Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson, Ed. The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading (Book Review‪)‬

Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson, ed. The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. viii+374. $55.00. This volume is the expansion of a special SiR issue (35-4 [1996]) on the work and legacy of Geoffrey Hartman, which had featured original contributions by Geoffrey Hartman, Frances Ferguson, Alan Liu, Paul Fry, Kevis Goodman, J. Douglas Kneale, and Lucy Newlyn, as well as an interview of Hartman conducted by Cathy Caruth. To these have now been added several more contributions, and the cumulative result is an impressive Festschrift responding to and inflecting some of Hartman's most enduring preoccupations (Wordsworth, the practice and value of interpretive criticism, the traumatic experience of history, and the humanizing force of the aesthetic). As Helen Reguiero Elam shows in her lucid introduction, over the more than five decades now spanned by his career, Hartman has established himself as one of the most thoughtful, perceptive, and humane commentators on literature, acquiring in the process a truly Arnoldian stature. Anchored in an almost unrivaled breadth of literary and cultural reference, his writings proceed with great wisdom when engaging and recognizing literature as the catalyst of (rather than obstacle to) our own evolving human intelligence and critical projects. Most contributors to this fine volume follow Hartman's sympathetic and generous critical imagination and--for the most part eschewing any servile or facile imitative gestures--extend Hartman's underlying vision of criticism as being about the ethics of reading. Needless to say, a volume as wide-ranging in its topics and diverse as regards the intellectual temperaments of its contributors can hardly be reviewed in exhaustive detail. In what follows, then, I will focus on a number of contributions (by Bruns, Ferguson, Frye, Goodman, Hartman, Liu, and de Graef) that seem especially probing, stimulating, and of enduring relevance even a full decade after their initial publication.