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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
Houndmills: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. 277. $59.95.
Evoking images of pedestrian travel and vagrant wandering, Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless suggests a broad study of romantic literature's engagement with what Anne D. Wallace in Walking, Literature, and English Culture (Clarendon, 1993) calls the peripatetic, a version of georgic in which walking takes the place of cultivation. In the Introduction, Benis qualifies this notion by offering "a cultural history of vagrancy in the Georgian period as refracted through the early poetry of William Wordsworth ..." (1). Our expectations are not exactly disappointed, for Romanticism on the Road occasionally draws our attention to the cultural significance of walking as a form of bourgeois entertainment and as the vagrant movement of the homeless. Nonetheless, this is not a book about romanticism in general, nor is it precisely a cultural history of vagrancy, except in as much as one is willing to allow Wordsworth to stand in as the paradigmatic romantic writer and his "refractions" of vagrancy to serve as the representative cultural mediations of homelessness. What Romanticism on the Road does offer is a carefully researched and intellectually engaging study of Wordsworth's vested interest in vagrancy as an index of resistance to, and complicity with, the domestic, social and legal categories that governed the discourse on homelessness in the 1790s.
Expanding upon earlier studies of Wordsworth's vagrancy, such as David Simpson's Wordsworth's Historical Imagination (Methuen, 1987), my Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse (Wayne State, 1994) and Celeste Langan's Romantic Vagrancy, (Cambridge UP, 1995), Romanticism on the Road correlates subtle thematic transformations in Wordsworth's poetry with changes in the vagrancy laws from the early 1790s through 1805. As Benis shows, the increasingly reactionary vagrancy laws interpellated the homeless and the vagrant as politically subversive or criminally suspicious bodies whose movements should be contained or curtailed. Moreover, in the language of these laws vagrancy functioned as a particularly open-ended metaphor, whose entailments blurred the boundaries between vagrancy, homelessness, sedition, and criminality. Setting up a dyad that structures the book's argument, Benis explains that in contrast to this official vilification of vagrancy, Wordsworth's poetry deploys vagrancy as a figure of refuge, a metaphor for marginal space outside the regulative grids of juridical, political and domestic...
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