Susan Manning's untimely death in 2013 robbed American literary studies of one of its most distinctive and thoughtful voices. The book under roundtable review here is her final, posthumously published work, a study which, in many ways, represents her most extensive working through of the principles of comparative literary criticism for which she had long been an advocate. One of the characteristics of Manning's work – before it was remotely fashionable within the discipline to talk about the global or the transnational – is its deep scepticism about the validity of the organizing power of the nation-state within literary history. From her first book, The Puritan–Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1990), through to Poetics of Character Manning sought to place literary texts in conversation with each other, establishing forms of relationship that often cut across the false coherencies of national affiliation. Within the study of American literature, the political reality of the Cold War had influenced a generation of critics to imagine that a national writing existing within a kind of geographical quarantine, a “world elsewhere” untouched by the complex and increasingly interconnected historical, political and economic processes at work outside this apparently autonomous space. While this was a way of imagining literary history that was driven by its moment, it remained a matter of intellectual and indeed pedagogical concern for Manning that we, as academics and teachers, remained wedded to the rubric of the nation not just as a way of explaining what might be distinctive about a work of literature, but more broadly as a way of plotting how that work might take its place within a literary history that could seemingly only be conceived as one tied to, and defined by, a geographical landmass.

Poetics of Character is a difficult book – but difficult in the way that good writing should be. It is sophisticated, it demonstrates years of reading and thinking, and its claims are potentially far-reaching. “All judgment is comparative,” says Imlac in Johnson's Rasselas, quoted at the start of Manning's book. Indeed, what is most provocative about Poetics of Character is its insistence that the terms by which we undertake that comparative judgement, and the grammar that underwrites it, need to be reimagined. Instead of Bloomian models of influence or priority that worry about the legitimacy of American lateness to the literary party, Manning proposes a transatlanticism in which tropes of analogy and correspondence enable forms of comparative work. She is less interested in relations that are constituted by cause and effect; rather hers is a concern with how literary history might be reimagined as the working out of rhetorical tropes that are not dependent upon a linear historical trajectory. She asks us to look again at that compound critical activity “literary history,” to reinvest significance in the first of those terms, the literary, not at the expense of history, but as a way of opening up alternative geometries of connection and exchange:

The transatlantic is thereby liberated from being a geographical qualifier to become instead a set of rhetorical possibilities, a way of conceiving relationship, dialogue, correspondence, and contagion – all key organizing terms in the conceptual underpinning of this book. Manning seeks to practise a transatlantic literary criticism in which formal, rhetorical considerations have as much weight as historical, biographical ones.

Manning's work exemplified how a critical openness might be required when considering the transatlantic as a field of inquiry. To think transatlantically means to cut across and between national literary traditions; to put critical pressure on the authorized shibboleths that national narratives generate; to explore how ideas, material objects, peoples and, for Manning especially, rhetorical formulations migrate and mutate. It is, she writes, “a way of thinking about cognition through comparison” (9). The Poetics of Character demonstrates that character – the expression and performance of taste and moral sentiment – is generated through acts of communication and relation; the representation of character, and the reading of it, were, she suggests, “ethical practices of correspondence with others” (15). It is to be understood discursively, such that thinking about character as a process of comparison and correspondence requires a rhetorical alertness – a sensitivity to repetitions, allusions, crossings and substitutions. As she writes, her interest lies in “what happens to words, phrases and grammatical structures as they travel transatlantically” (37), as character is performed and enacted. This can result in some dazzling chains of association, one example being her account of Henry James's study of transatlantic character, Daisy Miller. This sequence offers a perfectly realized exemplification of the kind of reading that Manning values, as James's story is tied, rhetorically through the image of a flower, to Burns, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, a palimpsest and circulation of Romantic and transatlantic associations. This is literary criticism as a high-wire act, and some readers might not be convinced that the claims for connection are always secure. Yet Manning's daring lies in her deliberate renunciation of our entrenched templates for how we understand our discipline. In this she is helped by turning to Poe's liking for the arabesque, a structure of dispersal in which beginnings and ends are obscured by variation and recursion, and in which what Manning calls the “endlessly recrossing marks of connection” (101) overturn patterns of origin and causality. This is a conceptual geometry through which transatlantic reading might be freed from the demands of empirical evidence, temporal priority or national dominance. The reviews that follow take up these questions to consider what is at stake for the practice of literary history when it is reimagined as a series of comparative acts, in which individual and national character is generated through what Manning calls “a relational response” (160).

What if transatlantic literary studies wasn't mostly a matter of shuffling the order of texts – finding ways to read British and American literary traditions in dialogue with one another – but rather a stringent critique of and alternative to historicist literary study? In Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1790–1900, Susan Manning seeks to extend the transatlantic paradigm from content to method, returning critics to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading practices that were less interested in influence, linearity, and development than in analogy, correspondence, and the connections forged by sympathetic identification. In this study, Manning mounts a thoroughgoing critique of the mutual entanglement of historicism and literary nationalism, noting how difficult it is for contemporary critics to say something about the nature and force of a literary work without resorting to national or historical representativeness as the payoff of literary analysis. Over and against the relentlessly developmental narratives of nationally framed literary study – the forward march of periods, genres, and styles – Manning advocates a return to rhetorical analysis and to a focus on style and idiom as the media of literary exchange.

It is perhaps easiest to describe her argument as structured by a series of principled refusals: (1) a refusal of historical priority, according to which nineteenth-century American literature is almost always considered an extension of British letters, a belated, secondary, or minor tradition; (2) a refusal to stabilize the complex dynamics of literary exchange through references to phases of historical development or the descriptive categories of literary sociology; (3) a refusal to draw a clear boundary line between life and work, buttressing the one through a simplified account of the other. Through a self-conscious practice of anachronic reading, Manning seeks to open up questions that a default historicism has settled in advance. Working backwards in time, Manning takes her reader on an at times dizzying tour of webs of signification that have accrued through multiple histories of reception. She is interested, for instance, in what Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) can tell us about the “posthumous biographical construction” (222) of eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Fergusson, and in how the philosophical literature that has grown up around Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing can help us understand the early career of Robert Burns. Manning organizes this tracking back and forth in space and time around the concept of poetic character, which she understands both as a fulcrum of individual readers' engagement with literary texts – a powerful instrument of sympathetic identification – and as a textual dynamic that draws its power only through socially mediated processes of reading and rereading, writing and rewriting. For Manning, poetic character doesn't exist in the author's mind or even in the text itself; it precipitates out of numerous complex feedback loops between writing and reception, textual circulation and authorial self-projection.

One of the signal strengths of Manning's approach to the poetics of character is that the workings of this “imagined compound” (106) of biographical and textual characteristics can be observed across a wide variety of genres, from poetry (Fergusson, Burns, John Keats, Elizabeth Oakes Smith) to philosophical essays (Cotton Mather, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Margaret Fuller), authorial correspondence (Carlyle and Emerson, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson), and short fiction and the novel (Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, James, Stevenson). Indeed, this is one of the few studies of nineteenth-century writing that doesn't take the novel to be the primary means or most important product of transatlantic exchange. And yet it is in Manning's readings of narratives such as James's Daisy Miller (1879) and Poe's “William Wilson” (1839) that the stakes of her critical approach are easiest to discern, perhaps because she is so carefully attuned to the ways in which these narratives allegorize the transatlantic trade in character. For instance, Manning's account of the thought process of Daisy Miller's Frederick Winterbourne beautifully shows how national types crystallize out of and hamper the free play of judgment. For Manning, Daisy Miller is a cautionary tale about the ease with which readers slide from forming opinions about character to taking individuals to be nationally representative, a process she regards as both inevitable and fatally misleading. Manning catches James in the act of working through questions that remain uncomfortable for critics trained in national literary study, generating a critique of the very terms that critics will use to make sense of his novel. Similarly, Manning is drawn to Poe's “William Wilson” both because the diabolical sameness-in-difference of the tale's doubled title character seems to provide an allegory for transatlantic exchange, and because the tale deliberately fails to resolve the questions of identity and agency that it raises. Manning writes that the tale “both demands to be read as an allegory of Anglo-American relationships, or even some kind of analogy for anxieties surrounding American literary independence, and cannot be: the different dimensions of significance and the different models of reading they require fail to form stable correspondences” (48).

Manning is keenly interested in the instability of comparisons that are nonetheless irresistible, what it means to be invited or drawn to make analogies that remain uneven, unsettled, irresolvable. The action of her book takes place where poetic character surfaces and dissolves again, those moments, for instance, in the personal correspondence of Stowe and Eliot when modes of address slip registers and these authors take on national representativeness or project it onto one another. Manning's favored critical terms – both figures she tracks in the works she studies and apt descriptors for her method of analysis – include “contagion,” in which the transmission of idiom or style is undeniable, but the question of agency is left moot; “whim,” a force that tugs against reason, order, and logical development; “correspondence,” or “the lateral logic of friendship” (183), which seeks sympathetic resonance while eschewing priority and hierarchy; and “charm,” intoxicating in its power and mysterious as to its origin.

If the proof of her method can be found in the acuity of her readings, Manning has certainly mounted a persuasive case. One fine chapter tracks the figure of contagion as it cuts across and disrupts texts from Cotton Mather – with whom Manning shares an “incorrigibly figurative” (66) sensibility – through Melville's “Bartleby,” Hawthorne's “Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844) and James's Daisy Miller. The following chapter deepens and complicates her initial take on James's novel by assembling a “florilegium” of meta-poetic passages that trope on daisies as flowers of rhetoric, passages drawn from Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Manning then traces the problem of poetic character and characterlessness in readings of texts by Henry Mackenzie, Jane Austen, and Margaret Fuller. This chapter establishes both the “densely transatlantic metaphoric texture” (101) of James's novel – how exactly it comes to feel like an echo chamber of literary Rome – and the endlessly productive nature of metaphor, correspondence, and analogy. The mischievously anachronic reading that will probably have the greatest influence on ordinary, dutifully chronological literary history is the final chapter, in which Manning bids fair to displace Wordsworth as the go-to Romantic for antebellum Americanists by noting startling resonances in the writing of Emerson and Burns.

And yet as Emerson makes clear in “Self Reliance” (1841), whim is a tough taskmaster. At times, Manning puts so many of the norms of literary criticism under question – agency, origin, authority, history, causality – that readers may feel at sea. This is arguably where Manning wants us to find ourselves. As she notes of the “imagined ideal of sociability” that is performed in authorial correspondence “across spaces, nations and ideological oppositions,” the transatlantic is not a place so much as a boundary or a limit of understanding, “an opportunity for imaginative expansion” (177). Reading a resolutely anti-chronological book from cover to cover is an odd and perhaps self-defeating exercise. I often had the feeling of being party to a particularly challenging, exhilarating conversation that I had entered midstream, having somehow missed something important, something grounding. Where, for instance, would Manning draw the limit to her own paradigm? If the transatlantic names a literary kinship, a sameness-in-difference that is the condition of possibility for sympathetic identification, couldn't this dynamic be found in any creole literary formation, regardless of language or location? Does the transatlantic need to claim specificity in order to retain interpretive force? Given how heavily elite nineteenth-century culture depended on luxury goods made possible the by the slave trade and how central the black Atlantic has been to transatlantic criticism, it is surprising how little the African American literary tradition shows up in this book. It may well fall to the next generation of scholars to reinvest transatlantic criticism with the insights that have been developed in the last decade of nationalist literary study – that is, with a significantly richer understanding of the interdependence of American and African American traditions. Finally, Manning's book raises important questions about the asymmetrical uptake of transatlantic literary study. While transatlantic approaches are often imagined as a necessary antidote to American exceptionalism, they appear to be an optional extra for students of British literature, little more than an expanded field in which to track the dissemination of British culture. If, as Manning argues, the schism that creates American literature as British literature's uncanny double is constitutive, internal to the British tradition, then British literary history ought to be more unsettled than it appears to be, both in Manning's account and elsewhere. Like William Wilson's double, American literature should be more difficult for students of British literature to shake off, capable of severely disrupting settled narratives at inopportune moments. Manning's book makes me long to see the transatlantic paradigm pitched as challenge and necessary rejoinder to the pieties of British as well as American literary history.

Published posthumously after her untimely death in 2013, Manning's Poetics of Character raises more questions than it can possibly answer, pushing to the breaking point the transatlantic paradigm that Manning did so much to codify, champion, and explore. We are lucky to have this challenging book to provoke and guide us as we do our best to continue the conversation without her.

The bold proposal of Susan Manning's invigorating study is that our thinking and critical practice in regard to transatlantic literary comparison needs to be reoriented, to be shifted away from readings reliant on historical frameworks and nationalist identity or motivated by philosophical argument to engage instead with a dynamic founded on “the poetics of character.” This phrase eludes easy summary, but its primary emphasis has little to do with how the modern self is constituted or how a history of character might be constructed. Rather, it evokes the many ways in which deliberations about character, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and philosophical texts, are at the intersection of a variety of social, political and ethical concerns, and how these concerns can be observed through a constellation of rhetorical tropes. These tropes – chiefly metaphor, metonymy, and prosopopoeia – are furthermore given special prominence, in Manning's thinking, in regard to a Scottish Enlightenment discourse establishing human comprehension as founded on sympathetic relations and notions of correspondence. Recovering understanding of how principles of analogy emerge during this period is the prelude to Manning's study of the dense stylistic interlocutions of numerous writers – Burns, Keats, Emerson, Poe, Fuller, James and Stevenson among them – and the intriguing labyrinths along which poetic ideas travel in a transatlantic space.

The first part of this study imagines an immediate skeptical response to the temerity of its approach by plucking a line from Herman Melville's novel of exuberant rhetorical performance, The Confidence-Man, to ask, “But is analogy argument?” and proceeds to furnish reasons for the intellectual foundations and virtues of analogical thinking. Taking as its essential starting points the epistemology of David Hume and the “New Rhetoric” lectures of Hugh Blair, this lengthy discussion both demonstrates how eighteenth-century discourses of rhetoric and character are deeply entwined and manifests the contemporary critical frameworks amidst which this study is positioned, notably arguments relating to performativity and language advanced by J. L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler.

This very demonstration, however, and the broad reach of Enlightenment ideas into so many facets of literary performance that Manning posits, unsettles a central strategy of the book, the accentuation of analogical thinking at the expense of a historical narrative of literary development. There are also moments of confusion as to whether the author wishes only to supplement a historical critical model or dramatically to supplant it. Indeed it is perhaps this uncertainty that makes portions of this chapter dense with abstraction or puzzlingly wayward in the arrangement of material; thus even while it everywhere manifests a mind thinking at a prodigious pace, symptoms of strenuousness obscure the clarity of the case.

If that is so, however, this opening discussion can be appreciated for its audacious exploratory nature while qualms about the presence of a covert historical framework informing its procedures recede in the course of the next seven chapters. Each of these examines character as a rhetorical figure present amidst networks of poetical correspondence in transatlantic writing in preference to concerns with originality, influence, or the prioritization of one culture or text over another.

The results of this method are provocative in the unexpected comparisons made and fascinating in the range of relations traced. By delineating subtle trails of linguistic usage and similar rhetorical practice between texts, while protesting the notion of any pure idiom in transatlantic writing, Manning discloses a range of latent but unacknowledged affinities between them while offering startlingly unexpected ways of reading individual works. Thus, for example, sympathetic resemblances between the works and life of the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson and Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” emerge by way of a specific biblical allusion, while Emerson and Burns are positioned side by side as “two young iconoclasts for whom whim was essential,” through a discussion that both suggestively understands their deployment of the term “whim” as “contrary to solipsism” and describes their stylistic performances, especially Emerson's “scandalous language,” in ways powerfully precise. Manning's vigorous close readings are deeply satisfying; when they are combined with imaginative detective work of the most acute kind, she also turns up surprising discoveries and associations. One of the most brilliant of these has to do with the personal connections of a number of mid-nineteenth-century writers to Margaret Fuller. Manning juxtaposes a historical episode in which a conspiracy involving Carlyle and Emerson to secure Fuller's papers, following her death, both suggests another dimension of the backstory of Henry James's The Aspern Papers and gives new emphasis to the tale's reflection on forces of sympathy and control that permeate biographical enterprise.

While moving amidst these complex webs of relation and affinity, Manning is repeatedly quick to distance her pursuits from a hunt for origins and sources or a concern with influence. The latter distinction, however, often seems tenuous or founded on a restrictive notion of the many ways influence might be imagined, and especially how it could incorporate precisely the kinds of “contagion” of linguistic practice affecting readers and writers that an early chapter of her study explores. Yet it could be said that while protesting her distance from the predictable authorial relationships which she believes studies of influence often yield, Manning unwittingly suggests ways to reformulate the concept. Certainly she shows how, in a densely associative, susceptible literary sensibility, “influence” may take on forms of mutuality and imaginative correspondence between one writer's linguistic field and that of another that are bounded by neither nationalistic nor temporal frameworks.

The range and resourcefulness of this study are dazzling; the sheer intellectual energy with which it makes its case and explores angles by which varieties of transatlantic “poetics of character” are displayed, across genres of poetry, fiction, personal correspondence, and biography, gives the impression of a mind in which no part of the whole of its complex interests can be lost or put aside for very long. Compelling strands of thinking are kept in play (the paradox of “characterless character,” for example, is considered in eighteenth-century notions of female reputation and through its appearance amidst the verbal textures of works by Keats, James and Fuller) alongside intriguing digressions and incisive asides (how, for instance, the archetypal American style of Harriet Beecher Stowe may anticipate that of Gertrude Stein). Together, these evidence the writer's own relish of “whim” as a profound way of thinking and how her own critical practice has been affected, as if by “contagion,” by the writers who have most inspired this study. They also display her wish to write a book that eschews grand narratives and offers instead graceful, flexible, provocative shapes for connections amongst transatlantic writers that may reveal meaningful conjunctions unavailable to more traditional critical perspectives.

In the closing lines of this book, the author returns to the question posed at its beginning: “is analogy argument?” Perhaps the question needs to be rephrased. The triumph of this brilliant series of readings is that, by the end of this volume, the issue of whether or not these are arguments in the strict sense becomes almost irrelevant. Susan Manning's analogies are illuminations.

In a complex manifesto for “argument by analogy,” Susan Manning launches what is a potentially devastating argument against historicist readings of literary texts. Rather than submitting poetry to history and chronology, she suggests that poetic forms and images can, and do, cut free, float loose, travel, drift and cross-pollinate, and even carry infection, across time and across diverse readers with all kinds of unexpected and contingent consequences. Insisting always on the importance of reading to writing, she points out how Edgar Allan Poe's reader is “kept uneasily, and pleasurably, aware of space and time,” reminding us that reading itself creates a complex set of temporalities between the present of the reader and the time frames of the narrative that s/he is reading. Poe, she argues, is peculiarly, almost morbidly, aware of these temporal confusions, and in his short stories, “More than points on a single line, the experience of reading compounds complex temporalities in de-localised spaces which are themselves forms of time-travel: gothic castles, dungeons, sea-going vessels or hot-air balloons” (31). Manning undertakes to remain attentive in her book to “the nature of imaginative engagement between the reader and the textual character” (49).

By opening up these multiple spaces and time frames of reading and narrative, what Manning goes on to develop in Poetics of Character is a method of reading literature through “[a]nachronic similarities” – a method that owes much to the pre-Romantic philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its emphasis on “character” and “comparison.” Polemically, she eschews any stately onward progress along one strict timeline that tramples everything underfoot, as posited, of course, by Romantic historiography. What this gives her as a critic is a way of turning away from the tired debates about “influence,” or about American “belatedness,” so that she can restore a particularity and delicacy to each of the texts that she considers, without doing any one of them either the violence of making them “originary” or the equal violence of casting them as “derivative.” Rather than a model of strict inheritance, Manning chooses to create a suggestive rhetorical model out of earlier eighteenth-century ideas of “friendship”: for her, literary texts depend upon a balanced exchange of sympathies. Like friends, her texts meet and gather and interact in circles, not in straight lines; and, like friends, they do not “follow” one another so much as agree and disagree, touch, turn away, and return. They loop around in time, meet, argue, part, remember one another, and meet again, rather than line up in orderly rows. And like friends too they make shift to maintain contact even across great distances.

This is an immensely suggestive way of conceptualizing transatlantic literary “encounter” and one that Manning uses to produce fresh new readings of familiar and canonical authors from both sides of the Atlantic, including brilliant work on Burns, Hawthorne, Emerson and James. Using her own zigzagging model, Manning weaves a daisy chain around Robert Burns, author of “To a Mountain Daisy,” Wordsworth's verse and Keats's “Daisy's Song” and Monckton Milnes's biography of Keats, Shelley's Adonais, and Henry James's Daisy Miller. Then she announces, “Daisies, in French, are marguerites” (105), and proceeds to weave Margaret (Marguerite) Fuller into her chain too. She explains that “historical priority, the imputation of influence, and biographical reading might support a reading of the influence on Daisy Miller of Keats' and Wordsworth's daisy poems, [but] none of these offers a critical purchase on the poetics of comparison” (105). By contrast, Manning's daisy works comparatively as a “flower of rhetoric,” and as such this daisy grows and blooms on a rhetorical field, a forcefield of exchange set apart from the life cycles of history, in which this tiny, unassuming and common flower becomes an emblem capable of uniting ephemerality and endurance, a recurring “character” which performs itself repeatedly, whilst remaining conscious both of the similarity and of the difference between one of its performances and another.

Performance emerges as a key term for Manning's argument by analogy. But her sense of performance is emphatically not the “masquerade and mimicry” (49) that she diagnoses as one of the categories of transatlantic criticism most in use at present. “[T]hese mutually defining iterations of different characters can only be understood in relation to the conditions of earlier and later performances,” she says. And she continues, “If the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is one of surrogation and exchange rather than origin and reception, how they perform – enact themselves in an implied relationship and antagonism – in relation to one another should … yield richer comparisons” (37–38). “Character,” too, becomes a loaded and potent term for Manning, and its meaning for her is far more ample than merely that of the novelistic character or personage. “Character” for Manning becomes a concept that can embrace both the particular inscription of individual style and a moral or ethical “atmosphere” or performance. As the consummately transatlantic writer and thinker Margaret Fuller wrote, “human nature goes not straight forward, but by excessive action and then reaction in an undulated course.” This constant renewal and reversal involved in the construction of self, essentially sociable and dialogic, lies at the heart of Manning's transatlantic model of character, which is always in motion and travelling, or perhaps rather undulating, in its encounters, and through which she finds “the homology between transatlantic relations and the transpersonal assumptions on which the poetics of character depend” (265).

The subtitle of Manning's book locates this challenge specifically in the “transatlantic” world between 1700 and 1900, with a fidelity to “period” which may seem somewhat to call into question her own polemical dismissal of historical time frames. Manning insists that we must “[c]hang[e] tack … and work … against the grain of historical priority” (222). In fact her argument is about a specific period of literary history, and a period marked by particularly agonized political relations between Britain and North America. “Historical priority” was itself a fraught political concept in these years, and Manning's thesis rests perhaps a little more than it admits on the peculiar “historical” moment about which she writes. It is not clear, for example, how necessary her thesis of argument by analogy might be as a corrective in earlier times, before Romantic historicism had established a hegemonic concept of “priority.” But while there are obvious dangers in setting up “Poetry” versus “History,” this book reminds us that “historicist” is not the same as historical. There is nothing, in fact, to exclude history from Manning's thesis, and indeed she explains that her transverse relations and correspondences do not necessarily detract from or contradict historicist reading:

Manning offers in fact a “complementary hermeneutic” (26), stressing that “the point is not to de-historicise but to reorientate literary history” (38).

Taken as an exercise in reorientation, the book is peppery and welcome as a corrective to what has perhaps become rather too settled an orthodoxy of historicism in literary studies. What Manning can offer us is nothing less than a new way of reading across literary traditions, genres, and national boundaries in British and American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is also clear that there are potentially radical implications in Manning's argument for our still-ingrained national models of canonicity. What it would mean to take this serious book seriously would be to redraw the fields in which “literature” gets thought about, and, perhaps equally crucially, taught. One of Manning's subjects in Poetic Character, the American writer and journalist Margaret Fuller, who spent much of her professional life in Rome in the 1840s, wrote that despite many points of disagreement, she felt that she shared something of “the same climate of mind” with Goethe. “Climate of mind” seems to express something similar here for Fuller as Manning's idea of “character,” in the sense that it denotes that which is transferable and exchangeable across cultures and distance. The equivalence is by no means total, or even stable, so this is not a fantasy of universalism so much as a fantasy of communication. And while pointing to their neglected importance, Manning also realizes the fragility of such fantasies: “Rupture or breach being supposed in the idea of communication, ‘failure’ is not an outside possibility on the margin of ‘successful’ communication, but part of what constitutes it” (51).

It was Goethe's scheme for Weltliteratur, “marvelous things … brought forth through refraction,” which, Manning tells us, “contemporaneously offered an ideological alternative to literature as a manifestation of nation-state or national Zeitgeist” (49). If literature is truly much less national than our institutional politics and the poverty of our language training has latterly made it, then texts might turn out to be more sociable, less hermetic and less predictable in their reactions than we might have thought. Perhaps we need to bring them together in the same rhetorical space more often to hear the surprising things that they might have to say to each other, even without, as Manning insists, any specific biographical or historical evidence of “contact” or “influence.” The canon is a fine and private place, but it lacks sociability, and those “great works” relegated to its cold ranks should perhaps get out more and mingle.

Poetics of Character is a deliberately polemical and provocative intervention. It represents the opening up of a conversation. It is, characteristically for its author, a text that offers a model of intellectual sociability and friendship as a way forward. For friendship, as Manning says, referencing Wilfred Bion, pivots on hope, on the hope of bridging the gap between self and other, much like “the hopeful act of correspondence” (207) which all metaphor, and ultimately all literary writing, represents. “Poetic ideas travel in different ways from intellectual ideas,” says Manning, “rhythms, echoes, voices and images disperse influence beyond the reach of documentary trace but still available to that combination of memory and imagination which constitutes emotional familiarity and extended recognition” (243). It is a great loss that this subject-shaking, provocative, initiating book should be Susan Manning's last, but the conversation will surely continue, travel and grow in “extended recognition” of the impact of her work.