This book contends that the separation of sex from reproduction and a new understanding of the aesthetic as purposiveness without purpose, in Immanuel Kant's definition, were not only contemporary but analogous. Richard Sha credits vitalist science with the former decoupling—a separation, in the words of the phrenologist J. G. Spurzheim, of “propagation” from the drive to “amativeness” (37)—and draws on its history as well as the histories of related sciences in an ambitious attempt to redescribe canonical romanticism tout court (but especially William Blake and George Gordon, Lord Byron) in terms of sexuality as liberation.
With the new knowledge being led by function, that which was not functional was “perverse” or “pleasure without function,” as in the scandalous realization that the only function of the clitoris might be pleasure or that anatomical symmetries might be what remained of an original single sex. Sha, like others, is interested in the romantic period because it is a period of transition, in its questioning of essential sexual division. It is illuminating to see Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, explained as knowingly rewriting the absolute distinction of sex proposed by Comte de Buffon (118–19).
Most of the book is about that supplementary “pleasure” rather than the disciplinary “functions” it escapes. This is pleasure without function or purposiveness without reproductive purpose. The book sees “function” not as the palpable design of power but rather as a repertory of ends and, in opposition to what it sees as a Foucauldian notion of sexual knowledge as a form of disciplinary power, it heralds liberation. However, Sha's account, late in the book (286–87), of how desire hardens into identity, both as a consequence of the policing of desire and, increasingly, by a persecuted group, seems like Foucauldian orthodoxy—such a discourse of sexuality may be, like the postmodern “textualism” opposed to the material body, a straw man.
The separation of sex from reproduction has clear implications, too, for ideological reproduction, so perversity becomes a norm. The second part of the book is concerned directly with aesthetic theory and aesthetic products, beginning with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the eighteenth century's Longinus, J. J. Winckelmann, Edmund Burke, and Richard Payne Knight. That the aesthetic could itself be seen as perverse was a concern for the romantic aestheticians in Germany and England—many of whom studied medicine—because aesthetics had an educational function too. In Kant's definition of art, the aesthetic is organic and romantic artworks are often breathily erotic. The ideal is sexuality without reproduction, so the aesthetic act, too, can be seen as initiative and pleasurable rather than reproductive. To claim that beauty is truth, however, is to claim that use and pleasure, purpose and purposelessness, are interchangeable.
Curiously, the two final chapters, on canonical authors, are more faltering. If perverse seems an odd rubric for some of the aestheticians, this is not the case for Blake, for whom, of course, reproduction runs the danger of being copying rather than imaginative (re)creation and whose antinomianism is not so naive as to see liberation ending simply in a state of liberty, whether that liberation is sexual or of other kinds. For Blake, generation is both mechanical and vegetative, but regeneration is possible. The chapter on Blake's self-annihilation as incarnation often turns, perhaps inevitably, into the kind of exegesis that can only repeat the radical or idiosyncratic terms of its object language in order to argue for that language's potential for liberation.
A final chapter on Byron and Don Juan as a pubertal epic can more easily demonstrate the imaginative payoff for such a notion, not so much in representing an ideal state before the reification of sexual division as in the ambiguities of Juan's sexuality or the fun to be had with that of Castlereagh. Bodies themselves are ambiguous. The state of puberty is a middle state, as bisexuality is, and it enables Byron to explore a position rather than an identity, a position of multiple possibility, of “both and” rather than “either or.”
If there is a suggestion that the human body might be the site of emancipatory movements occurring in the United States or France in the romantic period, a discourse of the body is not always mapped onto global events. The implied narrative of the romantic period's account of sexual and even human identity also makes this book comparable with Dror Wahrman's The Making of the Modern Self (2004). Sha claims of the romantic era that “sex in this period was unusually resistant to material fixity” (138), and it would have been interesting to confront this with Wahrman's claim that, on the contrary, such amorphousness or immateriality was an earlier phenomenon to be disciplined out of existence in the romantic era: for Wahrman, an earlier fluidity of gender or class identity, as of human identity, was already being policed and made rigid and normative by the 1780s. Wahrman's book falters on its claim to found the process of making identity rigid and normative in a particular time (that of the American war and after); nevertheless, Wahrman sees a closing down of possibilities in the same period at which Sha sees a progress toward liberation, and it would be interesting to see Sha defend his equally well-researched account in more abstract historical terms.
