Review
"The idea of the organic has troubled critics from Coleridge through Walter Pater on to their modern scholars. Denise Gigante''s Life brings extraordinary clarity and renewed force to this traditional perplexity."—Harold Bloom
(Harold Bloom )
"Life develops an important subject with much persuasive force, making use of extensive and careful research. It demonstrates that concepts of 18th-century vitalistic biology are essential to understanding the forms of major Romantic poems."—Karl Kroeber, Columbia University
(Karl Kroeber )
"Moving gracefully from Smart''s animals to Keats'' magnetic monsters, this brilliant book asks what the Romantic poets—or anyone—might mean by the deep and easy word ''life.''"—Michael Wood, Princeton University
(Michael Wood )
"Gigante succeeds nonetheless in introducing the fruitful and highly suggestive concept of an epigenesist poetics."—John Holmes, The British Journal for the History of Science
(John Holmes
The British Journal for the History of Science )
"Gigante''s book is marvelously lucid and accessible, a brand of scholarship that matches rigorous textual historical analysis with a style of consistently transparent argumentation...Gigante offers intimate, tightly knit series of close readings that evidence how the legibility of life can only be grasped as a compelx process of poetic formalization."--Jacques Khalip, The Wordsworth Circle
(Jacques Khalip
The Wordsworth Circle )
"Impressively broad in its interdisciplinary research and intrepid in its call to redefine our critical paradigms, Gigante''s book is also lucidly readable in its arguments. . . . This provocative, fascinating, and beautifully written study deserves our careful attention both for its subtle and powerful uses of history and its claim to transform the future of Romantic studies."—Nancy Moore Goslee, Studies in Romanticism
(Nancy Moore Goslee
Studies in Romanticism )
About the Author
Denise Gigante is associate professor of English, Stanford University, author of Taste: A Literary History and editor of The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology, both published by Yale University Press.
