406 Besprechungen / Reviews of the situation. Women were demonized as howling widows or conniving wives who selfishly wheedled their husbands into a bad business. Lastly, Weckel explains the loss of journals targeted at women or edited by women as a positive decision (women no longer needed separate journals, but could read the mainstream ones) with a negative outcome (women lost this one public forum). All four of these essays explain some aspect of how conditions were made bad for women despite very good intentions: the patriarchy as a bad situation rather than as an active conspiracy against women. Essays which show instead how women were actually empowered in the era include, in addition to Habermas’s, Gleixner’s on religious discourse and Aalsted’s on fashion as self-expression. Rabuzzi describes a sensational divorce case in which the wife was by no means the loser in a complex scenario of class differences and connections. Other essays explain a particular aspect of the way things tended to worsen for women in the era: Hüchteler on the gender politics of poverty, for example, or Michalik on changing laws regarding infanticide. Interestingly, she finds that the murder of illegitimate babies (as opposed to legitimate ones) was less severely punished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but for different reasons: under Frederick’s enlightened law, the mother’s fear of poverty and of loss of honour was acknowledged, and measures were taken to limit these dangers rather than to punish the mother more severely. In contrast, late nineteenth-century law explained its leniency by saying that such a baby belonged to no father, anyway, and that infanticide was preferable to making legal claims on the alleged father: the infanticidal mother at least showed some sense of shame. Schäfer-Bossert has interesting material on the active «cleansing» of religious art in Catholic and Protestant churches to eliminate powerful women figures. Ceranski gives a very clear and concise account of women’s opportunities to participate in science, and how institutionalization eliminated the already limited access women had to scientific knowledge and pursuits. Only one essay focuses on men: Stanislo on physical education. As is inevitable in a volume such as this, the results are somewhat uneven. Possibly partly due to the linguistic difficulties of working between two languages, the stylistic level varies considerably, and not all the essays are equally convincing. Some jump right into the topic, while others introduce the material as if for the newcomer, so it is hard to tell what the intended readership is. Gray’s, Dawson’s, Ceranski’s and Rabuzzi’s articles stand out as particularly clearly written, and could be appropriate material to give to students (NB: the introduction to the volume itself is not amongst these.) A final criticism might be that in this volume, with one exception, «gender» is still largely taken to mean «women» only: perhaps we have indeed come a long way in Gender Studies since this volume was apparently first conceived. University of Glasgow Laura Martin L EON C HAI : Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. 283 pp. $ 55. In Athenäum Fragment No. 216, Friedrich Schlegel announces that «the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendencies of Besprechungen / Reviews 407 the age.» There is certainly an important sense in which revolution - be it political, philosophical, or literary - shaped European Romanticism. It makes sense, therefore, that Chai might explore Romantic theory as it developed in literature, philosophy, and the sciences against the backdrop of concrete historical moments of the French Revolution. The story of Romanticism that emerges from Chai’s account is broad and sweeping. He does not focus on any particular national tradition (say English, German, or French) or any particular period of Romanticism (say, early, middle, or late), but instead blends in strands of each of these traditions. There are some casualties of Chai’s broad sweep. For example, no attention at all is given to important shifts in thought of the individual Romantic thinkers whose work he addresses, or to the important differences between various European Romanticisms. Even more problematic is the absence of a clear account of what exactly counts as «Romantic.» Still, one advantage of Chai’s broad, inclusive canvas of Romanticism is his focus on an important thread that does indeed connect various stages and aspects of European Romanticism: the fate of theory in Romanticism. This is the thread that lends sharpness to this suggestive, original study, in which there is also a high degree of granularity. Almost every chapter begins on a particular day, in a particular place, and the author uses this particularity to tell his story of how Romantic theory, or forms of reflexivity, developed in Europe’s revolutionary era. This particularity, Chai argues, exists simply because Romantic theory «grew directly out of concrete, material circumstances» (217). The book’s nine chapters can be broken down into three sections. There is an attempt, first of all, to lay the groundwork for an account of Romantic theory. This section, which comprises the first three chapters, opens at the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then moves to a discussion of Rousseau’s influence on Percy Shelley, where Chai provides an excellent analysis of «The Triumph of Life.» Throughout the volume, the interpretations of literary texts are impressively detailed and nuanced, and here he shows us how this piece offers «a glimpse not only of what theory meant to Shelley but of what it might have meant to an entire era» (20). In order to know what theory might have meant to an entire era, we need, of course, some working definition of theory, and in the first chapter the reader is offered several accounts: it is «a kind of insight that’s made possible precisely by a perspective that’s aware of itself as perspective» (14); it is «how we represent what we don’t yet know. As such it gives a form or shape to our quest for knowledge» (19). He is careful to connect theory to knowledge, and the approach serves him well, though some problems with Chai’s account of theory arrive in the following chapters, when he abandons the connection between theory and knowledge and begins to speak as if theory gives rise to facts - and can even create military victory. In the second chapter we find ourselves in Hadrian’s villa «sometime around A.D. 135» (21) with the yearning and nostalgia for that lost Golden Age of the Greeks that characterized so much of Romantic thought. Two different German Friedrichs figure prominently in this discussion: Friedrich Schegel, and Friedrich Wolf, whose Prolegomena to Homer had a great influence on him. Yet, there are problems with using Schlegel’s study of the Greeks to make points about Romanticism, since Schlegel himself considered this text to belong to his pre-Romantic phase, and even if Schlegel 408 Besprechungen / Reviews was wrong about this, some mention of this fact should be made. Section I ends with a discussion of Hegel that is set in Jena on October 14, 1806, as Napoleon makes his entrance. For Chai, Hegel’s work is the apex of Romantic theory. The second section (chapters 4-6) turns to the scientific dimensions of Romanticism, beginning with a section on Xavier Bichat and French vitalism. For Chai, Bichat «marks for the Romantic sciences the dawn of a new theoretical awareness» (112). Yet despite a detailed discussion, we are never given a real definition of Romantic science, and Bichat’s role in its development is never completely clear. The climax of this account of Romantic science comes with a treatment of Humphry Davy, and then the Romantic metatheory Chai sees originating in the work of the mathematician Évariste Galois. At this point in his account of Romantic theory, Chai enters rough waters, shifting rather abruptly from the early linkage between theory and knowledge to suspicious claims about theory’s ability to create facts. Consider the following: «The circumstances under which Davy turned to theory produced a need, in turn, for metatheory. As he himself promptly recognized, facts are shaped by theory. Experiments give rise to new facts, but experiments are devised by theory» (131). But brute, physical reality is most certainly not shaped by theory; rather, it is our knowledge of that reality which is shaped by theory. Experiments help us to know more about the world, to verify our claims about the organic material that surrounds us - in short, to uncover facts, but not to create facts. Finally, the author turns to how writers reacted to theory - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, and Friedrich Hölderlin. He argues in chapter 7 that the «archetypical Romantic text» was Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, though without really providing a clear definition of Romanticism itself. It is a book, Chai says, «about the way we do theory» (154) rather than a book about theory itself, which is a view in keeping with one of the motifs of Chai’s study, namely, that theory in the Romantic era became metatheory. Chapter 8, «The Dream of Subjectivity,» begins with an account of a conversation described by Mary Shelley on June 17, 1816, at the Villa Diodati (near Geneva) between Byron and her husband and the dream that the conversation gave rise to, a dream about the very forces of life. This leads to Chai’s assertion that for Shelley, theory is the «primacy of mind over external forces,» and thus something perfectly figured in dreams. For Shelley, he argues, theory is not about knowledge, but about «pure reflexivity» (186). Yet it is not at all clear from Chai’s account why pure reflexivity and knowledge are mutually exclusive. The section ends with an account of Friedrich Hölderlin’s investigation of the limits of theory, which turn out to be the limits of thought itself. The book concludes with an epilogue in which Chai discusses the connections between his view of Romantic theory and contemporary post-modern thought, and here he returns to the point that Romantic theory involved a move away from epistemological frameworks toward a «radically different perspective, that of pure theory» (227). This realm of pure theory is metatheory. But without an epistemological framework in place, it is difficult to see how this metatheory could help us understand the world, or our own reflexivity, in a revolutionary era - or, for that matter, in any era. DePaul University Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert