Ira Livingston, Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-8166-2795-9. Price: £17.95

Ira Livingston's Arrow of Chaos is an ambitious attempt to engage some refreshingly new ways of thinking about Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, fractal geometry, and chaos, amongst a host of other topics that flash across the shifting surface of this challenging book. The "Preface" aptly describes the book as a "'chaology of knowledge' insofar as it is a study of chaos as a logic at work in epistemological processes. 'Romanticism' and 'postmodernity' name the blurry beginnings and ends of a modernity that is forever chasing its own tail" (vii). What is admirable about Arrow is that it does not use chaos in particular, or science in general, as an authorizing discourse that provides some "objective" point of view from which assertions are made. Rather, Arrow casts a postmodern eye over the whole of its diverse subject matter. At its best, Arrow offers an effective critique of the notion of the Enlightenment masternarrative without producing its own masternarrative in turn. At times strongly echoing Deleuze and Guattari, Arrow delightfully negotiates a path between freewheeling postmodern speculations and provocative close readings of works as diverse as Wordsworth's Prelude , Elisabeth Hands' "Mad Heifer" poem, Wallace Stevens's "Of Mere Being," Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (yes, the film too), and David Cronenberg's Rabid—but are we still talking about Romanticism? If nothing else, Livingston's book is excitingly and even shockingly different from any other recent book focused largely on Romanticism. Paradoxically, it is because of the very success of its own project that Arrow runs the risk of not entering into a discussion of what many of its potential readers (Romanticists presumably) would think of as "Romanticism." What, then, does Arrow presume to do? As Livingston himself defines it, his book implicates For Livingston, "fractal logics" affords us another way to think of an underlying sense of organic structure attributed to Romanticism in the middle of this century. Rather than presenting itself as knowledge, the form of chaos manifests itself as a critical approach that identifies a rapidly proliferating disease, capable of endless mutations to avoid disciplinary capture in Arrow . The "hypertextual 'asides'" aren't hypertextual at all, but rather self-contained, loosely-related vignettes or illustrations that appear in boxes separated from the main body of text. Curiously, these vignettes at times give Arrow a playful feel; in other instances, however, they make Arrow read like an introductory psychology or sociology text book, seemingly assuming either boredom or the attention span of an insect on the part of their readers. Either way, Arrow's asides are indicative of its staunch refusal to act like a traditional volume of literary criticism, and, unfortunately, this refusal will probably raise the greatest questions for many readers as to its practical value. Given Arrow's broad ambitions, it necessarily thinks of Romanticism as more than a historical, material, and/or cultural group of practices. Since various forms of the disciplinary power to define a discourse are Arrow's critical targets-of-choice, it is not surprising that a significant part of what is at stake in the book rides upon challenging the largely historical character of contemporary studies in Romanticism. Livingston is direct in his imputation that "[u]nless Romantic periodization is relativized by studies that do more than put literature 'into historical context'—that instead serves histories of the present—Romanticism is falsely monumentalized into an intricate network of fixations since 'outgrown'" (10). In other words, the value of Romanticism as something to be studied is not that it gives us a clearer picture of a historically-specific segment of culture that produces literary artifacts and vice versa, but that Romanticism offers a way to think of a whole range …