Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

John Clare: nature, criticism and history

Matthew McConkey

To cite this article: Matthew McConkey (2018) John Clare: nature, criticism and history, Textual
Practice, 32:2, 361-364, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1420602

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 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 361

Maisie Ridgway
University of Sussex, Falmer, UK
maisie.ridgway@yahoo.co.uk
© 2018 Maisie Ridgway
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1427310

John Clare: nature, criticism and history, by Simon Kövesi, Palgrave

Macmillan UK, 2017, 266 pp., £72.00 (hbk), ISBN: 978-0-230-27787-8

Simon Kövesi’s John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History positions itself as an
intervention in Clare studies, and in literary criticism more generally. For
Kövesi, his monograph is ‘as much about critical and theoretical practice as it
is about Clare’ (p. 10), and indeed the wealth of subjects and critical viewpoints
Kövesi tackles in his ambitious book is worthy of commendation. Kövesi critiques
a dominant strand of New Historicism within studies of John Clare and literary
Romanticism, arguing that ‘the orthodoxy of historical context now goes largely
unquestioned across various modes of inquiry into literature’ (p. 218). He follows
Rita Felski’s contention that ‘we are inculcated, in the name of history, into a
remarkably static model of meaning’ (quoting Felski, p. 218).1 Kövesi’s proposed
solution to this critical stultification arises from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term the
‘fusion of horizons’ (quoting Gadamer, p. 220),2 a cross-temporal network in
which the critic’s ‘prejudices brought about by historical situatedness are moder-
ated, muted, qualified, adapted, but never erased or entirely surmounted’ (p. 221).
In light of this, it is clear why Clare is an apt case study for such bold interroga-
tions of critical practice. The book opens with an inquiry into the ‘place’ of Clare,
in terms of the poet’s historical and critical situations (p. 1). Kövesi argues that
few critics have been able to see beyond Clare’s status as a working-class poet
rooted to – and uprooted from – particular places. In this book Kövesi seeks to
redress this failure by examining Clare in a multitude of theoretical and historical
contexts: chapter one assesses how the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ are inflected
by Clare’s work as an agricultural labourer; chapter two interrogates the creden-
tials of Clare’s much-lauded environmental consciousness in the context of main-
stream Romantic thought; chapter three investigates how understandings of
Clare’s environmental consciousness relate to the textual politics of editing his
writing; chapter four discusses the figuration of women in Clare’s poetry and,
more generally, the critical neglect of his love poetry; and chapter five explores
recent creative engagements with Clare’s life and work in the context of
Kövesi’s critique of New Historicism, as outlined above.
This outline of the book’s chapters could suggest that it is a collection of dis-
crete readings of Clare, with Kövesi testing out a variety of methodologies. In a
sense this is true, as Kövesi hopes to demonstrate how readings of Clare’s
works can be generative without needing his ‘place, his class or his biography
as a reference point’ (p. 61). But Kövesi also interweaves his subjects and critical
362 BOOK REVIEWS

viewpoints, to show how static critical readings of Clare – whether historicist or

staunchly ecocritical – can be reductive. This is particularly the case in chapter
one, where Kövesi interrogates the critical tradition of presenting Clare largely
or entirely as a poet of ‘place’. Kövesi argues that for Clare, and for other labour-
ing-class poets such as Robert Bloomfield and Ann Yearsley, ‘“place” is both topo-
graphically located and socio-economically determined’ (p. 2). For Kövesi, Clare
and other poor poets have been associated with a particular place because they
lack the economic means to deviate, physically or imaginatively, from that
place. He develops this argument fruitfully through Michel de Certeau’s concepts
of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’, which he explains are ‘two categories of responses to – or
“ways of operating” within – orders of power’ (p. 18). Paraphrasing de Certeau, he
writes,
Those who can be strategic do so in their mobility across, and definitions of,
space, and in their confident delineations of their ‘proper’ place; those who
can only be tactical in the face of power do so in part because they struggle
to find places of their own. (p. 18)
This conceptual framework proves useful for Kövesi’s close readings, most
notably of the sonnet ‘To My Cottage’, where Kövesi contests the will to fetishize
the lives of rural labourers, arguing that ‘valuation of [Clare’s] cot is established
upon a persistently sensory and parentally ethical awareness of what it would be
like to be without it: home is not assumed and is not owned, so it is not named’
(p. 27). This reading is typical of Kövesi’s capability in marshalling new theoreti-
cal insights to stimulate critical readings of Clare, particularly with regard to his
working-class status.
The concept of ‘place’ also informs Kövesi’s engagement with ecocriticism. He
positions himself against ‘deracinating’ forms of ecocriticism which wrest Clare
from his historical context to further their ethical agendas (p. 14). Instead, he
endeavours to find ways of locating Clare in his socio-economic and topographic
specificity without compromising an ecological agenda. He demonstrates this
commitment particularly in Chapter 2, which ‘contextualises Clare’s supposed
resistance to anthropocentrism by reading him in the contexts of literary Roman-
tic egotism’ (p. 79). Kövesi draws upon the prose writing of Samuel Taylor Coler-
idge to trace the way in which Romantic egotism became ‘negated’ and
‘engendered with a pejorative meaning’ (p. 81). From here he moves to Keats’s
famous theorisation of negative capability and finally analyses Clare’s own
letters to Eliza Emmerson in 1830 to argue that Clare wants ‘a free plurality of
“existances”, a multiplicity of free writing selves’ (p. 88). With this intellectual-
historical framework persuasively mapped out, Kövesi goes on to use Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to give an innovative reading of Clare’s
poem ‘The shepherds almost wonder’. Here Kövesi shows a keen blend of histori-
cal rigour, theoretical apprehension and deft close reading, as he notices how
‘Clare’s predominant use of the ampersand when representing nature shows affi-
nity with the rhizome in terms of its co-ordinated, levelled, planar, anti-hierarch-
ical shape’ (p. 114). This reading leads him to affirm Clare’s proto-ecologism:
Clare refutes a hierarchising aesthetic relation between subject and object, as
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 363

‘interconnectedness is revealed to be the site of secure meaning for each of the

component parts’ (p. 114) of his poem.
In chapter three, Kövesi continues to show how seemingly discrete aspects of
Clare studies can illuminate each other, as he considers the possibilities for imple-
menting Clare’s ecological sensibility in editorial practice. In an impressive survey
of the editorial history of Clare’s works, Kövesi demonstrates how ‘Clare’s texts
have been pressed into presentational moulds predetermined by quite severely
politicised versions of his aesthetic and linguistic values and practices’ (p. 127).
Kövesi argues that these broadly ‘red’ or ‘blue’ versions fail to capture Clare’s
own changeable attitude to linguistic standardisation. This leads him to the enti-
cing argument that ‘ecological literary criticism … needs to turn from its con-
struction of nature to the making of texts’ (p. 149). Given his own useful
engagement with facsimiles in the preceding chapter, Kövesi’s advocacy of hyper-
texts and other digital technologies is persuasive, as he contends that ‘an editor
would become a facilitator for user interactivity rather than a prescriptive deter-
miner for the sort of text a reader would encounter’ (p. 150).
He continues to urge Clare scholarship in new directions in chapter four,
where he considers the importance of Clare’s representations of women in his
exposition of the division between human and non-human. He points out that
in an early manuscript conceived between 1808 and 1819 ‘more than a third of
his poetic practice is taken up in staging encounters with femininity’ (p. 164).
If he acknowledges that ‘the relational diversity … which has such deep structural
implications in Clare’s responses to the natural world, is reduced to a narrowed,
singular, centred intensity in much of the love poetry’ (p. 177) he is committed to
a belief that an ecocritical lens should not prevent the critic from engaging with
the generic variety of Clare’s oeuvre. This is demonstrated in his fruitful reading
of ‘The Enthusiast: A day-dream in summer’, where he maps ‘a rhizome of
complex relations’ (p. 178) between the poem’s male and female gazes and
their non-human counterparts.
Kövesi, therefore, uses contemporary ecocritical concerns to enliven our criti-
cal perspectives on Clare. But he is similarly innovative when he addresses issues
that don’t readily adhere to an ecological reading. Chapter four ends with an
examination of lists of women’s names found in Clare’s manuscript notebooks
he kept while in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (p. 193). Kövesi discusses
Lynne Pearce’s work on the asylum notebooks, which she writes are ‘as disturbing
as those sometimes found amongst the documents of sex-murderers’ (quoting
Pearce, p. 193).3 Whilst acknowledging that ‘it is probably true that there
remains a dearth of purposefully and expressly feminist criticism on Clare’
(p. 193), Kövesi takes a sensitive approach to Pearce’s statement. Never refuting
the misogyny present throughout Clare’s works, Kövesi argues that the banality
and masculinising pressure of life in a mental institution need to be taken into
account: ‘The absence of stimulation is not presented here to excuse Clare’s obses-
sions at all; but it might go some way to account for their seeming relentlessness’
(p. 203). Kövesi’s study of the asylum notebooks indicates important new avenues
for study, in his contention that ‘the texts are facets of a controlling desire, the
thinnest trace of an assertion of Clare’s masculine, sexualised power long made
364 BOOK REVIEWS

redundant by the august and thoroughly male authority of medicalisation’

(p. 204). It is important that more feminist work is done on Clare, precisely
because of his totemizing and often violent representations of women, which
need to be examined in the context of cultural and institutional constructions
of masculinity.
Kövesi’s engagement with contemporary creative work on Clare in chapter five
is paralleled in his own diverse and innovative approaches to Clare’s writing.
Kövesi is keenly aware of the manner in which editing and criticism inform
the construction of an author, and the John Clare which emerges from John
Clare is multiple and contentious. His presentation of ecocriticism, however, is
less nuanced; in place of critique, it would have been helpful to have engaged
more affirmatively with some examples of historically informed ecocritical
work.4 That aside, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History is invaluable for
its insights into the ways in which an ecological agenda might inform editorial
and research practices.

Notes
1. See Rita Felski, ‘Context Stinks’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), pp. 573–91.
2. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Wein-
sheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004),
p. 305. First published in German, 1960.
3. See Lynne Pearce, ‘John Clare’s Child Harold: The Road Not Taken’, in Susan
Sellers (ed.), Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice (Hemel Hempstead: Har-
vester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 143–56 (p. 147).
4. For examples, see Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Ashton Nichols, ‘“The Loves of
Plants and Animals”: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature’, Romantic
Circles special issue, ‘Romanticism and Ecology’ (2001); Patrick Bresnihan,
‘John Clare and the Manifold Commons’, Environmental Humanities, 3
(2013), 71–91.

Matthew McConkey
University of Sussex
Falmer, UK
mm858@sussex.ac.uk
© 2018 Matthew Mcconkey
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1420602