire to distinguish between the unruliness of feeling and normative models of the emotions, which have emerged out of long historical struggles over diagnostic criteria that allow us to not only identify but invest ourselves in states of feeling that can be recognised and assessed by others. I wonder whether the speaking isolate is not uniquely situated to observe the gap between affect and emotion (in my opinion, more thought-provoking than secure) as well as how they bleed into each other. Isolates may feel that they are living in the ‘remainder’ that the concept of affect gestures towards, ‘the unexpected, the singular, or […] quirky’ aspects of experience rather than ‘the generally applicable’.21 Yet if they are to express and take ownership of solitude, they must engage with the emotional frameworks that qualify particular sorts of selves, solitary or otherwise. If they tend to squirm a little, no wonder, since discourses on solitude are often condensed into aphorisms and clichés that have lost much of their pith and energy in the course of public circulation. Faced with an overdetermined vernacular, the isolate is forced to navigate the ineffable only-ness of their feelings and the thorny places where these singular intensities brush up against the social. Thus, like affect, the isolate sits on the precarious boundary between the public and the private, the individual and the social (albeit with some vested interest in preserving it). If the isolate tends to test their feelings against social grammars and feel about for the parameters of the self, it is because solitude is deeply connected to ideas of authenticity. I do not mean to say that solitude is exempt from artifice, or to privilege it as more real and pure than other feelings, but it often feels like an exceptionally authentic part of the self, the self’s most sincere testament. Woolf broaches this issue in The Waves, where Bernard contrasts his shifting identity, dependent on ‘the illumination of other people’s eyes’, with ‘the authentics’ who ‘exist most completely in solitude’.22 Likewise, Mansfield relied on solitude ‘to puzzle out’ her ‘own particular self’ – ‘[w]hat I aim at is that state of mind when I feel my soul and my mind are one. … Only solitude will do it for me’.23 Solitude seems to bring the self to a peak of concentration so that we exist in emphatic totality, absorbed in ‘that sense of being which is so extreme in solitude’ and temporarily lost to all the distinctions whereby we gauge authenticity and parcel out the self into zones that are deemed more or less personal and inviolable (like the body, mind, or soul).24 Yet while solitude seems to consolidate the self, it is often experienced as self-displacement or surprise, seizing us unawares. Although my solitude seems specific to me, I do not seem to be its origin. Similarly, though some critics suggest that solitude ‘produces individuals’, an ‘I’ is not necessarily its result.25 In Woolf’s experience of ‘solitude’, identity seems to ebb away ‘into deep waters’ and ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with’.26 Thus, solitude places pressure on the authentic self it evokes, prompting us to ask whether solitude stakes out some indigenous territory we can legitimately define as personal or whether, like affect, it reveals our susceptibility to migratory intensities stemming from ‘impersonal, or […] “pre-personal” forces’?27 Just as solitude is linked to the authentic individual, modernism has been defined by an interest in individual experience. As Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’, many modernists tried to discard ‘the conventions which are commonly observed’ and ‘record […] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.28 They sought to distinguish unique feelings from emotional norms through experimental works that reflect the vibrant flow of one’s inner life. Thus, modernism seems rather partial to the idea that ‘art […] is the rediscovery of solitude, and the road back into the individual self’.29 However, Woolf and Mansfield were sceptical of any art that ‘remains centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.30 This famous caveat from ‘Modern Fiction’, which immediately qualifies Woolf’s call to record personal impressions, may have been inspired by one of Mansfield’s reviews. A year earlier, Mansfield had contended that writers must not be content to ‘register’ the individual’s ‘faint inward shock[s]’, those ‘experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs’. Such an art would leave us enclosed within a ‘tiny circle’, like that envisioned in ‘Modern Fiction’.31 Both authors sought a style that would capture ‘the effect of things upon one’s mind’ and yet portray these effects as affects (in our contemporary parlance), resonances between the self and the outside world. Else, Woolf observes, the writer ‘“lives alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the / Kind”’.32 … no sound Which the heart does not make, or else so fit[s] To its own temper that in external things No longer seems internal difference … things that are without Live in our minds as in their native home.37 Glossing over whether this exquisite ‘fit’ between self and things is altogether seamless or a matter of nipping and tucking, these isolates suggest that nature is not simply a surrogate for society and its difficult compacts and compromises. The isolate’s experience in the natural world models a better, organic community that operates by the principle of complete integration, not only resolving any splits in the self but also the more fundamental split between self and world. The permeability of hands and peaches and souls and boughs admits no barrier of difference, raising the question of whether the isolate’s pleasures are finally autoerotic, a matter of voluptuous self-gratification rather than a real engagement with otherness. Although Marvell exclaims, ‘Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, / No name shall but your own be found’, is he actually grafting the name and legend of the human on the non-human world?38 Mansfield and Woolf were heirs to this tradition, demonstrating a deep familiarity with both Marvell and Wordsworth throughout their careers. For Mansfield, ‘W.W’ was one of those ‘people with whom I want to live’ and, in many ways, she did ‘live with’ Wordsworth, incorporating his ode to solitude into her letters and diaries.39 Mansfield’s repeated use of Wordsworthian motifs might explain the Woolfs’ conspicuous mistakes when typesetting Mansfield’s Prelude at the Hogarth Press; they were frequently in error over the title, using the definite article ‘the’, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.40 Wordsworth was also a significant figure in Woolf’s intellectual development and her frequent allusions to his work show that she was ‘involved in “one continuous unexhausted reading” of the Romantics, particularly of Wordsworth, from childhood to the end of her life’.41 Similarly, as Marvell was restyled in the twentieth century as the poet laureate of rural solitude, echoes of his poetry can be heard throughout both authors’ work.42 They invoke his images of blissful union with nature as well as his desolate ‘deserts of vast eternity’ to contemplate the double-edged nature of solitude.43 Indeed, Mansfield claimed Marvell’s ‘deserts’ as her personal ‘secret’, translating them into an existential threat hovering over the most quotidian experiences.44 In Mansfield and Woolf’s conversations with the past (shaped, perhaps, through conversations with each other), we see that to ‘live with’ these eminent poets of solitude was also to revise, rewrite, and disagree with them. Woolf and Mansfield tease out the complications and tensions in earlier paeans to solitude for, like other twentieth-century writers, they often felt immune to solitude’s If they could to Wordsworth’s pleasures in a they could also with when he of and the as by The of solitude are often (not by the natural as it seems to the by Marvell and Thus, Mansfield and Woolf’s writing much to who see as of our in […] the and its as much as its Solitude a sense of the and as we shall this is a precondition for a more of than that by of The cultural landscape of solitude is characterised by questions about and the nature of feeling, and our to others and to the non-human world. questions are also at in work on and and and A between solitude and affect can how solitude of and may even Indeed, solitude a in Woolf and Mansfield’s we find them the same ground in and their in and letters they were to have The and between their writings on solitude suggest the they claim to have or conversations that have been lost in the of I have letters in which she of the of a upon my writing with I have letters for adding of … the is it is The question also If it were not that I her of to these […] I should be more As it is Woolf frequently Mansfield’s and the quality of her own Indeed, authenticity something of a in their Mansfield knew she had a for and tried to Woolf that she ‘to be … without any at even to Woolf her Nevertheless, Mansfield ‘a to [her] and whether the most between women were could be and but also about her she with In Mansfield a of Woolf’s and she considered the ‘a in the to the effects of to to to the most … I am to by it might also for the of Mansfield’s repeated was in that and her situation with wonder she can is in her writing a of expression as though she were at – her over her – her own her – and her within Mansfield ‘I to feel like Virginia but she had I had This into her of and and Woolf spite in A she up to The was by Mansfield’s to to her – no no It that she is of the solitary we about solitude, I her expressing my feelings, as I never heard them we into as as as though were – … once more as as I feel a between us – a sense of being – not only about literature did they say when they about We can only because this it has no in Mansfield’s Yet it some about how these women solitude. Woolf solitude as the for an experience where we into feeling both and we think about solitude as a of This solitude, not as an but as a or that its – and meaningful – but is not by both authors tend to write of solitude in this tone seems to from the intensity of the feeling rather than from a that solitude is For instance, in To the and his an feeling that in the back of both of their minds … […] was for both of them the about The that is a profound between the but does not out In an To the echoes a from an in where Mansfield writes of ‘that which to her to be her only the only Woolf was to have this – is this what Mansfield when she my feelings, as I never heard them the of To the back to Woolf’s of in as solitude of Woolf that solitude is a even itself to a The idea that solitude is the of an may have its as when a young Woolf Wordsworth – like many is well to be in good I find solitude strangely Yet as the speaking isolate a in this does she some of her and authenticity – in a her Although Mansfield that solitude was the to a self, she also how even the most inward feelings and In solitude is up with an of […] and In her opinion, solitary we are ‘to a than would be in to to to even to ourselves or others only to find are no longer we think about Woolf and Mansfield’s it is to wonder whether Mansfield about how solitude the lines between the and its longer she the need to our feelings on show for others and have them recognised as sincere – a that might be as a in the air […] for of the with a of over of the sea […] – and more – of a where my were like and … and this other self in the the of her some of Mansfield’s find a of but one self is while and the of a towards the end of her Mansfield was with the idea of what she her and of feeling when we are most ourselves and least If Mansfield this experience their it is likely that Woolf would have her more for she that we are of many than but with the desire ‘to be but one ‘a self, a real Mansfield and Woolf might have that of alert us to the and of selves, our to flow towards things and back into is – what and – how one the other to have the other – … it is how and we each of us are – at the and from their find their into like a short in in which Mansfield ‘the quality of […] between an and to Woolf, consider how it is to find some one […] who to be with is in the desire to ‘the most of this ‘to be the Mansfield a of each up into that invite the other to complete each is with that the and of a that no For a minds to each Mansfield’s that she could ‘the quality of Yet For no their into and they themselves as little away into This is a as if the were to human they were – over their but from the a of and a The the with the the seems to a – is intimacy and a short from Woolf’s this between and on the and of a between and the of this is simply on the and the lines of and in the landscape the feelings this and that, like the of a sea felt that […] the who sits in while his does all the and and the show his the In the of social a of authentic encounter with ‘the upon which the was and they each other so were in so that they had only to by this as as in feels ‘the of human … that of Both the same the of human the quality of and the of and intimacy and isolation seem to from outside the sense of so that they and in time to an that them and echoes between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s at a about solitude that the ebbs and of their an intimacy they but could not finally Mansfield and Woolf’s over solitude was only by Woolf was already a by Katherine to my on Nevertheless, their seems to have Woolf to her to a she considered and so and so that I had to to the for something to As observes, this may be to the of Woolf as of with her a little on one and as if were Mansfield’s of Woolf with your a little on one as though knew some we shall see In Mansfield Woolf’s about her on their – it is not but who is of the her as Woolf’s that she between and she qualifies her on Mansfield’s it to all this of her into a Yet has an personal even as it out into a on of solitude Woolf

Bradford Boyd

In his 1932 Norton lectures, reflecting on Johnson as poet-critic, that other poet-critic T. S. Eliot argued that “it is surely by unconscious irony that we speak of an ‘age of Johnson’ as we do of an ‘age of Dryden’ or an ‘age of Addison.’ Lonely in his life, Johnson seems to me still more lonely in his intellectual and moral existence.” A great mountain towering above foothills such as Gray and Collins, Johnson was “their superior as a poet, not in sensibility, not in metrical dexterity or aptness of phrase, but in a moral elevation just short of sublimity.” Yet, a third of the way into the twentieth century, the Harvard audience still had to be convinced that Johnson was superior to these “meditative-Miltonizing” poets of sensibility, as Eliot's admirer F. R. Leavis would call them in his influential Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Johnson, Eliot told his audience, “could not even very much like the poetry of his age with which admirers of the eighteenth century now ‘think it necessary to be pleased.’ ”1Leavis in Revaluation acted even more decisively to move Gray, Collins, and company to the margins of the post-Pope, pre-Romantic canon. This age (still “Augustan” for Leavis) “had not favoured any very interesting use of minor talents. . . . And since unconvinced and undistinguished verse in Augustan modes . . . is pretty obviously uninteresting, minor talents took largely to the meditative-Miltonizing poetical modes.” Johnson, however, not only towered above the minor talents, but also achieved meaningful innovation, renewing Augustan idiom and style, Leavis argued. As “a professional writer and a scholar,” Johnson, unlike Pope, “transmitted no pressure of Good Form, no polite social code, through his pen,” which was driven instead by a moral elevation just short of sublimity. Thus, “both the professional and the moralist are felt in the characteristic weight that makes his verse so unmistakable for Pope's.”2These moves by Eliot and Leavis to revalue Johnson's poetry and critical prose, especially The Lives of the Poets, were timely. They were made when the scholarly labors of R. W. Chapman, L. F. Powell, David Nichol Smith, and others to edit and publish the Johnsonian and Boswellian corpus, building on George Birkbeck Hill's foundation, had gotten under way. This revaluation of Johnson's imaginative writing and criticism, undertaken in tandem by editors and professional critics, was to bear much fruit, notably, in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (1955–2019) and the Yale Boswell Editions, officially launched in 1949. The impressive body of scholarship that has grown from this modernist and mid-twentieth-century critical and editorial flowering is already well known to many readers of this journal. Suffice it to say the good work goes on. Celia Barnes and Jack Lynch's new edition of Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in the Oxford World's Classics series, for instance, was released in January 2020, keeping these perennial texts accessible for the undergraduate student and (one hopes) common readers.Criticism and literary history still proceed in tandem with editing, of course, as in Eliot and Leavis's time, and so, three volumes of new essays on Johnson and writers connected with him, both admiring and less admiring, have appeared in the last two years. (As The Age of Johnson has been publishing scholarship on Johnson, his circle, and their time annually for more than thirty years now, it seems safe to overrule Eliot on this point and use the titular term. It usefully describes even—perhaps especially—the writers and thinkers in that age who disliked or disputed Johnson.) 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The this and the scholarship on it in just two or three A

Seán Kelly

Writing in the Georgia Review in 1964, Charles Thomas Samuels provocatively inquired, “How can a bad writer be a major figure? About Edgar Allan Poe, no more important question can be asked.”1 Samuels’s question reflects his—and many critics’—uneasiness at the time with what he describes as the baffling paradox of Poe’s iconic cultural status despite “anything like a critical consensus”2 regarding the meaning and artistic merit of his literary works. To twenty-first-century ears, Samuels’s remarks may simply sound old-fashioned, expressing sentiments similar to T. S. Eliot’s infamous (and later somewhat revised) derisive judgements about Poe’s writing and intellect.3 However, Samuels’s jarring provocation and Eliot’s studied ambivalence both make reference to what might diplomatically be called the twentieth century’s “Poe problem”: the fact that Poe presented “a stumbling block for the judicial critic.”4 While there was no doubt among scholars that Poe’s cultural influence was equal to or even surpassed that of many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, his exact position in the American literary canon was subject to intense debate.5 Although much ink was spilled in analyzing Poe the man, Poe the writer continued to languish as “a scholarly and critical orphan.”6 One might suggest that the eventual solidification of Poe’s reputation as a literary artist has, quite literally, depended on scholars figuring out how to read his works. As David Ketterer acknowledged in 1979, the real “breakthrough” in reevaluating Poe’s writing coincided with G. R. Thompson’s founding of the Poe Newsletter at Washington State University in 1968. That moment marked the inception of what turned out to be a true “Poe renaissance,” characterized by the “considerable resurgence of American academic interest in the actual words that Poe committed to paper.”7 It is in this dynamic context that Thompson’s groundbreaking study Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) appeared, offering a new and influential set of critical interventions and interpretive frameworks with which to approach Poe’s fiction—in short, a “new way of reading Poe” (8).In prefacing his study, Thompson describes the “uncomfortable” situation facing scholars as one of accounting for the apparent unevenness and inconsistency in Poe’s oeuvre, noting that “the body of [Poe’s] fiction splits disturbingly into two large, seemingly inconsistent, groups: flawed Gothic tales on the one hand and flawed comic and satiric tales on the other” (4). Equally important, Thompson suggests that, historically, apparent inconsistencies and failures in Poe’s works had been explained by critics as reflections of the author’s own psychological fragmentation. Citing the failure of outmoded biographical and psychoanalytically oriented approaches, which, as David Halliburton has suggested, “tend to regard the text as a clinical phenomenon,”8 Thompson observes: Indeed, it has come to be conventional to explain the curious incongruities in Poe’s works by means of a pseudo-Freudian biographical approach, as proceeding from his lack of self-identity (Poe as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving father). This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks or guises and to spend his life in “role playing.” (5) Thompson’s inventive solution is to challenge the myth of Poe—the “merely . . . schizophrenic genius of the demonic imagination” (7)—with the portrait of a writer deeply informed by the aesthetic and philosophical currents of his milieu, namely the German school of Romantic Irony. From this perspective, apparent inconsistencies (and even deficiencies) in Poe’s writing may be viewed as the hallmarks of an ironic “multiple vision” (17) that allowed him to transcend personal obsessions and genre limitations.Central to Thompson’s thesis is that Poe inherited from the German Romantics not only their “Gothic gloom and horror” (20) but also their “theories . . . about the subconscious mind, about ‘objective subjectivity,’ about the ultimate ‘annihilation’ of contradictions through ironic art, and about the idealistic ‘transcendence’ of earthly limitations through the Godlike immanence and detachment of the artistic mind” (20). Thus, influenced by the German Romantic Ironists, Thompson argues that Poe developed peculiar forms of self-parody in his fiction that allowed him to transcend “mere selfness” and view circumstances from a “mystical” or “ideal” perspective (10). Although Thompson frames Poe’s relation to the German Romantics—especially Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and others—in terms of their broad metaphysical speculation, his discussion, for much of the book, specifically addresses the ways in which Poe’s aesthetics seek to accomplish a “transcendental mastery of the world and oneself through simultaneous detachment and involvement” (23). In this light, Poe is, in effect, rediscovered as a masterful ironist and brilliant hoaxer; his works—when traced to their obscure sources—often reveal a winking self-parody or a highly nuanced critique. One at least implicit goal of Thompson’s book, then, was to account for the troubling ambiguity surrounding Poe’s works and thereby re-present the author, himself, as a more self-aware, deliberate, and respectable literary figure.At the time of its publication, some reviewers found in Poe’s Fiction a much-needed supplement to traditional Poe scholarship, while others perceived a potential threat in Thompson’s approach. Nina Baym, for example, observed that Thompson’s method was a “good corrective to the excesses of the Weltschmerz tendency” in Poe criticism.9 J. Gerald Kennedy, who found merit in Thompson’s attempted synthesis of the comic and Gothic strains of Poe’s work, enthusiastically asserted that if the “implications of Thompson’s study are accepted,” it would require a “thorough reassessment of Poe’s art and his position in our literature.”10 There were others, however, who resisted Thompson’s “new” way of reading. In his lively assessment of Thompson’s study, David H. Hirsch remarked: Poe, according to Mr. Thompson, is a super-conscious super-rational super ironist who never meant any of the things that, for some hundred years, scholars, critics, and general readers thought he was saying. All these years the real Poe has been lurking contemptuously behind his masks of “mocking irony,” “ironic mockery,” “hoaxlike mockery,” “hoaxing satire,” “satiric hoax.”11 One gets the sense, when reading Hirsch’s (what may as well be described as a) diatribe against the book, that something valuable risked being lost in revamping Poe’s image and re-presenting him as a self-conscious ironist. Hirsch’s frankly emotional response to Thompson’s work reflects not so much the rejection of a critical methodology as a reaction to the idea of Poe that emerges through the application of that method. For Hirsch—who was also experimenting with a new, existentialist way of reading Poe—the ambiguity was the point.12 In response to Thompson, Hirsch concludes, “If the key to reading Poe lies in the concepts of tension and irony, then what happens to this key when contradictions (that is to say, tensions) are annihilated? The answer is that Poe (Mr. Thompson’s Poe, that is) becomes a dull boy.”13 From this perspective, Poe’s ambiguity, his darkness, to which the reader has become accustomed through careening tales of madness, sensation, and uncanniness, are no longer evidence of a mind or artistry on the brink. Rather, in gazing into the abyss of the “ultimately incomprehensible, absurd, or . . . possibly malevolent universe” (Thompson 12), Poe, the Romantic Ironist, seeks (only) to attain, through aesthetic means, “an ambivalent joy of stoical self-possession and intellectual control” (13).14There are moments in the early chapters of Poe’s Fiction when readers might tend to agree with some of Hirsch’s concerns. Thompson’s discussion of several of Poe’s early comic tales, for example, presents Poe as a sly and occasionally sophisticated satirist, but one whose objects of parody would have been obscure to most nineteenth-century readers and virtually undetectable by modern ones. Thompson’s overview of the Philadelphia Saturday Courier tales of 1831–32 is ostensibly meant to make the case that Poe’s use of ironic parody is, in fact, “deep-seated and all pervasive,” even in Poe’s earliest works (39). Although Thompson admits that Poe’s satiric aim was “only vaguely understood by his contemporaries” (42), the proof of his intention may be discerned through the meticulous textual excavation of primary sources and corroborating marginalia. “The Duke de L’Omelette,” for example, is revealed to be Poe’s mocking satire of a contemporary editor, Nathaniel Parker Willis. One would only realize this, however, if one recognized Willis’s signature affectations of refinement in the tale’s imagery. Thompson points out, for instance, that the roasted Peruvian ortolan served to the Duke represents Willis’s pet bird (45). Likewise, Thompson notes that “olives and ottomans” are meant to caricature Willis’s “symbols of refinement,” while the French phrases sprinkled throughout the tale are allusions to his pretentious style (45). Another Courier tale, “A Tale of Jerusalem,” performs a similarly veiled satire of the nineteenth-century “rage for didactic historical novels set in the Holy Land” (46). By imitating and even plagiarizing elements of such popular works as Horace Smith’s Zillah: A Tale of the Holy City (1828), Thompson argues, Poe achieves a “remarkable phony style” (46), and he offers this as proof that Poe must be “satirizing something, even if only the Jews themselves” (46).15 Such erudite analyses of Poe’s early comic works are plentiful in Poe’s Fiction and ultimately valuable in that they offer plausible interpretive strategies for approaching idiosyncratic texts that would otherwise remain indecipherable for most readers. For as Thompson himself observes, without the addition of such esoteric contexts, some of Poe’s early comic tales “see[m] simply pointless” (45). But while such readings prove that Poe was indeed capable of satire, they also suggest that most readers would likely never comprehend the targets of his parodic jabs without professional help.It becomes clear that exposing the subtle (and sometimes even offensive) satire in Poe’s early comic tales is not really the point of Thompson’s study. Rather, Thompson highlights the techniques involved in these early comic pieces (satires, hoaxes, burlesques) in order to trace Poe’s passage from satire to irony, specifically with regard to his view of the Gothic genre, as his title indicates. Thompson maintains that the early Gothic performance “Metzengerstein,” which had previously been viewed by critics, who regarded Poe only as a Gothicist, as a “false start” (67), can instead be viewed as a transitional text in Poe’s development as a writer and a “paradigm for [his] subsequent Gothic hoaxes” (67). Even with its convoluted plot line, (involving a blood feud between the Berliftzing and Metzengerstein families, superstitions concerning the occult doctrine of metempsychosis, and the supernatural appearance of a colossal and ghostly white horse), it reflects Poe’s serious philosophical consideration of the Gothic aesthetic universe while, at the same time, maintaining a skeptical stance against a “society that believes in such things” (67). Thompson points out, however, that because the tale’s satire is often subtle and Poe’s approach apparently serious, to many critics it seemed to be merely a failed Gothic tale. Thompson provocatively maintains that “Metzengerstein” is, on the contrary, a “carefully flawed” (67) tale by design, intended, precisely for that reason, as a hoax. Moreover, the critical confusion over the tale results from the fact that the ironic perspective is “somewhat blurred” (67). The careful consideration of how Poe’s ironic perspective comes into focus throughout his career—both in terms of its aesthetic refinement and its philosophical aims—emerges as the compelling primary focus of Thompson’s study.Some of the most insightful moments in Poe’s Fiction occur when Thompson translates the Romantic Ironists’ interest in the “deliberate breaking of the illusion” (21) of a literary work into Poe’s adoption of the characteristic posture of “ambivalent self-division” (176). Poe both meets the public’s expectations for Gothic sensational effects while, at the same time, perversely undermining them through hidden clues, on the one hand, and outrageous self-parody on the other. His tales not only depict instances of psychological perversion in the forms of obsession, self-deception, and self-destruction but they also enact such perversion at a structural-aesthetic level. If, as Thompson argues, “the universe created in Poe’s fiction is one in which the human mind tries vainly to perceive order and meaning,” the nature of that universe is, itself, deceptive and built on the “constant shifting of appearances” (165). Thompson describes Poe’s technique as a Gothic writer, then, as that of constructing a “deceptive tripleness” (77) in his tales, which he notes, reflects the peculiarly American version of the Gothic. In contrast to the English (Radcliffean) Gothic novel that depicts supernatural elements only to explain them away as the misperception of a character, the American Gothic retains an ambiguous attitude toward the supernatural (76). Poe’s tales are, within this tradition, meant to be viewed as “supernatural on one level, psychological on another, satiric and ironic on another” (77). It is the third, ironic element that offers something surprising for students of Poe.Thompson suggests that Poe’s readers, following Gothic conventions, may become “locked” into the delusional point of view of the narrator, notwithstanding the narrator’s explicit indications of his compromised perspective, “his madness, or nervousness, or terror” (77). However, Poe introduces a third position in relation to the psychological and the supernatural—the ironic—in order to disrupt the reader’s identification with the narrator’s perspective and establish a new, “transcendental” perspective—one that allows the reader to confront the deceptive nature of the human mind, literary texts, and reality itself. The “English” Gothic desire for rational explanation is fully apparent (“if the alert reader will look for it”; 82), though repressed in the text, displaced onto subtle symbolic imagery, obscure references, or barely perceptible frames. According to Thompson, then, the reader is essentially placed in the position of a ratiocinator searching for clues or, potentially, a member of Poe’s inner circle, sharing an inside joke with reference to the Gothic genre and his own works.In order to demonstrate this idea, Thompson offers the example of how multiple levels of irony operate in Poe’s popular tale “Ligeia” (1838). On the surface, the tale famously depicts the death and supernatural metempsychosis of the narrator’s lover, Ligeia, in the body of his subsequent wife, Rowena. Thompson suggests, however, that the tale’s real subjects are the narrator’s “delusive madness” and possibly even murder (82). According to Thompson, the perceptive reader may come to realize that Ligeia “exists [only] in the narrator’s mind” (80). It is clear enough that the narrator’s psychological state is being called into question when, in the opening of the story, he can remember neither the circumstances of meeting Ligeia nor her last name. Furthermore, as Thompson points out, the narrator’s mention of opium shifts from a potent metaphor for Ligeia’s “strange” beauty (she has the “radiance of an opium dream”; M 2:311) to a description of the narrator’s actual drug addiction (82). What is more profound in Thompson’s approach, however, is his insistence that Poe uses the term “arabesque” not only to describe certain odd features of the narrator’s Gothic interior but also to signify, from within the tale, a perspective of judgment on the events taking place. Citing, in particular, the description of the phantasmagoric effect of arabesque figures of Norman myth inscribed on the narrator’s draperies, Thompson argues that “the arabesque decor as Poe uses it is not merely the monstrousness of supernatural things but is a matter of appearance, of deceptiveness, of perspective and point of view in an overall design” (81). The interior details, in other a way of a of through which readers and thereby their own to In his analyses of several of Poe’s “The of “The and “The of the Thompson that such interior more the of Gothic explicit to the arabesque (and meant to the arabesque as an aesthetic be as to how a According to Thompson, who much to an historical overview of the of the terms “arabesque” and the for Poe, is with of odd and with and with and and with the of In Poe’s and symbolic then, “arabesque” with and represents and deceptive Gothic conventions, such as and to the status of the tale, itself, as an deceptive textual to and to the narrator’s into question while, the reader’s that the perspective is one in Thompson argues, Poe’s effects are “the of . . . a mind” In his reading of “The of Thompson that Poe the ironic self-parody of “Ligeia” to his ostensibly serious description of an home Poe’s of the of American ultimately the Gothic interior of his tale of is at in Poe’s Fiction is Thompson’s that Poe’s Gothic writing a a skeptical philosophical view of the universe is with and Thompson’s Poe, it out, is not simply to on his readers or them as the of his Rather, the Poe with his readers is to reveal of mind, namely the human to as a for the human of Thompson’s Poe of his His Romantic is not the of some of the the philosophical perspective in the of of (165). As Thompson observes, is only in the of that Poe comes to The effect of Poe’s aesthetic is the of an ironic tension between the of an mind . . . the of the and the reader’s “transcendental” that are Thompson suggests, in other that the of stoical and by Poe’s Romantic Irony is, itself, a merely of Poe’s of the Gothic of his own in its deceptive not offer the that there a for on which identity may be Poe’s ironic only to that the of a malevolent universe” can only be if it can at through a of the limitations of own The Thompson is “an ambivalent a of or irony, and as well a by the of the human mind out toward an

Paul Magee

This article takes its point of departure from Paul de Man’s observation that ‘whenever romantic attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion, a certain heightening of tone takes place, an increase of polemical tensions develops, as if something of immediate concern to all were at stake’ (1993, p. 3). Note the way scholars feel repeatedly called upon to deflate the possibility that a given poem was the product of sudden transport, by pointing to textual and biographical evidence that it was ‘extensively’ revised. The frequency of this critical gesture suggests that there is something in ideas like ‘spontaneous overflow’ (Wordsworth, 1800/1957, para. 6) and poetry coming ‘as naturally as leaves to a tree’ (Keats, 1966, p. 46) that is refusing to go away. The article turns to The Work of Revision (2013), Hannah Sullivan’s recent historicisation of the practice, to suggest that revision was not only less valued by the Romantics, but seems to have been less practised by them as well for a range of reasons, including technological ones to do with the general unavailability of proofs and the high cost of paper. On the other hand, contemporary poets’ interview comments suggest that revision is often far more performative than our common equation between it and a controlling rationality would seem to indicate. ‘Poetry now’ may be much closer to ‘poetry then’ than we like to assume. A concluding discussion of Jacques Rancière’s rejection of the concepts of modernism and postmodernism, in favour of a periodisation that locates present-day aesthetic judgements within the practices traced by Kant, Schiller and Coleridge, underlines this contention.

Rickie-Ann Legleitner

In Kendall Taylor's The Gatsby Affair, we find a biography that more carefully explores the life of Edouard Jozan, the French pilot who infamously had an “affair” of some sort with Zelda Fitzgerald in the summer of 1924 as her husband raced to complete The Great Gatsby, and who inspired numerous creative works from both Fitzgeralds while considerably impacting their marriage. Deborah Pike's The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald provides a serious treatment of Zelda's extensive writing and visual art, asserting her role as a legitimate modernist artist.Taylor's biography provides a detailed account of the lives of both Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, opening with a timeline that runs from 1896 to 2006, showing the progression of each individual's life—a helpful visual that traces when their lives met, overlapped, and diverged. Each dense chapter offers critical insights into the historical moment as well as compelling details about the lives of individuals who existed on the periphery of the famous duo, such as Jozan's friends Rene Silvy and Bobbe Croirer. Although every Fitzgerald biography offers its own interpretation of the minutiae of the Fitzgeralds' lives and complicated relationship, Taylor interviewed and carefully researched the family and friends of the Fitzgeralds and of Jozan, creating a more complete picture of the “affair” and its aftermath. As Taylor points out, “Although Edouard has always interested Fitzgerald followers, there has been little agreement about his impact on their lives, and in an otherwise well-researched case history, the pilot has remained a mystery” (xi). This book effectively fills that gap.Of course, in any discussion of the summer of 1924, one must put quotation marks around the word “affair” for the simple reason that available evidence neither confirms nor denies an actual physical relationship between the aviator and the 23-year-old wife who was bored and restless while her husband wrote. Were Zelda and Jozan lovers or was their five-week Riviera encounter a flirtation that trespassed into emotional adultery? Biographers typically take a stand at one extreme or the other and read texts such as The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz for corroboration. To a certain extent Taylor sidesteps the ambiguity of the evidence and simply asserts that the summer romance was indeed a “petite aventure, a brief affair with a willing partner” that left Scott “the proverbial mari trompé, or cuckolded husband” (71). Readers expecting a case to be made and a position staked against claims in previous Fitzgerald biographies may be thrown for a bit of a loop; for a measured assessment of clues and presumed proof (or the lack of it), one must turn to Scott Donaldson's chapter “Summer of '24: Zelda's Affair” (172–86) in his The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015).Refreshingly, Taylor does not come across as biased toward either of the Fitzgeralds, but instead offers an assessment that is critical and validating of both individuals' flaws, talents, aspirations, and misadventures. Following the contemporary trend, Taylor gives careful attention to Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's upbringing in Alabama as well as to her time in various mental institutions at the end of her life, showing how her experiences run parallel to her husband's own pitiable downfall. She is not portrayed as secondary to her husband, and Jozan is also given substantial attention beyond his role in the couple's marital woes.Indeed, the major contribution of this book is its robust understanding of Jozan, including insights into his upbringing, disposition, romantic motivations, and career and marital aspirations. For this background, Taylor is deeply indebted to Jozan's daughter, Martine Jozan Work, who contacted the author shortly after the publication of her 2003 biography of Zelda, Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage, offering insights about her father, who died in 1981. Additionally, Taylor provides a clear discernment of the cultural context, a large contributor to the drama that ensued: “It was accepted that a young officer, unprepared to wed, would take a mistress. Wives held particular appeal, rivaling single women, by offering pleasure without responsibility” (71). Taylor provides a reasonable and insightful assessment of what Jozan's intentions were in his brief pursuit of Zelda, why the relationship inevitably had to end, and why the Fitzgeralds were never able to recover.For Fitzgerald, Taylor sees this event as opening old wounds, as “He had not forgotten Zelda's reluctance to marry and her involvement with the aviator replicated Ginevra King's selection of a naval pilot over him” (79). Taylor astutely assesses the motivations and reactions of the Fitzgeralds, substantially building on her previous Fitzgerald scholarship in Sometimes Madness is Wisdom. She also provides closure to the narrative by investigating the suspicious circumstances surrounding Zelda's tragic death, and by exploring the misfortunes and deaths of the Fitzgeralds' family and friends. She recounts the much later passing of Jozan, a life that after Nancy Milford publicly identified him as Zelda's elusive French aviator in Zelda: A Biography (1970) was continually overshadowed by his brief involvement with the Fitzgeralds: “Instead of being celebrated for his own impressive accomplishments, Edouard and his fame became linked to the Fitzgeralds in the literary cosmos” (205).The one weakness in The Gatsby Affair is its secondary focus on the supposed sexual assault of Zelda Sayre during her teens in Montgomery, Alabama; while other critics have acknowledged this possible attack, Taylor goes further to suggest that this trauma resurfaced after Edouard's rejection, thereby causing her mental breakdown: “Trauma can generate psychoses, sometimes the brain's way of coping, and in this instance calamitous forces were released, a Greek tragedy—French style—triggering profound depression that culminated in Zelda's first suicide attempt” (xiii). She provides support for these claims by offering a close reading of Zelda's often autobiographical writing and by identifying similar events in the lives of her adolescent friends John Sellers and Peyton Mathis (the possible assailants). But it is difficult to prove any causal chain, especially one tied to a precipitous mental break. Taylor goes on to examine the repeated misdiagnoses and mistreatment that Zelda faced while in various mental institutions: “Asylums dismantle people, rarely reassemble them, and Zelda's internment only worsened preexisting conditions, leaving deep psychic scars” (137). This investigation is an honest assessment of the shortcomings of the mental health system at this time as well as the damage it did to Zelda's life and art. However, it seems contradictory to assert the cause for a mental collapse and then to critique a system that offers rushed, generalized, and improper diagnoses.Overall, this biography is well worth reading for any seasoned Fitzgerald scholar or new enthusiast. It is carefully researched, and it delivers original considerations of the role Jozan played in the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, while also acknowledging how his brief encounter with the couple would come to overshadow his many achievements. It establishes the affair as a pivotal moment that would markedly influence the lives and art of both Fitzgeralds, supplying new insight into a complex and often misunderstood relationship. As Pike claims, “Distinguishing fact from fiction is no easy task” (15), and Taylor provides a well-crafted biographical narrative.Pike's monograph offers a fresh and thorough interpretation of the life and works of Zelda Fitzgerald both in relation to her husband and as an artist in her own right. She contends that, “A serious artist on her own terms, rather than solely her husband's muse, she merits a place in literary modernism” (4). Pike's research is thorough, as is her knowledge of biographical, historical, and literary scholarship on both Fitzgeralds, making for a well-informed and nuanced analysis of Zelda's life, her published and unpublished writings, and her visual art.Pike employs Deleuze and Guattari's theory of minor language and literature to support her claim that Zelda's writing from the margins, be that from her husband's shadow, from her position as a Southern wife and mother, or from her time in mental institutions, enables her to speak in a unique voice that breaks with the conventions of major literature—or to create work that truly encapsulates the modernist ideal to “make it new.” As Pike states, “I see her work as violently alive, experimentally modernist, and offering a new mode of experience” (31). In her overview of scholarship on Zelda, she singles out the lack of serious studies of much of her work and the tendency to look at her writing only in comparison with that of her husband. She additionally utilizes Hélène Cixous's theory of uniquely feminine writing and Julia Kristeva's conceptions of madness in her feminist and psychoanalytic analyses, as well as many cultural, historical, and literary critics to support and complicate her arguments. Her book offers a sophisticated and serious look at the complete range of Zelda Fitzgerald's work.In her examination of Zelda's texts as reactions to her position in her marriage and in society, Pike dissects a transcript of the famous May 28, 1933, meeting between the Fitzgeralds and Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie to address “the issue of Zelda's writing and its effect on their marriage” (121). This transcript is alluded to in Taylor's biography and elsewhere, but Pike offers numerous block quotations to show Fitzgerald's and Dr. Rennie's debasing of Zelda's art, especially for its lack of exchange value in a patriarchal, capitalistic society. She further uses this transcript to analyze the different depictions of madness in Tender Is the Night (glamorous) and Save Me the Waltz (experiential), affirming Zelda's writing in a minor language to validate her own experiences and assert her identity. Similarly, she frames Zelda's early letters and magazine publications in relation to modern capitalism and advertising, offering a close reading that boasts that “F. Scott Fitzgerald may have documented the Jazz Age, but it was Zelda Fitzgerald who defined the flapper through her keen journalistic observations” (60). Pike acknowledges Scott's contributions to major literature, but she also asserts Zelda's voice as a minor modernist.In her effort to position Zelda as an artist, Pike offers readings of many texts that have been critically neglected, markedly expanding Zelda's oeuvre. In Zelda's asylum letters, Pike finds that her “writing is subversive; it does not imitate current patterns but makes up a different language” (31); this language is uniquely her own, and through it “she reinscribes an authenticity into her being” (99). Pike examines Zelda's unfinished novel Caesar's Things as a surrealist autobiography that shares striking similarities to the autobiographies of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn in its unstructured depiction of madness, claiming that the text “shares the revolutionary potential of female surrealist writings” (152). She admits to the problem of Zelda not being a surrealist or her using methods of automatic writing, but her framework opens up new modes of analysis, and affirms that Caesar's Things has a critical place in Zelda's collected works. Pike identifies Zelda's artwork as “conservative American modernism” (183), and offers a fresh study of her drawings and paintings, which are provided as illustrations. In her examination of Zelda's diary from the last years of her life, Pike refuses to dismiss her religiosity as symptomatic of her madness, and contends that the diary is a mystic's “journey toward enlightenment, toward artistic and spiritual self-consciousness” (214). Pike is innovative in her approach to each of Zelda's texts, and while her readings are theoretically driven, they are also clear and compelling.Admittedly, some of the analyses in The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald become more difficult to follow as Pike focuses on works such as the unfinished novel and diary that are challenging to read and only available in the Princeton University archive. But her investigation provides a strong argument as to why these materials should be digitized or otherwise published for wider readership and additional scholarship. Moreover, her bibliography delivers a comprehensive list of valuable resources for Zelda scholars working across disciplines—including literature, women's studies, history, art, psychology, and linguistics. This monograph is a significant work that further legitimizes Zelda Fitzgerald as an artist and a modernist.

Emily Doucet

Reviewed by: Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker Emily Doucet Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 by Herbert F. Tucker; pp. 737. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. $94.50 cloth. In his prodigious Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910, Herbert F. Tucker excavates a history of the epic in the long nineteenth century in an attempt to correct the “categorical erasure of the epic genre from our working picture of the nineteenth century” (10). “Literary history must have its victim” (4), argues Tucker in his introduction, and the epic in the nineteenth century is one such victim, in part because the rise of the novel and of modernity are stories told at the expense of the epic, which is presented “either as a casualty of great old age or as a sacrifice exacted to consecrate the birth of that modern consciousness from whose vantage literary history is perennially put together” (4). In Tucker’s account, the histories of both the development of the novel and of modernism require the concurrent history of the epic’s “surviving tradition” (7) during the long century, a history which has hitherto been ignored. In Tucker’s reasoning, if literary critics can kill off the epic, then they can also resurrect it. After the first theoretical and introductory chapter, he presents, in eleven chronological chapters (most treating a single decade), the evidence of hundreds of epics—the bibliography of poems cited runs to over twenty pages—written and circulated between 1790 and 1910. He offers sustained readings of only a portion of this list, ranging from Erasmus Darwin’s 1791 Botanic Garden to Thomas Hardy’s 1910 Dynasts. These chapters each read their epics according to “the gust of the zeitgeist as a given decade’s epic output shows it blowing” (8), and if these gusts occasionally seem suspiciously tidy, and conveniently divisible by decade, they are also appropriate to the larger purpose of the work, which is to counter received literary histories with Tucker’s own. And so Tucker begins his work. “We need to tell a different story,” Tucker writes, “one that organizes phases into episodes and then connects the episodes in series to a history that matters” (10). Tucker explains that Epic is less interested in “theoretical arguments, explications de texte, or even the thick description of epic texts concurrently produced” (10); as he succeeds in his stated aims so well, it seems churlish to look for those absent elements. Tucker’s “alternative story” (8) is a sound one, which makes a highly readable case for a counter-historical narrative in which the epic is still very active indeed, busy at the work that the nineteenth century’s victorious genre, the novel, cannot do. Epics tell their readers stories about themselves as members of communities, however construed. “Bold-faced or latent, mutant or rote,” argues Tucker, “the epic conventions that litter the nineteenth-century landscape were not fossils but proofs attesting the bard’s membership in a guild and the reader’s stake in a heritage” (26). In ways unavailable to the novel, the epic was able to engage, on a large scale, with notions of belonging and inheritance, of communities and cultures, in order to place the nineteenth century reading-subject within the whole sweep of human history. It is the epic, argues Tucker, that offers “the [End Page 153] successful articulation of a collective identity that links origins to destinies by way of heroic value in imagined action” (13). In short, it is the epic that can make a community known to itself. Tucker’s twenty-odd-page list of poems cited is accompanied by an extensive and thorough review of secondary scholarship, and his frequent footnotes provide a lively and helpful overview of the history of many of the scholarly debates with which he engages in his text. Tucker wears his impressive research lightly, however, and Epic is a remarkably engaging work, even when it is busy discussing poems that, by Tucker’s own admission, are not good, or much read. For a book of this size, and with such an expansive genre as its subject, it also works remarkably well...

John Brannigan

One of the preferred methods of beginning a New Historicist reading is the depiction of a scene or piece of writing which yields a microcosmic image of what the critic seeks to elaborate in relation to the main text of discussion. So Stephen Greenblatt begins 'Invisible Bullets', his acclaimed article named after the false understandings that American Indians had of the ways in which Europeans were destroying them (believing that the smallpox which was obliterating them was in fact the invisible bullets of the Europeans), with a story of how red spots on the face of the dying mathematician, Thomas Harriot, were falsely believed to be proof of revenge from God for Harriot's alleged atheism. Whether Harriot was an atheist or not we have no way of knowing, for, as Greenblatt reminds us, '[t]he historical evidence, of course, is unreliable' (Greenblatt, in Wilson and Dutton 1992, 84).1 In its first published form the article also began with the story of an Italian miller tried of heresy by the Inquisition who, having finally renounced his atheist views, was allowed to return to life in his village, albeit branded as heretic, but on returning to his atheist views was then burned at the stake.