Mark David Rasmussen, ed. Renaissance Literature and Formal Engagements.

New York and Houndmills: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2002. vi + 225 pp. index. $55 (cl), $18.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-312-29359-3 (cl), 0-312-29360-7 (pbk).

This collection of essays has its origins in a Modern Language Association panel that Professor Rasmussen chaired in 1997, at which four of the contributors delivered papers. Since few MLA panels ever find their way into print, the appearance of this expanded and published volume (there are now nine essays in addition to Professor Rasmussen's introduction) testifies to the interest that its topic generates. All of the contributors want to reassert the primacy of literature itself--its imaginative, formal, and expressive properties--in the analysis and appreciation of Renaissance texts.

Obviously this emphasis goes against recent critical currents, which have focused on literary works mainly as exemplars of theoretical or cultural issues. As some of the contributors remind us, the formalist New Critics of earlier generations against whom later criticism rebelled were often not as anti-historical as they were painted, especially when the works they were analyzing were filled with extra-textual references, or language that itself required explanation. Nonetheless, most of the essays here are at pains to distinguish their kind of formalism from that of many past practitioners, with their unexamined assumptions about coherent poetic "speakers" and image patterns, and their implications that great works of literature (as well as their critics) stood outside of the social and political fray.

The essayists here are thus far more self-conscious than earlier formalists about their critical assumptions. The first contribution in the volume by Stephen Cohen is especially valuable in laying out some of the issues for a new, historically based formalism, and in defining its relation to the anti-formalist practices associated with "new historicism," as well as to the Marxist-based cultural criticism of Raymond Williams and others. For Cohen, the analysis of the formal properties of Renaissance literature (with attention to the political and social implications that formal elements themselves express) is justified partly by the critical manuals of the period. Their didactic, socially utilitarian emphases never slighted the imagination and "poesy," with its various communicative devices. This closely argued and lucidly presented paper should be useful to specialists as well as students.

Most of the other essays try to make the case for the study of literary form and language through the analysis of particular texts, but they do so with the disclaimer that they are not practicing "mere" close readings of the older variety. The focal texts are test cases for larger critical propositions. I will mention only a few. Heather Dubrow takes the country-house poem as a prime example of a genre in which formal patterning reveals social and political concerns. Paul Alpers' carefully nuanced essay "Learning from the New Criticism" takes two or three of Shakespeare's sonnets to show what some of their best readers (Yvor Winters, Stephen Booth, Helen Vendler) have been able to reveal about them by paying close attention to their language, and what they have overstated by insisting on formal coherence and unitary, motivated speakers. For him the most compelling critical model is that of Kenneth Burke, with his emphasis on rhetoric. One of the most original and suggestive contributions in the volume is that of Mark Womack on Shakespearean wordplay, and it is hard to do it justice in a short review. Through analogies with the formal elements of painting Womack argues that puns--especially those which are submerged or of which the reader/hearer is not fully aware--contribute to the pleasures of literature, the aim of which is not primarily to deliver paraphrasable messages. In one of the book's final essays, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser discusses her experiences with close reading in the classroom, showing how essential aural effects are to transmitting poetry's most basic effects in ordering temporal experience.

Since "New Criticism" has become such a simplified object of scorn, it is useful to be reminded, as this collection does, how varied and sophisticated earlier textual criticism has actually been. William Empson, with his focus on multivalent meanings, is cited by several of the contributors, and there are mentions of some of the earlier "greats," such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, who brought the European humanistic tradition to bear on the close examination of literary styles, making them windows on the cultures that produced them. The volume's afterword by Richard Strier summarizes clearly why students and teachers of literature who are not ready to cede their discipline to "cultural studies" need to consider the issues this volume raises: without some reasoned belief in the value of close attention to texts, including their formal features, the idea of literature itself is hard to sustain.

BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS

Rutgers University