Maureen N. McLane. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 282. $60.00. The critical study of literature draws much of its prestige from the assumption that it offers a unique perspective on the meaning of the "human." With more or less of self-consciousness, it sustains itself through an implicit faith that literature is a distinctively human activity and even defines the human as such. The proper study of mankind, as Pope might have said, is literature. Romanticism, in particular, plays a crucial role in the formulation and institutionalization of what one might call literary humanism. For romanticism (to summarize somewhat schematically) literature is the language of imagination, and imagination is, as it were, humanity's watermark. So, for example, in Percy Shelley's "Defense of Poetry," "Poetry ... may be defined to be 'the expression of the Imagination' and poetry is connate with the origin of man" (my emphasis). Of course, this and other, similar pronouncements inevitably undergo dialectical transformation in the texts of the romantics and their critics, and recent scholarship on romanticism has done much to show how even romanticism's most idealizing formulations concerning the nexus of humanity, imagination, and literature (or poetry, usually--as in Shelley--the preferred term) belong to wider discursive networks that include economics, anthropology, and even biology. That is, it has done much to show how what is called "human" and what is called "poetry" has to be understood according to historical criteria that put the mutually defining authority of both terms in doubt. Maureen McLane's Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species contributes to this ongoing scholarship by asking, with astute forthrightness, what precisely the "human" signifies to the canonical romantic authors. For McLane, the romantic investment in the "distinctively human faculty" of imagination is not only informed by the disciplines of philosophy and psychology but "should be assessed in light of transformation in the natural as well as the human sciences" (31). She shows how the works of authors such as Wordsworth, Scott, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Keats respond to a conception of humanity that was undergoing radical redefinition in debates concerning political economy, ethnography, and natural science. More particularly, she shows how their works respond to the growing intellectual hegemony of utilitarianism--and the concomitant marginalization of literature--across all of these disciplines. (The argument often relies on the work of Alan Bewell and Frances Ferguson, both of whom McLane acknowledges repeatedly.) Underlining the increasingly scientistic context of romantic writing, Romanticism and the Human Sciences offers fresh perspectives on canonical texts and ultimately seeks to sketch a position that both recontextualizes romantic arguments and remains sensitive to how those arguments themselves test the boundaries of any merely contextual reading. Ultimately, like the romantics she reads, McLane remains deeply committed to a "defense" of literature against the encroaching authority of other discourses though she still aims to situate that defense on the far side of a critical rereading of romanticism: "... this project wishes to elude and thus to criticize both neoconservative humanist pieties and the anti- or post-humanist contempt for literature" (3).
