Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry

Abstract

Reviews Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, ed., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990. xxiii + 351 pp. $47.50 cloth, $18.95 paper. by Stanley Stewart In the Introduction to Soliciting Interpretation, Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus justify the subtitle of the book by ascribing theoretical affinities to the critics included, thus providing a rationale for their assembly of a dozen essays, which are, with the exception of Maureen Quilligan's essay on the poems from Mary Wroth's Urania (1621), on "major authors" (Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and Milton). What, then, is the principle of inclusion in an anthology which purports to react against the "high formalism" of predecessors (T.S. Eliot, for instance), to think of "the relationship between literature and history in a new way" (p. x), and to challenge the "New Critical canon" (p. xiv) — that historical consequence of settled opinion on "intrinsic excellences" (p. xiv). As for the book's organization, the editors concede that, although they have grouped the essays which "might fruitfully be considered together," other arrangements — or even a random mix of the twelve parts — might serve as well. So one section is "political," even though the assumption seems to be that all criticism — even criticism which purports to escape the "real world" of economic and political strife by resorting to an aesthetics of "art for art's sake" — is of necessity political. The editors praise the "new historicists" for having overcome the limits of criticism unmindful of "structures of political authority," past and present, implying that they have accomplished this critical wonder by a mere shift in reading interest: Thus, while quite eclectic in their use of theoretical models, many recent critics find most consistently helpful those writers who can help articulate those 74Book Reviews [that is, the "new"] strategies: Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, Irigaray. Critics now working on Renaissance literature are far more likely than their predecessors to interpret their task as démystification rather than celebration, maintaining a skeptical distance from the beliefstructures of the writers they discuss, (p. xi) The rhetorical difficulty here seems to derive from a perceptible slip the editors make from their earlier claim that the "new historicists" are somehow more self-aware — more alert to the presuppositions underlying critical statements as critical statements —than were their predecessors. But the list of readings set out above, and the new claim asserted (that the list of "helpful" writers "help" these critics articulate their own "strategies") seems by its circularity to bring the earlier claim of self-awareness into question. In addition, if "démystification" is a serious concern here, it is hard to see why names of the heavyweights of analytic thought, who have made "démystification" the central focus of their work (such names as Moore, Russell, Frege, Carnap, Quine, and above all Ludwig Wittgenstein), are so conspicuously missing. Some of these essays exhibit an independence of thought unrelated to the privileged list, while others, although clearly influenced by these readings, do not seem to have been "helped" at all. For instance, Harvey and Maus praise Jonathan Goldberg "for counteracting an ideological system that uses aestheticism or spirituality to conceal politically oppressive tactics" (p. x) by posing what he calls "fundamental questions about the kinds of narrativizations that produce conventional literary history" (p. 199). But Goldberg's "Dating Milton" proceeds as if terms such as "conventional," "literary," and "history" designate agreed-upon sets, the boundaries of which may be easily drawn on the basis of examples from the Milton Variorum and Mary Ann Radzinowicz's "Wordsworthian" study of the development of Milton's mind. As for evidence, Goldberg presents nothing new, but, rather, rehearses the known facts (or the lack of them) concerning the date of composition of Sonnet 19. Rather than credit new or old documentary evidence, Goldberg asserts the value of what he calls a "reading" which imagines the "possibility" ("the possibility that I am imagining" [p. 201]) that Milton revised the poem over a period of a dozen years. Book Reviews75 Goldberg talks about "the false grounds of traditional historical scholarship" (p. 205), rightly or wrongly...