February 27, 2008 Time: 12:19pm 011.

tex
Reviews
Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and
Continental Inuences: Writing in an Age of
Europhobia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
230. 45 hardback. 1 4039 1515 6.
This is a timely and most welcome book.
Well-researched and closely argued, Peter
Mortensens monograph examines an aspect of British
Romanticism in the 1790s and 1800s that, he feels, has
been unjustly neglected: the fundamentally
ambivalent way in which some rst-generation
Romantic writers responded to what was regarded, in
some quarters, as a highly pernicious ood of foreign
dramas, foreign novels, and foreign poetry, mostly of
German and French origin.
Mortensens main thesis is that while many writers
joined the chorus of those who deplored the
demoralising and politically destabilising effects of
foreign literature and publicly distanced themselves
from it, they also assimilated and appropriated the
same foreign forms and themes, more often than not
domesticating them in the process, in the double sense
of the word. In an age of paranoid Europhobia, when
reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Hannah More
and the Anti-Jacobin championed a stout nationalism
and a happy insularity in cultural and political
matters, some British writers displayed what
Mortensen, Associate Professor at the University of
Aarhus, Denmark, calls an imaginative resistance
to, and purposeful borrowing from, fashionable
non-English literary models (113).
It is one of the strong points of this benchmark
study how meticulously and in what a differentiated
manner its author traces the exact trajectories of these
ambivalent responses. A close reader, Mortensen
never loses sight of the wider political and cultural
contexts and even the most far-reaching and
general implications of his ndings are rmly
rooted in good textual and historical scholarship.
Maybe he overstates his case when he speaks in his
Introduction of a symptomatic reluctance in
Romantic criticism of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to
consider non-British contexts for British Romantic
cultural production (3), citing Harold Bloom and
Stuart Curran as examples. But one could, of course,
quote the counter-examples of Geoffrey Hartman and
Paul de Man, of Ren Wellek and Lilian Furst, of Fred
Burwick, Jeff Cox, and many, many more. Mortensen
himself refers to Julia Carlson and Nicola J. Watson,
and few, I surmise, would these days deny the
international and cosmopolitan dimension of British
literature around 1800: it seems an established
consensus that Romanticism was a European
phenomenon even, and maybe especially so, if it
came in the guise of virulent xenophobia. Even
in that, Britain was no exception but possibly a
very ne paradigmatic case.
If Europhobics construed European literature as an
overwhelming menace to Britains moral and political
health (9) (the usual culprits being Kotzebue, Brger,
Goethe, Schiller, and Rousseau), and if it is also true
that British Romantic writers owed considerable debts
to Continental pre-Romanticism (6), and if it is nally
true that some of those who publicly denounced
foreign literature were exactly the ones who (secretly
or openly) exploited its allure and attractions, then
what we have is an intriguing historical case of
contradictory cultural appropriation, an example of
how a menacing alterity is processed and domesticated,
and Mortensen is the right man to present the case.
Chapter 1 ( We Know that the Enemy is Working
among Us: The Rhetoric of Romantic Europhobia)
February 27, 2008 Time: 12:19pm 011.tex
Reviews 69
sets the scene. It is not surprising that the reactionary
discourse of the time swarms with Illuminati and
freemasons, with Germans and Jews, all busily
undermining the established order of Albion. Neither
is it quite unexpected that Europhobic discourse
systematically pathologises what is foreign: foreign
inuences are variedly called a disease, a drug, a
poison, an infection, a contagion, and so on, against all
of which the body politic has to be strengthened and
armoured. There is little new in this, and one could
easily provide present-day examples of the continuity
of this xenophobic hysteria. But even in this brief
survey chapter of only 23 pages Mortensen gives a
vintage example of his readerly skills in analysing
William Prestons Reections on the Peculiarities of
Style and Manner in the Late German Writers, whose
Works have appeared in English; and on the Tendency
of their Productions (1802, rst published in the
Edinburgh Magazine). It is not only that, ironically,
Europhobic discourse mimics and indeed easily
surpasses the German writers in what was attributed
to them as their most obvious deciency viz., excess
in everything, Europhobic discourse also suffers from
problems of logical contradiction or lack of coherence
which point to the possibility that the real problem
may not be the perceived danger at all, but rather the
outlook of him who feels beleaguered.
In chapter 2 ( Dethroning German Sublimity:
Outrageous Stimulation in Romantic
Ballad-Writing), Mortensen superbly anatomises four
responses to Brgers poetry: John Thomas Stanleys
Leonora, A Tale, Translated freely from the German
of Gottfried August Brger (1796), Coleridges The
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798), Wordsworths
Hart-Leap Well (1800) and Matthew G. Lewiss Tales
of Wonder (1801). Stanleys rst take at Brgers
Lenore is a free translation indeed, eliminating any
doubts about the religious orthodoxy of the original,
but sadly converting it into a simple story of crime and
punishment. Stanleys second try, restoring Lenores
lover to life, is even worse: The second Leonora is no
longer Brgers poem, for if Stanleys rst translation
already rewrote the German original in signicant
ways, the second changes it almost beyond
recognition (54). Stanley confessed that I have often
doubted whether [Lenore] was not calculated (as far
as its effects could extend) to injure the cause of
Religion and Morality, by exhibiting a representation
of supernatural interference, inconsistent with our
ideas of a just and benevolent Deity (56). Well,
Stanley certainly knew how to remedy that ambiguity.
One may wonder why Mortensen did not choose
Coleridges Christabel as a poem that is indebted to
Brgers Lenore or, for that matter, to Brgers Der
Wilde Jger as already mentioned, Mortensens
choice is The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, which he
reads, as Southey did, as a bid to tap the immense
commercial popularity enjoyed by Germanys ghostly
balladry (57). But, of course, The Rime is a poem that
famously eschews closure because all interpretations
offered within the tale itself are conspicuously
inadequate attempts at establishing a meaningful
narrative that gives the events coherence beyond their
merely temporal succession, thereby preguring the
readers attempts at trying the same. In this,
Mortensen argues, and in allowing an extreme ethical
ambiguity (65), Coleridge goes even beyond Brger,
emphasising what Stanley had tried to excise.
To read Wordsworths Hart-Leap Well in
conjunction with Brgers Der Wilde Jger is an
original move, and Mortensen is right to observe that
Wordsworth, from a certain perspective, makes
better poetry out of the German sensation-ballad.
But what is also striking in this case is that
psychological sophistication, aesthetic nish and
trans-historical validity are purchased only at the
cost of a political domestication. Wordsworth gives
with one hand and takes away with the other; what
the new poetry gains in dramatic power, it
simultaneously loses in specic social content.
The weakening of Brgers anti-aristocratic stance
is everywhere evident in Hart-Leap Well. [. . . ]
Generally speaking, class-conict is never a major
issue in Hart-Leap Well. [. . . ] The transformation
that occurs in the transition from Der Wilde Jger
to Hart-Leap Well, then, is not only the process
by which an obscure German ballad is enhanced
and rened into visionary English verse; it is also
related to the process by which Continental
radicalism is defused and deected, and transmuted
into food for virtuous thought. (74)
But it could, of course, be argued that in Michael, or
more notably in Goody Blake and Harry Gill,
Wordsworth preserves the political thrust that, to be
sure, is so obviously absent from Hart-Leap Well:
Typically, Wordsworth does not seek to resolve
the issues at stake what are the implications
of the harts tale? and what role does nature
take in redressing the wrongs suffered by her
February 27, 2008 Time: 12:19pm 011.tex
70 Romanticism
creatures? by tyrannically asserting an authorial
perspective, or by arguing that the poet is right
and the shepherd wrong. The narrator and the
shepherd fail to arrive at a shared interpretation of
every detail of the poems core-narrative. What
they do agree, however, is that the story primarily
concerns the troubled relationship between man
and nature, and this consensus in itself represents a
signicant change in relation to Brger. What
interests Wordsworth about Sir Walter is not his
socially determined relationship to members of an
inferior class (the peasantry), but humankinds
violent mistreatment of nature and the possible
repercussions that this may have in the future. (77)
The nal section of this chapter is on Matthew Lewiss
Tales of Wonder (1801), Lewis being the British
author who was most regularly castigated for his
supposed Germanness. But surprisingly, Tales of
Wonder, containing 60 ballads (16 by Lewis himself,
eight by Southey and ve by Walter Scott), has also
moments of parody and self-mockery, and seems, at
times, to distance itself from a convention that it
exploits so cleverly: Tales of Wonder vividly
manifests both the wariness with which British poets,
both Gothic and Romantic, approached Brgers
verse, and the complex negotiations by which they
sought to make both him and themselves more
acceptable while also wooing Brgers many readers
within the literary marketplace (93). It seems to me
this is one of the nest passages in Mortensens
monograph because it acknowledges a dialectic of
playful appropriation, without necessarily condemning
the practice of trying to get a foot into a promising
market (John Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci may
be another case in point). The intricacies of cultural
appropriation may be less clear-cut than appears at
rst sight to co-opt a trend may guarantee its
survival, but then again, it may as well signal its end.
Chapter 3 ( Il Est Devenue Classique en
Angleterre: Some Versions of Romantic
(Anti-)Pastoral) deals with some British responses to
Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierres pastoral
novel Paul et Virginie (1788). I think it makes sense to
delineate, as Mortensen does, the main plot and to
explain about the general drift of this exotic tale,
because otherwise most of the absurdities of the
English versions of Paul et Virginie might be lost on
the reader. Certainly, James Cobbs theatrical
adaptation Paul and Virginia: A Musical Drama
(1801), expounding, among other conservative staples,
the benets of slavery with a human face, must have
been a dreadful piece on many counts. To understand
Paul et Virginie as an intertext to Maria Edgeworths
Belinda is incontestably productive, but I am not so
sure whether The Emigrants, or the History of an
Expatriated Family (1793), now generally attributed
to Mary Wollstonecrafts deceitful partner Gilbert
Imlay (an attribution which one has reason to doubt),
is really in itself such an interesting text or such an
obvious response to Saint-Pierre specically that it
deserves such full treatment.
I regard chapter 4 ( Partizans of the German
Theater: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Drama
Translation) as the highlight of the book. After a
short survey of Coleridges and Sheridans
translations of German dramas (to which we now have
to add Coleridges translation of Goethes Faust),
Mortensen focuses on four specic cases (all published
within the crisis year 1799, when the controversy over
the foreign drama came to a head, 140) of translations
of Goethes Gtz von Berlichingen and of Schillers
Die Ruber, respectively, arguing that
[t]he writing and rewriting of Goethes and
Schillers plays [. . . ] became a site of social, cultural
and political contestation, engendering an
embittered conict over signs and meanings. Scott,
Lawrence, Craven and Holman [the four
translators] make no secret of their patriotically
motivated desire to accommodate, nationalize, and
domesticate Goethes and Schillers rebel-dramas;
all wish to exploit these European plays explosive
popularity, while also assimilating them to the
post-revolutionary climate of Edmund Burke and
William Pitts Britain. Yet all the writers also nd
themselves beset with difculties in the process,
and most fail to arrive at an end-product that is
satisfying to themselves and their critics. (140)
The main feature of Scotts translation of Gtz is the
systematic introduction of archaisms, literalisms,
solecisms, and Germanisms. It is a translation that
foregrounds its translatedness and foreignness, a
translation that distances the text and places it at a
remove. Mortensen has a ne ear for nuances in the
German language and for their English equivalents
(although the few typos in his book are almost
exclusively to be found in German passages see, for
example, 52, 71, 93, 146, 164), and it would be hard to
disagree with his resume (which is also true for Rose
Lawrences Gortz [sic] of Berlingen [sic]), The main
February 27, 2008 Time: 12:19pm 011.tex
Reviews 71
thrust of Scotts translation [. . . ] is precisely to deny
this cross-cultural and trans-historical signicance,
and thus to keep the plays jarring interests at arms
length (150). Many years later, John Gibson Lockhart
remarked that Goetz was translated with the aim of
opposing, in the hearts of modern men, the inuence
of those new doctrines by which the revolutionary
literature of France has appealed so powerfully to the
self-love of its generation (154/155). It sounds a little
like trying to write the whale out of Moby-Dick, but
Lockhart seems to have been satised with his
father-in-laws achievement.
Die Ruber was potentially even more dangerous
than Gtz: [It] came to gure as an amorphous,
pan-European threat to English self-denitions: it
seemed to epitomize everything that was menacing in
recent Continental literature and politics (155). Here,
the operation had to cut even deeper: To be successful,
British writers must both tap the success of Die
Ruber and cleanse Schillers play of all its Jacobinical
associations, in essence reinventing it as an apolitical
or even counter-revolutionary tract (156). As
Mortensen makes clear, Keppel Cravens The Robbers
was a heavily bowdlerised version, which suffered
from selective pruning of the original, which, of
course, the British public was forbidden so see:
Schillers Die Ruber had been permanently banned
from the British stage by the censor, John Larpent.
But J. G. Holmans The Red-Cross Knights was even
more of a travesty of Schillers play: rather than
declare war on tyranny and hypocrisy at home,
Holman has his Ferdinand (= Schillers Karl Moor) go
to war against the Muslims and throw them out of
Spain. However, strategists of the War on Terror
should be warned against resuscitating this play: it was
not a great success. And even though Holmans
Knights stands Schillers revolutionary play on its
head, the Morning Chronicle remained unreconciled:
the tendency, it found, remains the same (170).
This is, of course, one of the paradoxes of political
containment: even if you engage with the foreign by
radically altering its form, message and content, the
sheer act of engaging with it already constitutes a
recognition, an acknowledgement. The original lurks
in the shadows and can never be totally ostracised.
The nal chapter ( The Descent of Odin:
Romantic Writers among the Norsemen) may look
less conspicuous but it is essential to rounding the
study off. Starting with Bishop Percys Five Pieces of
Runic Poetry (1763) and with two treatises by the
Swiss historian Paul Henri Mallet, which were both
translated by Percy in 1770, the British discovered the
Vikings and the ancient North. Mallet, who taught at
Copenhagen, had the curious theory that the historical
conqueror Odin was originally a chieftain and
statesman in Asia Minor, but during his reign the
Romans began to invade his domain with hostile
armies. Alarmed by this incursion, and having learned
that fame awaited him in Scandinavia, Odin gathered
his most faithful retainers and worked his way
northward, eventually settling in Denmark (178).
Some nations, it seems, are traditionally more open to
foreign inuences than others. But the importance of
Mallets historical treatises lies in the fact that they
helped to link the ideas of progress, reason and
democracy to the concept of the North and to
Scandinavia in particular historically most dubious,
if not downright incorrect, but ideologically most
powerful.
Mortensen has four texts which show how British
Romantics negotiated this threat of Northern freedom.
Wordsworths The Danish Boy is, I think, an
unfortunate choice. It is a comparatively slight and
trivial poem and can hardly bear the evidence it is
supposed to carry. Mortensen sees The Danish Boy
as another instance of Jerome McGanns Romantic
Ideology, of a turning to Nature and the imagination
when the political has to be silenced or avoided. The
Danish Boy, says Mortensen, no longer epitomizes a
staunch commitment to liberty and equal rights
(184). Did he ever? Was Wordsworth really
consciously re-writing a rmly established cultural
signicance in this minor piece? One may wonder.
William Herberts Selected Icelandic Poetry
(18046) is denitely a more relevant example.
Attacking Amos Cottles Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda
of Soemund [sic! the book under review here
regularly confuses Norse ae with French oe]
Translated into English Verse (1797) because Cottle
knew no Norse and worked only from a Latin
translation, Herbert, by contrast, could claim to have
worked with Norse originals. Herberts translation
makes no literary or aesthetic claims it is a
philologists work, accurate and learned, catering to an
antiquarian taste. Mortensen speaks here of Herberts
fetishization of authenticity (190) and puts original
in scare quotes throughout. It may be true that the
cult of origin is itself a Romantic myth; it may be true
that by making the texts of the North the objects of
scholarship, Herbert removed them from the peoples
reach, to use Michel de Certeaus words from a
different context (193). But Herbert was clear in what
February 27, 2008 Time: 12:19pm 011.tex
72 Romanticism
he did, and it is at least doubtful whether a made-up,
ctitious version of Northern freedom would have
been more helpful to Britains working classes, even if
they had had any access to it in the rst place. For
better or worse, literary scholars seem to
intermittently overestimate the importance of such
matters. In any case, in the contrast between Mallet
and Herbert we can discern the growing dissociation of
discourses around 1800, described so eloquently by
Michel Foucault. As philology takes over, there
remains less room for myths (a truth that was later to
vehemently hit Victorian religiosity in the form of
German Higher Criticism).
Walter Scotts last metrical romance, Harold the
Dauntless (1817), is a much more deliberate onslaught
on ideas of Northern freedom and independence, an
epic that celebrates the binding of a Prometheus:
Once an alien, threatening and troublesome
presence within the body politic, Harold nally
converts to Christianity and bows to the
all-embracing power of the church. But Scott
intends his readers to fully understand that this is a
happy ending, as the volatile intruder is nally
brought within the purview of the dominant
culture, and so religion, domesticity and marriage
help dispel, or at least temporarily assuage,
Romantic Britains collective anxieties about
upward mobility and exorbitant ambition. (203)
British Romanticism and Continental Inuences ends
with an unlikely hero: Robert Southey. In Southeys
early poem The Race of Odin, Mortensen nds
evidence that there is no inescapable logical necessity
dictating Wordsworth, Herbert and Scotts adroit
manoeuvres. In contrast to his fellow-Romantics,
Southey not only refuses to domesticate the cult of the
northern sublime; he radicalizes it, lending greater
relevance to familiar ideas and going beyond previous
writers in the act of imitating them (205). That is
undoubtedly so. But we know what became of
Southey.
Mortensens book is essential reading for everyone
interested in British Romanticism as a European
phenomenon. The lessons of his readings go far
beyond his individual case studies, and far beyond
British Romanticism, I should say, as he traces time
and again what looks like the workings of a basically
xenophobic and dangerously parochial society. But let
us be fair and distinguish: foreign literature, foreign
drama, foreign poetry were immensely popular in
Britain in the 1790s and after. So much so that a
Europhobic populism (12) had to be instigated and
organised against it. Europhobia seems not to have
been an entirely spontaneous reaction.
Ironically, much of what Europhobics protested
against was originally and quintessentially British,
re-imported from Germany: rebellion against
neo-classical rules, the cult of original genius, a
Shakespearean drama of excess the Germans
believed they were only following the English example
in their revolt against French dominance and
hegemony. The repulsion felt by some, and organised
by others, against the threat of foreignness perfectly
ts Freuds classic denition of our response to the
uncanny: the uncanny is a part of ourselves, separated
from us, returning to us, that lls us with horror.
Europhobia indicates there is something in us that we
nd foreign and strange, that we think we can handle
if we only call it, say, German and hold it at arms
length. But it is always already here.
Christoph Bode,
LMU Munich
DOI: 10.3366/E1354991X08000111
Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and the
Canon 16601830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 268. 53.00 hardback. 0 19 926296 9.
Jane Spencers book Literary Relations is built around
the thesis that kinship relations real and
metaphorical played a fundamental role in the
construction of a national literary tradition, and in the
creation of individual authors identities and careers.
Her book examines literary kinship during the period
16601830 through an assessment of three basic
kinship metaphors paternal, maternal, and sibling,
highlighting such writing relationships as William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, Frances and Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.
Part of Spencers focus, as she explains in the
introduction, is how a family setting for literary life
nurtured and constrained writers, and how it affected
their sense of themselves as authors and the way they
were received (or not) into the developing canon (7).
Spencers particular objective is to demarcate the
position of female writers in an evolving literary
tradition the books nal chapter offers an extended
case-study of Jane Austen as a rare example of a
female writer who has succeeded in xing her position