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Anthony Hecht’s “The Book of Yolek” may be read as a test case for understanding a strand of twentieth-century American Jewish poetry, one that takes up a series of questions about the very meaning of the term “Jewish poetics,” especially when it sets itself to the task of remembering what Hecht once described as the “very terrible aspects of existence.” Hecht’s resistance to sentimentalism in “The Book of Yolek,” which is also a resistance to the consolations of culture, engages his complicated inheritance of elegy and pastoral. Such anti-sentimentalism also resists confidence in the perpetuation of memory, even though “The Book of Yolek” is centrally concerned with the burdens and the imperatives of memory. The poem implicitly interrogates the tensions inherent in the post-Holocaust American Jew establishing a ground for joining the tradition of high lyric.

David Duff. Romanticsm and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii+256. $99.00. The question of genre is still one of the thorniest in literary criticism, and its complexities persist beyond all theoretical paradigms brought to bear on it. Romantic genre, arguably the very ground of our cultural conundrums about reference, historicity, and class, has found a worthy scholar in David Duff, who gathers the dense materials of his subject with an unblinking rigor. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre thus joins Stuart Curran's magisterial Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) to lay bare the nuanced foundations of Romantic poetics. Duff sets out "to understand the distinctive genre-consciousness of the Romantic period" (vii), no easy task given that critical opinion about the Romantics' position on the subject is still deeply fractious. Though it has long been recognized that, far from disregarding the strictures of genre and form, Romantic authors were keenly interested in their meaning, our understanding of the architecture of Romantic genre is still troubled by the varying claims made by poets and critics alike about its significance: now claiming to transcend genre, now chiming to have rescued it anew, the tendency of the Romantics themselves is to stage contradictory positions on the subject. In so doing, asserts Duff, the authors were modeling real self-divisions, for the awareness of genre in Romanticism is tantamount to a particular kind of self-consciousness, with genre serving as one resource for the expressive mind, which of necessity contains self-divisions and self-contradictions. Romantic self-consciousness and Romantic genre-consciousness are inextricably joined, even when its authors are calling for the dissolution of the putative strangleholds posed by genre. Duff is more interested in genre as a concept than he is in calibrating any particular generic expression; however, this book is still packed with very detailed information about the particulars. Those particulars have their basis in the period's own obvious efforts to work out the brave new world of revolutionary form. As the author points out at various points throughout his study, it is not our own modern theorists who first noticed the political inflections of generic innovation. William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, indeed even Francis Jeffrey linked political transformation with aesthetic change, and they were as sensitive to the connections between the revolutionary 1790s and generic change, as they were to the literary inheritance that they sought to refract through their contemporaneity. No longer a set of inherited codes with prescriptive rules, which is how genre functioned for the Neoclassicals, it became with Romanticism an opportunity to appropriate the past and recast it for the present and future. Subverting generic decorum, though, is not tantamount to disregarding it. Rather, the Romantics enlarged the possibilities of genre, expanded its spectrum, and harnessed it as a forum for originality. While they did revive such genres as romance, sonnet, epic, ballad, and pastoral, Duff points out that "[w]hat is important is that in each case an effort of imaginative retrieval is involved. Unlike earlier revivalist movements such as neoclassicism, however, Romanticism had to reckon with the temporality of the genres it sought to retrieve and adopt.... They were defined not by their 'rules,' but by their origins, their history, their ethnic associations, their genealogy" (145). If genre is no longer a set of transcendent rules, then retrieving and reworking its history becomes also a nationalist enterprise. British poetry exults in the long tradition of British appropriations of genre, and negotiating a generic history is an opportunity to assert one's authority with respect to it. The sonnet may be Italian in its provenance, but it came to England at the moment of Elizabethan cultural ascendancy, and it was revived by the Romantics in part as an instance of specifically British expressive ingeniousness. …

Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, reviewed by John Clubbe Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, reviewed by Heather Murray Richard Bourke, Romantic Discourse and Political Modernity: Wordsworth, the Intellectual and Cultual Critique, reviewed by Karen A. Weisman Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, reviewed by Elizabeth Jones John Lennox, ed., Margaret Laurence—Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters, reviewed by W. J. Keith Lé-Franç Hoffmann, Haïti: lettres et l'être, reviewed by Bernard Delpê

This book is divided into loose categories of ‘history’ and ‘knowledge, theme, and practice’, categories which certainly overlap and underline one another. The parts of the book classed under ‘History’ make contact with specialized thematic concerns raised elsewhere in the volume, and this is as it should be. Still, historical contextualization is itself a slippery eel in literary studies, and though these earlier parts of the book take up the range of thorny issues elaborated in the second section, they also address urgent problems in the very conceptualization of tradition within elegy. The areas of the book grouped under the category of ‘Knowledge, Theme and Practice’ are as alive to the complexities of history, tradition, and their manipulations as any of the articles in the ‘History’ section. It is hoped that this book will provide clarification of generative processes of elegy for both student and scholar.

In recent years, many university athletic programs have turned to program and scoreboard advertisements, corporate sponsorships, and other nontraditional sources of revenue to supplement their operating budgets. As confirmed by several high-profile court cases, these nontraditional revenue sources can be subject to federal unrelated business income tax—-a consequence often overlooked by athletic administrators and those involved in sport management programs. This article discusses the unrelated business income tax and its impact on collegiate athletic programs. Court cases and Internal Revenue Service pronouncements are reviewed, where applicable. Compliance and planning issues are also briefly addressed.

Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, eds., Sartre Alive, reviewed by T. H. Adamowski Philip R. Wood, Understanding Jean-Paul Sartre, reviewed by T. H. Adamowski Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, et al, eds., Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, reviewed by Karen A. Weisman Herbert Lindenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions, reviewed by Karen A. Weisman Gene Ruoff, ed., The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, reviewed by Karen A. Weisman Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., The New Medievalism, reviewed by David Townsend