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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
Clement Hawes. Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+244. $59.95.
Since the publication of Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act in 1981, and the general "return to history" in literary studies identified by J. Hillis Miller a decade ago, the question of methodology in literary-historical criticism has become rather more, not less, murky. One still encounters work inspired by Jameson and the structuralist-Marxist approach he pioneered, of course, and Jameson himself is a superb reader whose engagement with particular artistic works is always ingenious and frequently persuasive. But Jameson's root approach to literature in terms of a socio-economic allegory is increasingly marginal to the culturalist orientation of many recent, historically-oriented studies--whether of literature as such, or of the relationship between literature and economic phenomena. In works by Katie Trumpener and James Chandler, to take two recent examples, the allegorizing impulse has itself become an object for historical critique (as are its implications for the retrospective theorization/narration of socio-cultural developments). Given the central place of allegory in a number of influential theories of romanticism (such as those of M. H. Abrams, Harold Bloom, and Northrop Frye), scholars of the romantic period should be especially well placed to consider the critical recourse to allegory as itself a literary-historical phenomenon. It is telling, in this regard, that Frye--Hegel to Jameson's Marx--took an important cue for his general theory of literature from Blake's description of art as a "great code."
Compared with Jameson's opening, new historicist approaches to literature have seemed to offer a more materialist grasp of literary history, debunking the overt allegorizing of individually-authored works in favor of an archivally-based view of the literary artifact as a unit in a general field of documents, both literary and non-literary. Where Jameson presents the possible...
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