<i>Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation</i>. Andrew Mattison. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. 260.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewSolitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation. Andrew Mattison. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. 260.Heather DubrowHeather DubrowFordham University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe often identify periods in our field through the dominant methodology and its concepts: according to such models, the 1980s were the era of new historicism and its preoccupation with power, and so on. Yet it is sometimes more revealing to trace preoccupations that appear at the same time in a range of divergent methodologies, considering both how and why they are widespread and the very different forms they may take. Thus, repetition could provide this type of touchstone for the decades when many claim New Criticism was the only game in town, though in fact psychoanalytic criticism flourished and literary history and philology, all engaged with forms of repetition, determinedly survived in certain quarters. Today authorship and its mirror image, reception, might serve a similar role, allowing us to compare and contrast a range of critical approaches and ask why so many of them address those two concepts.Andrew Mattison’s Solitude and Speechlessness: Renaissance Writing and Reading in Isolation focuses on revisionist analyses of authorship and reception. Mattison maintains that we must acknowledge the essential isolation of writers rather than stressing their interactions with their chronological cohorts. His book examines a number of different but interlocking types of isolation. The opening chapter concentrates on writers’ failed attempts to reach out to strangers, notably future readers; other sections chronicle the solitary temperament that he considers normative for artists, their distanced and uncertain relationship to many readers, the effects of obscurity, the desire for solitude, the attraction to retirement, and the neglect or misunderstanding of texts by readers who succeed the original author. Texts, Mattison argues throughout the book, are “solitary wanderers disconnected from their origins” (171): they move through time in often unpredictable ways, and through such wandering confound the agency and control of their author and the posited patterns of the literary historian. Language itself, “because of its inherent relation to distant times and places through etymology, literary influence, and the possibility of future readership, has an inherently nonsocial element” (16). Although these arguments are largely grounded in analyses of poetry, the author approaches drama through this lens as well, maintaining that even the collaborative interactions stressed by so many students of theater today do not preclude fundamental isolation.Mattison’s perspectives on reception fruitfully contribute to some tendencies in recent criticism, notably the emphasis on how editors, copyists, and audiences can create changes in a text, even from one century to the next. And his book also repeatedly challenges certain widespread procedures and predilections on both that subject and authorship. He is quite right that an undue concentration on patronage at the expense of other types of relationships with readers is among the least fortunate legacies of new historicism; Mattison insists on the significance of very different relationships between author and reader. In rejecting an emphasis on the social circumstances of an author, he invites us to reconsider the extent to which many contemporary studies—notably, of course, those participating in identity politics—focus on biography. His analyses of the difficulties of interpretation call into question some assumptions of both older and newer versions of close reading.Solitude and Speechlessness also develops revisionist perspectives on a wide range of other subjects and methodologies. Mattison’s emphasis on types of distancing valuably qualifies certain widespread celebrations of immediacy, especially that of lyric. In this and other regards, his recurrent discussions of genre, arguably a sign of the growing interest in the new formalisms, is among the contributions of the book. And its author’s analysis of versions of rereading, whether by the same person or subsequent ones, is another valuable corrective to many analyses. In developing these and other ideas, Mattison demonstrates from several angles the value of contemporary challenges of traditional periodization; wandering texts clearly compromise assigning them to a particular era, and in his own criticism Mattison resists conventional period boundaries when, for example, he usefully links writings on retirement by Marvell, Cowley, and Traherne.Such arguments are buttressed by the range of sources on which their author draws. The book includes reexaminations of some familiar texts and episodes, reading Jaques’s departure at the end of As You Like It, for example, in relation to hermeticism, but it also discusses a poem by Bacon that has been neglected, and it does not shy away from wrestling with difficult texts such as Greville’s Caelica 80. Moreover, Mattison uncovers and deals fruitfully with some writings that are archival in the traditional sense of not reproduced in print or simply unduly ignored; thus, for example, rather than rounding up the usual suspects when discussing rhetorical theory, he draws on lesser-known authorities as well, such as the work of Josua Poole.Despite the potentialities and realized achievements summarized above, in some respects the book does not realize its promise. Certain recurrent arguments and key concepts are open to question, often because their broad generalizations would benefit from qualifications and nuances. Is isolation really the principal result, as opposed to one among many potential consequences, of an early modern writer’s attempted connections to readers in earlier or later eras? Surely intimacy better describes Spenser’s relationship to Catullus when he drafts his own deeply—and fruitfully—derivative epithalamium. And often addresses to future readers can imply or actually create a much closer relationship than Mattison credits. Witness the version of poems by Petrarch and Wyatt in Berryman’s “What was Ashore, then? Cargoed with Forget.” Witness too the splendid meditations on that same sixteenth-century poet by the regrettably neglected Australian poet Gwen Harwood or our contemporary poet and critic Kimberly Johnson’s relationship to Donne. Similarly, shared spiritual commitments and devotional practices can build bonds between writers and readers in very different eras; the work of Herbert, discussed intelligently elsewhere in the book, is a case in point. Perhaps in many instances one might even represent the relationship of addresses to members of one’s immediate social circle and putative subsequent readers as redefining the social circle as a series of concentric ripples.In pursuing its arguments, the book defines poetic ambition as the largely unsuccessful attempt to forge connections with writers in other eras. But because of all the other types of ambition, acknowledged but downplayed in this study, this label is problematical. The author at least needs to do more with how ambition in many other senses interacts with the type on which he focuses. And as for the relationship between writers and their contemporaries, deliberate obscurity may distance a poet from his readers, as Mattison repeatedly asserts, but both early modern poetry and contemporary experiments demonstrate the ability of such obscurity to build a select circle.Although the volume includes a number of productive readings of texts, more than a few other analyses are open to challenges in the form of either judgment calls or more serious disagreements. For example, should interpretations of Astrophil and Stella 90 downplay Stella’s role as addressee to the extent that this book does? Rather than reading the lines ironically or playfully, Mattison asserts that Marvell’s famous “And Pan did after Syrinx speed, / Not as a nymph, but for a reed” (“The Garden,” lines 31–32), register Pan’s genuine preference for the vegetative transformation. The analyses of poems by women would benefit from more engagement with gender studies, notably the debates about the relationship of same-sex love and friendship in Katherine Philips’s poetry.But such issues coexist with significant contributions, including many trenchant points about developments in our field; for example, in discussing the problems of literary history, he demonstrates that we must emphasize long-term shifts created by texts’ wandering. And one might also profitably extend Mattison’s important observations about resisting rapid and facile interpretations to a challenge we face as teachers today: resisting too many students’ assumption that what matters can be expressed in the length of a tweet and that all answers are available almost instantaneously on their devices. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711123 Views: 339Total views on this site HistoryPublished online August 21, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact jou[email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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