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MILNES, TIM and KERRY SINANAN, EDS. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 268 pp. $80.00
In their new volume Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan have collected eleven essays that explore how ideas (or ideals) of truthfulness affected both the creation and the reception of literary texts during the British Romantic era (fairly liberally represented as the period between the 1760s and the early 1840s). Notably, the editors show great flexibility in selecting work that demonstrates their shared theories of truthfulness and mendacity, or reality and unreality, in Romantic England: we here find studies of Chatterton and Macpherson, Spence and More, Carlyle and Tennyson; both poets and prose writers receive attention, and the contributors' interpretations of sincerity and authenticity often vary significantly. Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, to Milnes and Sinanan's credit, accommodates the scope of its contributors' efforts without undermining its own announced focus. Milnes and Sinanan assert provocatively that "it is in Romantic literature and thought that 'sincerity' and 'authenticity' are fused-and thereby transformed-for the first time" (2), later clarifying this claim by stating that "authenticity is a state, sincerity a practice" (4). As these brief quotations suggest, the book's conceptual framework has sufficient intricacy both to generate and to sustain several approaches to the subject at hand. For this reason, the volume should appeal both to professional Romanticists and to readers who are broadly interested in England's literary milieu as it existed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Milnes and Sinanan have organized the volume into four sections, and the first of these, entitled "Forging Authenticity," begins with Margaret Russett's intriguing and well-researched "Genuity or Ingenuity? Invented Tradition and the Scottish Talent," in which Russett (who...