Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between literary interpretation and medical diagnosis. Hegele demonstrates how the interpretive practices of literature and medicine, two disciplines that "considered the common problem of life," informed each other (3). Locating medicine as the discursive touchstone for Romanticism, Hegele joins a growing group of literary scholars and historians such as Sharon Ruston, Alan Richardson, Hermione de Almeida, Nicholas Roe, and Alan Bewell in drawing attention to the links between the era's literary and scientific discourses. As Hegele reminds us, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who coined the terms "bipolar," "neuropathology" and "psychosomatic" (7). Such attention to lexicography is one of the hallmarks of this deeply researched study and a large part of what makes the book such a joy to read.

Hegele's study also reflects scholarship, such as Denise Gigante's Life, Amanda Jo Goldstein's Sweet Science, and Dahlia Porter's Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism, that connects Romantic literary production to natural philosophy and organic form. Romantic Autopsy thus focuses on organicism as a chief concern shared by Regency medicine and Romantic literature, which, Hegele argues, may be understood via their common "protocols of diagnosis" (12). Such methods may be used both by "doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry" (12).

Reading bodies as both textual and corporeal is one of the oldest tropes of humanistic inquiry. Centering on "medical close readers," Hegele applies "diagnostic exegesis" to a range of body types (15). Here "autopsy" functions less as the examination of dead bodies than as the retrospective analysis of literary forms that engage in discourses of loss, mourning, and memorial. Hegele also extends the term to indicate forms touching upon corporeality (gothic poetry) or even regulating the speech of living bodies (narrative fiction). She thus organizes her study around four central protocols: dissective reading, the postmortem, free indirect style, and semiological diagnostics. She then links each of these methods to emergent medical specialties of the period: "anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology" (17). At its heart, then, Romantic Autopsy is a book about reading, and Hegele concentrates on symptomatic reading as the diagnostic approach par excellence of the era. For her, this approach is more than mere metaphor: one may discern textual symptoms of (underlying) disease through modes of textual analysis.

In the first chapter, "Hermeneutic Dissection in the Lyric," Hegele builds from Wordsworth's famous phrase regarding murder and dissection. The analogy between reading and anatomy frames an extended analysis of "Tintern Abbey" that delineates Wordsworth's two central modes of reading, one fragmentizing and the other restorative. Hegele positions Wordsworth's "simultaneous antipathy and attraction to dissection as an interpretive practice" as a harbinger of the era's turn towards organic form. Wordsworth saw his own poetic practice (and verse in general) as having therapeutic potential (30). And yet, Hegele's use of the word dissection, to say nothing of her deployment of autopsy as a framing concept, would suggest we consider texts as merely dead things even as it insists upon a diagnostic approach to emerging and shifting literary forms.

For Hegele, Wordsworth's poetic philosophy contains two competing strains: "therapeutic reparation" and "violent dismemberment" (43). Curiously, no attention is paid to the fragment poem despite Hegele's emphasis on dissection (here Keats and Coleridge would have been a natural fit). Instead, she offers an analysis of "Tintern Abbey," which she understands as vacillating "between [an] eighteenth-century taxonomist's and nineteenth-century anatomist's versions of the [poetic] gaze" (45). Hegele's examination of the poem highlights an interpretive mode she calls "surgical reading," which, together with "sentimental dismemberment," forms a path that ultimately leads to the reconstitution of a Wordsworthian past. This approach aligns with one of Hegele's key critical claims: that the modern practice of symptomatic reading may have its roots in what she identifies as Romantic diagnostics.

Hegele ends the chapter with an explanation of Keats's "dismembered poetics" through a reading of "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil" to conclude that both Wordsworth and Keats "struggled explicitly to reconcile the practices of post-Revolutionary anatomical medicine with those of poetry" (54). Giving due attention to the grislier aspects of the poem, Hegele goes on to highlight Keats's preoccupation with the relationship between "metaphysical mind and bodily brain" (58). The emphasis here is less on autopsy than on pathology, where "Keats presents the imagination as a diseased physical space that can be both read and destroyed through anatomical dissection" (59).

Hegele makes a plausible case for understanding how Keats's afterlife "invites a new closeness between sentimental and analytical forms of dissective reading" (61). As such, Chapter 2, "Postmortem, Elegy, and Genius," opens with a lengthy meditation on his final months and death, the contemporary critical assessment of his writing, and the memorials that followed his passing. For Hegele, these various acts of mourning collectively constitute what she calls the "posthumous curating" of both Keats's corporeal remains and his poetic legacy (64). Along with biography, anecdote, memoir, and elegy, Hegele positions the postmortem or autopsy report as intimately connected to modes of life writing. Here, Keats provides an opportunity to appreciate the "cross-cultural affinities between literary writing" and what Hegele calls a "flagship practice of the emergent specialty of pathology" (66-67). More than just an evaluation of the physical corpus, Hegele argues, the postmortem becomes a key Romantic genre shaping the literary protocols for "the public recognition of death" and "a new theory of elegiac interpretation" (67, 85). In Hegele's nuanced reading, P.B. Shelley's Adonais figures as the nexus between the literary and the medical, as "the physical details of the cadaver are linked implicitly with the dead poet's biography and character" (86). She closes this section with a reading of another elegy, Tennyson's In Memoriam, where she reveals the "still-living body of the mourning speaker" to be directly shaped by the commemorative literary forms of the Romantic era (94).

In a chapter on the "materiality of grief" (86), Hegele turns her attention briefly to Wordsworth's Essays upon Epitaphs, which she links to the period's "new interest in interpreting the materiality of the dead body" (75). From here it's a jump backward in time to Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which Hegele frames as a grieving husband's attempt (and failure) to manage Wollstonecraft's posthumous reputation. These detours make sense given the book's desire to draw connections between medical dissection and literary fame, as does some attention to the death of Lord Byron. Indeed, Hegele marvels over Dr. Julius Millingen's detailed assessment of Byron's corpse (including the remarkable weight of his brain and the advanced biological age of his skull), which seems perfectly calculated to fuel an afterlife of perpetual Byromania. Little critical attention is given here to Byron's well-known physical disability (his club foot). The public "dissection" of other celebrities, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Ludwig von Beethoven, seem less relevant here, despite Hegele's claim that "explicit and detailed descriptions of their cadavers," like those of Keats and Byron, attempted to discover "the physiology of genius" (77).

In Chapter 3, "The Madness of Free Indirect Style," Hegele moves beyond the notion of autopsy and dissection to pathologize narrative form. She argues that "free indirect style is a protocol for discursive control that shares an affinity with strategies used in Romantic-era psychiatric practices of surveilling and mediating speech" (104). Here Hegele invokes Dr. John Monro's Case Book, a fascinating volume that reveals the private thoughts of "a historical mad-doctor" mingled with "the voices of the insane" (112). Monro advanced a theory that quality of speech could be read as a sign of both mental health and effective therapy. Similarly, Hegele suggests that the Jacobin novel of the 1790s deployed free indirect discourse less as a stylistic experiment than as a strategic practice "to monitor political and sexual radicalism--historically coded as madness--and to regulate domestic sociability in counter-Revolutionary Britain" (104). She qualifies this claim with a reading of Wollstonecraft's final novel, Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman, by suggesting that gender has the potential to ironize such regulation. Maria's "psycho-narration" both exemplifies and criticizes how the moral management of women's bodies and minds aligns with state practices regulating political speech (130).

Hegele centers this chapter on the use of free indirect discourse in Jane Austen's juvenilia and published novels. Her reading of Pride and Prejudice highlights what Hegele calls "Lydia's folly" and the domestication of "mad-speech" that frames the "dynamics of behavioral management...within the Bennet family" (132). An explanation of how such moral regulation relates to the practices of autopsy or dissection remains somewhat elusive. Moreover, there is little focus on gender in Hegele's analysis; one is left to wonder how woman's speech may be surveilled differently from that of men. Equally surprising is the lack of engagement with the history of disability, specifically the connection between speech and disability that shapes Romantic-era literature.

The final chapter, "Unreliable Semiology from Frankenstein to Freud," treats Mary Shelley's first novel as a kind of "medical case history" (143). Victor serves as the "physician-figure" rather than as father or creator; his narrative renders the Creature, "the text's most obvious patient-figure," less as a character than as "the progress both of a disabled body and of a contagious disease" (143, 165, 144). As in the previous chapters, disability is not a critical concern here. Rather, Hegele shows how the novel's "superabundant narrative layering transgresses the norms of medical reporting," a compelling claim despite the fact the novel eschews medical, scientific, and technological details (145). If Victor's narration is "structured as a case history," Hegele might also have linked these levels of textual mediation to the novel's various epistolary frames, as well as to biological hybridity. And despite her emphasis on autopsy, Hegele does not examine the death of Victor's mother, an actual medical case history: Shelley devotes significant consideration to the diagnosis and progression of the disease that causes Caroline's death, to say nothing of its role in Victor's scientific obsessions.

Medical case studies of the Romantic era (published in periodicals such as the London Medical Gazette, the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood's) bolster Hegele's claims about the cross-pollination of Britain's literary and medical discourses. They enable her to connect literary semiotics and medical semiology (e.g. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiogomy), viewing "the body itself as a system of signs" (148). In this way, Hegele's analysis of Frankenstein focuses on characters' bodies, wherein "the semiologist is revealed as an active participant in the construction of narrative" (173). She discovers in the novel what she calls "semiological diagnostics," a kind of physiognomic approach to pathology that derives undisclosed conditions from surface qualities. While the Creature is a trained semiotician, Victor proves a "bad read[er]" of his countenance, and Walton "struggle[s] with interpreting the Creature's irreconcilable physical and linguistic evidence" as shaped by Victor's narrative (170, 168). One may wonder why Hegele, so attuned to medical discourse, interpretation, and reading practices, opts not to include notions of disability or stigma in her use of semiotics. Regardless, there is some excellent close reading of Frankenstein, particularly of hands "as disembodied vehicles for their respective crimes" (166). Those interested in psychoanalysis (popular in Frankenstein scholarship) will find the last section of this chapter of interest, as Hegele draws on Freud's case studies to tie transformations in Regency literary production to the explosive growth of biological, medical, and psychological discourses.

Romantic Autopsy is an admirable contribution to the burgeoning realm of research in the medical and health humanities. The book inherently situates itself within a growing body of scholarship concerned with non-normative bodies and minds (e.g. Jason Farr, Emily Stanback, Essaka Joshua), though it does not address how the protocols of diagnosis highlighted here figure into the rich cultural history of disability as both a literary and medical category. It is surprising that Hegele does not connect her analysis of free indirect style to earlier scholarship (e.g. John Barrell, Jon Mee) that has examined the regulation of speech in this era. Moreover, one wonders why a study that centers the trope of Romantic dissection would include poetry and prose fiction but leave out drama. Many of the figures noted here (Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Byron) were fascinated by the stage, and one may consider the criticism of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge as notable examples of the dissection or even as autopsy of the dramatic form. Finally, the lack of attention to race in this study surprises, even though much of the Romantic era's writing on corporeal form was racialized and certainly shaped by Britain's colonial and imperial practices. Of course, no academic study can be exhaustive, but even an acknowledgment of these critical themes would have provided a platform on which future work could be built.

These caveats aside, Romantic Autopsy displays the deep learning of its author and provides compelling new frameworks by which to consider the canonical works associated with the Romantic era. This book will appeal to those interested in the links between literature and medicine, and between philosophy and science; as well as those working on the medical humanities, theories of reading, genre theory, and Romanticism more broadly. Rather than relegate the field of Romanticism to the buried past, Romantic Autopsy signals hope for new understanding of both lives and afterlives of the era's literary productions. It advances vigorous approaches and fresh perspectives that recognize the value of reading practices, medical diagnosis, semiosis, and pathological protocols, which collectively offer evidence that Romanticism as a critical field is not dead yet.

Jared S. Richman is Professor of English and Judson M. Bemis Professor of the Humanities at Colorado College.