Jacques Khalip. Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Book Review‪)‬

Jacques Khalip. Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. 235. $60.00. Romantic poetry asks, "What is the human subject?" as persistently as Romanticists have asked themselves what their subject is: "What is Romanticism?" Is it, for instance, an aesthetic category or a historical designation? Neither the question of the human subject nor that of the literary critical one has proved easy to settle. "Romanticism" in Jacques Khalip's stimulating, often thrilling study, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession, designates not only poetry, but essays, autobiography, and prose fiction. What's more, Khalip shows us the Romantic subject's very own withdrawal from categorization or specification--an elusiveness in the texts themselves that speaks to our own perpetual questioning of just what it is we study.