The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period ed. by Devoney Looser (review)

Abstract

to a range of audiences, Jackson does not really consider in detail philosophical theories of aesthetic judgment. However, she is still able to make a convincing case by illustrating the circumstances that have led readers to prefer Keatsean imagination to Huntian fancy. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at recovery projects: specifically, the enthusiasts and scholars who recuperated the reputations of Blake and John Clare, and the question, articulated through the example of Robert Bloomfield, of how far it is possible to re-popularize any apparently neglected author. Like Crabbe or Hunt, whom she describes as restrained in their opinions of their own merit, Jackson’s claims for her achievement in Those Who Write for Immortality are modest: “one of my fears when I embarked on this project,” she states, “was that the outcome was obvious, the conclusion foregone” (p. 217). While it is the case that the central argument concerning the contingent nature of literary fame will not seem particularly controversial to contemporary scholars and the decision to write with a general audience in mind may mean that the narratives of individual authors will be fairly familiar to specialists, there are also plenty of significant insights to be gained from bringing these authors’ histories into direct conversation. Jackson does important work in drawing together, under a single thematic head, the arguments of previous critics in the areas of celebrity studies, literary afterlives, authorship, and reader-response. In doing so, she redirects critical scrutiny back onto readers and, perhaps more significantly, critics themselves, noting that sometimes (as in the case of Keats) critical debate can seem to have moved on very little in two hundred years (p. 130). Despite having different priorities from today’s scholars, nineteenth-century reviewers and biographers, Jackson contends, “often set the terms that still define [our] subject” (p. 225), a point well worth considering in light of critics’ own roles as literary canon-makers. University of Leeds Alys Mostyn