|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
Anne Janowitz. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii+278. $59.95.
Several years ago, in a review in these pages, Anne Janowitz identified "plebeian studies" as an emerging new field of enquiry within British romanticism. With Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Janowitz makes a remarkable contribution to that field, and to its near neighbor, radical studies, and at the same time provides the most compelling case yet for the integration of subcanonical forms of popular radical expression into the main line of the English romantic tradition. Indeed, the book moves well beyond its indispensable recovery work on the lost voices of a radical lyric tradition, and goes about defining romanticism as an object of study in ways that are more systematic than most recent work on canonical topics; the note boldly struck in the introduction, "Romantic Studies as a Unified Field," is sustained and developed throughout the book, and if Janowitz transforms romanticism, her revisionism is scrupulously engaged with the traditions of Anglo-American romantic studies. Add to this a historical range that extends right through the nineteenth century, with treatments of Chartist poetry and a (not quite) valedictory chapter on W. J. Linton and William Morris, and the result is one of the most ambitious and consistently rewarding explorations of romantic lyric expression to have appeared in recent decades.
As it turns out, a "unified field" theory does not require "an ideology of seamlessness" (1), but instead describes a romantic movement that unfolded historically within an unevenly developed matrix of formal devices and political commitments. Lyric...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
