Like many scholarly and artistic movements once labeled “new” (the New Criticism, La Nouvelle Vague, New Jack Swing), New Historicism has long outgrown its claims of newness. The essays Porscha Fermanis and John Regan have brought together in this invaluable collection, Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770–1845, aim to rethink New Historicist methods while retaining the movement's interest in “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history,” to cite a well-worn New Historicist catchphrase. As Fermanis and Regan explain in their introduction, they aim to “straddle a new territory somewhere between the textualism of literary New Historicism and the history of ideas associated with philosophic New Historicism, while also attempting to engage with the kind of issues that are relevant to working historians, such as sources, documentary evidence, methodology, and historical judgment” (6).

In other words, the contributions to this collection in various ways take seriously imaginative writing as a form of historiography, concerning themselves “not so much with the construction or formation of disciplines as with the ways in which disciplinary boundaries, and in particular the opposition of scientific and rhetorical history, have subsequently resulted in the exclusion of literary texts and other aesthetic forms from the history of British history from 1770 to 1845” (2). In endeavoring to treat imaginative texts as contributions to historiography, Fermanis and Regan build upon other works concerned with expanding the boundaries of what counts as history, including Mark Salber Phillips's Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing In Britain, 1740–1820 (2000); Lisa Kasmer's Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830 (2012); James Chandler's England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1999); and, in a broader way, the works of pioneering historical theorists such as Hayden White and Stephen Bann.

As Fermanis and Regan further explain in their acknowledgments, the collection grew out of “Romantic Historiography,” a conference held at University College Dublin in 2010. The conference brought together literary scholars and historians, including the aforementioned Phillips and Chandler, but most of the contributors to this volume work in the field of English literature; historian Rosemary Mitchell is the notable exception. Each contribution in the volume is thoroughly researched and compellingly argued. Contributors hail from institutions in Ireland, England, Wales, Canada, and the United States and include such luminaries as Fiona Robertson, Paul Hamilton, Greg Kucich, and Clare Connolly. Because the contributors are predominantly literary scholars, the contents of the volume are weighted towards canonical and semi-canonical literary figures but with an intermixture of other topics throughout. Individual chapters cover a range of genres, including Mary-Ann Constantine's analysis of the way Thomas Pennant's topographical Tour in Wales theorizes history and Mitchell's study of the history paintings of Richard Parkes Bonington. A cluster of essays concentrates on second-generation romantic poets, including Christopher Bundock's study of the role of history and prophecy within Percy Shelley's Hellas, Richard Cronin's piece on Byron's Don Juan and Walter Scott's historical novels, and Michael O'Neill's chapter on Byron's aesthetics of history.

Several other contributions highlight the breadth of topics addressed in the volume. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts's essay on romantic-era history and poetry about India highlights the way this collection crosses generic boundaries, here bringing together discussion of Sir William Jones and Robert Southey. While Roberts brings together literary and historical texts, Fermanis highlights the literary within the historiographic in her essay analyzing Thomas Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell in terms of its use of devices associated with the novel, such as psychological interiority. Conversely, Fiona Robertson looks at the historical within the literary in her excellent chapter on depictions of North American history within British historical fiction. Finally, Paul Hamilton provides perhaps the most compelling of the chapters focused on Byron and history, examining Byron in connection with John Clare in order to highlight “the importance of poetry as a form of historiography” (241). While most of the essays in the collection adhere fairly closely to the rethought New Historicist methodology described above, a couple bring in more diverse theoretical perspectives, including Bundock's use of historical theorist Reinhart Koselleck and Claire Connolly's foray into Irish book history in a chapter that features the national tales of Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson.

One small quibble with the collection is Fermanis and Regan's arrangement of the essays into three parts: “History, Rhetoric, Genre,” “Historical Space and Time,” and “Aesthetics of History.” The subdivision of essays into these three fairly broad designations felt unnecessary, especially because so many of the essays touch equally upon issues of genre, space and time, and aesthetics. That critique notwithstanding, Rethinking British Romantic History is a timely and essential collection for scholars interested in romantic-era writing and the interrelations of history and literature.