On the modest tone of recent work in romantic studies

Bewell, Alan. 2000. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $45.00 hc. xv + 373 pp.

Elfenbein, Andrew. 1999. Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. NewYork: Columbia University Press. $49.50 hc. $17.50 sc. xii + 262 pp.

Larrissy, Edward, ed. 1999. Romanticism and Postmodernism. NewYork: Cambridge University Press. $59.95 hc. xii + 238 pp.

In recent years a renewed emphasis on historical modes of reading has transformed criticism of British romanticism. Now that the era of aggressively historicist critique is a decade behind us, having given birth to a strong consensus by practitioners in the field, work in romantic studies threatens to become all too predictable in its procedures: local in focus, rigorously empirical and materialist in its emphases, modest in its assertions, it seeks only more nuanced and contextualized readings of the panoply of primary texts and more intricate versions of relevant strands of social history The danger of this modesty is that in cases when research leads to farreaching insight, authors seldom indicate as much and remain content with minor claims. The result is an endless stream of good books whose full implications remain unstated and whose cumulative effect is opaque to all but alert specialists in the field.

Two recent books, Alan Bewell's Romanticism and Colonial Disease and Andrew Elfenbein's Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, exemplify the modesty of romantic studies. Both are original and well researched, are written clearly, recontextualize and reread canonic texts in important new ways, engage less canonic texts with great insight, and open up new lines of inquiry. Both are major contributions to the field and at times are truly brilliant.Yet both authors resist spelling out the full implications of their arguments or even tying together the arguments of different chapters into a more cumulative and powerful whole. In each case, the particularist habit stifles the emergence of a stronger claim.

Bewell argues that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers conceived of the British tropical colonies in such thoroughly medicalized terms that they produced what he calls a "medical geography." Since disease was thought to be caused by the properties of air, especially that near swamps or jungles, writers depicted the tropics as pathogenic spaces. Such conceptions of the colonies derived in part, Bewell shows, from the appalling human cost of colonization: the vast majority, indeed nearly all, of the men sent to the tropics to enforce colonial rule lost their lives or their health in the attempt. Bewell points out that, according to historians such as Philip Curtain and Marcus Rediker, more seamen died during the infamous middle passage that brought African slaves to the New World than did Africans (102-03).While postcolonial criticism has typically emphasized the situation of the colonized, Bewell shifts focus to the colonizers, or rather to the plebeian military personnel impressed into duty by a colonizing state. Ranging widely across the period, discussing poems, novels, autobiographical accounts, and more, Bewell extends many of the themes of late nineteenthcentury medical studies (such as the aestheticization of tuberculosis) into a much earlier era and gives decided new force to recent work in romantic studies on what Nigel Leask has called the "anxieties of empire." But this book pushes well beyond these affiliated projects, creating virtually a new vocabulary for discussing the colonial discourses of the period. Moreover, in fresh and often stunning new readings of texts such as "The Ruined Cottage," "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "To Autumn," The Triumph of Life, Jane Eyre, and The Last Man, Bewell demonstrates that British writing even about life in the home country depicted it in relation to the problem of the effects of tropical disease or, more problematically, of the miasmas native to England itself.

Given the originality of his project, it is odd that Bewell makes revisionist claims only briefly or in passing. It is thus useful to pause and list some of the key new questions raised by his book. His account of the enormous loss of life of British servicemen, a loss treated with indifference by the patrician establishment, and of the tacit agreement that the impressment of plebeian men helped clear away unwanted portions of the population shows that a quiet kind of mass murder of men in a particular social category was underway for generations (69-83). The implications of this argument are breathtaking; one cannot simply absorb it as a historical datum or as useful background information but must understand it in part by revising or discarding many of the cultural theories now being applied to the period. For example, if such ruthless exploitation was already underway long before the arrival of an industrial economy, what happens to familiar Marxist interpretations of class history? Building on work by Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, who write of a shipboard "Atlantic working class," Bewell describes a mode of exploitation well worthy of resistance, whether through piracy, mutiny, seaboard urban riots, or the protest or anticolonial writings of the 1790s examined in his excellent second chapter. Unlike Rediker and Linebaugh, Bewell does not attempt to extend the Marxist class analysis back into the eighteenth century, but by not raising the historiographical question, he similarly dodges the task of constructing a convincing model of exploitation and resistance proper to a mercantilist, colonizing, and anti-reformist regime. Similarly, what notion of "colonization" emerges when one learns that the state routinely sacrificed vast numbers of its own people to subjugate its overseas populations? Should one begin to speak of"self-colonization"? Finally, what are the consequences, if any, for the history of race relations if more white people died in the middle passage than black?