James Walter Caufield. Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism. Farnham, Surrey, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2012. ISBN: 978-140942651. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

The first significant attempt to overcome Matthew Arnold was performed by Arnold himself in the author’s preface to the 1853 edition of his Poems where he explains at length his omission of “Empedocles Upon Etna” from the new collection. While the poem was accurate in its delineation of the Sicilian Greek Empedocles’s feelings, Arnold explains, the poem did not succeed in inspiriting or rejoicing the reader. Thus, Arnold’s debut as a critic begins with an act of renunciation and an ethical claim for the necessity of a poetics of optimism and delight. The stated aim of James Walter Caufield’s recent study of Arnold is “simply to demonstrate that philosophical pessimism undergirds the whole of Arnold’s work and that his thoroughgoing ethic of renunciation in fact constitutes the axis on which all of his texts turn” (201). There is nothing simple about attempting such a demonstration. First of all, Caufield believes we have more than a century’s worth of critical prejudice to overcome before we can properly appreciate Matthew Arnold as an ethically significant and ever-relevant cultural critic. He offers Overcoming Matthew Arnold as a passionately researched antidote to this inherited prejudice. The movement of the book is supposed to place Arnold’s ethics—by which Caufield means, Arnold’s “first principle of conduct, ‘renouncement’”—in dialogue with “important trends in modern religious and philosophical thought” (4), and to render transparent Arnold’s position within “the long-obscured nineteenth-century tradition of philosophical pessimism” (4). Citing a passage from Culture and Anarchy (1869) in which Arnold describes himself as “a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement,” Caufield identifies the final term by which Arnold’s Liberalism is tempered as the “long-neglected first principle of his ethics” (1). Caufield would have done well to define this key term—“renouncement”—more thoroughly for the purposes of his study at the outset. Instead, the book launches into the extensive preperatory work that Caufield deems necessary before his analysis of Arnold’s ouevre in terms of “renouncement” can begin. First, he must help the twenty-first-century reader overcome certain prejudices against Arnold’s thought by revealing the common historical and philosophical lacunae that have encouraged such fallacious critical presuppositions over the years. And so, Chapters 2 through 4 are devoted to an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) treatment of the “strategic appropriations and caricatural reductions that obscure our view of Arnoldian ethics” from the mid 1860s to the present (12). In this substantial section of the book, Caufield identifies five significant phases of Arnoldian caricature, these being “the Victorian logicians, the Strachey-Eliot interlude, the moment of Scrutiny, the New Left turn, and the postcolonial Arnold” (48). The earlier phases attack Arnold for his “defective logic and puny eristic efforts” (48); the latter phases simplify him for the purpose of partisan leftist critique. While the literature review performed in the opening half (or more) of the book is thorough, to a fault, it often proceeds more as an ambling rehearsal of everything that has been thought and said about Arnold than as a strategic selection of the best examples from Arnold’s lengthy and interesting critical heritage for the purpose of establishing a critical point. Part of the goal of this survey, it seems, is to demonstrate the continuity between the early critical depictions of Arnold as an effeminate rhetorician incapable of coherent or systematic critical thinking, and contemporary attacks on intellectual historians like Stephan Collini by recent cultural and political theorists. Most importantly, the hemorrhage of hostile criticism that Arnold’s work has faced over more than a century is offered to show that we have inherited a skewed rendering of Arnold’s thought. For example, through extensive close readings …