Kevis Goodman. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. ISBN: 0521831687. Price: £45/US$75.

In an admirably subtle study, Kevis Goodman argues that we should take a new look at the continuity of the georgic mode in British poetry by way of historical media rather than, say, with more generic eyes. Goodman’s thoughtful book is not a study of genre; she is more interested in treating the persistence of the georgic as a “subtle underpresence” in poems. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism would rather have us productively think of “medium consciousness as distinct from an awareness of form” (18). This study’s distinctive contribution to our understanding of how British poetry reads, or is read by, history is directly tied to its wider and subtler range, where Goodman situates her reading within the history of ideas, affect, and broadly speaking, media theory (10). Her approach here is novel and important for our understanding of eighteenth-century poetry and Romantic historicism, and this book goes a long way in explaining the seemingly peculiar post-Augustan persistence and value of the georgic mode – something not quite explained in, and often ignored by, previous studies. Goodman shows us that by way of georgic verses, we are at once pointed to a heightened medium-consciousness, which finally opens the work, and by extension the heart (the receptive consciousness), in complicated and affective ways to the world outside and to the pains of history. The georgic as such remains one of the significant “channels of sensation and perception” through which eighteenth-century readers and writers could begin to know and feel the strangeness of their world (22). Beginning often from the hurt that history allegedly gives to Romantic consciousness, we have become accustomed to criticisms of georgic nature in terms of how it hides history in favor of the self. Goodman, however, wants to complicate this reading: first, by refusing to see the georgic only as a genre that vanishes after the 1760s; and second, by arguing that despite the productiveness of the negative hermeneutic, it is time to ask whether this sort of poetry does, in fact, “offer a substantial register of history” (3). At the heart of this matter is a critical problem about how history is registered in poems; in the georgic, this concerns a significant failure of recognition and reception, especially when we are presented with what is turned up, though not named specifically, as history. The main argument throughout this careful book is that, rather than simply burying history by turning it into nature, the georgic also ‘turns up’ historical presentness as “upleasurable feeling” and “sensory discomfort” (3). The material georgic versus (a Virgilian pun on furrows and poetic lines) are shown to be complex sites that open up “sensible paths,” which might communicate, not an “idea” of history, but some affective sense of “the flux of historical process” (3). Following Raymond Williams, Goodman is after this unsettled and unsettling “presentness” of historical process in georgic representation as it is distinct from “presence” in terms of immediacy. The crucial tension in this study for our sense of history is therefore appropriately located in media, between knowing and feeling. Goodman’s persistent question remains: does some sense of historical presentness remain in modes of perception even though it escapes direct articulation and thought? The answer, it seems, is yes, but that what remains is a whole lot of noise. This book is a welcome complication of more recent provocative readings of the British georgic that would see it primarily bound to the problem of enclosure, where the georgic is shown to be an ideological form implicated in an authoritative and “backward-looking vision” (Crawford 103). Goodman turns away from this focus …