Denise Gigante. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Book Review‪)‬

Denise Gigante. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 302. $40.00. Impressively broad in its interdisciplinary research and intrepid in its call to redefine our critical paradigms, Gigante's book is also lucidly readable in its arguments. Those arguments will surely provoke lively debate. Had it been published only under its subtitle, "Organic Form and Romanticism," an unsuspecting reader might think her book simply returns to an earlier era of Romantic literary studies innocent of the critical, skeptical counter-readings of de Man's deconstruction and McGann's "Romantic ideology." It does indeed urge such a return, though with a significant difference. For above this subtitle is the apparently simple but enigmatic one-word title "Life." Tracing the European turn from mechanical to organic models during the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries, Gigante analyzes the resulting debates among empiricists and philosophers over what constitutes "Life" in a biological organism--and the consequences of these debates for the arts and for society more broadly. "The problem with Romantic organicism as it is traditionally understood," she proposes, "is that ir leaves out the dynamics of power under-writing unexpected forms of both nature and art" (6). To explore this "dynamics of power," she pursues generative energies from their literal, material, and often minutely particular origins in sea-creatures, chick embryos, and plants, then develops a critical vocabulary for analyzing such power as both content and form in four apparently formless English poems: Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, Blake's Jerusalem, Percy Shelley's The Witch of Atlas, and John Keats's Lamia. Each poem, interpreted through a critical vocabulary drawn from scientific developments, occupies a single extended chapter, though she reaches out to many more poetic works than these. Coleridge, the poet-critic-philosopher-scientific thinker, is everywhere with an apt, unifying statement.