Richard C. Sha. Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0801890413. Price: US$55

Richard Sha’s second book presents an argument about the perversity of Romantic aesthetics so compelling and so obvious in retrospect that we can only wonder why it took Romanticists this long to make the case. Sha argues that Foucault’s history of sexuality incorrectly emphasizes Victorian compliance over Romantic resistance and that its understanding of the evolution of discursive power needs to make all ideas of sexual liberation seem like quaint delusion (43). As a result, Sha maintains, we have underestimated both the complexity of Romantic entanglements with medical knowledge of the body and the degree to which changing ideas of human sexuality have informed aesthetic practice. Specifically, an increasingly undeniable gap between sexual pleasure and reproductive function encouraged the Romantics to recognize and resist the forces of hetero-normativity. The subsequent move from corporeal to aesthetic was logical if not unproblematic. When poems become organic, in other words, aesthetics presupposes biology, and William Hunter and Immanuel Kant can be seen to share a purposiveness without purpose, a recognition that pleasure without function is an unavoidably natural unnaturalism common to art and bodies alike. Put another way, when the Romantics turned away from rational aesthetics, they turned toward a perversity that sought to blur sacrosanct boundaries between poet and audience as it challenged inherited ideas about anatomy as destiny. Sha makes his case by offering up detailed readings of the science of sexual pleasure. Sha’s first three chapters consider the changing arguments of neurology, botany, natural history, biology, and anatomy. His fourth chapter then focuses on the impact of this science on Romantic aesthetics before the book turns in its two finals chapters to Blake and Byron. Chapter One, “Romantic Science and the Perversification of Sexual Pleasure,” explains the emergence of vitalism, the shift from generation to reproduction, and the changing relationship between anatomy and physiology. William Hunter occupies central stage, and Sha carefully situates his work in relation to that of Compte de Buffon, the Abbé Spallanzani, Albrecht von Haller, Erasmus Darwin, Franz Gall, and J. G. Spurzheim, among others. Sha’s purpose is first to identify those moments when sexual pleasure becomes unhinged from reproductive function and second to anticipate the repercussions of that separation for aesthetic theory. With confidence and precision, Sha opens up a whole world of scientific inquiry largely ignored by literary scholars. His careful study of materials in the National Library of Medicine obviates the need for a top-down argument, and we are treated to a dazzling array of new authors, new arguments, and new ideas presented with detail and clarity. Sha’s project, in other words, is properly archival, and nowhere do we sense the violent imposition of present upon the past. In Chapter Two, Historicizing Perversion, Sha continues his exploration of the complex connections between pleasure and function. He examines ideas of locus and instinct and destabilizes arguments, both then and now, about the identifiable ground of reproductive pleasure. George Cuvier’s comparative anatomy is contrasted with the transcendental anatomy of Geoffroy St. Hilaire as Sha traces the emergence of ideas of perversion that search for the origins of their own pathologies hither and yon. Contemporary scholarship is engaged throughout, and we are not allowed to forget that the history of perversion is also the history of modernity. Chapter Two concludes: As this passage suggests, Perverse Romanticism is carefully and at times densely argued. Sha can move quickly from point to point, intertwining arguments about primary and secondary materials and challenging conventional ideas in several different ways at once. In Chapter Three, for example, Sha expands our understanding of Thomas Laqueur’s argument about the transition from a …