Sarah M. Zimmerman. Romanticism, Lyricism, And History (Book Review‪)‬

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xxii+233. $20.50 cloth/ $19.95 paper. How long ago it all now seems. It was the late 1980s, even the historicists still talked in terms of the Big Six of British romantic poetry, and there were rumors that a graduate student at Princeton named Sarah Zimmerman was working on "noncanonical writers." Now the John Clare Society has two sessions a year at MLA, presumably the average student specializing in romanticism in a major graduate program knows Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head" and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" and, rightly, respects them as central poems of the period. Zimmerman's project, no doubt conceived when noncanonicity was noncanonical, emerges at a time when noncanonicity is if anything taken for granted. But has what Zimmerman terms "the broadening of the field's traditional chronological and generic boundaries" (148) actually affected the ingrained paradigms of romantic literary study? In Romanticism, Lyricism, and History, Zimmerman, now Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, attempts just this task--the resetting of norms of romantic lyricism in the light of a knowledgeable assessment of the work of Clare, Smith, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.