Hoeveler, Diane

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of1-1-1998Review of Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author bySonia HofkoshDiane HoevelerMarquette University, diane.hoeveler@marquette.eduPublished version. Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 29 (1998): 222. Publisher Link. © 1998 BostonUniversity Editorial Institute. Used with permission.manistic scholarship in Germany has been through several cycles of decline and re-emergence, and Marchand's ability to delineate them is impressive. Marchand describes the gen-esis and early establishment of the institutions that would nurture the professionalized fields of philological and arche-ological study, the challenges to classical study from Nietz-sche, Schliemann, educational reform movements, and Sonia Hofkosh, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge Univ. Pr. , 1998) , xi + 188. $54.95. A Review by Diane Long Hoeveler Marquette University Sonia Hofkosh's Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers six carefully argued, beautifully written chapters on "the way invisible girls are scripted into romantic tradition in particularly material configurations-as bodies, among ob-jects, like books, in the marketplace-even as they appear to be overlooked or, what may amount to the same thing, looked over" (3). Hofkosh's study focuses on texts that have themselves been overlooked: Mary Shelley's gift-annual sto-ries, Sarah Hazlitt'sJoumal, documents relating to the defini-tion of prostitutes and milliners, and the popular ladies' magazines of the era. Examining these marginalized texts, Hofkosh argues, allows her to interrogate the "ideologies of the everyday, the inscape of romanticism , by which I mean those suppositions about value that reverberate not just in the sanctioned forms of High Culture-finished products, public pronouncements-but also through the most (seem-ingly) ordinary occasions of social transaction" (8). Hofkosh 's thesis expands and reverberates throughout the book, and each time she states it the book takes on fur-ther depth and nuance. Early in the study she notes that "disciplinary definitions such as 'High Romantic' or 'Poetry' or 'Literature,' have ignored or devalued work by women not because such work did not exist, was not consequential or, even, 'good,' but precisely because it was so formative, so re-sponsive to and resonant with the literate culture 's emerging concerns, desires, aspirations .... " (l]). Later in the text, Hofkosh again elaborates on this, her main point: "What I want to suggest is that the very judgments which comprise that [high Romantic] tradition and claim for it an historical order and consistency are informed by (among other things) a sexual politics that is as embedded in critical history as it is in contemporary discussions of authorship and audience and in other overlapping cultural institutions as well" (116). Hofkosh actually charts in this study the forces that op-posed the privatization of the masculine imaginary. And so she concentrates on prostitutes and circulating libraries, commerce in women's writings and women's bodies, and "on 222 German prehistorical studies, and finally its evolution in the 20'" century. In the end Marchand summarizes the various threads of decline as having been "specialization, institu-tional inertia, demographic and economic changes, national-ism, hyperaestheticization, and the social irresponsibility of those who benefited from the perpetuation of 'disinterested' learning" (374). the way women and images of them function to describe a model of writing that the male author represses. Such an ex-ploration is based on the interplay between private and pub-lic realms, between the individual personality and the culture of production and consumption" (38). When Hofkosh ex-amines Lockhart and Hunt on the status of women milliners, she concludes that this textual debate reveals an anxiety about "th e visibility of women's labor in an industrialized market economy, an economy in which the sites of produc-tion and patterns of consumption are shifting and signs of value, like capital, a re being redistributed and reconsoli-dated" (67). Hofkosh then shifts her argument from manual labor to literary labor, stating that what is at stake in the ab-jection of lower-class women and their productions is "a poli-tics of production that claims authorship as a sign of subjectivity, of inspiration, knowledge, judgment, power, as well as a p olitics of consumption, of who reads and values what books and why, what counts as significant writing" (68). Hofkosh 's book is as persuasive and well-grounded as any I have seen on this issue. My only problem with the text is that it is at least a decade overdue . Would anyone, in fact, dispute her thesis? I think not. New Historicist readings of marginalized historical texts have been current for over a decade, while "sexual politics" is a term borrowed from Kate Millett who first coined it over two decades ago. In short, Hofkosh 's project is not new nor are many of these chapters, one of which first appeared in 1988. The two new chapters-one on milliner girls and the magazines and one on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park-are valuable discussions that lend depth and substance to Hofkosh's earlier work on Keats and the Bluestockings; Lamb, Coleridge and the circulating li-brary; Byron and Scott; Mary Shelley; and the Hazlitts' strange divorce discourse. The chapter on milliners, in fact, seems to me to embody the newest and most promising di-rection that new historicist work is moving: a genuine en-gagement with supposedly obscure texts that actually explains the crucial absences and gaps in the dominant dis-course system. 

Review of \u3cem\u3eSexual Politics and the Romantic Author\u3c/em\u3e by Sonia Hofkosh

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Review of \u3cem\u3eSexual Politics and the Romantic Author\u3c/em\u3e by Sonia Hofkosh

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