Andrew M. Stauffer. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-521-84675-7. Price: £45/US$80.

As early as the fifth century B.C., Hippocrates believed the brain to be the seat of human intelligence and emotion. Even today scientists and psychologists are still learning, however slowly, the nature of human emotion through a mapping of the human brain. It is no wonder then that the subject of anger has remained such a demanding and intriguing one that Andrew Stauffer has undertaken to explore this tenuous emotion as it appeared during the Romantic period. Readers of the January 29, 2007, issue of Time magazine can surely attest to the importance of this ancient topic on the dichotomy of the mind and body from the cover article “The Brain: A User’s Guide.” While leaving a study of the brain to neuroscientists, Stauffer instead attempts to map the history of anger by delineating its literary roots from the satirists of the Renaissance and from even earlier sources of Greek and Roman rhetorical writings, thereby illustrating how writers of the Romantic period classified, understood, and expressed anger during the turbulence of the French Revolutionary age. Stauffer builds his perspective of Romantic anger on the political concerns, historical contexts, and public consciousness developing in England during the 1790s through the forms of revolutionary rhetoric that began with Edmund Burke’s inflammatory discourse Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He focuses primarily on the effects of anger on the literature of this period to enhance the attention already given to the human emotions in studies of grief, melancholy, and fear. The six chapters that follow his introduction demarcate the emotional particularities of Romantic writing, directly addressing the nature of Romantic anger with a poignant examination of the values inherent in this emotion, values that consider the ethics and judgment of anger. The reader not only becomes increasingly aware of the importance of this study and its contribution to Romantic period literature, but is also immersed in a realm of inquiry that elucidates the imaginative production of ideas and their relevance to understanding the socio-political timeline of a revolutionary culture. In his opening chapter Towards Romantic anger Stauffer grounds his argument about the aesthetic development of Romantic anger on eighteenth-century issues of sensibility and the sublime in an attempt to show that “the Romantics inherited a tradition of thinking about (and writing in) anger that led to a seeming aesthetic paradox: how can a poet be filled with fury yet pleasingly terrified, enraged yet in control, angry yet a figure of sympathy to an audience?” (16). To explain this contradiction of the varying expressions of anger, Stauffer examines the historical evidence of classical writers such as Plato and Aristotle, Homer, Seneca, and Horace, as well as Longinus and others whose writing on anger and its control reveal conflicting attitudes that have arisen in the dramatic poetry and discourse of the Romantics. As Stauffer thoughtfully unravels these conflicts, he portrays the complications that anger creates in its magnitude and its intensity in both individual and public expressions and reactions. For instance, he cites the Stoic viewpoint of Senecan anger as an unsympathetic expression in contrast with Horatian grief and Aristotelian fear and pity that readily evoke sympathy from their audiences. Looking beyond the apparent contradictions, Stauffer delves into this paradox of rage and sublimity as he links Homer’s depiction of rage in the Iliad with Longinus’ writings on the sublime where anger is judged an acceptable expression of violent passion, clearly justifiable in Longinus’ words: “‘a wild gust of mad enthusiasm’” (22). Stauffer further develops his exposé of the rhetorical role anger played in eighteenth-century writing as he puzzles out the complicated threads of …