Anthony John Harding, The Reception of Myth in English Romanticism. University of Missouri Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8262-1007-4 (hardback). Price: £ 38 ($39.95).

This ambitious work attempts to construct what the author calls "a truly historicist myth criticism" by exploring how several Romantic writers "understood and received myth" as well as "what they understood 'the mythic' to be" (7). Harding convincingly argues that "myth" is itself a historically shifting term and that any study of the relationship between Romantic poetry and myth requires diligent historicizing and contextualization. At the heart of Harding's project is an effort to reestablish "myth criticism" within contemporary literary scholarship by revealing its interconnectedness with current post-structuralist, feminist, and new historicist theories. Working against the conceptualization of "myth criticism" as "a conservative resistance to the more innovative kinds of literary analysis," Harding attempts to unite "the study of myth with a deconstructive, or ideologically alert, approach to the use of myth in Romantic writing" (259). Harding's introductory chapter grounds his study in the works of several earlier myth critics such as Hans Blumenberg, Northrop Frye, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Ted Spivey. Harding takes to task several of these writers for their inability to successfully historicize myth and demonstrate the way in which myth is constantly in a state of transformation and reinterpretation. He argues that to focus on a mythological archetype is to efface the ideological, cultural, and historical conditions that inspire a writer to reappropriate and reinterpret any particular myth. Harding's methodology is indeed in line with "more innovative kinds of literary analysis" as it attempts to deessentialize myth by revealing the slippages and overlaps between myth, history, and ideology. Harding is not so much interested in the "myth traditions themselves," but in "the interpretive, appropriative strategy" a writer employs when incorporating myth into a literary work (17). This study intelligently gestures towards a politics of complexity as it values the "many different interpretive possibilities" myths provided Romantic writers (18). Although Harding's study tends to embrace multiplicity, indeterminacy and complexity, it occasionally undermines its own critical agenda. When in Chapter Five Harding discusses Coleridge's "Christabel," his analysis becomes disappointingly monocausal and empiricist. Many studies of "Christabel," he argues, over-emphasize the poem's affinity to the Gothic novel: "["Christabel's"] remoteness from novelistic narrative is apparent in many of its most important episodes, not the least of which is the frightening metamorphosis of Christabel (in Part II) into a stumbling, hissing double of Geraldine." Harding concedes that "[n]o one expects a Gothic tale to obey canons of literary realism, but something is happening here that refuses to be confined even within the rather extravagant parameters of credibility that apply to the Gothic prose tales Coleridge could have known." Harding then attempts to connect the poem to myth, arguing that "[b]oth events and characters are polysemous in the way we usually expect myth to be polysemous" (142). Such a conclusion ignores the fact that we would be hard pressed to find a character more polysemous than Matthew Lewis's demonic changeling Rosario/Matilda and its many parallels in other Gothic prose narratives. Harding's claim that "[t]he poem is richer in significance if read as a reinterpretation of [the Genesis] myth than if treated as Gothic romance or, psychoanalytically, as the self-revelation of the poet's sexual anxieties" reductively robs the poem of the multiple interpretations and origins that his study seems to embrace elsewhere. The analysis of "Christabel" would be more true to the interesting methodology Harding establishes in the introduction and early chapters were it to consider the poem in relation to myth and romance and psychology, as well as the significant slippages between the three. The majority of Harding's book, however, does succeed in presenting myth as a complex, shifting, indeterminate site of ideological …