Angela Esterhammer. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-521-89709-9. Price: US$99

Angela Esterhammer’s Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 contributes to an emerging trend in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural studies that focuses on the reception of a particular artistic genre in order to recast its importance for understanding the history of the period. Some landmarks of this incisive approach are James Johnson’s Listening in Paris (University of California 1996) as well as Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s edited volume, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton 2001). While the former locates changes in opera-going and listening to music from which to map French political and cultural history from the Ancien régime to bourgeois society, the latter takes up the question of print culture in nineteenth-century Europe to reveal the vivacity of transnational communities that were created through the practice of reading novels. In a similarly expansive vein, Esterhammer studies the reception, re-interpretation, and literary representation of the Italian improvvisatori and improvvisatrici in England, Germany, France, and Russia to argue that the figure of the spontaneous oral poet illuminates a constellation of issues germane to Romantic ideology and identity politics from 1750-1850. Setting her analysis against the cultural backdrop of pan-European print culture, Esterhammer proposes to examine the improviser as a site of exploration for a wide swath of concepts: genius, embodied and interactive performance art, authenticity, literary history, celebrity, national character, gender, and class. Like other scholars studying the mid- to late-nineteenth-century flâneur and prostitute, Esterhammer reads the improviser as a kind of nexus: an iconic figure whose ubiquity and metamorphoses in the literature and culture of Romanticism make it the ultimate Zeitgeist to be decoded. The work of unpacking so many tightly layered levels of meaning across several different national traditions would seem infinite. Yet Esterhammer’s compact, cosmopolitan approach demonstrates masterfully that improvisation is at the conceptual center of so many identity questions precisely because the improviser is ultimately a liminal figure. Improvisation blossomed into an important and popular form of performance art in Italy in the eighteenth century. A creative feat entailing both scholarly erudition and the ability to produce coherent, even titillating verse spontaneously before an audience, improvisation is a glittering ballroom dance between thought and verbal poetic expression that inspired much amazement and some skepticism among those observing it. Esterhammer opens her book by drawing readers into the bodily liveliness and affective energy of what it was like to attend an improvisation in Italy around the turn of the century. We are to imagine a theater in Rome in which a “slim, elegantly dressed Italian gentleman” appears on stage with a violinist and a young girl who draws three topics from an urn (1). The improviser begins composing ottava rima stanzas one after the other on the aurora borealis, the glory of ancient Rome, and the death of Hector until finally, exhausted “and “trembling,” he collapses into a chair while the mostly entranced crowd has erupted into giddy applause (2). It is against the backdrop of this most singular and spectacular event between an extemporaneous performer and his international crowd that Esterhammer sets the scene for an intriguing paradox: improvisation is “entirely the product of a literate society” and gained cultural traction in countries like England and France amidst “the ubiquity of print.” The rise of this oral performance genre thus coincided with European cultures “whose perspective and disposition [were] thoroughly shaped by reading and writing.” While scholars in the Romantic era disdained the “primitive” nature of a poetic form that was not written, Esterhammer suggests that the vogue of improvisation reflects collective nostalgia for a “more authentic, pre-literate past” (68). This tension between the written …