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Goethe Yearbook

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short step from there to Kleists essay on the Marionettentheater and to the question of how damage to bodies relates to damage to narratives. Engelstein reads the anecdotes of the essay to conclude that the ultimate failure of bodies to cohere becomes a visible and disturbing symptom of the precarious coherence of the world of meaning (129). In chapter four, Spallanzanis discovery that a decapitated snail could regenerate its own head is investigated in terms of questions about a paradoxical nature that simultaneously depends on and suppresses its intrinsically mechanical functioning (157). Engelstein then interprets E. T. A. Hoffmanns Der Sandmann as a story that reveals that even reason lies within the perishable machinery of nature (171). Chapter five argues that Mary Shelleys creature becomes monstrous by exposing the animality of the natural human (196); and the books final chapter examines Jane Austens work in the context of debates about race and slavery, concluding that Austens happy endings are called into question by allusions to slavery,which expose the violence lurking behind the presumed legibility of the body (247). This brief synopsis doesnt begin to get at the complexity and power of Engelsteins arguments; but perhaps it will lead readers to an important and often delightful book. My single complaint is that the book doesnt provide much summary of the works discussed, leaving readers unfamiliar with them in a partial vacuum. Finally, the book includes a striking set of figuresdetails of a prosthetic leg, drawings of regenerated newt limbs, twins in a womb, illustrations of methods of grafting including copulating and occulating grafts, just to give a few examples and each figure is skillfully woven into the discussion.

Utah Valley University

Scott Abbott

Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 303 pp. We have spent over two hundred years living in and through books, and the ways in which we have done so were essentially the invention of a short span of time straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. Such is the central thesis of Andrew Pipers Dreaming in Books. And Piper adds another, perhaps more surprising guiding thesis: at what seems to many observersthough not to Piper, to be surethe twilight of the book era, many of the concepts used to describe what is supposedly new about communication in the internet age map quite snugly onto the forms of communication that were established by, and in turn helped establish, the dominance of the book in the late eighteenth century. Piper, surprisingly sanguine about the future of the book, argues that not only have we not left the book behind; instead the very terms we turn to mourn or celebrate the books demise actually hearken from the world of the book itself. As a result, Piper tells the story of the book not as a narrative of rise and fall, but . . . as a series of social, historical, and technological negotiations (236). This is a set of exciting and ambitious claims, and Pipers rather detailed case studies dont entirely manage to vindicate these claims with quite as much force as staked out by his introduction. But Piper is breaking new ground here, and he seems quite content to forge ahead and beckon others to followand, given this erudite, lucid, and altogether thrilling book, I am quite confident that they will.

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Book Reviews

Each individual chapter deals with a different way of putting together texts, or texts and images, between two covers. The first of these chapters deals with the fractious and fragmented editorial history of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Piper starts out from the simple suggestion that, given the incredibly convoluted genesis of the book we purchase under that title today, it might make more sense to speak of a network of interrelated and interacting texts rather than relying on a teleological model by which the earlier texts are simply fragments striving for the final fulfillment of their destiny between the covers of a physical book. Pipers second chapter deals with the tantalizing and terrifying role the copy plays in fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century. Piper connects E. T. A. Hoffmanns practice of republication and collection with his deployment of uncanny returns and doppelgngers.The third and fourth chapters deal with two other kinds of books that contained multitudesnamely editions and almanacs. The importance of translation in constituting the pan-European romantic movement has received much scholarly attention recently, as has the crucial role women played in romantic translation practice. In picking up on these discussions, Piper once again grounds the phenomenon in the material world of physical books, drawing our attention to the commercialism of womens writing. It was through translating that women writers became professionalized, Piper argues, and it was translating and publishing translations that allowed them to negotiate problems of originality, subjectivity, and publicity. Piper begins his fifth chapter with a writer who did not just practice translation, but rather lived in translationElisabeth Kulmann grew up in St. Petersburg and wrote most of her poetic work in three languages at once, without any of them ever being the primary or original one. He then backtracks to survey a number of women translators and their practice, from Sophie Mereau-Brentanos translation of La Princesse de Clves, via Hedwig Hlles translations of Homer, to Dorothea Tieck. Chapter six turns to the illustrated books of the romantic age. Here Piper is most interested in the intertextual and interpictorial references that abound in the early nineteenth-century explosion of illustrated books, books of illustrations, or books about illustrations. Piper deftly navigates the proliferation of engravings, Schattenrisse, or Umrisse, drawings (such as those of Goethe), either accompanying texts or appearing by themselves. Resolutely eschewing any simplistic praise of the book, or cultural jeremiad against its decline, and finely attuned to the myriad ways in which books are put together, Pipers chapters speak not only to the scholarly discourse around writing and publishing in the age of romanticism. His well-placed scholarly interventions are subtended by a more general critique of lamentations about the passing of the book, one that boils down to the charge that such laments lack a clear picture of just how multifarious a field of objects is described by the term. Pipers prose is lucid and engaging, and while a rather trigger-happy use of secondary texts may at times make this book harder on lay readers than it should be, the book should not pose too much of a challenge for laypeople or undergraduates. And since Pipers book is about bibliophilia and about living with books not just as novels or anthologies, but instead as physical objects, it is only fair to point out that readers will be able to live quite easily with the handsome object produced by the University of Chicago Press.

Stanford University

Adrian Daub