Youngquist, Paul. 2003. Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $59.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xxxi + 224 pp."The monstrosities of Romanticism," writes Paul Youngquist in his introduction to Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, "trouble the matter of normality" (2003, xxix). And troubling-or problematizing-the matter of normality, specifically as normality works as a regulator function for conceptions of embodiment, is precisely Youngquist's aim. His decision to focus his study on the British Romantic period is no arbitrary decision either, as he notes that it "coincides with the cultural consolidation of a "proper body" (xv). Working from the intersection of Judith Butler's ideas on individual agency and embodiment as performance and Michel Foucault's theory that "liberal society operates by means of a dispersed network of regulatory norms that discipline bodies toward the end of a socially serviceable docility" (xv), Youngquist probes the tensions between regulatory norms and the subversive monsters that haunt them. He provides an interesting and useful dissection of the Romantic origins of the "proper body" and how deviations from this norm-monstrosities-always return, like Frankenstein's creature, to challenge the political discourses that define, regulate, and enforce normality.Youngquist states a twofold purpose in writing this book: "first to examine further the emergence of the proper body as a regulatory norm, and second to show how monstrosities of various kinds become occasions for advancing, resisting, or transforming its operations in British culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (xxx). He divides his book into three parts: "Incorporations," "Habituations," and "Appropriations." Part I sets the theoretical, cultural, and historical groundwork for the book by defining and examining the norm of the proper body and then presenting several examples of deviances which haunt the stability and power of this cultural norm. Part II consists of two chapters juxtaposing divergent reactions to opium and addiction, first in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who represents the repentant addict, and then in the case of Thomas De Quincy, who represents an apologist for addiction. In Part III, Youngquist concludes his study with two chapters on the rise of institutional appropriation of the flesh and its cultural ramifications.Chapter 1 examines how the norm of the "proper body" came into being in the first place through the rise of anatomical science, especially in the work of the surgeon John Hunter, and the materialist ideology of John Locke, culminating in polarized reactions to the French revolution; ultimately represented on the ultra-conservative side by Edmund Burke and on the radically liberal side by Thomas Paine. "Between them," writes Youngquist, "Burke and Paine consolidate the force of the proper body as a cultural norm" (2003, 26). The proper body is what's at stake in the paranoid climate of 1790s England, dominating political and cultural discourses of the time. Revolutionary France represents the monstrous deviation from this norm, the horrific other, threatening to infect England's "healthy" body like a disease. Youngquist's analysis of the confluence of medicine and politics during this period is one of the strengths of his book.In the next chapter, Youngquist considers, "the fate of monstrosities in liberal society," where only proper bodies matter (2003, 28). This eclectic chapter moves from a discussion ofWilliam Wordsworth, to Daniel Lambert, the 700-plus pound man, to Sarah Biffin, the armless miniature painter, finally cohering a bit around Youngquist's analysis of the carnivalesque atmosphere of Bartholomew Fair, "a space of deviance, a collective social practice that for a few days each year challenged the normative force of the proper body" (45). It culminates in a brief, obligatory for monstrosity studies, snippet on Frankenstein. …