The eleven essays bound together in this volume were conceived, writes Paul Hamilton, in “a spirit of dialogue.” They respond to and develop the work of Marilyn Butler, a scholar for whom “the question of historical recovery” is “ever-present and never conclusively decided.” While this volume's aim is to “honour” Butler (1), and while its contributors, themselves prominent academics, are her readers, students, and colleagues, the collection is neither monolithic nor exclusive; “Marilyn Butler is not one of those critics who have sought to establish a school” (16).

Hamilton's introduction to the volume, having marked Butler's “generosity of interest” and “creative eclecticism,” and the “deceptively un-theoretical and accessible” quality of her writing, explicates what is pioneering and distinctive about her work (2, 3). Fittingly, though, perhaps, Butler's influence is felt largely in the critical practice of the succeeding chapters. Some of these take off from specific insights: into place (James Chandler on Scott and “an odd vagueness [of] place” (119); Nigel Leask on Elizabeth Hamilton and the staging of oriental settings); into a poet's internationalism (Paul Hamilton on a European context for Coleridge's philosophy; Michael Rossington on Shelley's republicanism); and into a novelist's social representations (Janet Todd on Austen and the professions). Scholarly editions and paperbacks edited by Butler appear in endnotes and acknowledgments, and her editorial project is continued by the contributors’ own enterprise (most immediately, Susan Manly’s, and Pamela Clemit’s). Opening up the (textual) canon to marginalized or dissenting voices, the chapters' authors invoke Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Jon Mee), Lucy Aiken (Anne Janowitz), and Hazlitt (Kevin Gilmartin), as well as the Romantic authors just mentioned above. Whether detailing the diversity of Dissenting cultures, recovering the collective authorship of a history, or urging the present import of a repossessed past, all of the contributors to this volume show a Romanticism, and a historical apprehension of it, that is collaborative, shifting, a work in progress.

The collection closes with a bibliography of Butler's writings, compiled by Heather Glen. In their subtle digestions and critical examples, as well as in their explicit acknowledgments, the essays in Repossessing the Romantic Past nudge their readers to assess their own practices in relation to what Butler has written. Although the volume's title might conjure a “New Historicist” self-positioning very much of the early 1990s, the piece that it recalls, Butler's “Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History,” and the book in which it appeared, Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (ed. Marjorie Levinson et al. [Oxford, 1989]), are exemplary exercises in critical praxis. (Rethinking Historicism might indeed be less weighted toward present historicist orthodoxy than Repossessing the Romantic Past is.) Succinct and generous-spirited endnotes to the volume also allow readers to navigate a range of recent critical literatures.

Repossessing the Romantic Past is divided into three parts: “Dissent and Opposition,” on the forms of Dissenting culture in the late Enlightenment and early stages of Romanticism; “Reopening the Case of Edgeworth” (Butler oversaw the preparation of a landmark edition of Edgeworth's Works for Pickering and Chatto, published in 1999–2003); and the catchall “Different Directions,” whose essays suggest, says Hamilton, that “our own academy has to register a[n] openness to change and development if its critical readings are to remain adequate to the historical mobility of the cultural phenomena they interpret” (17). The collection is remarkably coherent both within and between sections. Its contributors enact, rather than announce, the quality of their engagement with the past. They also share themes across partite divisions: readers interested in sentimentalism, conversation, sociability and kinship, education, professionalization, internationalism, gender, secularization, (imaginative) economics, and beauty—not all of which are indexed—should find something of interest here.

There is matter, too, for those looking for intellectual biography and history. Pamela Clemit concentrates on Godwin's “interiority” (104) and reads his letters as a “demonstration” (103) of how, in private and in public, pure theory is modified by experience. Michael Rossington writes of Shelley's “`Europeanizing' of the English Revolution” from the Continent (68) and “the collective acts of memorializing” that focus on Marlow (65). Anne Janowitz's nuanced and fascinating essay suggests the reciprocal relationship between the self-representations of the Aiken-Barbaulds and the contexts of radical Dissent, education at the Warrington Academy, domestic reform, and liberal memoir writing. Similarly impressive is Susan Manly's study of Maria Edgeworth's Practical Education as a “quiet challenge to authoritarianism” (143).

Building on Marilyn Butler's work on Jane Austen, Janet Todd shows a novelist investigating the social construction of the “professional wife.” Austen's works do not emerge, however, as conservative or didactic. Rather, notes Todd, as “fiction, fantasy, excess, and romance,” they give “histor[y]” the slip (221). Kevin Gilmartin's chapter is fully attuned to rhetoric and form as well as politics, especially in its smart and supple close readings of the “urban Leviathan” in Hazlitt's essays (58). Nigel Leask exhibits a like sensitivity, observing “the dangers of flattening [Elizabeth] Hamilton's lively, reflexive, and polyphonic satire,” Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, “into the terms of available ideologies (`anti-jacobin', 'orientalist', 'evangelical')” (191).

Conversation sounds throughout the collection, as a theme as well as a metaphor for critical inquiry. It is most fully elaborated in Jon Mee's essay, which focuses on Barbauld's varying relations with “bluestocking” writers but also outlines a more ramified reading of conversation as “literary and verbal technology” (21; one that might trouble the volume's bias toward a text-based public sphere). Mee's notion of conversation allows for “the clash of differences” as well as “harmonious exchange” (22). And—of course—Repossessing the Romantic Past itself hosts (reasonably) oppositional voices. James Chandler persuasively but rather coyly introduces “the methodological anachronism” of Gilles Deleuze and cinema theory to his excellent analysis of specificity and nonspecificity of place in Scott's novels (120). Paul Hamilton's synthesizing and philosophically sophisticated discussion of Coleridge construes his “European context” not in terms of the French Revolution, or “a search for sources,” but as “a fluency in a way of thinking.” Coleridge's “mental stamina,” he says, “vitalized the many discourses his thought invaded” (165). Jerome McGann, finally, contrasts Wordsworth's and Byron's responses to the “crisis and apparent 'decay'” of beauty (240; Byron wins). By retracing the history of beauty, McGann aims to rethink it out of its malaise (228) and to urge us also to return from “forms of worship” to “poetic tales” (240).

All these contributions make Repossessing the Romantic Past a fine book: generous, sympathetic, conversable, and contentious.