Thomas Pfau. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University

Thomas Pfau. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xii+572. $65.00.

Mood was always romantic matter--Wordsworth's "sweet mood when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind" is representative of the self-absorption of the later poetry of sensibility. But what mood does he mean? Melancholy is the period term for such undertow; Wordsworth employs it memorably in "Resolution and Independence," in a voice that swings from dejection to elation. This antic turn was famously satirized by Lewis Carroll as terminal self-referentiality. The mood swing lies at the heart of the poem, but our critical condition is hardly equipped to grasp or respond to it. Latter-day, rehistoricizing critics have not been very helpful in making the mood matter again for reading such texts despite suggestive work by Kay Redfield Jamison on manic depression, Peter M. Logan on hysteria, and Rei Terada on emotion in theory. The construction of romantic ideology has upstaged the affective intensity of the best writing of this period, as characteristic as the minor key in Beethoven.

Thomas Pfau's new book is concerned to demonstrate why mood matters in ways that would reintegrate it with social and intellectual history, and with reading of the disciplinary, institutional kind that he practices. Working off an extensive range of sources in the period, as disparate as scripts of the treason trials of 1794 and Adam Muller's conservatively romantic Staatswissenschaft, Pfau restores a cast of German informants to the picture while remaining within the orbit of the familiar English story beginning from Burke. He makes an original and compelling case for the bearing of German philosophy on Gefuhl, Kant's equivalent term for feeling or emotion, peculiar synonyms perpetuated in this form by Martha Nussbaum, among others. But the vocation of this book is larger, for it would draw attention to the social circulation of affect, and of affective disorders such as paranoia, trauma, and melancholia, far beyond the romantic horizon, in politics and public life and of course in the arts of the Age of Prozac, so typically afflicted with psychic...

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