Deborah Elise White. Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. 227. $45.00.

As the latest round of historicism retreats into history, it is increasingly apparent that the challenge it presented to the theoretical discourse on literature has missed its mark. To its perpetual embarrassment, historicism, too, has a history, and as it dates the substance of its arguments are inevitably put into question. With the mere passage of time, the claims of criticism are reversed into the deceptions of ideology, and the "critical" position endorsed by the latest historicism is exposed once again as being all too obviously a mere product of its time. It is, of course, at precisely such an historical moment that historicism finally becomes of some theoretical interest: the question of the historicity of historicism restates concisely, in a temporal mode, the question of reflexivity, the central question of any theoretical discourse. The historically (and theoretically) inevitable transition of historicism from a (merely) temporal to a reflexive discourse raises a series of importunate questions, not least of which is the status and function of temporal succession in establishing a critical reflection. In a critically sophisticated historicism, the authority of succession cannot be assumed, with the inevitable result that it is no longer self-evident, in textual interpretation, which text "criticizes" which.

Theory, like philosophy, is a retrospective discourse, and the theoretical interest of such a reflective historical moment is undeniable. Deborah White shows a shrewd sense of historical timing as well as superb strategic acumen in her assessment of the opportunities, theoretically speaking, this historical moment provides. As its title indicates, Romantic Returns begins with a temporal act which undoes the authority of temporal determination, reopening a series of unresolved theoretical questions that historicism attempted to historicize away. In what has become the characteristic gesture of theoretical discourse, White reads literary texts by Collins, Hazlitt and Shelley against their reception. The imperative to reassert the critical claims of the primary text is precisely the kind that Shelley would have been the first to recognize, since the "Historical" criticism of romanticism "has yet to catch up," as White puts it, "with the discourse on imagination it claims to have surpassed" (2).

As a truly critical, rather than ideological, thinker, White is acutely aware of the artificial nature of critical "debate," sensitive, as few others have recently been, to the misfiguration of relations and contrasts between discourses which compulsively misread each other. Her engagement with the current, unsettled critical scene is therefore prudent and indirect, and she has wisely refused to limit the scope of her critical ambitions to the temptations of these local polemics. Instead, she has focused her considerable intellectual energy on the scholarly reconstruction of the theoretical complexity of the original texts, establishing, as it were, the textual "facts" that a very different kind of future historicism would have to account for. The theoretical moment, that is, occurs in White's work as the history our current historicism struggles to forget.

Such temporal and conceptual reversals are, of course, a familiar aspect of any reflexive discourse, and White's facility in exploiting their strategic potential in the construction of her own work demonstrates conclusively that she has correctly identified the theoretical crux posed by her texts. "By the positing and development of imagination through and as a reflexive structure" White writes, "Romantic texts offer a more, not less, sophisticated account of 'ideology' and 'illusion' than that offered by contemporary criticism" (2). In the historical reception of romantic literature, the centrality of imagination has never been displaced, nor could it be without abandoning the correlative concept of literature. The ongoing succession of schools that have contributed to this reception--historically unprecedented in its range and interest--can, however, be read as various attempts to restrict, by figurative means, the...

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