This book is full of deep paradoxes that radically refresh our perception of both Mikhail Bakhtin's theories and Romantic aesthetics in their mutual refractions. Bakhtinian approach to English Romanticism allows us to penetrate more deeply into the latter's personalistic and dialogical tenets. Furthermore, Walter Reed prompts us to see Mikhail Bakhtin himself as a disguised Romantic of the third generation ... Read morewhose critique is addressed primarily to traditional adversaries of Romanticism (such as Rationalists and Neoclassicists), but also to the Romantics of the first (early 19 c.) and second (decadents and symbolists of the turn of the 20 c.) generations. Bakhtin's critique of Romanticism is internal critique: of the less radical otherness from the standpoint of the more radical otherness. This book is a must read for all lovers of Romantic poetry and aesthetics.
Mikhail Epstein, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature, Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory, Director of the Center for Humanities Innovation, Durham University, UK Readers will come away from this book with a better grasp of Bakhtin's ideas and a pocketful of new perceptions about well-known Romantic poems. More than that, by putting Bakhtin into fruitful dialogue with it, Walter Reed has lit up the whole terrain of English and German Romanticism, not to mention literary theory. And beyond even that, his welcome departure from the prevailing "hermeneutic of suspicion," his generous and assimilative stance, his "poetics of trust," confirms what many of us still believe: that Romanticism was not just an ideological or "aesthetic" delusion but a worldview full of durable insights.
Michael K. Ferber, Professor of English, University of New Hampshire, USA Distracted by carnival and forever allowed a second chance by dialogue, it is easy to forget that those concepts were preceded by an ethical architectonics. Bakhtin’s cosmos is founded on the notion that dialogic knowledge is dependent on interactive personalism, Creator-creature relations, and the virtues of trust. In his new book, Walter Reed develops these early Bakhtinian ideas into nothing less than an architectonics of Romanticism: muscular, full of particulars, in which Bakhtin’s passion for the fragment is harnessed to a case for Otherness and literary genre becomes the universal binder for creativity. In the early 1920s, while his colleagues in Leningrad were talking Marxism, Bakhtin was holding seminars on his life-long hero, Friedrich Schelling. Reed suggests illuminating reasons why this was so. Both Bakhtin and Romanticism gain in potency and relevance.
Caryl Emerson, A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA The real treasures of Heffernan's book lie in the extraordinary series of readings and close analyses each of its chapters has to offer... For on the whole, this book stands as a great success, and should go a long way in establishing the importance of hospitality within the field of literary studies.
Peter Melville
Review 19
Can one Russian philosopher of communication help us to explain Romantic literature?...Fortunately for this book, Bakhtin is one of the great original thinkers of the past century, and Reed’s ambition to coordinate a theorist and a whole period is matched by his caution. Having taught Romantic writers in a comparative context for four decades, and having produced studies of the novel and of Bakhtin, Reed offers a grand scholarly synthesis in a relatively short study.
Review 19
In the past half-century Mikhail Bakhtin has been read in many ways, but he has yet to be widely accepted as a Romantic or a Romanticist, or at any rate a critic whom one can use to read Romanticism … Walter L. Reed’s remarkable new book, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin, prompts us to reconsider this view, and in typically Bakhtinian fashion does so from a position of outsidedness … it firmly establishes the relevance of Bakhtin to discussions of Romanticism and perhaps suggests ways of reading Bakhtin himself in the proper critical spirit, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin should be necessary reading for the respectful and suspicious alike.
Matthew Walker, Stanford University
Slavic and East European Journal
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