The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (review)
categories in a hierarchical structure (history first). A similar set of assumptions seems to generate Franco Moretti's discussion of "The Crisis of the European Bildungsroman" as socially determined, though he recognizes genre as relatively autonomous and fully understands the controversial nature of his own materialist approach. Controversy, indeed, is acknowledged in the first essay's first words ("It is a battle-cry, a command, a whole program," says Norman Bryson about the claims of contextualizing art historians against their formalist colleagues), and controversy remains a presence throughout. With an increased sense of the discipline-specific nature of our work, and of the historically contingent and institutionally based nature of our disciplines, controversy seems an inevitable fact of our professional lives nowadays. The essays throughout this volume engage intelligently and provocatively with the conflicts of recent critical history, including two useful reconsiderations of the New Criticism (by Murray Krieger and R. K. Meiners). Such engagements both describe and enact current disputes. They are "studies in historical change" the way Shakespeare was in theaterÂ—subdued to what he worked in like the dyer's hand.