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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
William Jewett. Fatal Autonomy: :Romantic Drama and The Rhetoric of Agency. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. 262. $49.95.
Given the recent surge of work on the drama of the romantic period that has brought us such fine books as Julie Carlson's In the Theatre of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1994) and Catherine Burroughs' Closet Stages (University of Pennsylvania, 1997), I should begin by noting that William Jewett's Fatal Autonomy is not intended as a contribution to that body of work. It is not a survey of or argument for the body of plays produced during the romantic period. Jewett also sets aside the question of the relation between the plays he discusses and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theater. In other words, this book is not offered as an intervention in the current debate about the drama and the theater of the age of Wordsworth and Byron.
Instead, Jewett's book "describes an enduring moral puzzle and explains how it shaped, and was shaped by, a set of dramatic poems" (ix). The moral puzzle is that of human agency and how attitudes towards agency shape political action. More specifically, the book treats the ways in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley turned to dramatic forms in order to explore the problems of' agency that received more famous if perhaps less clear-cut exposition in their better known works. This book seeks to revise our critical discourse about the poets under discussion and to redirect our discussions of agency and action, of the subject and structure, of free will and determinism. It is thus simultaneously a set of exacting close readings and a theoretical argument; Jewett himself describes it as "`paratheoretical' in its focus on what compels people to adopt theories that compel them to act" (2).
In his introduction, Jewett makes his case for the plays written by the major romantic poets as the starting point for a "genealogy of contemporary debates about agency" (18). He argues that romantic drama keeps open a skepticism about agency that is closed off by, say, Marx...
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